The conquests achieved by literary genius over the impenetrable dulness which is, in the most enlightened, as well as in the darkest ages, the portion of the general mass of humankind, are, like other great conquests, not the work of a moment: the day on which the victory is decided and proclaimed is preceded by many a conflict of doubtful issue, and many a forlorn hope has to be led on before a breach can be effected in the massive fortifications of intellectual impassibility. Such forlorn hopes are the various attempts which have been made to introduce to the English reading public, by translations and biographies, one of the most distinguished literary characters of what may well be termed our German brotherland.
The first of these attempts proceeded, some twenty years ago, from no mean pen, that of the veteran of German criticism in the field of English literature. By two reviews of the two principal biographies of the author, the one authentic[1], the other apocryphal but[2], and by translations of several short pieces[3], Mr. Thomas Carlyle brought the English public acquainted with the name of Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, and gave them some little "taste of his quality." He was followed by Kenney, from whose pen appeared at Dresden, 1839, a translation of "The Death of an Angel," and of a large number of short pieces, selected from the works of Jean Paul, together with "A Sketch of his Life and Character;" and now we have before us from an American pen, in an English reprint[4], a " Life of Jean Paul," in two volumes, followed by a translation of his Flegeljahre, from the same pen; and furthermore a translation of Siebenkäs, from the pen of Mr. Noel. As we shall find opportunities of dropping an obiter dictum on the merits of these productions, we shall not detain our readers by criticisms upon the copies from that further and fuller acquaintance with the originals to which we shall endeavour, as far as is possible within our limits, to introduce them. Neither do we propose to enter into any details respecting the life of Jean Paul, of which as much as can be compressed into a brief sketch has already been told, and well told, by Mr. Carlyle[5]. The history of genius working out its powers under the pressure of worldly disadvantages, and struggling into greatness and fame through a long continuance or overwhelming adversity, is indeed an interesting and a highly-instructive theme: But still more interesting, and replete with instruction of a yet deeper sort, is the history of a mind groping through the darkness of human systems after the light of heaven's truth; endued with an instinct of truth too powerful to be deceived by the false lights by which philosophic thought and poetic enthusiasm are endeavouring among our German neighbours to supply the absence of the torch of God's truth, and yet kept back from seeking the light of that truth where alone it can be found, by prejudices, the existence of which is to be laid in a very great measure at the door of those who announce themselves to the world as its depositaries and heralds.
Such a mind was that of Jean Paul. In his earliest year's, on the verge of boyhood, a deep touch of religious sentiment accompanied his first communion; but when the luxuriant growth of his mind and heart in youth, and the full ripe power of all his faculties in manhood, would have required the strong meat of Christian grace and truth to sustain them, the leanness and dryness of Lutheran orthodoxy failed to satisfy the cravings of his mind, while the cold and barren forms of Lutheran worship acted like the negative pole of the magnet upon his warm heart and his deeply poetic soul. Thus became he an easy prey to the seductions of that idolatry of genius which was at its height in Germany when Jean Paul's mind awoke to the great questions of life; and which, when afterwards by his own literary productions he rose into notice, placed himself also among the idols in the temple of literary fame. But although both a worshipper and an idol in that temple, neither its worship nor the faith on which it was founded could quench his soul's deep thirst for a higher and more heavenly life; and we find him who had become a free-thinker as soon as he began to think at all, in the ripeness of his manhood, and when he was full of years, before the gates of death and the portals of the invisible world, struggling to give to that world reality within his breast. One of his most interesting works, written in the very acme of his literary strength and fame, treats of the great question of the immortality of the soul; and a second and still maturer work on the same subject was commenced by him on the day on which he was bereaved of his only son, a hopeful youth of nineteen, whose premature end was accelerated by spiritual struggles surpassing his bodily strength. This latter work especially, which was left incomplete, when, five years after, death overtook the author in the blindness occasioned by the sorrow of his bereavement, is a touching attestation of the flame of hope and faith which was glimmering in his soul, and which longed for the heavenly oil that. would have kindled it into dazzling brightness. As we behold the unfinished manuscript of that work laid upon Jean Paul's bier by his mourning friends and admirers, we seem to see the soul, which in its flight from its earthly tenement left behind these fragments of its inward workings, passing over the threshold of the unseen world with that mighty question on its lips, there to receive a full and an eternal answer.
As is not unfrequently the case with men, whom their high gifts and their singular energy or character mark as chosen instruments for the accomplishment of great moral and intellectual reforms, Jean Paul's literary and social career commenced with opposition against the existing state of things. For it is the manner, the instinct, so to speak, of men of that stamp to chant forth into the world, forcibly and without disguise, whatever is for the time being the key-note of their inner life; whence it happens that what in after years of moral and intellectual maturity proves a sweet and salutary fruit of wisdom, is in earlier years not unfrequently obtruded upon the public with all the sourness and asperity which belongs to an unripe state. In few instances has this truth been more strikingly illustrated than in that of our author; the gentle mellowness of whose later works forms the most extraordinary contrast with the uncouth crabbedness of his youthful productions; while the position in which he found himself at the commencement of his literary career, at the age of nineteen, "at hand-grips with actual want," was one which to an ordinary mind would have suggested any course in preference to that of provoking the world's hostility by a series of keen and bitter satires. Such, nevertheless, were the first-fruits of Jean Paul's genius; and in the preface to them in the edition of his collected works, which he began to prepare after he had been an author for forty years, he frankly condemns them on this very account. He appears almost reluctant to reproduce them, yielding in fact to the curiosity of the public as to the first lucubrations of a favourite author; but even with this excuse he cannot make up his mind to republish them in their original form: he says he found it indispensably necessary to "reduce the coarse-grained gray salt" of his wit "to a finer state," or "to exchange it for white salt altogether." He chides his former self in good earnest, for that "in two entire tomes no room was found for even a single line of gentle love;" and he sets his wit to work to account for a phenomenon so inconsistent with the tone of his later writings.
"The Juvenilia of Satire are like the iambics of Stolberg-mostly Juvenalia. Hence there are in this youthful little work no other flowers than humble violets, which, like other violets in the spring season, have drastic properties; for, in fact, all spring flowers are dark coloured and poisonous. Let it be remembered, then, that it is the reader himself that calls for these violets, the juvenile relics of a novelist whom he has never known otherwise than gentle, even as love itself. After all, however, this book of satires will represent nothing worse than the relic of a Petrarcan cat, especially since it has the electric skin, and the sparkling eyes, and the sharp claws of the feline race; precisely as at Padua they still show the skeleton of a cat with which the love-sick Petrarca was wont to play."-Jean Paul, sämmtliche Werke, t. i. p. xiii.
The first objects of Jean Paul's satire were authors and reviewers. As regards the former, he puts the question, "How can one manage to write a great deal?" to which he makes answer:
"Whoever wishes to endue his fist with necessary fruitfulness, let him proceed thus: Let all the ideas which embellished his first productions be brought out in later productions in new characters and under a new disguise, putting upon them, like upon old hats, a new gloss. Whatever ideas chance may throw up in his brain,-those which rise at the first moment of waking; those which form the vanguard of nightly dreams; those which shoot up in the heat of conversation; those which he picks up in familiar chit-chat, or snatches accidentally from some torn scrap of paper; those which turn up in idle moments; or those which , scarcely emerged from darkness, are trying to escape from memory's gripe, as young partridges run from the nest as soon as they are hatched,—all these ideas let him invest with a paper-body, quicken them with ink, scrape them on a heap, and carry them to market in any cart he can get. By thus listening for the light step of each idea, and forthwith shutting it up with others in a book,—by scraping from the brain every shooting crystal of thought, and inflating with words every dumb frog, the driest matter will swell into an octavo volume; every stone will be turned into an intellectual child, and into bread in the bargain; every head will become the patriarch of a sister-library, and fill its own book-case by its own fertility. At last such an author will be unable to help laughing at the writers who produce so little, and who have to rub their foreheads so hard till their ideas begin to flow….
"Piracy is the soul of copious writing. In the republic of letters, as at Sparta, those thieves are in high esteem who know how to hide their long fingers in a glove; and the journals tie around their temples wreaths and bands very different from those which the criminal code of Charles V. fastens round the neck of common thieves…. The greedy instinct with which these inventive copyists cause to be printed for the benefit of mankind under their names what was originally printed under the author's name only, and procure their subsistence, not from other men's coffers, but simply from other men's books, has to crawl through various paths towards their aim, and to enwrap their merit in various shapes. One solders together the 'disjecta membra poetarum' with his own rhymes into a Horatian 'humano capiti cervicem pictor equinam,' &c., or cuts for himself in the oak forests of Klopstock a little wooden or corken pegasus or bobby-horse, or does as those who melted down the fragments of horses of gilt brass found in Herculaneum in to an entirely new nag…. Another, like thieves in England, puts on a mask, writing anonymously, and steals other men's honey, being defended against the stings or its rightful owners by a wire-mask and gloves. Another disguises his selfishness under the semblance of disinterestedness, steals the fruit of the sweat of other men's brows for the sake of imparting it to the public, and enriches himself by impoverishing them through sheer philanthropy; as Pococke relates that the Egyptian thieves smear over their naked bodies with oil, to avoid their being laid hold of in their nocturnal expeditions. Some steal from the author nothing except the book itself, which they fit up with a preface and an index of their own; in other words, with an improved head and an improved tail; as Scheuchzer paints the unicorn,—the body of a horse, with a horn on the forehead and the tail of an ass. Others, again, are fishing in the familiar circles of friendship for the stray thoughts of great men; make them drop their cheese by fair speeches, like the cunning fox in the fable; and store up in their memory the fruit of other men's lips for their next publication. … Nay, often the pupil robs the master, and cheats the world with his borrowed greatness, until the true sun rises and causes the moon to turn pale; or be locks up his stolen ware till the death of the owner, intending by patchwork of his own to prevent its being recognized even so a she-wolf once suckled Romulus, the son of a god. This accounts for the fact that an author is often so much worse than his book, and the child so unlike the father; that those who write for the amusement of a whole public of readers are often mute in society; even as crocodiles are not themselves eatable, but only their eggs."—Grönländische Processe, s. W., t. i. p. 24-27.
In this wild strain,—which we have been obliged to chasten here and there, the salt of our author being, in spite of his own expurgations, occasionally still too gray to be set upon on English table,—the literally starving son of the Muses ran on through four volumes of satires upon all classes and conditions of men, under the grotesque titles "Greenland Lawsuits," and "Extracts from the Devil's Papers."
