■1 |i;i! 

 
 fl^.
 
 nV 
 
 LIFE 
 
 Jean Paul Frederic Richter, 
 
 COMPILED FROM VARIOUS SOURCES. 
 
 PRECEDED BY HIS 
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 
 
 By ELIZA BUCKMINSTER LEE. 
 
 " I would gladly, after my death, have that, which has never yet happened 
 to any author, all ray thoughts given to the world, — not one should be con- 
 cealed."— Jean Paul. 
 
 THIRD ariTK'N. 
 
 BOSTON : 
 
 TICKNOR AND FIELDS 
 
 1864. 
 
 m
 
 J. 
 
 /^^j.^6C. 
 
 
 2j^ 
 
 
 Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1864, by 
 
 TICK NOR AND FIELDS, 
 
 in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts. 
 
 University Press: 
 
 Welch, Bigelow, and Company, 
 
 Cambridge.
 
 To 
 
 The beloved and ever-present memory of her whose last 
 gift of a German Bible first led to the study 
 of the German tongue, I dedicate this 
 imperfect proof of that study 
 and inadequate expres- 
 sion of that 
 love.
 
 is^^V^^^e.f 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 TO THE THIRD EDITION. 
 
 T is now twenty-two years since the First 
 Edition of the " Life of Jean Paul " was 
 pubhshed, and in the altered condition of 
 our country it seems almost an intrusion and an 
 impertinence to expect such a book to be received 
 with favor ; for what is nearest touches us most, 
 and our hearts beat more painfully at domestic 
 tragedies, of which we have had so many, than at 
 the crowded anguish of distant, though kindred 
 cities. But in giving our hearts to the great, to 
 the altogether absorbing and tremendous interests 
 of the passing time, we may not neglect the way- 
 side flowers, the little gems of nature which are 
 scattered in such profusion at our feet. 
 
 Carlyle says of Jean Paul : " To old English, 
 alike with new, such a man as this, in such days 
 as these, cannot be too generally known. Let who-
 
 VI PREFACE. 
 
 ever has a sense for him worship him as he will, — 
 ^^'ithout fear of excess in that direction ! Amid 
 the clang of our steam-machinery and money-get- 
 ting, in our toiling and slaving great, but dumb and 
 deaf, most tragic English " industrial world," Jean 
 Paul, wherever found, will be a blessed element ; 
 like a Httle pot of violets in the window-sill of some 
 huge workhouse and cyclops-smithy, reminding this 
 man and that of many sweet forgotten tilings, and 
 very well worth its room there." 
 
 Boston, March 17, 1864. 
 
 f^%?il
 
 PREFACE 
 
 TO THE FIRST EDITION. 
 
 HE following pages are presented to the 
 reader as containing an authentic life of 
 Jean Paul, although they are not a literal 
 translation of any one of the biographies of the 
 great German Poet. 
 
 It is well known that he was the most frank 
 and unreserved of authors, and that he has inter- 
 woven, in all his romances, much of his personal 
 experience. When, in the latter part of his life, 
 he began his great comic romance of Nicholas Mar- 
 graf^ or Poetry from the Life of an Apothecary^ 
 he undertook, at the same time, as a parallel or 
 companion piece, his Autobiography, or Truth from 
 my oivn Life, intending to interweave the tivo, as 
 the romance and reality of one life. Hence re- 
 sults the comic tone, and the apparent affectation 
 of speaking in the third person in his Autobiogra-
 
 vm PREFACE. 
 
 phy, whicli was continued only to his thirteenth 
 yeai'. He found, perhaps, that it was only in 
 childhood he could idealize his own life, and do 
 that better in his fictitious heroes than when he 
 was avowedly his own. 
 
 The first part of the following Life is as literal 
 and as accurate a translation of Richter's oivn bi- 
 ography as I am able to make ; tlie mystification, 
 already mentioned, has added obscurity to the " be- 
 wildering conceits " with which he usually illus- 
 trates his "wdt and his wisdom. My desire to 
 preserve, as much as possible, the peculiarity of 
 the original has perhaps given to the English a 
 German dress, which, I trust, is thrown oif in the 
 remaining parts of the work. 
 
 The Life is continued from Wahrheit aus Jean 
 PauVs Lehen^ — " Truth from the Life of Jean 
 Paul " ; Spazier's " Biographical Commentary " ; 
 and Paul's correspondence with his friends. The 
 materials furnished from these sources I have 
 drawn out, and woven too;etlier again with the 
 same threads, although in a different form ; and 
 my embarrassments, which have not been small, 
 have arisen from the abundance of the materials, 
 and fhe difficulty of selection, where I wished the 
 reader should enjoy the whole. But as the whole
 
 PREFACE. ix 
 
 is comprised in scarcely less than twenty volumes, 
 I have selected only such parts of the letters as 
 would throw light upon Jean Paul's personal con- 
 cerns, and explain the peculiarities of his char- 
 acter. 
 
 Should German scholars find any discrepancy 
 in the extracts from the letters, the reason may 
 be, that I have translated, as happened to be con- 
 venient, from three different versions ; from Otto's 
 and Spazier's selections, and from Jean Paul's cor- 
 respondence with Otto. 
 
 August 12, 1842.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 Sketch of the Fichtelgebirge, the Birthplace of Rich- 
 
 TER 1 
 
 PART I. 
 
 THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 WuNSiEDEL. — Birth. — Grandparents 9 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 Which includes the Time from August, 1775, to January, 
 1776. — Joditz, — Village Idyls 23 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 Schwarzenbach-on-the-Saale. — First Kiss. — Rector. — 
 The Lord's Supper 71
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 PAKT 11. 
 
 FROM JEAN PAUL'8 ENTRANCE INTO THE HOF GYMNASIUM, 
 TILL AFTER HIS FIRST VISIT IN WEIMAR. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 Remarks upon the Autobiography. — Removal to Schwar- 
 ZEKBACH. — Self-Education. — Loss of Childish Faith 89 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 HoF Gymnasium. — School Anecdotes. — Death of the 
 Father. — Domestic Troubles 101 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 Youthful Friendships. — Werther Period. — First Book- 
 making. — "On the Practice of Thinking" . . . 110 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 Richter enters the University of Leipzig. — Letters 
 from Leipzig. — Change of Studies. — Letters to his 
 Mother 119 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 Extracts from .Journal. — First Literary Effort. — 
 Greenland Lawsuits 136 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 Extreme Poverty. — First Success. — Costume Contro- 
 versy 149 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 Love Passage. — Second Volume of GREENLA]|n> Law- 
 suits. — Pressing Poverty. — Flight from Leipzig. — 
 Domestic Circumstances in Hof. — Book of Devotion 166
 
 CONTENTS. xiij 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 Christian Otto. — Studies. — Herman. — His Death . 171 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 Adam von Oerthel. — Residence at Topen. — Death of 
 HIS Friend. — Change of Views 181 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 RiCHTER TAKES A SCHOOL AT SCHWARZENBACH. — METHOD 
 
 OF Instruction. — Female Pupils and Friends . . 192 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 Richter's first Serious Work. — " The Little School- 
 master Wuz." — "The Invisible Lodge." — First Suc- 
 cess. — Sabbath Weeks of Life. — " Hesperus " . . 207 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 Richter visits Bayreuth. — The Jew Emanuel. — The 
 Original of Clotilda. — " Siebenkas." — Letter from 
 Septimus Fixlein 225 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 Letters from Weimar. — Letter from Madam von Kalb. 
 — Richter prepares to go to Weimar .... 234 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 First Visit in Weimar. — Letters from Weimar. — Goe- 
 the. — Herder. — Schiller. — Wieland .... 239 
 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 
 Madam von Kalb. — Letters. — Close of Richteb's Inti- 
 macy with Madam von Kalb 262
 
 Alv CONTENTS. 
 
 PART III. 
 
 FROM JEAN Paul's first visit in weimar to his 
 
 FINAL RESIDENCE IN BAYREUTH. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 Prince Hohenlohe. — Madam von Krudener. — Letters. 
 
 — " Jubelsenior." — " Campanek Thal " .... 261 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 RiCHTER VISITS THE FrAUZENBATH IN EgER. — DeATH OF 
 
 HIS JIother. — Emilie von Beklespsh. — Removal from 
 HoF TO Leipzig 270 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 Residence in Leipzig. — Letters. — Emilie von Berlespsh. 
 
