What Would Have Happened If …

Fantasy builds castles in the air—but these airy halls and towers have a definite and strict relation to the solid facts of life. Glittering and unsubstantial, they are not built up by willful whimsies; their structure is made of a peculiar sort of reality, the reality of possibilities.

Every daydreamer finds the starting point for his fancy-work in one and the same situation: if something had happened otherwise than it actually did or hadn't happened at all, what might have been then? Here is a big opening for the beginning of wishful thinking of any sort. This is the point where the ordinary reality and the wish fulfillment, molded into a semblance of possibility by fantasy, have their parting of ways. Consequently it is the point on which the poet, as the mastermind among the daydreamers, starts: it is the nucleus of his creation.

The best story by the Austrian poet Grillparzer—who was generally more of a playwright than of a story teller—is: “Der arme Spielmann” (the poor fiddler). The hero's father is an important and ambitious man. At a public examination the son has to recite some Latin verses which he knows very well, but he stumbles over the word “cachinnum” which he cannot remember, and gets so confused that he fails to pass the examination. The father is deeply hurt by this humiliation and stops the son's studies. The boy becomes a humble copying clerk. He falls in love with a girl of a much lower social standing, whom he can not marry because of his poverty. He sinks deeper and deeper in the world and becomes in the end a common street fiddler without, however, losing anything of his moral integrity and purity of mind. He finds his death by saving a child from drowning.

The episode at the examination and the stumbling over the word “cachinnum” has happened to Grillparzer himself, as he tells in his autobiography, but it had none of the fatal consequences which the author attributes to it in his history. His