From this mood, which he himself characterized afterwards as the "vinegar state" of his mind, he passed, after the lapse of nine years, into a kindlier and healthier state, in which he exchanged the character of satirist for that of novelist. The transition was marked in his literary career by the "Life of the cheerful little Schoolmaster, Maria Wuz, in Meadvale; a kind of idyl," in which, as Jean Paul says in his preface to the second edition of the "Invisible Lodge," the sweetness of the honey was still mixed with some acid; being written before the "Invisible Lodge," although published in the form of an appendage to it. Wuz, the hero of this opusculum, is a village schoolmaster, who has the happy knack of making the most of small comforts against the ills of life, and finding contentment in small enjoyments. His biography, barren of incident, is a still life humorously drawn, in which the disposition of mind which at this period appears to have been the most enviable of all in the eyes of Jean Paul, is variously displayed; a disposition which
"was not resignation, that submits to evil because it is inevitable; not callousness, that endures it without feeling; not philosophy, that digests after diluting it; not religion, that overcomes it in the hope of a reward: it was simply the recollection of his warm bed. 'This evening, at any rate,' said he to himself, 'however they may annoy and bully me all day long, I shall be lying under my snug coverlet, and poking my nose quietly into the pillow, for the space of eight hours.' And when at length, in the last hour of a day of crosses, he got between his sheets, he would shake himself and draw up his knees close to his body, and say to himself, 'Don't you see, Wuz, 'tis over, after all.'" —Leben des vergnügten Schulmeisterlein Maria Wuz, s. W., t. vii. p. 135.
After accompanying the possessor of this happy temperament through the different stages of his life, among which his courtship and marriage hold a conspicuous place, Jean Paul adds "seven last words to the reader," from which we extract the following, as the moral which by it he intended to convey:
"O ye good men! how is it possible that we can grieve each other even for a short half-hour! Alas! in this dangerous winter night of life; in this chaotic multitude of unknown beings separated from us, some by depth and some by height, in this world of mysteries, this tremulous twilight which enwraps our little ball of flying dust,—how is it possible that lone man should not embrace the only warm breast which bolds a heart like his own, and to which he can say, 'Thou art as I am, my brother; thou sufferest as I suffer, and we may love each other?' Incomprehensible man! rather thou wouldst gather daggers, and force them in thy midnight existence into the breast of thy fellow, which a gracious Heaven designed to afford warmth and defence to thine own! Alas! I look out over the shaded flower-meads, and remind myself that over them six thousand years have passed with their high and noble men, whom none of us had the opportunity of pressing to his heart; that many thousand years more may yet follow, leading over them men of heavenly, perhaps sorrowful, minds, who will never meet us, but at most our urns, and whom we should be so glad to love; and that only a few poor decades of years bring before us a few fleeting forms, which turn their eyes towards us, and bear within them the brother-heart for which we are longing. Embrace those hieing forms; your tears alone will make you feel that you have been loved.
"And even this, that a man's hand reaches through so few years, and gets so few kind hands to lay hold of, must excuse him for writing a book: his voice reaches further than his hand; his love, hemmed in a narrow circle, diffuses itself into wider spheres; and when he himself is no more, still his thoughts hover, gently whispering, in the paper-foliage, whose rustling and shade, transient like other dreams, beguile the weary hours of many a far distant heart. And this is my wish, though I scarcely dare hope it. But if there be some noble, gentle soul, so full of inward life, of recollection, and of fancy, that it overflows at the sight of my weak imaginings,—that in reading this history it hides itself and its gushing eye, which it cannot master, because it here finds again its own departed friends, and bygone days, and dried-up tears; oh, then,—thou art the loved soul of which I thought while I was writing, though I knew thee not; and I am thy friend, albeit never was of thine acquaintance,"—Wuz, Leben, s. W., t. vii. pp. 177-179.
Such was the frame of mind of Jean Paul at the opening of the second and brighter part of his literary career, during which he produced—besides the unfinished tale of "The Invisible Lodge," the hero of which is, at the close of the third volume, left in a prison, into which he had been cast by some unexplained blunder—-his three most highly-finished and most celebrated novels, "Hesperus," "Siebenkäs," and "Titan."
The first of these, "The Invisible Lodge," is an attempt to exhibit human nature under the effects of an early development of mind and heart, free from all the corrupting influences of the world, and directed towards the worship of God in nature. For this purpose, the author has had recourse to a whimsical device, which will at once remind our readers of the strange story of Caspar Hauser, and which, it is far from improbable, may have suggested the first idea of that romance in real life. Gustavus, the hero of the "Invisible Lodge," is educated for the first ten years of his life in a subterraneous pædagogium, with no other living associate but his tutor and a white poodle dog. On his eleventh birth-day the child emerges from this hypochthonian nursery and schoolroom, through a long passage which opens in the side of the mountain upon the upper world; with many precautions to prevent injury to his eyesight and his physical health, and under the accompaniment of music, to heighten the excitement of his soul. From the preparatory communications which his tutor had made to him, he is led to imagine that this passage out of the subterraneous world is death, and the upper world into which he enters, heaven, where he meets his parents and other persons whom hitherto he had known only by hearsay. The further progress of his education is conducted by Jean Paul in person, who quaintly enough introduces his real self, every now and then, into his own fictions, and in due time he is launched into a military academy, the "Sandhurst" of the imaginary principality of "Scheerau," which might be rendered "Clipfield," and seems to derive its name from the continual clipping which its loyal subjects have to undergo for the benefit of the princely exchequer.
What might have been the ultimate moral which Jean Paul intended to work out from these strange beginnings, it is impossible to tell: as it is, the hero, educated under the earth by his first, and in the clouds by his second tutor, descends, more naturally than surprisingly, by an Icarian fall, into a considerable moral quagmire, from which it appears that the author intended afterwards to extricate him; but probably he found that be had, with more truth than he himself suspected in his tale, marred his own theory of life, of which the subterraneous training was the first chapter, and had no heart to resume a fiction which required throughout magic lights to sustain it, and the enchantment of which was effectually broken. That he never quite relinquished the thought of rescuing his Gustavus from the black hole in which he so mysteriously lodged him, and pouring the balm of happier hours into the heart of a somewhat imaginative young lady, who is dying with love for him,—a favour which, it must be confessed, he little deserves,—is evident from the "apology" which he prefixed to this tale in the edition of his collected works:—
"Notwithstanding," he says, "my intentions and promises, it remains after all a ruin born. Thirty years ago I might have put the end to it with all the fire with which I commenced it; but old age cannot finish, it can only patch up, the bold structures of youth. For supposing even that all the creative powers were unimpaired, yet the events, intricacies, and sentiments of a former period seem no longer worthy of being continued."—Die Unsichtbare Loge, Entschuldigung, s. W., t. v. pp. 7, 8.
A far more highly finished performance was that which followed within three years after "The Invisible Lodge," and which placed Jean Paul at once on the lofty eminence which he ever after maintained, in the very first rank of literary genius; viz. his "Hesperus," or "Five-and-forty Dog-mails." The latter title has reference to the humorous mystification which the author perpetrates upon his readers, by pretending all through, that the story, which is actually in progress while he writes it, is brought to him by a dog, who carries the successive chapters suspended from his neck, as a kind of contemporary biographical mail; and at the end, to his great surprise, Jean Paul finds himself involved as an actor in the plot of the story, he turning out to be a mysterious personage which has been missing all along. This conceit, however, which is drawn round the story like a festoon, from which numberless jokes and satirical hits are playfully, suspended, has nothing whatever to do with the main design. The leading idea which is worked out through the whole of this complicated tale, full of trying moral situations, is to represent the conflict between good and evil, between the coarse and selfish passions of the common herd of mankind, and the higher and nobler aspirations of what may aptly be termed the aristocracy of the mind and heart. In this conflict the higher souls are victorious, but they can be so only by self-sacrifice: the thought that lies at the foundation, is an essentially Christian thought, but embodied in a poetic fiction: virtue is put in the place of Christ, and has both its passion and its resurrection. Hence the title "Hesperus," as signifying both the evening and the morning star; the whole being, in the wildest strains of German romance, an echo of that word of the Psalmist, "Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning."
The central character of the story, on which the whole plot hinges, appears but rarely on the stage. He is an English nobleman, Lord Horion, whose heart spent itself in early life in one ardent passion for a beloved wife: a short season of intense happiness is succeeded by a long life of cold desolation; the only object left him on which to bestow his affections, his son, being blind, and therefore a perfect cipher in the life of a man, the tendency of whose mind is essentially practical. This high-toned character, free from every earthly affection, because all he loved moulders in the tomb, independent of man's fear or favour, undertakes in a small German principality, with whose hereditary sovereign he has formed a connexion, not indeed the office of prime minister,—that is occupied by a premier of the ordinary cast,—but the function of a ruling genius, enacting a kind of providence for the good of mankind. To him, the other leading characters of the story, whose movements he directs, often unknown to them, look up with reverential awe: but the presumption of a short-sighted mortal, taking in hand the direction of human affairs, is fearfully avenged upon him; for in the end all his plans, cherished for years, are in the most imminent danger of being altogether frustrated: he appears once more as the Deus ex machinâ, to set all right again; and having done so, and secured the perpetuity of his arrangements by an oath, which was to be binding till his return, he, like another Lycurgus, disappears for ever, not only from the country for the benefit of which he has been labouring, and from the prince whose government he has found the means of controlling for good, but from life itself: he retires to the tomb of his early love, and there dies by his own hand.
Of the other characters of Hesperus, the principal, and by far the most brilliant, is Clotilda, Jean Paul's ideal of the female character. She is related to Lord Horion by her mother's side, and becomes during a period of blindness, when he requires her aid to carry on his correspondence, the depositary of all his secrets, under the guarantee of an oath, which places it out of her power to reveal them even to save the life of her own brother. The loftiness of her spirit, united to the meekest gentleness of heart; the exquisite delicacy with which she avoids all contact with the low intrigues and the base passions by which she is surrounded on all sides; the heroic firmness and consistency of her conduct, sustained by a deep religious faith, under the severest trials; her self-denying, self-sacrificing spirit, which in her case does not, degenerate into suicidal enthusiasm; the holy resignation with which she surrenders her dearest affections at the call of duty; the high poetry of her soul, combined with a clear and calm judgment, place her, as a perfectly faultless character, on a superhuman eminence, high above the other characters, not of Hesperus only, but of all the works of Jean Paul. In its delineation he attained a point or perfection, which even his own pen could not afterwards exceed. In Titan he painted a man of much higher cast than the male hero of his Hesperus, but Clotilda stands unequalled and unrivalled among all his heroines.
The other two characters in Hesperus which rise above the crowd, are Victor and Emmanuel. The former, the putative son of Lord Horion, having been exchanged in infancy for his blind child by the father himself, is by him placed in the office of physician to the prince, in which he is not only to minister to the bodily health of the court, but to watch and to influence its contending tides and currents, in the interest of the philanthropic plans of his supposed father. He, too, is the depositary of Lord Horion's secrets, except as to his own birth, and under the same guarantee; and partly by the intricacies of his position, partly by the almost feminine softness of his feelings, and the too great pliancy and versatility of his character, he becomes entangled in moral difficulties of the most formidable nature. He is sustained throughout by Clotilda, under whose influence he is brought not only by their common possession of Lord Horion's secrets, but by the ties of the most ardent and mutual love. Without that support it is evident throughout that his character would be unequal to his position; and as the hero of the tale, which he is intended to be, he must be pronounced a failure.