 — Visits Dresden 279 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 Richter returns to Weimar. — Wieland. — Goethe. — 
 Herder. — His Attachment to Jean Paul. — Philoso- 
 phy. — Madam von Kalb 292 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 Richter visits the Court op Hildburghausen. — Mademoi- 
 selle von F. — The four Sister Princesses. — Dedica- 
 tion of Titan. — Visits Berlin 306 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 Richter removes to Berlin. — Introduction to Caroline 
 Meyer. — The Meyer Family. — The " Verlobung " , 317 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 Eichter's Petition to the King of Prussia. — Marriage. 
 
 — Caroline's Letters from Weimar .... 830
 
 CONTENTS. XV 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 Residence in Meiningen. — Letters. — Birth of Richter's 
 FIRST Child. — Dog's Petition 338 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 Titan 346 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 Richter leaves Meiningen. — Removes to Coburg. — 
 Birth of his Son. — Death of Herder. — " Flegel- 
 JAHKE." — Bayreuth . 856 
 
 PART IV. 
 
 FROM JEAN Paul's residence in bayreuth to his 
 
 DEATH. 
 
 N 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 Richter removes to Bayreuth. — Social Position. — 
 Personal Appearance and Habits. — Family. — Letter 
 FROM his Eldest Daughter 367 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 "Introduction to ^Esthetics." — "Freedom Pamphlet." 
 — "Lev'^ana." — Richter's View of Napoleon. — Comic 
 Works. — Letter to General Bebnadotte . . . 377 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 Pecuniary Embarrassments. — Prince Dalberg. — Paul 
 receives a small Pension. — Extract from Varnhagen 
 von Ense's Memoirs 890 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 Domestic Letters. — Journey to Erlangen. — Journey 
 TO Nurnberq. — Jacobi 401 
 
 ■^
 
 xvi CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 KiCHTER IX Relation with the Unhappy. — Letters. — 
 Maria Forster 413 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 Eichtek's Love of Travelling. — Visits Prince DaI/- 
 berg. — Visits Heidelberg. — Receives his Doctor's 
 Diploma. — Henry Voss. — Animal Magnetism . . 430 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 Visits MuNCHEN. — Richter. — His Son Max. — His Melan- 
 choly and Death 445 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 Richter visits Dresden. — The Impression he made upon 
 his Relatives 454 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 The purely Comic Works of Jean Paul. — The Life of 
 FiBEL. — Nicholas Margraf, or the Comet . . . 462 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 '^ Richter visits Nurnburg on Account of his Eyes. — 
 
 Kanne. — His Blindness. — Last Letters. — "Selina" 471 
 
 CONCLUSIOl^ 489 
 
 APPENDIX 603
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 Sketch of the Fichtelgebirge, the Birthplace 
 OF Richter. 
 
 IjIN the very centre of Germany, in the kingdom 
 of Bavaria, rises that mountain region called 
 the " Fichtelgebirge " or Pine Mountain, which 
 takes its name from the pine woods with 
 which its summit is crowned. The author from whom 
 I have taken the following account gives it the name of 
 the " mountain island," derived from the isolation in which 
 it remains, although surrounded by mountains, and only 
 divided from them by mountain plains. He speaks of it 
 thus : " The Fichtelgebirge, spite of its wonderful pecu- 
 liarities, is an unknown and unvisited part of Germany. 
 To a great portion of the cultivated as well as the igno- 
 rant world its name is scarcely known. The trains of 
 travelling carriages, on the road from Munich and Nu- 
 remberg to Saxony, pass the foot of the mountain on the 
 western side, and the travellers throw only a hasty glance 
 at its dark-green crest as they go l)y. The troops of 
 travelling German youth, with their staves and sketch- 
 books, turn away from its threshold, frightened at its 
 gloomy aspect."
 
 c^.-f'^: L'li*£ OF'JftAN PAUL. 
 
 Tq ;he bc-soui of thja mysterious mountain island Jean 
 Paul Frederic Riclitei" leceived his birth ; and, if eountiy 
 and climate and early circumstances exert a powerful in- 
 fluence on the character of the Poet, it seems a proper 
 introduction to his biography to give a slight sketch of 
 the region where he received his earliest impressions, 
 and of its inhabitants, among whom his early days were 
 passed. 
 
 The elevation of the Fichtelgebirge above the level of 
 the sea subjects it to late springs and cold summers, and 
 in winter it is covered with perpetual snow. The winter 
 lingers late into the short summer, and the frosts begin so 
 early that the potatoes are sometimes dug from the snow, 
 and the harvest gathered when the hands must be cov- 
 ered with gloves. Cut off^ as they are, from the sur- 
 rounding country, and pressed together within a small 
 compass, so that they can. embrace each other with the 
 eye as well as the heart, the inhabitants are joined to- 
 gether in the closest bonds, and, like other mountaineers, 
 are united by a romantic attachment to their country. 
 
 The air has been said to belong to the Germans as the 
 sea does to the English ; but many of the German tradi- 
 tions go far into the secret bosom of the earth, and, among 
 the mountain people who dig for treasures, there is a spe- 
 cies of romance that belongs to no otlier country. 
 
 In the Fichtelgebirge, gold, that object of intense de- 
 sire in the INIiddle Ages, had been found, and the search 
 for it led to many valuable mineral discoveries. Gold is 
 no longer sought there, but the traveller hears continually, 
 in the solitude, the hollow echo of the blows of the man 
 of the mountains, and sees arise, behind a wall of ver- 
 dure, the smoke of the smelting-furnaces for iron, vitriol, 
 and tin. The beautiful fountains and fresh streams, that
 
 INTRODUCTION. 3 
 
 burst out in every little hollow and green nook, are a 
 constant source of delight; and the sweet and soothing 
 sound of running water is heard, whenever the blows of 
 the hammer and the roaring of the furnace are hushed. 
 Indeed, that which gives its peculiar character to this 
 region are the numerous springs which everywhere 
 freshen the soil and impart that vivid green to the hills 
 whose summits are crowned with the darkest and most 
 beautiful firs. 
 
 The inhabitants of these heights are a pious, true, and 
 simple people. Their employment gives a certain pride 
 and self-confidence to their character, and a grave and re- 
 ligious seriousness to their manners, although they are often 
 excited and heated like the element in which they work. 
 The most numei-ous and contented class are the wood-cut- 
 ters. Many young men leave a mechanical employment, 
 irresistibly drawn, by the singing of birds and tlie charms 
 of the fresh air, to a life in the pine woods, where they 
 have no wants but simple nourishment and necessary 
 clothing. But the inhabitants of places where manufac- 
 tures are carried on, like Hof, have lost somewhat of the 
 simplicity of their manners. Many are engaged in manu- 
 factures, who live, indeed, like country people, uniting 
 some handicraft or agricultural occupation with their 
 manufacturing employment. Among them, at the first 
 glance, may be discovered, by certain peculiarities, the 
 landlord, the butcher, the baker, and the miller, and 
 these form the well-to-do and independent class of citi- 
 zens. The higher classes, who possess estates in the 
 mountain, the nobles, also retain the peculiarities of the 
 country. In their domestic arrangements a pure sim- 
 plicity prevails, and the inhabitants of the whole region 
 live in confidential intercourse with each other.
 
 4 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 In describing one of the dwellings of the inhabitants 
 of the middling class we shall give an idea of the house 
 in which Richter passed his infancy. The richest people 
 live in substantial stone houses, with tiled roofs ; but the 
 poorer houses, and such as the father of Richter occupied, 
 are built of beams of wood filled up with mortar, and 
 thatched with straw, enclosing under the same roof the 
 stables, and shelter for all kinds of domestic animals. At 
 the entrance of these humble dwellings, a small space is 
 parted off for the implements of agriculture. On the 
 wall hang the scythes, sickles, and cart and sled harnesses. 
 A door on one side leads to the stalls for oxen and cows, 
 and, on the left, to the dwelling apartment, and in the 
 rear is the little dark kitchen. Near the entrance stands 
 always, even in the poorest houses, a large stove, often of 
 china, glazed or polished^ that diffuses its genial warmth 
 over the whole house ; upon the top are two ii'on vessels, 
 built in, for holding warm water ; benches are around the 
 walls, and a soi-t of movable frame, to hang garments 
 upon, is placed on one side. The walls are kept clean 
 and white by constant washing, and, as the apartment is 
 lighted with pine knots, there is a little funnel, near the 
 stove, to carry off the smoke. The floor is tiled, with a 
 groove in the centre to convey away the water often 
 shaken over from the iron stoves-pots. 
 
