Produced by Charles Bowen, from scans provided by the Web Archive Source: Web Archive http://www.archive.org/details/picturesbetrothi00tiec THE PICTURES; THE BETROTHING. NOVELS, TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN OF LEWIS TIECK. * * * * * LONDON: PRINTED FOR GEO. B. WHITTAKER, AVE-MARIA-LANE. 1825. LONDON: PRINTED BY THOMAS DAVISON. WHITEFRIARS. THE TRANSLATOR TO THE READER. A tale ought never to stand in need of a preface or commentary. The best are those which are the most strictly national and in the highest sense of the word popular, which touch immediately the sympathies of the living generation, and display the common elements of our nature, the purely human, under the social relations most familiar to the author and the reader. For then essence and form are most intimately, because naturally and unconsciously blended; neither is exclusively studied, or sacrificed to the other. But even when it is the poet's endeavour, as it is often the highest exercise of his high vocation, to recall the image of the past with its individual peculiarities, to refresh the fading colours of an important, but half-forgotten period, to catch and raise the faint tones of an expiring tradition; when even his historical groundwork is fixed in a remote age and a foreign scene, still the tale ought to contain every thing necessary for it to be fully felt and understood within itself. It should not only be completely independent of any formal introduction or addition, but should even be able to dispense with the aid of those digressions and reflexions and elaborate descriptions, which are in fact only prefaces out of their place, or notes taken up into the text, and which sometimes disfigure even the best of our modern novels, and dispel the illusion created by the poet's genius, by taking us behind his magic lantern and shewing us the machinery of his art. This will apply in most cases to translations of such works. It may however sometimes happen, that a tale perfectly intelligible and luminous in the circle of readers for which it was designed may to a different public seem obscure, or give occasion for misapprehension. Such is most frequently the case with those which belong most exclusively to the age and country of the writer, when he does not merely aim at exhibiting human nature clothed in the existing forms of society, but takes for his immediate theme the spirit and tendency of the times in which he lives, the principles and opinions, the tastes and the pursuits of his generation.