Emmanuel stands aloof altogether from the plot and progress of the novel. He is an Englishman by birth, and having been employed by Lord Horion as the tutor of Clotilda, Victor, and several other persons involved in the story, is also in the secret; but he takes no active part. He is a visionary enthusiast, full of years, and rapidly approaching his death, of which he has a mysterious presentiment: he is introduced into the story as an impersonation of what was, to Jean Paul's conception, the highest and purest faith, great depth of religious sentiment, interwoven with a few scattered rays, and no more, of Christian truth, consuming itself in efforts to emancipate the soul from the trammels of earth, by the apprehension of a higher and a perfect state beyond the grave; for which, however, he has recourse, not to the volume of revealed truth, but to bold flights of imagination. Feelings, once morbid, drawn from the deepest depths of the human heart, and soarings, often presumptuous, of poetic fancy to the utmost boundaries of human thought, such are the ingredients of the religion which Emmanuel preaches and practises in his ascetic solitude, and the flame of which he keeps alive in the hearts of those under his influence, especially of Victor and Clotilda, the latter of whom alone, being a communicant of the Church, holds her high faith in a Christian form, and under the Christian name.
" I cannot," exclaim Emmanuel, in one of his ecstasies, "any more adapt myself to the earth; the water-drop of life has become flat and shallow; I can move in it no longer, and my heart longs to be among the great men who have escaped from the drop. O my beloved, listen to this hard heaving of my breath; look upon this shattered body, this heavy shroud which infolds my spirit, and obstructs its step.
" Behold here below both thy spirit and mine adhere to the ice-clod which congeals them, and yonder all the heavens that rest one behind another are discovered by the night. There in the blue and sparkling abyss dwells every great spirit that has stripped off its earthly garment, whatever of truth we guess at, whatever of goodness we love.
" Behold how tranquil all is yonder in infinitude! —how silently those worlds are whirling through their orbits, how gently those suns are beaming! The great eternal reposes in the midst of them, a deep fountain in the overflowing and infinite love, and gives to all rest and refreshment; in His presence stands no grave."—Hesperus, s. W., vol. viii. pp. 274, 275.
Besides the higher philosophy of life, pointing to another and an eternal world, there is in Hesperus an undercurrent of political feeling, an advocacy of civil liberty, in opposition to the miserable despotism under which at that period the petty states of Germany were groaning, which, no doubt, had its share in rendering the work as popular as it was from the very first. Of the keenness of Jean Paul's tone on this subject our readers may judge by the following extract:
" Not in colleges and republics only, but in monarchies too, speeches enough are made—not to the people, but to its curatores absentis. And in like manner there is in monarchies liberty enough, though in despotic states there is perhaps more of it than in them and in republics. In a truly despotic state, as in the frozen cask of wine, the spirit (of liberty) is not lost, but only concentrated from the watery mass around into one fiery point. In such a happy state liberty is only divided among the few who are ripe for it, that is, the sultan and his bashaws; and this goddess (which is more frequently to be seen in effigy than even the bird phoenix) indemnifies herself for the smaller number by the greater value and zeal of her worshippers; and that the more easily, as the few epopts and mystagogues which she has in such states enjoy her influence to a degree far beyond what a whole people can ever attain unto. Like inheritances, liberty is reduced by the number of participants; and, for my part, I am convinced that he would be most free who should be free alone. A democracy and an oil-painting can be placed only on a canvas in which there are no knots or uneven places; but a despotic state is a piece done in relief,—or, stranger still, despotic liberty lives, like canary-birds, only in high cages; republican liberty, like linnets, only in low and long ones.
" A despot is the practical reason of a whole country; his subjects are so many instincts which rebel against it, and must be subdued. To him alone, therefore, the legislative power belongs (the executive to his favourites). Even men who had no higher pretensions than that they were men of sense, like Solon or Lycurgus, had the legislative power all to themselves, and were the magnetic needles which guided the vessel of the state; but a regular despot, the enthroned successor of such men, is almost entirely made up of laws, both his own and other people's; and, like a magnetic mountain, he draws the state vessel after him. 'To be one's own slave is the hardest of slaveries' says some ancient, at least some Latin, writer; but the despot imposes upon others the easier form of slavery only, and the harder one he takes upon himself. Another author says, Parere scire, par imperio gloria est; so that a negro slave acquires as much glory and honour as a negro king. Servi pro nullis habentur; which is the reason why political ciphers are as little sensible of the pressure of the court atmosphere as we are of that of the common atmosphere. On the contrary, political entities, that is, despots, deserve their liberty on this account, if on no other, that they are so well able to feel and to appreciate its value. A republican in the higher sense of the word, ex. gr. the Emperor of Persia, whose cap of liberty is a turban, and his tree of liberty a throne, fights behind his military propaganda and his sans-culottes for liberty with an ardour such as the ancient authors require and represent in our colleges. Nay, we have no right whatever to deny to such enthroned republicans the magnanimity of a Brutus, until they shall have been put to the test; and if good rather than evil deeds were chronicled in history, we should, among so many shahs, chans, rajahs, and chalifs, have to point out by this time many a Harmodius, Aristogiton, Brutus, &c., who did not shrink from paying for his liberty (for slaves only fight for that of others) the dear price of the life of otherwise good men, and even of his own friends."—Hesperus, s. W., vol. iii. p. 196-198.
After rising so high as he did in Hesperus, we are disappointed to find our author descend to a composition so full of false sentiment, of doubtful morality, and of sporting with life, death, and eternity, as the "Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces; or, the Wedded Life, Death, and Espousals of the poor counsellor, F. St. Siebenkäs.[6]" The foundation on which Jean Paul raised the superstructure of one of the strangest and wildest stories that ever entered the human brain, is a duplicate man, i.e. two men so perfectly alike, internally and externally, as to enable the one to take the place of the other without the possibility of discovery, merely by affecting lameness, that being the only point in which one differs from the other, and which prevents the exchange of individualities from becoming a matter of mutual accommodation. But the author shall himself introduce the pair to our readers:
" Such a royal alliance of two strange souls has not often occurred. The same contempt for the fashionable child's play of life; the same hatred of littleness is combined with tenderness to the little; the same abhorrence of mean selfishness; the same laughter-love in the fair bedlam earth; the same deafness to the world's, but not to honour's, voice;—these were no more than the first faint lines of similitude which constituted them one soul lodged in two distinct bodies. Neither is the fact that they were foster-brothers of study, and had the same sciences, even to jurisprudence, for their nurses, of any great weight, seeing that frequently the very similarity of studies acts upon friendship as a deleterious dissolvent. Nay, even the discrepancy occasioned by their opposite polarity, Siebenkäs being more inclined to forgive, Leibgeber to punish; the former being more of a Horatian satire, the latter more of an Aristophanic pasquil, full of unpoetic and poetic harshnesses,—is sufficient to account for their being suited as they were. But as female friendship rejoices in likeness of apparel, so their souls wore the undress and morning-suit of life,—their two bodies, I mean,—altogether of the same trim, colour, button-holes, lining, and cut; both had the same brilliancy of eye, the same sallowness of countenance, the same stature, leanness, and all the rest; for indeed nature's prank in producing likenesses is much more common than is generally supposed, because it is remarked only when some prince or other great man is imaged forth in a bodily counterpart. I could have wished, therefore, that Leibgeber had not been limping, and thereby given occasion to distinguish him from Siebenkäs; more especially as the latter had cleverly abraded and extirpated the mark by which he too might have been distinguished from the other, with the cautery of a live toad burst upon the mark, which consisted in a pyramidal mole by the side of his left ear, in the shape of a triangle, or of the zodiac light, or of a comet's tail reversed; in fact, of an ass's ear. Partly through friendship, and partly through relish for the mad scenes which were occasioned in every-day life by their being mistaken for one another, they wished to carry their algebraic equation yet further, by bearing the same Christian and surnames. But this involved them in a contest of flattery; for each insisted on becoming the other's namesake, until at last they settled the dispute by each retaining the name taken in exchange, after the Otaheitean fashion of exchanging names together with the hearts. As it is already some years since my hero has had his honest name filched from him by his name-thief of a friend, and has got the other honest name instead, I know no help for it in my chapters, but am obliged to produce him in my muster-roll, even as I presented him at the threshold, as Firmian Stanislaus Siebenkäs, and the other as Leibgeber (i.e. ' Bodygiver '), —although I want no critic to tell me that the more comical name Siebenkäs (i.e. ' Sevencheese ') would be better suited to the humorous visitor, with whom it is my intention by-and-by to bring the world better acquainted than even with myself."— Siebenkäs, s. W., t. xiv. pp. 31-33.
We have selected this passage, both as the key to that thimbleriggery and exchange of persons upon which the whole plot of Siebenkäs is founded, and as a sample of the exuberance of thought which constantly heaps figure upon figure, and compresses the most grotesque contrasts and the most striking analogies within the briefest compass of speech. This of itself renders it extremely difficult, both to understand Jean Paul in the original, and to translate him into any other language; and the latter difficulty is much increased by his frequent intercalation of parenthetical thoughts, by his copious use—copious with all German writers, but more copious with Jean Paul than with any other,—of compound words of his own manufacture, and by the extraordinary manner in which the different significations of one and the same word, however widely apart they may lie, are pressed close together into the service of the author's versatile wit. Of this there is a remarkable instance in the passage just quoted. The opposite character of the temperaments of the two friends, the one being more inclined to mildness, the other to severity, is assigned as one of the causes of the attachment which they felt for each other; and to the same mutual attachment the author refers the striking similarity of their outward persons. Upon these two simple ideas the author contrives to engraft, first, the image of the mutual attraction of opposite magnetic poles; secondly, the antithesis between "Horatian satire" and "Aristophanic pasquils;" thirdly, the punning criticism of describing the latter as "full of unpoetic and poetic harshnesses;" fourthly, the trope of representing the body as the "undress and morning-suit of life," carried out into the details of "trim colour, button-holes, lining, and cut," on the one hand, and eyes, colour of the face, stature, and make, on the other hand; fifthly, the girlish notion of adopting similarity in dress as a badge of friendship; sixthly, the general observation that personal likenesses are more common than is generally thought, and pass unobserved only because the persons themselves in which they occur do not fall under observation. And while all these incongruous materials are welded together into two thoughts and two sentences, the connexion between the two is formed by the double signification of the German word Anziehen, which means both "attraction"' and "attire." Availing himself of this, Jean Paul runs down his first conglomeration of thoughts upon the sense "attraction," and then upon the strength of the sense "attire," hooks on to it, so to speak, his second cluster of ideas. This nice point, at which the two sets of images are riveted together, and which we have endeavoured to render in English by the double sense attached to the word "suited," being overlooked, the coherence, and with it the artistic beauty, of the whole passage is destroyed; and that which is in reality a most skilful and witty combination, assumes the appearance of a mere negligent jumble, of ideas; as is the case with the passage in question in Mr. Noel's translation[7]:
" Nor was it simply the want of resemblance, which, as an opposite pole, decided their attraction. Siebenkäs was more ready to forgive, Leibgeber to punish: the former was more to be compared to a satire of Horace, the latter to a ballad of Aristophanes, with its unpoetical and poetical dissonances; but like girls who, when they become friends, love to wear the same dress, so did their souls wear exactly the same frock-coat and morning-dress of life; I mean, two bodies, with the same cuffs and collars, of the same colour, button-holes, trimmings, and cut. Both had the same brightness of eye, the same sallowness of face, the same height, and the same meagreness; for the phenomenon of similarity of features is more common than is generally believed, being only remarked when some prince or great man casts a bodily reflection."—Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces, by Noel, vol. i. p. 10.