 Near the window, in a corner, stands a large wooden 
 table, used for all purposes, and suiTounded with wooden 
 stools ; shelves near the door contain the w^ooden, iron, 
 and tin implements for cooking, dining, &c., and above 
 the door is a shelf on which the great, well-worn Bible, 
 and the sermon and psalm-book are laid. Every Satur- 
 day, table, benches, and all other utensils, are rubbed and 
 polished with white, shining sand.
 
 INTRODUCTION. 5 
 
 All these conveniences and habits of cleanliness are 
 doubly necessary, where a whole family live in one room. 
 There is, however, a small apartment, divided off between 
 the stove and the wall, where they can retire for purposes 
 of rest or solitude ; and the bed of the married pair some- 
 times stands in a small adjoining room, together with a 
 large chest, curiously carved and ornamented, that de- 
 scends from father to son as an heirloom in the family. 
 This chest contains the family linen, the money, the 
 silver shirt-buttons of the husband, and necklace of the 
 wife, the registers of marriages and births, tax-bills, and 
 other important documents. 
 
 The background of the premises is closed by a cart- 
 house, swine-house, and large baking-oven. In the centre 
 stands a circular dove-house, elevated on a low pillar. 
 This peculiar feature of a German homestead is familiar 
 to those who have looked at Retzsh's beautiful sketches 
 of German life in the " Song of the Bell." Ai'ound are 
 great piles of firewood ready split for the stove, necessary 
 both winter and summer, in a climate so severe as that 
 of the Fichtelgebirge. An orchard near the house, with 
 a little corner appropriated to kitchen vegetables, and still 
 another little corner with a few pinks, forget-me-nots, and 
 lavender flowers, complete the domestic picture. 
 
 These little orchards surrounding the houses, the flow- 
 eiing hedges bordering the streets and connecting house 
 with house in the villages at the foot of the mountains, 
 and the rustic bridges crossing the frequent streams, give 
 them an aspect of beauty, dear to the eye of a painter or 
 • lover of rural scenery. Otlier ornaments are the flower- 
 ing maples and weeping birch-trees, and the decorated 
 May-pole, that stands in the midst of every village, and 
 ai'ound which, on Sundays and festivals, the dance is led.
 
 6 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 Not all the mountain villages are thus ornamented. In 
 some, the presence of only clumps of mountain pine give 
 them a sombre and melancholy aspect. 
 
 The dress of the people who are not engaged in manu- 
 factui'es is primitive and simple. The old women bind 
 a three-cornered handkerchief upon the head, and the 
 young weave a silken band through the hair. They wear 
 a woollen petticoat with a leathern girdle around the 
 waist, through which, in working hours, the petticoat is 
 tucked. Their stockings reach only to the ancle, and 
 the feet are bare, as the shoes are carried in the hand, 
 and only put on when they reach the church door. The 
 large straw hat is also carried in the hand, and is worn 
 only on rare occasions. The dress of the men is finer 
 and more ornamented. Indeed, the women are almost 
 serfs, and do all the heavy and laborious out-of-door work 
 of the family. The men, it is true, are occupied in the 
 mines, and in cutting wood in the forests for smelting 
 metals. This may be the reason why the agricultural 
 labors, and the care of the animals, devolve upon the 
 women. But we cannot regret it ; for this circumstance, 
 no doubt, gave occasion to those passages of tenderness, 
 respect, and compassion for women, in the writings of 
 Jean Paul, that made the hearts of the German women 
 his own. 
 
 The festivals of marriage, baptism, Christmas, and the 
 season of the first communion, are enjoyed and celebrated 
 in these mountain villages with the utmost heartiness and 
 delight ; and every reader of Jean Paul will recollect how 
 large a space these festivals occupy in his novels. 
 
 Plain and simple as are tlie inhabitants of this region, 
 the charm of romance and the poetry of the ancient 
 superstitions are thickly spread over it.
 
 INTRODUCTION. 7 
 
 The old people relate that good-natured dwarfs and 
 fairies entered secretly certain families and brought them 
 good fortune. In the forests are woodmen and wood- 
 women, who nourish and protect those who have lost 
 their way, and, for a piece of money, give them good 
 counsels. Everywhere around in the deep solitudes tlie 
 horn of the "wild hunter" and the anvil-blows of the 
 " man of the mountains " are heard. 
 
 The atmospheric phenomena of these regions are stiU 
 another source of excitement to the imagination of the 
 poet. Sometimes the whole mountain-tops are covered 
 •with vapor, where the sun is reflected in infinitely beau- 
 tiful hues long after it is below the horizon. Sometimes 
 the mountain-top presents the same peculiar rosy hue 
 that is seen upon the Alps. The reader, who has been 
 wearied by Richter's too frequent and diffuse descrip- 
 tions of atmospheric changes, will find their source in the 
 rare and beautiful appearances this otherwise sombre sky 
 often presents. His weather-prophesying, like that of all 
 mountain people, was an occasion of continual sport and 
 pleasantry, and also of serious attention and study. 
 
 It would be impossible for a poet, with so keen a sus- 
 ceptibility to all impressions as Richter, to be born under 
 such influences and to pass his youth just within the 
 threshold of a region so filled with romance, without its 
 having a powerful, but perhaps secret, influence upon the 
 whole man, and upon the character of his genius and 
 writings. It makes him the most personal of authoi-s. 
 The fact that he never could climb the heights of his 
 birthplace was the mother of that infinite longing with 
 which he every moment, even in the most cheerful cir- 
 cumstances of his life, fell back upon liis youth. "When 
 easier circumstances permitted him to travel, he would
 
 8 
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 not ascend the romantic heights of the Fichtelgebirge, 
 lest the reality should break the enchanting dream of 
 memory, and the illusions of his youth, that embellished 
 the evening of his hfe with romantic hues, should vanish. 
 Late in life he returned, after a short separation, drawn 
 by the mountain magnet, to the place of his birth. The 
 \asitor found him, in his last years, in the little city and 
 plain of Bayreuth, at the southern threshold of the moun- 
 tain, where his eye could always turn to the high cradle 
 of his infancy, and where the shadow of the pines could 
 fall upon his grave.
 
 PART I, 
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 
 
 FIRST LECTURE. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 WuNsiEDEL. — Birth. — Grandpaeents. 
 
 r was in tlie year 1763,* about the same time 
 with the Peace of Hubertsburg, that the pres- 
 ent Professor of his own history came into 
 the world ; — in the same month that the 
 golden and gray wagtail, the robin-redbreast, the crane, 
 the red-hammer, appeared, and many snipes and wood- 
 cocks arrived also ; and, indeed, on the same day of the 
 month, — in case any one should wish to strew flowers 
 upon the cradle of the new-born, the spoonwort and aspen 
 hung out their tender blossoms, — on the 21st of March ; 
 also at the earliest and freshest time of day, — namely, at 
 half past one in the morning. But what crowns all is, that 
 his life and the life of the spring began at the same mo- 
 ment. This last circumstance, that the Professor and the 
 spring were born together, I have mentioned in conver- 
 sation at least a hundred times ; but I fire it off here, as a 
 salute of honor, the hundred and first time, that, by print- 
 
 • Just a hiindred years from the date of this third American edition. 
 1*
 
 lO LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 ing it, I may place it out of my power to offer again as a 
 bon-mot what through the press has gone the rounds of the 
 whole world. [So poor had fortune left his outward hfe, 
 that he delighted to invest the accident of his hirth, that 
 came with the spring, with a poetic meaning ; and this, 
 through his whole life, was a source of joy, and threw 
 a romantic light over his whole being.] 
 
