No doubt for others my self-revealment, in which I appear to them, may be taken seriously, inasmuch as they interpret me as though in reality I was in earnest about the business; but therein they are deluded, poor, _borné_ creatures, without the faculty or the power to comprehend and attain to the height of my argument. And by this it is brought home to me that _everyone_ is not so free (_e.g.,_ that is _formally_ free) as to see in all which is usually of value, dignity and sanctity to mankind, merely a product of each man's own possibilities of inclination, which is operative in permitting him to determine and make rich the course of his life, or the reverse. It is thus that this virtuosity of your ironical artist's life comes to be credited as some _god-like geniality_, for which every conceivable thing is a purely spectral creature, to which the free creator, knowing himself to be absolutely unattached, does not yoke himself, for he can ever annihilate the same no less than create it. Whoever has reached such a standpoint of god-like geniality consequently looks down in his superior fashion on all other mortals. They are ruled out as narrow and dull, in so far, that is, as law, morals, and the rest retain for them a validity that is assured, obligatory, and essential. And the individual who thus lives this artist life, which he does no doubt associate with others, whether friends or mistresses or I know not what, yet as man of genius sets no real stock on such relations as they stand to his individual personality and particular actions. All these are as nothing in their contrast to the universal which is his in its own and independent warranty, namely that genius which faces all such with irony. This is the universal import of the genial god-like irony as this concentration of the Ego in itself, for which all bands are broken, and which can only live in the bliss of self-enjoyment. This irony was the discovery of Herr Fried, von Schlegel, and many have chattered about it after him, or it may be are giving us a fresh sample of such chatter.