Here the word "attraction," which answers only to one of the two senses of the German "Anziehen," is evidently an insufficient translation; it is besides divided from the sentence with which it should stand in immediate connexion, by the whole parenthetical sentence; to say nothing of the lameness of the phrase, "more to be compared to," or of the inappropriate rendering of "Gassenhauer" by "ballad," and of "Härten" by "dissonances;" which latter, moreover, in Mr. Noel's translation, refers to the "ballads of Aristophanes" only, whereas, in the original, it refers to both, but principally to Leibgeber; whence "harshnesses" is preferable; in addition to which, the clumsy circumlocution, "girls who, when they become friends," for "Freundinnen," and the tasteless "phenomenon," for "Naturspiel," complete the process of deterioration which Jean Paul's original has undergone in the hands of his translator. This brief specimen will be sufficient to show how difficult, nay, next to impossible, it is to translate Jean Paul well, and how easy to mangle him. The fact is, that even Mr. Carlyle, whose translations are on the whole admirable, was obliged to take great liberties occasionally with the original, and has not unfrequently lost some of the more recondite allusions in which the writings of Jean Paul abound. It is, indeed, no disparagement, even to a first-rate German scholar, to say, that he is not qualified to translate that author; for among his own countrymen there are but few capable of appreciating all his beauties, and following him through the boundless variety and the vast expanse of that world of thought in which he moves with such astounding ease and agility. His mind resembles a complicated prismatic apparatus in which the rays of light, and the colours into which they resolve themselves, are perpetually scattered, variously reflected, and gathered up again into one focus; or better, it is like a kaleidoscope, which at every turn and shake produces a new combination, and presents to the eye, as if by mere chance, an endless variety of the most regular and beautiful designs.
But to return to the story of Siebenkäs. The poor counsellor, who, like other briefless barristers, is obliged to betake himself to authorship, has the misfortune of possessing a wife whose mind is as narrow as his circumstances, who, while he labours hard at the literary lathe, interrupts and irritates him perpetually with household questions and household operations; and, while he strives to escape from the closeness and misery of real life to the regions of higher thought and feeling, is for ever harping on his poverty, and taking occasion, from every little incident of daily life, to keep the remembrance of his troubles keen and fresh before his mind. The desolation of his life is yet increased by the evident preference which his wife, Lenette, to whom he was in the first instance tenderly attached, feels for a friend and daily visitor at his house, one Schulrath, i.e. "school-councillor," Stiefel, whose common-place mind harmonizes better with her own than that of her eccentric husband, while her conscience is effectually prevented from taking the alarm, because her unconscious predilection for him is set down to the account of her admiration for his pious and orthodox discourses from the pulpit, with which it must be confessed that the free-thinking remarks of Siebenkäs must have formed to a religious female mind a somewhat uncomfortable contrast. The unpropitious nature of his friend's financial and domestic position does not escape the notice of Leibgeber, who, happening to get the offer of a bailiwick on the estates of the Count of Vaduz, conceives the strange plan of extricating his double from all his difficulties by letting him personate himself in the bailiwick, after passing previously through a sham death and burial at his own home. This plan he accordingly presses upon his friend, who, after some hesitation, is persuaded to agree to the proposal, being moved thereto in no small degree by the consideration that Lenette, who, as his wife, leads a life of great wretchedness, would in all probability, if left a widow per hypothesin, marry Stiefel. A romantic acquaintance which, at this very time, while on a visit to Leibgeber, he forms with a young lady of great beauty and high mental attainments, the intimate friend of his friend, Natalia by name, adds a new interest to his life and to the story; though she is no further concerned in the present affair than that, being penniless and dependent on a rich relation, who wants to marry her to a worthless character, she consents, in ignorance, of course, of the entire scheme, to accept a pension secured for her in a life-insurance office, upon the decease of her admirer; a "fraud," as we should call it in plain English, upon the office aforesaid, for which, as well as for the purchase of a widow's pension for Lenette, Leibgeber furnishes the funds; the dishonesty of the transaction being somewhat palliated by an intention to indemnify the office out of the profits of the bailiwick. All the preliminaries of the plan being settled, Siebenkäs returns home, and is soon after followed by Leibgeber, when the pseudo-tragedy of his death and burial is enacted, and he proceeds to his bailiwick. After the lapse of two years, curiosity induces him to revisit incog. the scene of his former life, when he finds that his relict, Lenette, who had, according to his own wish, expressed upon his supposed death-bed, married the Schulrath, has lately died in her first childbed. This intelligence induces him, during the night, to seek her grave in the churchyard; and there he meets Natalia, who, believing him dead, had come on a similar errand to visit his cenotaph. She takes him at first for his ghost, and is well-nigh killed by fright; but a recognition and explanation afterwards takes place, which ends in their espousals, and so justifies the quaint order of events in the title-page of the work.
It may easily be conceived what ample opportunities the story of which we have now given our readers a brief abstract, omitting all the minor details, and all the subordinate characters, would afford to Jean Paul's inexhaustible humour to display itself. But the sport which he makes, though not uncongenial to the German mind, accustomed to speak and think on the highest and the most serious subjects with an alarming degree of freedom, is hardly suited to our English taste, or justifiable in the abstract; and Jean Paul himself was carried by the impulse which he had given to himself, so for beyond all the bounds within which poetic fancy should be restrained by religious awe, as to introduce Christ proclaiming from the summit of the universe the non-existence of a God. It is true, the whole vision forms part of a dream, and its object is not to inculcate atheism, but to combat it, by showing the utter desolation of heart and mind which atheism involves; but even this cannot reconcile us to a conceit so wild and strange, and, as we cannot help feeling, in spite of all the apologies by which Jean Paul prefaces it, so irreverent. At the same time, it is impossible not to admire the depth and grandeur of many of the thoughts which occur in this extraordinary composition. The idea., for instance, of "a vacant, bottomless eye-socket, staring down upon the immensity of creation," instead of "the Divine eye," is a delineation of atheism at once so bold and so graphic, as to be worth a score of dry arguments against it: the fault we find is, that such an idea should be put into the mouth of Christ, who gives the description of that "vacant, bottomless eye-socket" to the expectant universe as the result of his inquiries after the Eternal Father.
The next, and by far the most eminent of Jean Paul's productions, is his "Titan," on which he was engaged one year beyond the Horatian term of literary finish. It was already written in part, when Siebenkäs was given to the world; and with his usual love of fun and mystification, Jean Paul brings several of the characters of Siebenkäs on the stage again in Titan. The most conspicuous among these is Leibgeber, who, having restored that name to its original owner, and being precluded from resuming his own proper name, Siebenkäs, by its appropriation to the cenotaph of his friend, has now assumed the name of Scioppius, contracted into the German Schoppe, an eccentric character, as Bayle's dictionary testifies, full of strange opinions, and a wandering Proteus with many aliases like himself. In the story of Titan, he enacts the part of the devoted friend and tutor extraordinary of the young hero, who, by his knowledge of the world and his sagacity, manages to penetrate into various secrets, and, amidst all his wild vagaries, renders the most essential services to his pupil-friend. The chief interest, however, which attaches to the character of Schoppe, is not the place which he fills in the wheelwork of the novel, but the fact of his being an impersonation of the keenest satire upon the philosophy of Fichte, by which he is represented as becoming at last half-crazed. He is the alleged author of the "Clavis Fichtiana seu Leibgeberiana[8],"published by Jean Paul as an "appendix to the first comical appendix to Titan," which in a series of articles under various headings, exhibits the philosophical system of Fichte in the most ludicrous light. As a specimen of this kind of persifflage, we give the article
" Leibgeber. 'It strikes myself,' said I, as I was taking a cursory review of my system whilst bathing my feet, and looking significantly at my toes, the nails of which were being paired—'the I am the All and the Universe; it is impossible for me to become more in the world to the world itself, and God, and the spiritual world and the bargain. Only I ought not to have spent so much time (which, after all, is of my own making) before I discovered, after half a score of metamorphoses à la Vishnu, that I am the natura naturans, and the demiurgos and the pulley-lever of the universe. I feel exactly like that beggar, who, waking from sleep, finds himself all at once a king. What a wonderful being, producing everything except itself, (for it only rises into existence, and never exists,) is that absolute "I" of mine, which is the progenitor of all else!
" Here I was unable to keep my feet any longer in the water, but paced to and fro, barefooted and dripping. 'Come for once,' said I, 'make a rough estimate of thy creations—space—time (as far down as the 18th century)—whatever exists in both,—the world's—whatever is on them—the three kingdoms of nature,—the beggarly kingdoms of royalty,—the kingdom of truth,—the kingdom of the reviewers;—and last, not least, all the libraries! And consequently, the few volumes too which Fichte has written: first, because I must produce or suppose him before he can dip his pen; for it depends entirely upon my moral politeness whether I shall concede him any existence; and secondly because even if I do concede it, we can neither of us, being both anti-influxionists, ever listen to our respective 'I's', but we must both invent what each reads of the other, he is my Clavis, and I his sheets. Therefore, I call the epistemology[9] unhesitatingly my work, or Leibgeberianism, supposing even that Fichte did exist and entertained similar thoughts; in that case he would only act the part of Newton with his fluxions, and I that of Leibnitz with the differential calculus, two great men like ourselves. Even as there is a like number of philosophical messiahs, Kant and Fichte; and the Jews also reckoned two messiahs, one, the son of Joseph, and the other, the son of David."—Clavis Fichtiana, s.W., t. xxvii. pp. 41, 42.
Poor Schoppe, a determined Fichtian, by irony and hypothesis, continues to dwell upon the keynote of Fichte's philosophy, the "I," until at last it begins to haunt him like an evil spirit. Finding that he excites considerable surprise by the apprehensions which he expresses lest the "I" should appear to him, he exclaims in great wrath:—
"Oh, I see, I'd take you; quite, quite! You do not think me you one-eighth part as rational as yourselves, but rather mad. Wolf[10]! Here! Here! Thou beast has often in my solitary rambles and wanderings been my shield-bearer and exorcist against the 'I.' Sir, a man that has read Fichte, and his vicar-general and brain-serf Schelling, has often as I have done, by way of fun, will at last find the matter sufficiently serious. The 'I' supposes itself, i.e. the 'I' and that certain remainder which some people call the world. When philosophers deduce anything, in—for instance, an idea, or themselves,—from themselves, and they fail not, if they're proper philosophers at all, to deduce in like manner the remaining universe. The 'I' imagines itself; it is therefore the object and the subject, and, at the same time, the lair of both; by Jove! there is an empirical and a pure 'I;' the last words which according to Sheridan and Oxford, Swift pronounced shortly before his death, were 'I am I," which I call sufficiently philosophical.…
"I can put up with anything except the 'I,' the pure intellectual 'I,' the god of gods. How often have I not, like my name and deed-sake Scioppius or Schoppe, changed my name and have annually become a different man, yet still the pure 'I' is manifestly pursuing me. One sees it most plainly in journeys, when one looks at one's own legs, and sees and hears them stalking along, and puts the question, Who is it that is so vigorously keeping pace with me down there? And then he is eternally talking to me: if you should someday personally appear before me, I should not be the last to grow faint and pale as death."—Titan, s. W., t. xxiv. pp. 114, 115.