 It is a misfortune in the history of a man, even the 
 wittiest, that Fate herself has laid for him a pun as a 
 nest-egg ; for upon this egg he sits and broods his Hfe 
 long, and strives to bring something out of it. Thus, I 
 knew a barber and a coachman, who both, at the ques- 
 tion, " Wliat is your name ? " answered with simplicity, 
 and without any appearance of wit, " Your obedient 
 servant," or " Your servant." The reason was, they 
 had the misfortune to be named Diener {servant), and 
 through this their heads were indelibly tonsured by a 
 standing joke, they were both condemned to a perpetual 
 conceit, and these small-shot of wit all went in one dii-ec- 
 tion. Let us not hope, my honored friends, who bear at 
 the same time a common and a proper name, such as 
 Ochs or Rapinat (both, indeed, Swiss), "Wolf, Scldegel,* 
 Ilichter,t to surprise such a double-named man with any 
 consequent play of wit, however brilliant ; tor he has 
 lived too long with his own name to find any allusion 
 to it, which may occur to the novice, either new or sur- 
 prising or witty, but all to his ear is quite worn out. 
 Mullner made a more witty play u})on words, with Schot- 
 ten and Sckatten (Scotsman, shadow), for no Scotsman 
 ever considered himself a shadow, and no shadow can be 
 a Scotsman, for two vowels separate them eternally. 
 
 But I return to our history, and place myself among 
 
 * A beater. t A judge.
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY. II 
 
 tlic dead, for all are out of the world who saw me come 
 into it. My father was called John Christian Christopher 
 Eit'hter, and was Tertius * and organist in Wunsiedel. 
 My mother, who was tlie daughter of the cloth-weaver, 
 John Paul Kuhn, in Hof, was named Sopliia Rosina. 
 The day after my birth, I was baptized by the Senior 
 Apel. One godfather was the above-mentioned John 
 Paul ; the other, John Frederic Theime, a bookbinder, 
 who did not know at that time to what quantities of his 
 own handicraft he lent his name. From these two spon- 
 sors was the name John Paul Frederic shot together ; 
 the grandfatherly half I have translated into Jean Paid, 
 and have thereby gained a name, the reasons for which 
 shall be fully made known in future lectures. 
 
 But now let the hero and subject of these historical 
 lectures lie and sleep securely in the cradle and on the 
 mother's breast ; for in the long morning sleep of "life 
 there is nothing interesting for the universal history of 
 the world, and he may sleep until I have spoken of those 
 after whom my heart and my pen yearn, — my ancestors, 
 my father, mother, and grandparents. 
 
 My father was the son of the Rector of the Gymnasium 
 in Neustadt on the Culm. We know nothing of my 
 grandfather, but that he Avas in the highest degree poor 
 and pious ; and, should one of his two remaining grand- 
 sons come to Neustadt, the inhabitants would receive him 
 with grateful joy and love. The old would relate how 
 conscientious and severe his life and instructions had 
 been, and yet how cheerful. They yet show a bench, 
 
 * Tertiu? is master of the third class in a Gymnasium. A German 
 Gymnasium has eight classes. The classes are an-anged in an in- 
 verse order: thus, the first is taught by the rector; the second, by the 
 conrector; the third, by the subrector; the fourth, by th^ qaintus, 
 &c. — Tr.
 
 12 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 behind the organ, where every Sunday he kneeled to 
 pray, and a hollow or grotto in the above-named little 
 Culm,* that he formed for himself to pray in (at this 
 distance of time it stands open), and in which his more 
 ardent son sported with the Muses and Penury. The 
 evening twilight was a daily harvest for him, in which, 
 for some dark hours, he walked up and down the poor 
 school-room, weighing the produce of to-day and the seed 
 that was to be sown to-morrow, under the influence of 
 earnest prayer. This school-house was a prison, not in- 
 deed of bread and water, but of bread and beer ; far more 
 than these, of some little contentment of the most pious 
 character, which a rectorate could not give, although united 
 with the offices of chanter f and organist. But notwith- 
 standing the fellowship of united ofhces, it produced only, 
 one hundred and fifty florins annually. At this common 
 hunger-fountain for Bayreutish schoolmasters the man 
 who had been chanter in Rehau thirty-five years long 
 stood and drank. Certainly he would have gained a 
 couple of bites or pennies more, had he been promoted 
 to the office of a country pastor. As often as scholars 
 exchange their dress, that is, from the school mantle to 
 the priest's mantle, they receive a little better food, as the 
 silkworm at the casting of her skin receives richer nour- 
 ishment ; so that such a man, by increasing his labors, 
 may so increase his salary as to be inferior only to a 
 statesman with expectancies or gratuities ; or, in general, 
 
 * The Culmberg, near Neustadt, is a solitary conical hill, on the 
 
 southeastern entrance to the Fichtelgebirge. It is surrounded by 
 
 pines that give it a dark-blue appearance, easily distinguished from 
 
 Bayreuth. We can easily believe that the poetic eye of Richter was 
 
 ■ turned to this, his pious grandfather's altar, when near his cot- 
 
 ~ wrote in the open air. — Tr. 
 often ,„ .„ 
 
 tage study tie 
 
 f Director of the ni..
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 13 
 
 to some high functionary in i-etirement, whose staflf of 
 emoluments is carried through the whole score of the 
 chamber, and that even during all the pauses of the 
 instrument. 
 
 In the mean time, my grandfather visited the parents 
 of his pupils in the afternoons, more on account of the 
 latter than the former, taking a bit of bread in his pocket, 
 from the above-mentioned beer and bread by which he 
 lived, and receiving, as a guest, only his little can of beer. 
 But at last it happened, in the year 1763, exactly the 
 year of my birth, on the Gth of August, probably through 
 especial connection with higher powers, he was promoted 
 to the most important station, one for which the rectorate, 
 and the city, and all the Culmberg itself, could easily be 
 given up ; and when he numbered seventy-six years, four 
 months, and eight days, he was actually promoted to the 
 station above mentioned in the Neustadt chiu-chyard. His 
 wife, twenty years before, had preceded him, occupying a 
 rival station, and waited for him. My parents went with 
 me, then a child of five months old, to visit his dying bed. 
 A clergyman who was present, as my father has often told 
 me, said, " Let the old Jacob lay his hand upon the child, 
 that he may bless him." I was placed in the bed, and he 
 laid his hand upon my head. Pious grandfather ! often 
 have I thought of thy cold, blessing hand, when fate has 
 led me out of dark into bi'ighter hours ; and I needed to 
 hold fast my faith in thy blessing, in this world, pene- 
 trated, governed, and animated by wonders and spirits. 
 
 My father was born in Neustadt, December IGth, 1727 ; 
 — more, I should say, to tlie winter of life than, like my- 
 self, to the spring, had not his excellent nature had the 
 power to carve a good haven from an iceberg. But the 
 Lyceum in Wunsiedel could only be enjoyed or endured
 
 14 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 bj him, as by Luther the school at Eisenach, as an alum- 
 nus, or poor scholar ; for when my grandfather's salary, 
 one hundred and fifty florins a yeai', was divided among 
 many brothers and sisters* his part was exactly nothing, 
 or at most alumnus-bread ; therefore he went to the Gym- 
 nasium at Ratisbon, not only to hunger in a larger city, 
 but to cultivate the peculiar floiver of his nature, as well 
 as the leaves, and this was the science of music. 
 
 In the chapel of the Prince of Thurn and Taxis, the 
 well-known connoisseur and patron of music, he could 
 serve the saint for whose adoration he was born. Forty 
 years later piano-pla}'ing and general bass made him a 
 favorite composer of church music in the principality of 
 Bayreuth. On the evening of Good Friday, he often de- 
 lighted himself and us, his cliildren, with the exhibition 
 of that holy power of music, the tones of which even to 
 this day elevate and sanctify souls in the Catholic Church. 
 I must, alas ! acknowledge that, when I was lately in Kat- 
 isbon, among the antiques and forgotten relics of that 
 place, the oppressed life of my father was the most pre- 
 cious of all ; and, when I was in the palace of Thurn and 
 Taxis, and in the nari-ow streets where two portly persons 
 could scarcely pass each other, I thought of his small 
 means, and the narrow passages of his youthful life. In- 
 stead of the delightful science of music, he studied theol- 
 ogy, both in Jena and Erlangen ; perhaps for no better 
 reason than tljis, to suffer himself to be plagued for a long 
 time, even till his thirty-second year, as a domestic teacher 
 in Bayreuth, where his son collected these particulars ; 
 for, in 17G0, he obtained from the city authorities the 
 post of organist and Tertius in Wunsiedel. In this case, 
 he obtained under the Margrave of Bayreuth a better and 
 earlier fortune than that candidate in Hanover, of whom
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 15 
 
 I have read, who, at seventy years old, had received no 
 better place in the church than what the churchyard offered. 
 
