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 which enwraps our little ball of flying dust,how is it possible that lone man should not embrace the only warm breast which holds 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 flowerthousand years have passed with their high and meads, and remind myself that over them six 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 I never was of thine acquaintance."-Wuz, Leben, s. W., t. vii., pp. 177-179. "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 Paul at the opening of the second and Schulmeisterlein Maria Wuz, s. W., t. vii., p. 135. brighter part of his literary career, during After accompanying the possessor of this which he produced-besides the unfinished happy temperament through the different tale of "The Invisible Lodge," the hero of stages of life, among which his courtship which is, at the close of the third volume, and marriage hold a conspicuous place, left in a prison, into which he had been Jean Paul adds " seven last words to the cast by some unexplained blunder-his reader," from which we extract the follow-three most highly-finished and most celeing, 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 the 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 Such was the frame of mind of Jean brated 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 na "my intentions Notwithstanding," he says, 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. ture. For this purpose, the author has somewhat imaginative young lady, who is had recourse to a whimsical device, which dying with love for him, a favor which, will at once remind our readers of the it must be confessed, he little deserves,strange story of Caspar Hauser, and which, is evident from the "apology". which he it is far from improbable, may have sug-prefixed to this tale in the edition of his gested the first idea of that romance in real collected works :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 royal subjects have to undergo for the benefit of the princely exchequer. 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 Dogmails." 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, What might have been the ultimate mo- which is drawn round the story like a fesral which Jean Paul intended to work out toon, from which numberless jokes and safrom these strange beginnings, it is impos- tirical hits are playfully suspended, has nosible to tell as it is, the hero, educated thing whatever to do with the main design. under the earth by his first, and in the The leading idea which is worked out clouds by his second tutor, descends, more through the whole of this complicated tale, naturally than surprisingly, by an Icarian full of trying moral situations, is to reprefall, into a considerable moral quagmire, sent the conflict between good and evil, befrom which it appears that the author in- tween the coarse and selfish passions of the tended afterwards to extricate him; but common herd of mankind, and the higher probably he found that he had, with more and nobler aspirations of what may aptly truth than he himself suspected in his tale, be termed the aristocracy of the mind and marred his own theory of life, of which the heart. In this conflict the higher souls are subterraneous training was the first chapter, victorious, but they can be so only by selfand had no heart to resume a fiction which sacrifice: the thought that lies at the founrequired throughout magic lights to sustain dation, is an essentially Christian thought, it, and the enchantment of which was ef- but embodied in a poctic fiction; virtue is fectually broken. That he never quite re- put in the place of Christ, and has both its linquished the thought of rescuing his Gus-passion and its resurrection. Hence the tavus from the black hole in which he so mysteriously lodged him, and pouring the balm of happier hours into the heart of a title "Hesperus," as signifying both the evening and the morning star; the whole being, in the wildest strains of German ro mance, an echo of that word of the Psalmist, "Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning." 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 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 of 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 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 hightoned character, free from every earthly affection, because all he loved moulders in the tomb, independent of man's fear or favor, 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 ap-father. He, too, is the depositary of Lord pears once more as the Deus ex machina, 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 laboring, 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 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 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 rapid ly approaching his death, of which he has keenness of Jean Paul's tone on this suba mysterious presentiment; he is introduc-ject our readers may judge by the following ed into the story as an impersonation of extract: what was, to Jean Paul's conception, the "Not in colleges and republics only, but in mohighest and purest faith, great depth of re-narchies too, speeches enough are made-not to ligious sentiment, interwoven with a few the people, but to its curatores absentis. And in 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, often 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 Christain name. "I cannot," exclaims 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 this 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 of overflowing and infinite love, and gives to all rest and refreshment; in His presence stands no grave."-Hesperus, s. W., vol. viii., p. 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 like manner there is in monarchies liberty enough, "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 favorites). Even men who had sense, like Solon or Lycurgus, had the legislative no higher pretensions than that they were men of 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 honor 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 ardor 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 the discrepancy occasioned by their opposite potest; and if good rather than evil deeds were chro-larity,-Siebenkäs being more inclined to forgive, nicled in history, we should, among so many shahs, chans, rajahs, and chaliffs, 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. viii., p. 196-198. 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, color, button-holes, lining, and cut; both had the same After rising as high as he did in his brilliancy of eye, the same sallowness of counteHesperus, we are disappointed to find our nance, the same stature, leanness, and all the rest; author descend to a composition so full of for indeed nature's prank in producing likenesses false sentiment, of doubtful morality, and is much more common than is generally supposed, because it is remarked only when some prince of sporting with life, death, and eternity, as or other great man is imaged forth in a bodily the Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces; or, counterpart. I could have wished, therefore, that the Wedded Life, Death, and Espousals of Leibgeber had not been limping, and thereby given the poor counsellor, F. St. Siebenkäs."* occasion to distinguish him from Siebenkäs; more The foundation on which Jean Paul raised especially as the latter had cleverly abraded and the superstructure of one of the strangest extirpated the mark by which he too might have and wildest stories that ever entered the been distinguished from the other, with the cautery of a live toad burst upon the mark, which consisthuman brain, is a duplicate man, i. e. two ed in a pyramidal mole by the side of his left ear, men so perfectly alike, internally and ex-in the shape of a triangle, or of the zodiac light, ternally, 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. 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 returning the name taken in exchange, after the Otaheitean fashion of exchanging names "Such a royal alliance of two strange souls has together with the hearts. As it is already some not often occurred. The same contempt for the years since my hero has had his honest name fashionable child's-play of life; the same hatred filched from him by his name-thief of a friend, of littleness combined with tenderness to the little; and has got the other honest name instead, I know the same abhorrence of mean selfishness; the no help for it in my chapters, but am obliged to same laughter-love in the fair bedlam earth; the produce him in my muster roll, even as I presented same deafness to the world's, but not to honor's, him at the threshold, as Firmian Stanislaus Siebenvoice; these were no more than the first faint käs, and the other as Leibgeber (i. e. 'Bodygiver'), lines of similitude which constituted them one-although I want no critic to tell me that the 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 mere 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. By rendering the German Armen-Advocat," AdWe have selected this passage, both as vocate of the poor," the English translator has the key to that thimble-riggery and exdropped out an equivocation which the merry author change of persons upon which the whole played off on his very title-page. The Advocat answers to our barrister or counsellor, and the Armen-plot of Siebenkäs is founded, and as a samAdvocat means a counsellor whose practice lies ple of the exuberance of thought which among the poor; but in the oblique case, in which constantly heaps figure upon figure, and it stands on the title-page, it involves the double sense of a counsellor who is himself poor. We the most striking analogies within the compresses the most grotesque contrasts and therefore suggest that it should be rendered-after the analogy of "poor house," "poor doctor"-by "poor counsellor." In our compound word "poorlaw commissioner" this double sense does not exist, owing to the intervening word "law," and to the handsome salaries which that law puts into the pock ets of the commissioners. 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 |