This tendency to insanity, engendered by Fichte's philosophy, is brought to a crisis by the prediction of mysterious personage, half-wizard, half-juggler, who finds him an obstruction to his dark and crooked designs, and tells him that within a certain period he will be beside himself. The impression produced on Schoppe's mind by this prophesy, helps, as predictions of such a nature are apt to do, to bring about his own verification; and an accumulation of harassing incidents at the critical period works up his mind to such a degree of excitement that his bodily health gives way under it, and he dies in a paroxysm brought on by the sudden appearance of Siebenkäs whom he mistakes for the long dreaded personal appearance of the 'I.'
"'My Schoppe,' exclaimed the figure (Siebenkäs), 'I am in search of the: does thou not know me?' 'Long enough have I known thee! Thou art old "I"—come on then, and put thy face close to mine, and make this stupid existence cold,' cried Schoppe with a last effort of expiring manhood. 'I am Siebenkäs,' said his double tenderly, and stepped quite close to him. 'So am I, "I " equal to "I," added the other in a low tone, and his heart, overwhelmed, broke in death.' "—Titan, s. W., t. xxiv. p. 158.
As regards the plot itself, in the dénoument of which the tragic end of Schoppe bears so conspicuous a part, it is by far the most complicated among all the novels of our author; and, in fact, so full of the most inconceivable conceits, and the most monstrous improbabilities, that Jean Paul's merit consists, not so much in the invention of his story, as in the skilful management of it, by which he contrives to make his reader forget the fictitious character of the wildest fictions, and carries him through them all, in spite of himself, with an intensity of interest, such as usually belongs only to real persons and events. The whole is evidently an improved and enlarged edition of "Hesperus:" the groundwork of the story in this, as in the other case, is the education, in a private station, and under a feigned name, of the heir to a throne. In Hesperus, the disguised prince, Flamin, is one of the subordinate characters, distinguished indeed by a certain princely excess of self-will and violence of passion, but otherwise not rising above the common level; and this, which cannot be accounted otherwise than a defect in the whole plan of Hesperus, seems to have suggested to Jean Paul the notion of reproducing the same idea, of course with necessary variations in the details of the plot to prevent actual repetition, in his Titan. Here, accordingly, the whole interest of the story is concentrated upon Count Albano, who is the rightful heir to the German principality, in which the scene is laid, but who appears on the stage as the son of a Spanish grandee. Around his lofty and highly-finished character all the other personages revolve, like attendant stars around the central sun. In the place of Lord Horion we have in Titan the Spanish knight Don Gaspard de Cesara, but with this difference, that Lord Horion is animated by high thoughts for the good of mankind, whereas Don Gaspard is impelled partly by vindictive feelings, and partly by an ambitious design to effect an alliance between Albano and his own daughter, the Countess Linda de Romeiro. Of the female characters, not one approaches to the perfection of Clotilda in Hesperus: Liana, the first object of Albano's love, placed in circumstances very similar to those of Clotilda, in the house of thoroughly worldly and ill-assorted parents, is too soft and morbidly poetic, and melts away before the heat of life's trials, like fresh fallen snow before the sun's rays. Her early death removes this formidable obstacle to the accomplishment of Don Gaspard's ambitious designs, and Albano is captivated by the far more commanding charms of Linda. But that bond, too, is broken by the moral fall of Linda, whose romantic notions of love, spurning matrimony as a vulgar bondage, are abused by a villain, the former friend of Albano and his rival for the hand of Linda, for the purpose of robbing her of her innocence; the similarity of his voice to that of Albano, and her debility of sight after sunset, even to actual blindness, favouring his diabolical design. Ultimately, after the discovery of Albano's real birth, and his accession to his ancestral dominions, he forms an alliance with a princess, named Idoina, who bears a striking resemblance to the departed Liana, but who is kept too much in the background during the whole progress of the story, to give scope for a development of her character sufficient to interest the reader in her.
To exhibit a highly gifted and morally powerful nature, brought to maturity by the discipline of heart and mind which Albano undergoes during the course of these transactions, surrounded by the most opposite influences, and by a variety of persons whose characters are not less discordant than the aims which they pursue, and which are all more or less connected with himself, is the main object which the author of Titan had in view. The dream of human greatness and goodness is realized in the character of the hero; and whatever objections may be raised to the truth of the moral, as involving the fallacious doctrine of human perfectibility, it must be confessed that few of those who have attempted to embody that doctrine in fiction, have taken a loftier aim, or handled their pencil with greater boldness and effect, than Jean Paul in this, which, after all, stands out pre-eminent among all his writings as the master-work of his genius. Subordinate to this leading idea, and interwoven with it, there are other and kindred thoughts of high moral truth; such as the victory which, under the most crushing circumstances, the feeblest may achieve by the triumphant power of an invincible endurance, exemplified in the touching fate of Liana; the certain and fearful danger resulting from presumptuous disregard of the unalterable rules of moral order, in the terrible fate of Linda; and the desperate termination of a career of reckless self-indulgence in that of her seducer, Roquairol, who, after strutting on life's stage in all the eccentricity of a highly talented roué, blows out his brains in the last act of a tragedy of his own composition, in which he has reserved to himself the part of the suicide. In addition to these high lessons, Titan contains a vast abundance of keen and graphic satire upon court life and the corruptions of government, which shows that Jean Paul had not yet escaped from the infection of the liberalism of the revolutionary propaganda, the traces of which, in his Hesperus, we have before noticed. Moreover, the perusal of Titan is rendered interesting and instructive by many profound and cute remarks on subjects of art; the cultivation of his taste being made a prominent part of Albano's education by Don Gaspard, who for this purpose engages, along with the philosophical Schoppe, a Greek artist, to bear him company in his travels. The depth and truth of Jean Paul's observations on these subjects, and the beauty of his descriptions, are the more surprising, because he never visited the scenes which be depicts in such glowing and graphic language in person, but derived his information partly from books and partly from one of the four sister princesses to whom Titan is dedicated.
In Titan, Jean Paul reached the highest point of what the Germans call the "Ideal," according to his views of life and of human nature. He was himself evidently conscious that he could not exceed his Albano and his Clotilda, the Jupiter Olympius and the Venus Urania of his poetic chisel. The efforts of his genius, in producing the two fictions of Hesperus and Titan, had lifted him to the top of Parnassus; and having reached it he wisely determined not to waste his strength or to jeopardize his fame by abortive endeavours to outdo himself. Instead of straining his powerful nature, as he had hitherto done in his ascent to the cloud-capped mountain of the Muses, be was content henceforth to exercise it gently by disporting himself upon its summit. None of his subsequent works exhibit the same concentration of his varied gifts; it seems as if he had subjected his now matured mind to an analytic process, and determined to open for every faculty and tendency of it a separate channel in which it might flow forth, for the instruction and delight of a grateful and admiring public, and for his own satisfaction in the fulfilment of what he considered his calling in the moral and intellectual world of Germany. Of the writings which belong to this last period of Jean Paul's literary history, some are philosophical, a few political, and the rest divided between comic and sentimental humour. Among the comic productions we have chiefly to notice "Dr. Katzenberger's Badereise," or "Visit to the Watering-Place" of " Maulbronn," Anglicè " Mouthbourn;" the "Life of Fibel;" "Nicolaus Markgraf, or the Comet;" and the "Journey of the Military Chaplain, Attila Schmelzle to Flätz," of which Mr. Carlyle has given an admirable translation, with occasional abridgements. Of an earlier date, and more sentimental than comic in the character of its humour, is the unfinished novel entitled the "Flegeljahre," or lubber years, of which, under the title of "Walt und Vult," the names of the two heroes of the tale, the American editor of the Life of Jean Paul has just published a translation. The story itself, strange, as all our author's stories are, is a kind of mythic representation of the two sides of his own poetic genius; one of the twin brothers, Walt, being a dreamy sentimentalist, the other, Vult, a man of the world, full of practical sense and humour. The latter, a vaurien, who roams through the world as a strolling musician, in vain attempts to protect the former from the loss of a large inheritance left him, but under conditions which to a person of Walt's simplicity of character, unacquaintance with the world, and visionary cast of mind, prove constant snares. For a while the two brothers live together in great harmony; until they both become enamoured of Wina, a great beauty, by whose exalted rank, however, the attainment of her hand is rendered as hopeless for poor Walt, as the possession of the inheritance by the conditions attached to it by the testator. Nevertheless Walt is the accepted lover, while Vult meets with a decided refusal, in consequence of which he takes his leave of his incorrigible and yet more fortunate brother. Thus the story ends, or rather is broken off in the middle, though the allegory seems complete; the inability of poetic genius either to secure the lower advantages of the material, or to reach the higher aims of the ideal world, being admirably represented by the situation in which Walt is left, with a lady love whom he has no hope of marrying, and a fortune which he has no chance of realizing; while at the same time the utter inutility of that keen and humorous perception of life which often accompanies poetic genius, and did so pre-eminently in the case of Jean Paul, for the practical purpose of restraining its eccentric flights, and the repudiation of worldly wisdom, and of the humour of the clown by the highest ideal of poesy, are ingeniously rendered in the allegory by the futility of all Vult's efforts to prevent the mistakes of Walt, and his rejection by the noble and lovely Wina.
As regards the merit of the performance by which the American editor of Jean Paul's Life has attempted to transplant this interesting tale upon the soil of English literature, we are bound to warn our readers, that if they wish to steer clear of the lofty genius and the poetic beauties of our author, they cannot do better than make use of this translation, which turns all his bright poetry into dull prose much more effectually than it does his German into English. We do not underrate the difficulties which a translator of Jean Paul has to cope with; but making every allowance for these, and for the inevitable inferiority of the copy as compared with the original, we cannot admit that the translation before us comes up even to the most moderate requirements which the reading public has a right to make upon a work of this nature: The poetic beauties and the keen wit of Jean Paul are evidently lost upon this translator; and through an exceedingly imperfect knowledge of the German language, apparently of its very accidence, even the grammatical sense is not always faithfully given. We might adduce, if it were worth the while, numberless instances in justification of these remarks; one passage may suffice. Walt in his capacity as notary is called upon to draw up the last will and testament of Flitte, a runagate, who, to avoid his creditors, has lodged himself in the keeper's apartments in the top of the church-tower, and, feigning deadly sickness for fraudulent ends, has recourse to the comedy of making his will. For this purpose he employs the single-hearted Walt, whom he insists, in spite of his remonstrances, on including in the number of his legatees. After the execution of the document Jean Paul thus continues the story:—
" It was a bitter pang to Walt, to part from the poor merry bird, who was leaving him some of his feathers and golden eggs, and to see him already fluttering, half-plucked, in the talons of the owl of death. Heering lighted him and all the witnesses down. ' It bodes me,' said the keeper, 'he will not get over the night; I have my own curious tokens. But to-morrow morning I'll hang out my handkerchief from the tower if he is actually gone.' Ghastly was the descent down the high-step ladders, through the vacant dank chambers of the tower, which contained nothing but stairs. The heavy stroke of the iron-pendulum, like the mowing to and fro of the iron scythe of time, suspended from the clock,—the wind without beating against the tower,—the lonesome noise of the nine living footsteps,—the strange gleams of light which the lantern, swinging in the keeper's hand, cast down from the highest gallery into the pews below, in every one of which a livid corpse might be devoutly sitting, as well as one standing in the pulpit, and the apprehension that at every step Flitte, having breathed his last, might be flitting through the church in a pallid glance,—all this chased the notary like a frightful dream through the dusky land of shadows and of terrors, so that he was as one arising from the dead, when out of the narrow tower he stepped out below the open starry sky, where above him eye was twinkling to eye, and life to life, and disclosing the world in deeper and deeper depth."-Flegeljahre, s. W., t. xxxiv. pp. 36, 37.