 Some of my hearers may fear, from what I have said, 
 that I shall bring my father before them with a pitiful 
 aspect, like some modern ultra-Christians, who cover their 
 faces with a tear-steeped handkerchief. On the contrary, 
 he lived, as it were, on wings, and was sought by the 
 families of Brandenburg and Schopf as the most agree- 
 able of companions, always full of wit and jests and amus- 
 ing anecdotes. The faculty of social wit accompanied 
 him through life ; even when in his office he passed for a 
 very severe pastor, and as it was called, in the jjulpit, for 
 a preacher of the Law. In his native city he won his 
 relations by his exciting preaching, and in Hof, in Voigt- 
 land, something yet more important, — a bride, and, what 
 was far more difficult, the rich relations of his bride. If 
 a citizen who, through cloth-weaving and veil-selling, had 
 become wealthy, could not deny, of his two only daugh- 
 ters, the most beautiful, the most delicate and tenderly 
 nurtured, and withal the most beloved, to a needy Tertius, 
 who dwelt, with his creditors, a whole day's journey from 
 them, so, on the other side, tliis Tertius could only with 
 the reputation of great desert and shining pulpit gifts, and 
 agreeable personal appearance, gain both daughter and 
 parents. The elevated soul of the cloth-weaver must 
 have raised him above his cloth and his money, and 
 talents and spiritual gifts must have appeared to him 
 of more worth than the shining heaps of common wealth. 
 
 The 13th of October, 1761, the beloved went as a 
 bride, with all her treasures, into his little narrow school- 
 house, that fortunately was not made narrower by furni- 
 ture. His cheerful life, his indifference to money, united 
 with his entire confidence in his housekeeper, left in the
 
 l6 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 Tertius' shell room enougli for all travellers from Hof, 
 who wished to rest there. My mother, for such were 
 married people at that time, and there are a few such 
 now, troubled herself as little as my father on account of 
 this emptiness. 
 
 In my historical readings, hunger will accompany the 
 steps of my hero, and will indeed be mentioned as often 
 as feasting in Thiimmel's Travels, or tea-drinking in 
 Richardson's " Clarissa." I cannot but choose to say to 
 Poverty, " Be welcome ! so thou come not too late in 
 life." Riches weigh more heavily upon talent than pov- 
 erty. Under gold mountains and thrones lie buried 
 many spiritual giants. When to the flame that the nat- 
 ural heat of youth kindles the oil of riches is added, 
 little more than the ashes of the phoenix remains ; and 
 only a Goethe has had the forbearance not to singe his 
 phoenix wings at the sun of Fortune. For much gold, 
 the poor historical Professor would not have had much in 
 his youth. Fate does with the poet as we with singing- 
 birds, and overhangs the cage with darkness until he sings 
 the tune we would have him sing. But preserve, just 
 Providence, the old man fi'ora want! for hoary years 
 have already bent him low, and he can no longer stand 
 upright with the youth, and bear heavy burdens on his 
 head. The old man needs rest in the earth even while 
 he is upon it, for he can use only the present and a little 
 of the future, for the future does not reflect for him as in 
 a glass the blooming present. Only two steps from the 
 couch of his last and deepest repose, with no other curtain 
 than the flowers about the grandfather's chair of old age, 
 he would yet slumber and rest a little, and, lialf-asleep, 
 open his eyes once more upon the ancient stars and fields 
 of his youth ; and I have no objection, — since he has al-
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY. Xf 
 
 ready made his best preparation for the other world, — if 
 now in the evening, he should rejoice over his breakfast, 
 and in the morning take comfort in his bed, and now, 
 when he is a second time a child, the world should appear 
 again under the mnocent form of delight in which it first 
 came before him. 
 
 Only one false resolution of my lather's could we place 
 perhaps to the account of liis necessities, that, instead of 
 wooing with his whole heart the muse of sweet sounds, he 
 gave himself, like a monk, to the office of preaching, and 
 suffered his genius for music to be buried in a village 
 church. Indeed, the church, according to the opinion of 
 my grandparents, was then the provision-ship, and the 
 needy son of the Muses sought to run into the quiet 
 haven of the pulpit. But whoever, is not forced by ne- 
 cessity, but feels within him, growing with his growth, an 
 inclination and declination of his magnetic needle, let him 
 follow its pointing, trusting to it, as to a compass in the 
 desert. 
 
 Had the present Professor of his own history imitated 
 his father as he desired, he would now, instead of these 
 lectures, be holding sacred discourses, casual preachings, 
 and other sermons, and he might even have had a place 
 in the " Universal Magazine for Preachers," only, alas ! 
 he would have been puffed up more than duty demands. 
 
 But my father was in fact neither unfaithful to himself 
 nor to the muse of sweet sounds. Did she not visit him 
 as his first love in the vestal garments of the holy Virgin, 
 and bring with her, every week, to tlie solitary, silent 
 parsonage of Joditz, the sweetest church music ? And, on 
 the other hand, another art dwelt with that of music, and 
 sought its playroom in the pulpit of Joditz ; for, in my 
 father the master of the chapel and the master of the altar
 
 l8 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL.' 
 
 were united. Eloquence, the prosaic but near neighbor 
 to Poetry, dwelt in my father's heart ; and the same sun- 
 beam of genius that in the morning of his days waked 
 sweet sounds in him, as in the statue of Memnon, kindled 
 later in life, in the pulpit, the warmer light and the 
 thunder of a preacher of the Law. 
 
 My hearers will remark, that I dwell a long time on 
 my relations, and praise them much ; but I will immedi- 
 ately begin to speak of myself, and then shall scarcely 
 come to a pause. Indeed, the praise itself that I here 
 give my father would not appear (if he yet lived) so im- 
 portant to him as it is empty to me. If I placed myself 
 before him in eternity among the blessed, he would not 
 be elated, that in the year 1818 I should inform the 
 world, from my Professor's chair, that he was appointed 
 by the Bayreuth government to be their composer of 
 church-music. And, in some future time when I am 
 among the blessed, should my own son speak of me, — 
 ought he, because I no longer feel praise, to speak in 
 a less animated strain of the applause my works have 
 gained ? 
 
 In general, my revered hearers, would I ten times 
 rather hold historical lectures over my ancestors than 
 over myself How altered would be tlie appearance of 
 that distant and foreign time, if our relations did not pass 
 through it, stamp it with our presence, and make it fra- 
 ternal to us. That man is to be envied who can retrace 
 his history from ancestor to ancestor, and cover hoary 
 time with the green mantle of youth. For if we are only 
 able to paint the time in which our ancestors lived, and 
 themselves also in the splendor and freshness of youth, 
 then we should connect our posterity with ourselves, and 
 paint them, not as youths, but more properly as old men.
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 19 
 
 I return at last to the hero and subject of our historical 
 lectures, and select especially the fact that he was born in 
 Wunsiedel, a city of the Fichtelgebii'ge. . That Fichtel- 
 gebirge, almost the highest region of Germany, gives to 
 its inhabitants so much health that they can dispense 
 with the Alexander baths, and furnishes for them a tall, 
 large wood-growth, and the speaker invites his hearers to 
 decide whether he appears as a confirmation of, or an 
 exception to, his assertion. It is particularly vexatious to 
 a man whose dearest hope is to acquire a name ui his 
 native city, that the Wunsiedlers swallow the r at the 
 middle and end of every word, and it is well known that 
 the name of Richter begins and ends with that letter. 
 
 Besides, the forefathers of the Wunsiedlers stand there 
 with the laurel-crowns of Avarlike bravery that I must 
 win for myself, for it has been constantly known from 
 history how they withstood the Hussites and were vic- 
 torious ; and perhaps, if they will place reviewers there 
 instead of Hussites, I shall not be struck from the list 
 of brave men, if they will number my victories over my 
 enemies, from the Plussite Nikolai to the Hussite Merkel.* 
 
 In former times, Wunsiedel Avas the sixth town in the 
 so-called Six Districts, at least for patriotism and united 
 zeal in defence of our country and rights ; in short, it 
 was a sixth day of creation, and German fidelity and love 
 and strength long continued to hold out therein. 
 
 I am willing to have been born in thee, little city of the 
 high mountain, whose summits look down upon us like 
 the heads of eagles. Thy mountain throne is embel- 
 lished by the steps tliat lead to it, and thy fountains of 
 health give the sick man strength to ascend to the wide 
 
 * Nikolai and Merkel, editors and printers of Reviews that had 
 severely criticised the works of Jean Pa«l. — Tk.
 