This passage the American translator has rendered as follows[11]:—
"It was sad and bitter to Walt to bid farewell to the poor pleasure-loving bird, who would have left him both feathers and golden eggs. Heering lighted both him and the witnesses down the stair. ' I will swear,' he said, 'he does not survive the night; there are many curious indications; but if he really gets over the night, I will hang out my handkerchief from the tower early in the morning.' Shuddering with cold, they descended the long ladder through the empty dark descent in which there was nothing but steps. The slow iron pendulum of the clock, that carried on the decrees of destiny, swung here in there, like the mowing of the scythe of time. The winds that came in gusts against the tower; the solitary and careful steps of the nine men, as they descended; the strange light of the lantern that struggled in the upper darkness and shed a sepulchral light upon the living, and the expectation that Flitt, at any moment, might depart, and like a pale ghost pass through the church; all these haunted Walt, like a dream, in the land of shadows and terrors, so that he stepped from the tower', like one risen from the dead, and meeting eye to eye, and life with life, in the outward living world."— Walt and Vult, or, The Twins, vol. i. pp. 38, 39.
We have marked in italics the numerous mistranslations and perversions of this short passage, as far as the case admits of it; and we now ask our readers to compare them with the correct translation which we have given above, and those who know German, with the original. To render e.g. "Mir will's schwanen," i.e. It bodes me, by "I will swear,' is bad enough; but to translate "wenn er wirklich ahgefahren ist," i.e. if he is actually gone, "if he really gets over the night," giving just the contrary sense, is really too bad; to say nothing of several more venial blunders against both grammar and dictionary. But what we find fault with above all, is the evident want of all capability to seize upon the imagery of our author, and the cool composure with which words and entire passages, which it is clear the translator does not understand, are either omitted altogether, or else some random productions of the translator's own dull brain are put in the place of Jean Paul's vivid thoughts. For instance, the bold and striking figure of "the owl of death," which is already beginning to "pluck" its prey, the dying man "fluttering in its talons," has wholly disappeared. The graphic description of 'the ghastly descent down the high step-ladders, through the vacant dank chambers of the tower,' is pared down to the inexpressive and partly incorrect translation, "Shuddering with cold (!!) they descended the long ladder (instead of "ladders"), through the empty dark (instead of "dank") descent: " can any thing be poorer or more clumsy? Again, that beautiful image in which "the heavy stroke of the iron pendulum " is compared to the "mowing to and fro of the iron scythe of time suspended from the clock, " how it is marred! The pendulum, indeed, is said to be "swinging here and there"(!!) and something is said about "the mowing of the scythe of time;" but not a word to indicate that the pendulum itself is "the iron scythe of time suspended from the clock;" in lieu of which we have the translator's gloss, "that carried on the decrees of destiny, " which no doubt he thought mighty fine, and a considerable help to unimaginative readers. Further on, where the reader of the original almost hears " the lonesome noise (Gepolter) of the nine living footsteps," the translator, losing sight of the "noise" altogether, substitutes the epithet "careful," the most inappropriate of all the epithets he could have chosen, because conveying a precisely contrary idea; while the wholly superfluous information that "they descended through the descent," does not indemnify the reader for the loss of the contrast between the dead stillness of the lonesome tower before described, and the "living footsteps." Then what intolerable bungling in the startling description of the effects of the lantern, as it swings in the keeper's hand, in the highest gallery, and casts "strange gleams of light into the pews below, " instead of which, we are told of its " light struggling in the upper darkness," and "shedding a sepulchral light upon the living," of all which stuff there is not a syllable in the original. And what becomes of those uncomfortable tenants of the church, "the livid corpses in the pews and in the pulpit," that congregation of the dead conjured up by Walt's fears and the poet's fancy? Are we to take "the sepulchral light shed upon the living, " as an equivalent for that also! Again, how is the poetic bloom taken off from the image which represents the soul of the dying man above, as "flitting through the church in a pallid glance," instead of which he is made in downright prose to "pass through as a pale ghost!" And why are the epithets "frightful" and "dusky" omitted, in describing the notary as chased (not "haunted") through the land of shadows and terrors, by all the circumstances before described, as by "a frightful dream?" And last, not least, what a lamentable falling off in the closing sentence! Jean Paul's description of "the open starry sky," we seek in vain in the translation; and so we do Jean Paul's beautiful comparison of the stars above, to eyes twinkling to each other, "eye to eye, life to life," and so disclosing by their bright sheen to the mortal eye below "the world in deeper and deeper depth," all which the ill-starred translator understands of human eye meeting human eye, one living man with another living man, in "the outward living world."
We were inclined, before we looked more nearly into the matter, to pity Jean Paul's translator; but we confess our pity is altogether transferred to poor Jean Paul himself, who, if he were alive to see how one of his favourite works is "dished " in a language for the literature of which be felt such intense love and veneration, would assuredly pay a visit to his caricaturist across the Atlantic, in the character of Siebenkäs, or Leibgeber, or Schoppe, and chastise him soundly for his murderous assaults upon his finest thoughts.
But enough of the Flegeljahre, and this travesty of them. We must draw our article to a close; which we shall do with a brief account of the philosophical works of our author. These are, besides two treatises on the immortality of the soul, his "Levana" and his "Æsthetic." The former of these contains his views on education, in a series of what be himself calls "fragments;" the latter, in a no less fragmentary form, his theory of poetic beauty. The following list of the subjects treated of in the two first volumes of the "Æsthetic," will give our reader some idea of the plan of this ars poetica of Jean Paul:—
" Of poetic art in general—of the successive degrees of poetic power—of genius—of Greek or plastic poesy—of romantic poesy—of the ridiculous—of humoristic poesy—of epic, dramatic, and lyric humour—of wit—of characters—historic fable of the drama and the epos—of the novel—of lyric poetry—of style—a fragment on the German language."
The three following volumes are of a much more miscellaneous character, consisting of short disquisitions, essays, and fragments, on a variety of points connected with the main subject of the work; among them, in the fourth volume, under the title "Kleine Bücherschau," a reprint is given of several reviews written at different times for the "Heidelberger Jahhrbücher," one of which, doubly interesting on account of the reviewee, as well as the reviewer,—the review of Mad. de Stael's Germany,—is already known to the English public by Mr. Carlyle's translation.
Far more interesting, however, than either the "Levana" or the "Æsthetic," are Jean Paul's two treatises on the immortality of the soul, his "Kampaner Thal," and his "Selina." Both are in the form of dialogues, after the manner of Cicero's philosophical disquisitions; with this only difference, that, instead of Roman knights and senators in all the dignity of the toga, we have here ladies and gentlemen of bon ton, dressed up in Jean Paul's best manner, especially the ladies. The "Kampaner Thal" belongs to his earlier productions, its publication intervening between "Siebenkäs" and "Titan;" its tendency, and the character of the author's views on this subject, will be best understood by the replies which he makes to the two principal objections raised against the belief in the immortality of the soul: the first, the apparently simultaneous decay of the powers of the soul, as well as the body, in old age; the second, the alleged impossibility of searching into a future mode of existence, of peeping over, out of a visible, into an invisible world. In answer to the first of these objections, he thus argues:—
" You are not a materialist; you assume that the action of the soul and that of the body correspond and excite each other; that, in fact, bodily organs are the keys which answer to the different glasses of the inner harmonica. Hitherto the bodily accords of the feelings only have been noted, as, for instance, the swelling heart and the sluggish pulse in longing desire, the effusion of bile in anger, and so forth. But the intertwining and anastomosis between the inner and the outer man is of so quick and so intimate a nature, that every image and idea of the mind must call forth a corresponding vibration of some nerve. These bodily after-tones ought to be observed and set down in the notation of speech when they express poetic, algebraic, artistic, numismatic, or anatomical ideas, no less than when they are the utterance of the feelings and passions. At the same time the body is no more than the sounding-board; it is not the spiritual scale, nor its harmony. Sadness bears no resemblance to tears, confusion none to the blood which is ebbing in the cheeks, wit none to champagne, the idea of this valley none to the miniature sketch of it on our retina. The inner man, the veiled god in the statue, is not of stone like the statue itself; his living members grow and ripen by a mysterious process of life within the stony limbs of the outer man. We do not sufficiently take notice of the influence which, in fact, the inner man has upon the outer man in restraining and moulding him; bow, for instance, principles gradually cool and quench the irascible body, which, according to physiological laws, ought to be burning more and more fiercely from week to week; how it has even happened that terror or anger has held together, as by spiritual clasps, the texture of the body, which was already rending asunder and out of joint. Even when the whole brain is in a manner paralyzed; when every fibre is already rusted in and choked up; when the mind is clogged, it needs only an act of the will, which may at any moment be exerted,—it needs only some letter, some striking idea, to set the machinery of the cerebral fibres, the spiritual clockwork, going again without any bodily assistance….
" When the extravasation of an artery in the fourth cerebral chamber of a Socrates covers the whole land of his ideas with a bloody inundation, it is true that all his ideas and moral affections are covered by the tide of blood; but they are not destroyed by it; because his virtue and his wisdom resided not in the cerebral globules which have been thus drowned, but in his 'I;' and because the dependence of the works of the clock on its case, for protection from dust and the like, does not prove that the case and the works are identical, still less that the clock consists of nothing but cases. Since the functions of the soul are not bodily functions, but only either their consequents or their antecedents; and since every function of the soul must leave traces in the soul, as well as in the body, why should we suppose that the former are lost, when paralysis of old age effaces the latter? Is there no difference, then, between the mind of a childish old man, and the mind of a child? If the soul of Socrates were to be plunged into the body of a Borgia, as into a mud-bath, would it therefore lose its moral powers, and all at once exchange its virtuous for vicious propensities? Or are we to suppose that in the morganatic marriage by which soul and body are united, but without community of goods, the one spouse can only gain, and does not lose also, with the other? Is the ingrafted spirit to feel the influence of the body only when it is flourishing, and not also when it is decaying? And if it must feel the latter, as well as the former, then must not the clay which is wrapped round the body give to the soul the appearance of stopping or of retrograding, in the same way as the progress of our earth gives a like appearance to the movements of the upper planets? If we were to be unshelled at all, this could not be effected but by the slow hand of time by the spoiling of old age; if it was once determined that our career shall not end in one world, the gulf which separates this world from the other could have no other form than the grave. The short interruption of our progress by old age, and the longer interruption of it by death, no more do away with that progress, than the still shorter interruption by sleep. In faintness of heart we mistake, like the first man, the total eclipse of sleep for the night of death, and that night itself for the world's doom."— Kampaner Thal, s. W., t. xix. pp. 48-50.
As for the second objection, the want of evidence of the reality of an invisible world, Jean Paul thus replies to it:—
" Am I to presume upon lifting the veil of a whole world of futurity? I, who am not coming thence, but am only on my way thither? No doubt it is this dissimilarity of the future world to the present, the very incommensurability of its greatness, that has made so many unbelievers in it. It is not the bursting of the larva-skin of our body in death, but the distance between our future spring and our present autumn, which throws so many doubts into our poor heart. This is evident in the case of the savages, who look upon the next life only as upon the second volume, the New Testament, of the first life, and know of no other difference between the two but that which exists between old age and youth: they readily put faith in their hopes. Your first objection, 'the peeling off and crumbling of the bodily glazing, does not deprive the savages of the hope that they shall spring up again in a new flower-pot. But your second objection daily multiplies both itself and the number of sceptics; for as the second world itself cannot be subjected to the blast of the chymist's furnace, or placed in the focus of the solar microscope, the progress of chymical and physical science tends, by its dissolvents and other appliances, daily more and more to precipitate or sublime the hope of a future existence. Indeed, it is not by the practice of the body only, but by its very theory; not only by the applied mathematics of its lusts, but by the pure science of the existence of a world of sense, that the holy, inly-diving look upon the inner world is necessarily obscured and obstructed to beings dwelling as yet in the outer world. The inner world is more easily comprehended only by moralists, metaphysicians, poets, nay, even by artists; the chymist, the physician, the mathematician wants for it telescopes and ear-tubes, and in course of time even eyes and ears.
" On the whole, I find fewer men than is supposed, who decidedly either believe or deny a future existence. They that venture to deny it, are exceedingly few, because without it the present existence would lose all unity, character, completeness, and hope; and equally few are they who venture to assume it, because they are affrighted at the thought of their own translation into glory, and of the dying away of the diminished earth. Most men are tossed up and down midway between the two opinions, in poetic vagueness, by the impulse of alternating feelings.
" As we paint devils more easily than gods, furies more easily than the Venus Urania, hell more easily than heaven, so we believe in the former more easily than in the latter, in the greatest misery more easily than in the greatest happiness. Is it not, then, natural that our mind, accustomed to the disappointments and the chains of earth, should be slow to admit the thought of an Utopia against which the earth is wrecked, in order that its lilies may, like the Guernsey lilies, find a shore on which they may bloom[12], on which the tortured heart of man may be saved, satisfied, exalted, and blest."— Kampaner Thal, s. W., pp. 64, 55.
Thus far the arguments in favour of the immortality of the soul are rather of a negative character, defensive against scepticism; in the sequel Jean Paul urges the positive proofs also of the existence of a future world with great effect. One passage is all we can make room for:—
"There is a spiritual world suspended in our heart which breaks like a warm sun through the clouds of the material world,—I mean the universe of virtue, beauty, and truth; those inner heavens and worlds which are neither parts nor emanations, neither derivatives nor copies, of the outer. The reason why we are less struck by the incomprehensible existence of these three transcendent celestial orbs is, that they are always banging before us, and that we foolishly imagine that we are creating them, whereas we only perceive them. What prototype, what plastic power have we, or what materials, to create such a spiritual world within ourselves? Let the atheist but ask himself how he came by the gigantic ideal of a Godhead which he either denies or materializes; a conception which is not formed by an accumulation of finite quantities and measures, because it is the very reverse of all measure and of all quantity? The fact is, that the atheist denies the original of the copy which he holds in his hands. As there are idealists in reference to the outer world, who fancy that the perceptions produce the objects, whereas the objects cause the perceptions; so there are idealists in reference to the inner world, who deduce being from appearance, sound from echo, existence from observation, instead of accounting, as they ought to do, contrariwise, for appearance by the existence of that which appears, and for our consciousness by the existence of that whereof we are conscious. We mistake our analysis of the world within us for its preformation; in other words, the genealogist mistakes himself for the sire.
" This inner world, which is yet more glorious and wonderful than the outer, needs another heaven than the one above us, and a higher world than that which is warmed by a sun. And therefore we say with truth, not the second earth or sphere, but the second world; that is, another world beyond this universe."— Kampaner Thal, s. W., t. xix. pp. 58-60.
The depth of thought and intensity of feeling with which Jean Paul clung to this faith in the reality of a spiritual world, and which gave to the productions of his pen a higher tone and a heavenly colouring, had the most beneficial influence upon the minds of the German public at a time when the foundations of revealed truth were undermined, no less by the lifeless dogmatism and supercilious selfishness of the champions of orthodoxy, than by the irreverent boldness of rationalistic criticism[13]; and when, moreover, the tendency of the philosophical systems which sprang up in rapid succession, was to reduce all truth, as all morality had been reduced before, to the narrow and unsound foundation of the individual self. Among the metaphysicians, Jacobi alone, deeply loved and venerated on that account by Jean Paul, stood up for the maintenance of religious faith and hope against the empty, vain eclecticism, and the cold and sneering scepticism of the age; and it is not too much to say, that Jean Paul's whole tendency and ambition was, to be, as a poet, his ally and fellow-soldier in that good cause.
It is, therefore, infinitely disgusting to find, not only among ourselves Socinianism pressing Jean Paul into its service, as if he had been one of that ilk, but in Germany also his posthumous papers abused, and that by his own son-in-law[14], for the purpose of throwing his great name into the scale of the shallow infidelity of the "friends of light." Jean Paul was certainly far from being an orthodox divine, or a man of sound opinions on the subject of revealed religion; but in order correctly to appreciate the value of that fact, both in regard to his own character, and to his influence upon the public, we must bear in mind what was the general tone and tendency of the age in which he rose. That was decidedly towards unbelief; while Jean Paul's tendency, on the contrary, was towards faith. On the ladder of truth which God has let down upon the earth out of heaven, some are ascending, while others are descending back again to their earthly systems of ignorance and error; those that ascend and those that descend may chance to meet on the same round, but it is manifest folly thence to conclude that they stand in the same relation to truth. So it is with Jean Paul and the rationalists: he was strenuously working his way upwards into the regions of faith, they are sliding down rapidly towards the abyss of unbelief: they may occasionally strike the same notes, but the keys in which they play are widely different, and not the keys only, but the whole spirit of their music,—the one being a constant effort to produce harmony, the other a perpetual hammering out of dissonances.
We have thought it due to the memory of Jean Paul to vindicate him from the ill savour which some of his admiring and patronizing friends, both here and abroad, threaten to bring upon his name; and we shall now adduce, in further confirmation of the view which we have taken of our author, in counting him among the champions of the inner soul's holy faith and hope, against the cold and base unbelief of the carnal mind, a few passages from his "Selina." This work was, as" we have already stated, commenced by him on the day when he received the intelligence of his son's death; it was intended to complete the argument of the "Kampaner Thal," of which it is, both in form and substance, a continuation. The miserable theory which denies the immortality of the soul and the continuance of individual existence after death, designated by the expressive term "Vernichtungsglaube," i.e. belief in annihilation, is assailed and demolished by Jean Paul with arguments of singular depth, boldness, and power. His heart boils with indignation at the blasphemy of that theory; he challenges its advocates to pluck up their courage, to draw near and look down into the yawning gulf beneath them :—
" Many errors appear, like the moon, at a distance mild and soft; but on a nearer approach they show, like the moon through the telescope, precipices and volcanoes. Come closer, then, to the belief in the mortality of the soul, and look down into its chasms and craters.
" Realize, for once, the thought that we are all mere sound-figures of fine sand, which a note draws together on the vibrating glass, and which afterwards a breath of air without any sound blows off from the glass into empty space; and the existence of nations and centuries is not worth the expenditure of trouble and of life. They are formed and buried, raised up and thrown down again; but what use is it, that by careful nurture herbs are made to grow in the place of weeds, and blossoms to succeed the leaves? The churchyard lies upon the ploughed-down nations; the present is nothing to the past, the future nothing to the present. Sciences rise for ever; and for ever the heads which contained them, sink and grow hollow and empty down below. Let, at length, any one people attain the highest degree of science, of art, and of moral culture, in which later nations outstrip their predecessors, let in the last age the spiritual harvest and abundance accumulated through successive centuries be deposited in the human multitude of sound-figures: within fifty years the figures and the treasures vanish, and nothing remains but the fact that they have been. The light of creation and of its spirit is extinct; there is an end of all progress; there remain only steps; nothing but scattered beings:—at most they that have been, are confounded in the dust; and all that is of a higher nature must be gathered afresh. God from all eternity has seen nothing but perpetual beginnings after perpetual endings; his sun sheds forth the pallid light of an everlasting, never-setting sunset upon an interminable graveyard, in which corpses upon corpses are still accumulating. God is alone; He only lives among the dying….
" Our life owes its poor semblance of duration simply to the circumstance, that we include the past in our calculation of the present; but it shrivels up into a tiny moment, if we place it by the side of an immeasurable future, which flows towards us in a broad stream, but every drop of which is absorbed as soon as it touches us; a life between the contending tides of two oceans of eternity, which by meeting can make each other neither larger nor smaller.
" Imagine, then, that, instead of sixty years, we should live only sixty seconds,—and, properly speaking, in the face of a boundless eternity, we do not live longer, no, nor even so long, —what matters it what such a minute-creature may think, and desire, and aim at, for half a minute, in order to transmit and perpetuate its seed and crop in another minute-creature? What value has the civilization and illumination of a people whose existence is reckoned by seconds, of a little heap of pulverized colophony, which blazes and shines while it is blown through the flame of life? And can the dead pseudo-immortality of libraries and museums, which resides and is reflected in the transient blaze of the quickly consumed witch-meal[15], give warmth and soul to a life exposed to an eternal extinction often before its short seconds are lived out and fulfilled? If the continual admixture and influx of the rising generation into that which is fading away, were not to impart to the latter a solid appearance of duration and continuity, turning it into a kind of electric jar of knowledge; if, without mixing with the next, the element of its renovation, each generation was in its turn to sink down like a swarm of day-flies from the beams of the evening sun into the water, all the brilliancy and splendour of the nations would appear to us only as the vanishing of glow-worms, which through the night describe their small orbit over the earth. Then must each individual, in the midst of his flight and effort to ennoble himself and others, be cast down by the thought that the injury done him by any chance gust of wind, may at any moment cause the tombstone to descend like a portcullis upon all his endeavours….