 20 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 throne above him, and to send liis glance over distant 
 villages and mountain plains. I am glad to have been 
 born in thee, little, but good, city of my affections.* 
 
 It is often observed that the first-born is usually of the 
 female sex. To this observation the hero of this history 
 is no exception, notwithstanding his right to be the first- 
 born ; for his parents were married in October, 1761, and 
 he w^as born in March, 1763. There went before him 
 a being that on this earth was only a shadow, and began, 
 perhaps, its life in the light of another world, without 
 having discovered the light of this. 
 
 Men who have a firm hold on nothing else delight in 
 deep, far-reaching recollections of their days of child- 
 hood, and, in this billowy existence, they anchor on that 
 far more than on the thought of later difficulties. Per- 
 haps for tw^o reasons, — that in this retrospection they 
 press nearer to the gate of life guarded by spritual exist- 
 ences, and, secondly, that they hope, in the spiritual 
 power of an earlier consciousness, to make themselves 
 independent of the little, contemjDtible annoyances that 
 surround humanity. To my great joy, I am able to bring 
 from my tAvelfth, or, at furthest, my fourteenth month, 
 one pale, little remembrance, like the earliest and most 
 frail of snow-drops, from the fresh soil of childhood. I 
 recollect, namely, that a poor scholar loved me much, and 
 that I returned his love, and that he carried me about in 
 his arms, and, later, took me more agreeably to the large, 
 dark apartment of the alumni, where he gave me milk 
 to drink. This form, vanishing in distance, and his love, 
 hover again over later years, but, alas ! I no longer re- 
 
 * Wunsiedel is a pleasant little town of about three thousand in- 
 habitants. It lies between Bayreuth and Egar, the two extremities of 
 the Fichtelgebirge, and higher on the mountain than eithei\
 
 AUTOBIOGllAPHY. 21 
 
 member Ms name. If it were possible tbat he lives yet, 
 far in his sixtieth year, and that, as a learned and well- 
 informed man, tliese lectures should meet his eye, and 
 that he should then recollect the little Professor that he 
 bore in his arms and often kissed ! Ah God, if this 
 should be so, and he should write, or the older man 
 should come to visit the old man ! This little morning- 
 star of earliest recollection stands yet tolerably clear in 
 its low horizon, but growing paler as the daylight of life 
 rises higher. And now I remember only this clearly, 
 that in my earlier life I remembered everything clearly. 
 [A characteristic of Jean Paul is the transparency in 
 which his earliest years lay mirrored in his mind to his 
 latest age. The beginning of his Autobiography is not 
 the least original in this, which divides him from so many 
 others. In this he is remarkably the opposite of Goethe, 
 whose active and agitated life had erased from his mem- 
 ory the traces of the unfolding of his childish soul.] 
 
 As in the year 1765 my father was called to be pas- 
 tor in Joditz, I can separate my Wunsiedler relics more 
 easily from my childish recollections of Joditz. Under 
 the parsonage-roof of Joditz is now the second act of our 
 little historical monodrama, where the hero of the piece 
 has entered into a wholly different unfolding of character, 
 for every division of my lectures is in a different dwell- 
 ing-place. It is especially in the liistory of these lec- 
 tures, or the lecture on this history, so skilfully and 
 happily arranged, that, of the three unities of an histor- 
 ical piece, the first, that of place, is no more violated than 
 that of time ; for, as the hero must go from one place of 
 residence to another, so, from tlie entrance into life to the 
 entrance into his ProfessorsWp;. be -mu^it. pais«'.from one 
 period of time into another. But he hopes, in the repre-
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 Bentation of the piece, that he shall scarcely offend the 
 unity of time by growing older, although the great diffi- 
 culty will be to preserve throughout the unity of interest. 
 Our hero has ah-eady risen one step, and we have the 
 satisfaction to meet him, whom we left in the first divis- 
 ion only son of a Tertius, after two years as the son 
 of a pastor ; for in 1765 my father was preferred to 
 Joditz by the Lady von Plotho, whose maiden name 
 was Bodenhausen, the wife of the same Plotho who, in 
 the beginning of the Seven Years' War of Frederic the 
 Only, was a delegate to the Imperial Diet at Regens- 
 burg.
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 WinCH INCLUDES THE TiME FROM AuGUST, 1775, TO JANUAET, 1776. 
 
 — JoDiTZ. — Village Idyls. 
 
 E now find the Professor of his self-biography 
 in the parsonage in Joclitz, which, in a female's 
 cap and a girl's petticoat, he entered with his 
 parents. The Saale, springing like myself 
 from the Fichtelgebirge, ran with me or after me there, 
 as it did also when I removed afterward to Hof, pursuing 
 its course and passing that city also. This river is the 
 most beautiful, at least the longest, in Joditz, and courses 
 round it as if it wei*e a little hill. The little place itself 
 is traversed by a small brook that is crossed by a board 
 for pedestrians. An ordinary castle and the pastor's 
 house are the only distinguished buildings. The envi- 
 rons upon a level are not more than twice as large as 
 the village itself. And yet is this village to the Profes- 
 sor of his own history far more important than the place 
 of his birth ; for here he lived the most important, the 
 boy Olympiad of his life. 
 
 Never could I give my voice for the nineteen cities, that, 
 according to Suidas, quarrelled for the honor of giving 
 birth to Homer ; as little for the different Dutch cities, 
 that (according to Bayle) would have produced Erasmus.
 
 24 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 What can the first day after nine months signify more 
 than any day before ? And can the place of the grave 
 confer dishonor or advantage on its inhabitant more than 
 the place where his cradle stood ? Altliough so many 
 princes, on the whole, have been born in their own cities, 
 yet London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, do not glory in them, 
 otherwise cities and hamlets that have produced great 
 villains must on that account take shame to themselves. 
 At furthest, the land of one's birth might arrogate the 
 honors of birthplace, if, through the predominance of 
 good bii'ths, anything could be decided as to the climate 
 of the place or the character of the inhabitants ; but a 
 Pindar in Boeotia does not make there a swallow-sum- 
 mer.* 
 
 The first and longest place of education is, indeed, the 
 spiritual birthplace ; and if it is so for these great, world- 
 renowned men who rarely need, and more rarely make 
 use of education, how much more for hamlet and village 
 mediocre celebrities ; men like my hero, who has gained 
 so much through nurture and education, in connection, 
 with reading, which is only a more important instruction, 
 that he has become what he is, a Ilildburghausen Coun- 
 sellor, a Heidelberg Doctor of Philosophy, a threefold 
 member of different societies, and the present unworthy 
 possessor of the Professorship) of this autobiography. 
 
 Let no poet suffer himself to be born or educated in a 
 metropolis, but if possible, in a hamlet, at the highest in 
 a village. The excesses and the fascinations of a great 
 city are to the excitable, weak soul of a child, like sip- 
 ping at a midnight table a draught of burnt waters, or 
 
 * The meaning seems to be this: one Pindar does not make a Par- 
 nassus of Boeotia, because born in the latter place, any more than one 
 swallow makes a summer.
 
 AUTOBIOGKArilY. 2$ 
 
 bathing in fiery wine. Life exhausts itself in boyhood, 
 and, after enjoying the greatest, he has nothing more to 
 wish but smaller joys and village pleasures. But one 
 does not gain so much when he comes from a city to a 
 village, as, on the contrary, from Joditz to Hof, that is, 
 fi-om a village to a city. I am thinking of that which is 
 most important to the poet, — Love ! He must, in the 
 city, draw about the Avarm zone of the friends and ac- 
 quaintance of his parents the greater and colder number 
 from the icy circle of unloved persons, who meet and 
 pass him with the same indifference that a ship's com- 
 pany on the great ocean meet and pass another ship, 
 freighted with those they do not love. But in a village 
 they love all the inhabitants, and not a nursling is there 
 buried, but every one knows its name, and illness, and the 
 tears it has cost. The Joditzers have accustomed them- 
 selves to dwell in each other ; and this heartfelt sym- 
 pathy for every one who bears the form of man, and 
 which overflows upon strangers and beggars, engenders 
 a concentrated humanity, and rules all the pulsations of 
 the heart. And then when a poet wanders from such a 
 village, he bi-ings to every one he meets a piece of his 
 lieart, and he must journey far before the whole heart is 
 expended upon the streets and lanes. 
 
 There is yet a greater misfortune than that of being 
 educated in a great city, namely, that of being educated 
 like many aristocratic children, who journey whole years 
 through strange cities and among strange men, and know 
 no home but the coach-box. 
 
 We approach nearer again to our hero, the pastor's son, 
 
 whose life in Joditz I should best describe if I called it, as 
 
 I look back upon it, a whole course of Idyllic years ; but, 
 
 as wholesome cloudy weather often precedes a clear day, 
 
 2
 
 26 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 these clouds of my childhood were rich in instrnction, 
 although this was first gathered at the end of ten years. 
 My life consisted in learning everything. Like a prince, 
 I revelled in half a dozen teachers, but I had scarcely a 
 good one. I yet remember the winter evening delight, 
 when I received from the city a respectable ABC book, 
 with a pointer to show the letters. Upon the cover, with 
 true golden letters (and not without good reason were 
 they of gold), the contents of the first page were written, 
 which consisted in alternate red and black letters. A 
 gambler wins with gold and rouffe et noir less delight 
 than I by that book, whose pointer I did not once apply. 
 After I had at home gone privately through the lower 
 school classes, I entered, in a green taffety cap, but al- 
 ready in breeches (for the schoolmistress had established 
 my weak claims to enter), the high school, namely, the 
 one whose school-house was opposite the parsonage. 
 
 As usual, all in the school were dear to me, especially 
 the lean, consumptive, but animated schoolmaster, with 
 whom I shared his patient anxiety, when he lay in am- 
 bush behind his bird-cage, placed in the window to allure 
 some tmwary passing goldfinch, or when he spread his 
 net without in the snow, and caught a yellow-hammer 
 from tlie host of birds. In the midst of the winter sul- 
 triness of the crowded school-room, I remember the de- 
 light with which I drew out the pegs that secured the 
 canvas over air-holes bored in the wooden walls, and 
 drew into my open mouth the exciting refreshment of 
 the frosty air from without. Every new copy-book from 
 the master delighted me as others are delighted with pic- 
 tures. I envied every one who said his lesson well, and 
 I enjoyed reading together with my class, as singers enjoy 
 the blessed liarmony of tl)eir music.
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 27 
 
 Was it twelve o'clock, and the dinner not ready ; I and 
 my deceased brother Adam (although a bird's-nest was 
 dearer to him than the wliole seat of the Muses) desired 
 nothing better, for we flew with our hunger back into the 
 school-room, not to lose a moment when the ajiartment 
 was empty and quiet. Much might be thought of this 
 sacrifice to the love of learning, but I know well that a 
 great part of it was owing to the common desire of chil- 
 dren to depart from the every-day, established order. "We 
 willingly dined an hour later, just as on this account the 
 late hour of fast-days delighted us. Was the whole house 
 in confusion, either through whitewashing* the apart- 
 ments, or moving into another house, or through the 
 arrival of many guests, we httle fools could think of 
 nothing finer ! 
 
 Alas ! I closed forever upon myself the school-door by 
 an untimely complaint to my father, that a tall peasant's 
 son (Zah is his name for posterity) had cut me a little 
 on the knuckle with a clasp-knife. In his ambitious 
 anger, my father resolved to instruct my brother and 
 myself alone, and I must henceforth have the mortifica- 
 tion to see every winter the children running into that 
 haven that was shut to me. In the mean time, the rival 
 joy remained foi- me to carry frequently to the school- 
 master the bulls and decrees of his village Pope, which, 
 instead of the Romish Agnus Dei and consecrated Christ- 
 mas-box, consisted of a butcher's joint, or a little dish with 
 his dinner. 
 
 Four hours in the forenoon, and three hours in the 
 afternoon, our father gave to our instruction, which con- 
 sisted of merely learning by heart sentences, catechisms, 
 
 * The reader will recollect the Fichtelgebirge houses were white- 
 washed every spring. — Tr.
 
 z8 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 Latin words, and long gi\ammatical lessons. We were 
 obliged to learn the long rules of the genders, every de- 
 clension, together with the exceptions, and the accom- 
 panying examples in Latin verses, without understanding 
 one word of them. Did my father on a beautiful sum- 
 mer's day go into the country, such cursed examples as 
 pants, piscis, were left to be learnt by heart for the next 
 morning. As for my brother Adam, to whom the long 
 summer's day scarcely sufficed for his activity and child- 
 ishness, not an eighth part remained in his head, for rarely 
 had lie the good fortune to have such precious declensions 
 as scamnum or cornu among the number, of which he cer- 
 tainly knew how to recite the Latin half Besides, you 
 will easily believe that it was not an easy thing, in a clear, 
 blue, June day, when the omnipotent father was not at 
 home, to make one's self a fast prisoner in a corner of the 
 apai'tment, and delve and engrave two or three pages of 
 vocables in the head. In a blessed long summer's day it 
 was not easy, but more so in a short, dark December's 
 day, and we must not wonder if my brother always bore 
 marks of such days. Tlie Professor of his own liistory 
 ventures to make tliis general statement, that he was never 
 in his school life flogged in general, neither in part, not 
 to say he was never completely flogged in his life. 
 
 Let not this mere learning by heart throw a false light 
 upon my unwearied and amiable fatlier, wlio sacrificed 
 the whole day to writing out and committing to memory 
 the weekly sermon for the country people, merely out 
 of extreme pastoral conscientiousness, although he liad 
 many times proved the power of liis extemporaneous 
 eloquence. In his weekly visit to the school, and in 
 doubling his public exercises with the children, yes, in 
 everything, he went beyond liis duty by his voluntary
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 29 
 
 and gratuitous services. And how he hung with a wann, 
 tender, parental heart on me, and easily, with every lit- 
 tle sign of talents or improvement, bui'st out into joyful 
 tears ! This fjither committed no fault in his whole plan 
 of education — rarely as it happens — except faults of 
 the head, — none of the will. 
 
 To school-teachers, especially, is this method to be 
 recommended, since so much toil and trouble is never 
 saved as where the pupil relies on the book as a vicarius 
 or adjunct of the teacher, and his curator absentis, and, 
 like a powerful clairvoyant, feels himself magnetized. 
 This intellectual self-repose of the children admits of 
 extension to such a degree that I will venture, by means 
 of the post-office alone, to preside over whole schools in 
 North America, or over such as are fifty days' journey 
 removed from me in the Old World ; for I will merely 
 write for my school-boys what they have to learn by 
 heart every day, and I will have an insignificant man, to 
 whom they shall repeat what they have learned. And 
 so I shall enjoy the consciousness of their fine spiritual 
 fast's day reminisceres. 
 
 In the dialogues in Langen's Grammar, I guessed at 
 the German from longing to understand their contents ; 
 but my father would not allow me to translate while in 
 Joditz. In a grammar of the Greek language, written 
 in Latin, I studied, hungering and thirsting, the alphabet 
 of that language, and at last wrote tolerable Greek, at 
 least as far as belongs to the handwriting. How easily 
 and Avillingly could I have learnt more ! The spirit, if 
 not the substance, of a language entered easily into me, 
 as the third lecture of our winter term will best prove 
 to the world. 
 
 Once in a winter's afternoon, — I might have been
 
 30 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 eight or nine years old, — my father brought me a little 
 Latin dictionary that I was to learn by heart, l)ut first I 
 was to read him a page. I read lingua, notwitlistanding 
 his frequent coiTection, not ling-wa, but always lin-gua, 
 and repeated the same fault, in s])ite of his repeated 
 corrections, so often, that, Avith angry impatience, he took 
 the book from me, and deprived me forever of leai'iiing 
 it. I cannot, even now, discover the source of this obsti- 
 nate stupidity ; but my heart tells me that through my 
 whole life I have never been self-mlled, even in play, 
 and never to my father, who at this very time had given 
 me a school-boy's pleasure through a new book. This 
 historical feature is purjjosely exliibited in our lecture- 
 room, that the impartiality of our historical investigator 
 and Professor may appear through the shadows he throws 
 upon his hero, whom he would willingly, if truth only 
 were stated, represent in the most brilliant light. Be- 
 sides, how often in life, either with or without under- 
 standing, do poor, innocent men say Kn-gua, instead of 
 the more correct ling-wa, and even with the tongue (lin- 
 gua) that at the same time signifies language (lingua) ! 
 