" If from dying nations we pass on to dying individuals, it is painful to the soul thoroughly to realize, even for a moment, love between those that are to perish. From perpetual nothingness a couple of men wake up on their death-beds, and from these they look at each other with eyes full of deepest love, and instantly, after a few minutes, they close those eyes again in eternal annihilation; —and is that the imperishable love of men towards one another, —of parents, children, spouses, and friends? Without immortality, you cannot say to any one, 'I love thee;' you can only sigh and say, 'I would love.'
" The heart stands lonely upon the earth, till at last it ceases to be lonely in the great Sahara beneath the earth, because it ceases to be at all. It cannot even mourn and weep; for the shade in which it might sorrow, which for a moment stood there warm and coloured, has not grown cold and dark, but has become invisible in the vast invisible night. Even that small warm and red thing, which thou called thy loving heart, is dissolved, it may be, at the very moment when it weeps, into invisible intangible night, not into a part of that night (which has no parts), but into that night itself."- Selina, s. W., t. lxi. pp. 15-18.
From this powerful refutation of the theory of individual annihilation, Jean Paul passes on to an examination of the system of metempsychosis; he next proceeds to consider the objections against the immortality of the soul founded on the phenomena of sleep, of dreams, of old age; which leads him to throw out many striking remarks on the relation between body and soul. Thence he proceeds to the positive demonstration of the soul's immortality; on two grounds, first, the existence of God; secondly, the soul's inward craving for happiness, and the internal promise of it to the heart, which argues the existence of a future state, in which that craving may be stilled and that promise fulfilled.
The abstract question of the soul's immortality being thus decided in the affirmative, Jean Paul passes on to the further questions of the resurrection of the body, and mutual recognition in a future state. But on this deep and interesting theme he was not permitted to do more than put the objections into the mouth of the "Advocatus Diaboli." In the answer to them he was overtaken by the hand of death; his work remained unfinished on the earth, and his truth-thirsting soul was removed out of this world, which was to him a state of darkness and conjecture, into that world in which all the questions of life are answered, and all its riddles solved; that world to the existence of which, and its connexion with the present; Jean Paul himself bore testimony when he said, that "somewhere there must be resting on the earth a heavenly ladder, whose top reaches up far beyond the most distant stars."
- ↑ Wahrheit aus Jean Paul's Leben, which contains the autobiography of Jean Paul, in the form of humoristic lectures, extending, however, no further than his boyhood; followed by the continuation of his history by his intimate personal friend and literary confidant, Otto, who himself, also, did not live to complete it, having died a few months after Jean Paul, from grief, it is said, for the loss of his friend. The conclusion is from the pen of Dr. Förster, Jean Paul's son-in-law, to whom, after Otto's death, the completion both of his biography, and of the complete edition of his works, was committed. The first volumes of this biography were reviewed by Mr. Carlyle, in No. IX. of the Foreign Review. The article is reprinted in the second volume of Carlyle's Critical and Miscellaneous Essays.
- ↑ Jean Paul Friedrich Richter's Leben, nebst Characteristic seiner Werke, von Heinrich Döring, Gotha, 1826. Of this production Mr. Carlyle gave an account in No. XCI. of the Edinburgh Review; reprinted in the first volume of his Miscellanies. Döring himself published, in 1830, a second and enlarged, but scarcely improved edition of this biographical compilation, against which Jean Paul's widow cautioned the public by advertisement.
- ↑ A translation of Jean Paul's Review of Madame de Staël's Germany, was given by Mr. Carlyle in Nos. I. and IV. of Frasier's Magazine, and is reprinted in the second volume of his Critical and Miscellaneous Essays; and the third volume of his "German Romances" contains a translation of "Army-Chaplain Schmelzle's Journey to Flätz," and of the "Life of Quintus Fixlein."
- ↑ The English reprint forms part of "The Catholic Series," the object of which, we are told, is to "realize the idea of Catholicism in spirit." For this purpose, inter alia, an "Ideal Head " is placed on the title-page of each number, which, in our simplicity, we were on the point of mistaking for a bad likeness of Jean Paul, when our eye was caught. by the announcement that it is "taken, with considerable modification, from De la Roche's picture of Christ." As a specimen of the extent to which the galimatias of infidelity is carried, even in England, we transcribe the following explanatory remarks on this "Ideal Head:"—"An attempt was previously made to symbolize the idea of spiritual Self-reliance and Progression, but nothing was produced that we deemed adequately expressive, or applicable, as a characteristic of the series; hence, the present engraving was adopted, not specially because it was intended by the artist to express the idea of Jesus Christ, (for that must always be imaginary.) but as an embodiment of the highest ideal humanity, and thus of a likeness of Jesus Christ, as its highest historical realization. In prefixing this engraving to each a number of Catholic Series, it is intended—by the absence of passion—by the profound intellectual power—the beneficent and loveful nature, and the serene and spiritual beauty therein portrayed—to awaken in the beholder a self-consciousness of the like qualities in a greater or less degree; and to imply the necessity of aspiration in progress, in order to unfold and realize the nature which the artist has essayed to express in this ideal image; and as a contributory means to this and the Catholic Series is issued." If the whorl should last long enough for a future antiquary to collect specimens of the different genera and species of Catholicity, which have been spawned by the 19th century, the collection will, we fancy, turn out something exceedingly rare and curious.
- ↑ In the article in No. IX. of the Foreign Review, reprinted in volume ii. of his Critical and Miscellaneous Essays.
- ↑ By rendering the German Armen Advocat, "Advocate of the poor," the English translator has dropped out and equivocation which the merry author played off on his very title-page. The Advocat answers to our barrister or counsellor, and the Armen Advocat means a counsellor whose practice lies among the poor; but in the oblique case, in which it stands on the title page, it involves the double sense of a counsellor who is himself poor. We therefore suggest that it should be rendered—after the analogy of "poor house," " poor doctor"—by " poor counsellor." In our compound word for law commissioner this double sense does not exist, owing to the intervening word "law," and to the handsome salaries which that law puts into the pockets of the commissioners.
- ↑ The original is as follows:-"Ja nicht einmal die blosse Unähnlichkeit ihrer ungleichnamigen Pole (denn Siebenkäs verzieh, Leibgeber bestrafte lieber, jener war mehr eine horazische Satire, dieser mehr ein aristophanischer Gassenhauer mit unpoetischen und poetischen Härten) entschied ihr Anziehen. Aber wie Freundinnen gern einerlei Kleider, so trugen ihre Seelen ganz den polnischen Rock und Morgenanzug des Lebens, ich meine zwei Körper von einerlei Aufschlägen, Farben, Knopflöchern, Besatz und Zuschnitt: beide hatten denselben Blitz der Augen, dasselbe erdfarbige Gesicht, dieselbe Länge, Magerheit und alles; wie denn überhaupt das Naturspiel ähnlicher Gesichter häufiger ist, als man glaubt, weil man es nur bemerkt, wenn ein Fürst oder ein grosser Mann einen körperlichen Widerschein wirft."
- ↑ One of the mystifications by which Jean Paul makes himself merry at the expense of his readers, is, that, on the one hand, he works his own person into the story of his novels, under various disguises; so, on the other hand, he attributes some of his own publications to the fictitious characters in his novels. Thus, while Leibgeber or Schoppe is made the author of the Clavis Fichtiana, the "Selection from the Devil's Papers," mentioned before, is alleged to be from the pen of Siebenkäs, the production of his tortured brain during his purgatorial matrimony with Lenette and in the "Flegeljahre" the "Greenland Lawsuits " are attributed to the humorous twin-brother, Vult.
- ↑ The title of one of the principal works of Fichte is, “Wissenschaftslehre,” which, after the analogy of technology, τεχνολογία, we render epistemology.
- ↑ The name of Schoppe's dog.
- ↑ The German reads thus:— "Es war ihm bitter, von dem armen lustigen Vogel— der ihm Federn und goldne Eier zurückliess — zu scheiden, und ihn schon in den Krallen der rupsenden Todes-Eule um sich schlagen zu sehen. Heering leuchtete ihm und sämmtlichen Zeugen herab. 'Mir will's schwanen, sagte der Thürmer, dass er die Nacht nicht übersteht; ich habe meins kuriosen Zeichen. Ich hänge aber morgen srüh mein Schnupstuch aus dem Thurme, wenn er wirklich abgesahren ist." Schauerlich trat man die langen Treppenleitern durch die leeren dumpsen Thurm-Geklüfts, worin nichts war, als eine Treppe, herunter. Der langsame eiserne Perpendikelschlag, gleichsam das Hin- und Hernrichen der an die Uhr gehangenen Eisen -Sense der Zeit — das äussere Windstossen an den Thurm — das einsame Gepolter der 9 lebendigen Menschen — die seitsamen Beleuchtungen , die die getragene Laterne durch die oberste Empor hinunter in die Stuhlreihen flattern liess, in deren jeder ein gelber Todter andächtig sitzen konnte, so wie aus der Kanzel einer stehen — und dis Erwartung, dass bei jedem Tritte Flitte verscheiden und als bleicher Schein durch die Kirche sliegen könne das alles jagte wie ein bang. Traum den Notar im düstern Lande der Schatten und Schrecken umher, dass er ordentlich von Todten auserstand, als er aus dem schmalen Thurms unter den ossnen Sternenhimmel hinaustrat, wo droben Auge an Auge, Lebeu an Leben sunkelte und die Welt weiter machte.
- ↑ "The Guernsey lily from Japan has its name from the island of Guernsey, on which it was poured forth and sown from a wrecked vessel."— [Author's note.]
- ↑ The following passage from the unfinished preface of his last work on the immortality of the soul, throws light upon the state of feeling which was produced in Jean Paul's mind by the controversies of theologians and philosophers :—"How is it possible to write decisively on the form of immortality, seeing that the empty dogmas, and responses of philosophers, theologians, and naturalists, excite regular disgust and indignation in the mind of an old man, so that at last he wishes heartily to escape from a world full of lying libraries."—Selina, VorredeBruchstücke, s. W., vol. lxi. p. xxii.
- ↑ Since the completion of the edition of his collected works, Dr. Förster has published, at Frankfort, 1845, two volumes of selections from Jean Paul's posthumous papers, and among them an essay "against hyper-Christianity," written by Jean Paul under the painful excitement caused by the premature death of his son, which was attributed to the effect of religious enthusiasm upon a feeble frame. This collection of fragments bears the quaint name of "Der Papier-drache," i.e. the paper-kite; a name under which Jean Paul himself announced his intention of publishing the numberless literary scraps which had accumulated under his hands, and which he had not "used up" in the composition of his different works. These he meant to connect together without much system, in the same way that boys paste and string papers of all sizes and colours together in making their kites, whence the name Papier-drache, or "paper-kite," not "paper-dragon," as we have seen it somewhere infelicitously translated.
- ↑ This is the popular name given in Germany both to pulverized colophony and to the seed of Lycopodium, either of which is used on the stage and by jugglers to imitate lightning, by blowing it through the flame of a candle.