 Further, history, as well ancient as modern, natural 
 history, the most interesting descriptions of the earth, 
 arithmetic and astronomy, as well as orthograj)hy, — all 
 these sciences I became sufficiently acquainted with, but 
 not in Joditz, where I was, indeed, twelve years old 
 witliout knowing a word of them, but many years later 
 at ditrc-rent intervals and by fi'agments, from the Uni- 
 versal Library. So craving was my thii'st for books in 
 this intellectual Sahara Desert, that every book was to 
 me a fresh, green oasis, — particularly tlie Orbis Pictus,* 
 
 * Goethe mentions the " Orbis Pictus" of Amos Comenius as one 
 of the books that delighted his childhood. — Tk.
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 31 
 
 and the " Dialogues in the Kingdom of the Dead." 
 Only my father's library, like many public ones, was 
 rarely open, except when he was not in it, nor at home. 
 I, at least, often lay upon the flat roof of a wooden lat- 
 tice-bedstead (like a great cage for animals),* and crept 
 to the books to obtain one for myself. We may well 
 consider that, in a thinly peopled village and a solitary 
 parsonage, a man speaking in a book must be, to such 
 a thirsting soul, as precious as the richest foreign guest, 
 a INItEcenas, a travelHng prince, a firet American to a 
 European. A novice, ignorant of the A B C of history, 
 I did not in the least understand the quarto volume of 
 the " Conversations in the Kingdom of the Dead " ; but 
 I read it, as well as the newspapers, as if it were a geo- 
 graphical work, and I could relate much from both. As 
 I related to my father out of the book, I told him that 
 one evening during his absence I had read the history 
 of the love of Roxelane for the Turkish Emperor. I 
 was led to this by newspaper extracts received from an 
 ancient noble lady. He had, from his patroness Plotho 
 in Zedwitz, a present of the Bayi'euth newspaper, month- 
 ly or quarterly, — as often as he went to visit her. He 
 brought home these for a month or a quarter of a year, 
 and he and I read the great heap with profit, as it came 
 to us more in volumes than in sheets. A pohtical news- 
 paper, read, not in sheets, but in volumes, communicates 
 real instruction, as there is room enough in a whole vol- 
 ume of leaves to correct previous impressions and get 
 the true one, and like the air, whose true color is not to 
 be seen in parts and portions, but in the whole circum- 
 ference, as only in its whole mass it obtains its heavenly 
 
 * In the houses of the Fichtelgebirge, as the bed often stood in the 
 common room, it was enclosed in a sort of wooden wicker-work. — Tb.
 
 32 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 blue. Every morning I bore my news atlas to the castle 
 of the old Lady von Reitzenstein, and, at the morning 
 coffee, prophesied one event and another from the news 
 I brought, and allowed them to praise me. I remember 
 yet the noun of multitude, at that time often repeated, — 
 confederacy (it is highly probable it was the Polan'd con- 
 federacy) ; but I do not recollect the least interest taken 
 in it, probably because I understood nothing of the whole 
 matter. Thus impartially and calmly were Polish affaii-s 
 considered in our village, as well by myself as by the 
 old Lady Reitzenstein, my hearer. 
 
 The intellectual fibres of our hero, thirsting for learn- 
 ing, penetrated and wound themselves around everything 
 from which they could extract their aliment. He pre- 
 pared clocks, whose dial-plates were good counsellors, 
 with pendulums and wheel and weights, which stood 
 well. He found a place for a sun-dial, and wrote upon a 
 wooden plate the figures with ink, and drew the white 
 line with the gnomons, and placed it firmly near the 
 tower clock, so that he could frequently tell the exact 
 time. He made dials as many cities do, rather than 
 clocks, as Lichtenberg makes the titles of books before 
 the books themselves. The present writer shows in little 
 a box in which he established a miniature etui library of 
 his own Joditz works, made from the ribbon cuttings of 
 his father's octavo sermons, sewed together and neatly 
 trimmed. The contents were theological and Protestant, 
 and consisted of a little explanatory note, written under a 
 verse in Luther's Bible, whence he copied it. The verses 
 themselves were left out of the little books. Thus lay 
 concealed in our Frederic Richter already a little Fred- 
 eric von Schlegel, who in the same manner in his selec- 
 tions, " Lessing's Geist," gives his opinion upon passages 
 in certain writers, without the passages themselves.
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 33 
 
 In the same manner, our hero threw himself upon 
 pauiting. Many ruling potentates sat, or rather lay to 
 him, when, with a fox'k, he pricked through their features 
 upon a thick sooty sheet of paper, placed under the en- 
 graving, and afterwards pressed it upon a sheet of white 
 paper. Whether he might not, under sunny influences, 
 have attained the fame of Raphael Mengs, remains to be 
 guessed, for, unlike this ai'tist, they had to beat him from, 
 not to painting, and, -when he afterwards received a box 
 of colors, he colored the whole Orbus Pictus after the life. 
 I could not, at this time, believe all that was in the box 
 of colors, everything is so painted in memoiy, — the pale 
 red leather ball, the four-cornered red tile, the rounded 
 palette, the splendid colored shells, and the green and 
 gold beetle yet shimmering in that box. It were yet 
 something less judicious, from his art of making herrings 
 in winter, to conclude that he could have been a great 
 financial correspondent. His artifice for collecting her- 
 rings at such a distance from the coast consisted in this. 
 He waded into the brook with his herring bread, and 
 softly raising a stone under which was a gudgeon, or 
 smaller fish, he immediately placed it in a hollow cabbage 
 stalk, which he called a herring cask and salted it in, and 
 when the little cask was full, he would have had herrings 
 to eat, if they had not all been spoilt. Still worse would 
 it be to consider the little financier the precursor of sur- 
 rogate discoveries, because he placed the brown, dried 
 halves of pears upon pieces of broken glass like doves' 
 feet, and served them up as hams ready for eating, or 
 that he drove snails to pasture.* In fact, every future 
 investigator of the history of the present historian would 
 
 * Richter means here to ridicule those biographers who infer an 
 original genius for their heroes from the nature of their sports. 
 2*
 
 34 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 appear extremely ridiculous to me, if, out of the broken 
 and scattei-ed fragments of any other childhood, he should 
 collect and read something wonderful. The foolish man 
 would appeal- to me like that Paris barber, who, Avith tlie 
 help of a Jesuit, placed together many of the bones of an 
 elephant, and sold them as the true skeleton of the Ger- 
 man giant, Teutobach. The beard does not make a phi- 
 losopher, for a sailor and a criminal may each come from 
 his ship and prison with that appendage, because they 
 have not been under the barber's razor. 
 
 The boundless activity of our hero expended itself 
 more in mtellectual than in physical experiments, but he 
 followed all with inexpressible delight. Thus he invent- 
 ed, instead of a new language, a new wi'iting character. 
 He took the calendar signs from the Almanac, or geomet- 
 rical out of an old book, or chemical, or original from his 
 own invention, and putting all together, composed a 
 wholly new alphabet. When it .was ready, the first use 
 he made of his solitaire alphabet, was to clothe therein a 
 couple of pages of copied" matter ; thus he was his own 
 secret wi'iter, and his concealed play was with himself. 
 Without peeping into Biittner's comparative tables of 
 alphabetic characters, he could read his own as easily 
 as the common, as he placed this literally under his 
 own as a warrant, and had only to glance at it to read 
 the secret. 
 
 At this time little will be thought of said historical in- 
 vestigator, if, out of this ciphering and deciphering, which 
 even at this early time was less valuable for its contents 
 than its form, he should have seen himself the incipient 
 Counsellor of the Embassy, or even the Ambassador him- 
 self ; for I have in fact, gained the character of legations- 
 counsellor, and could to-day decipher many things.
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 35 
 
 To music was my soul, like my father's, everywhere 
 open, and had for it a hundred Argus ears. When the 
 schoolmaster sent the church worshippers home with the 
 final cadences of the organ, my whole little elevated be- 
 ing laughed and leaped as in a spring morning ; or, when 
 the morning after the night dance of the Kii-chioeihe,* (at 
 which my father the next Sunday sent loud, thundering 
 anathemas,) when the foreign musicians with their haut- 
 boys and fiddles collected the contributions of the peasants 
 before the wall of the parsonage court, I climbed upon 
 the wall, and a clear jubilee echoed through my narrow 
 breast, and the delightful airs of spring played within, 
 with the spring-time of life, and I forgot every syllable 
 of my father's sermon. I devoted whole hours upon an 
 old untuned harpsichord, whose only tuning-hammer and 
 tuning-master were the winds and the weather, to thun- 
 dering out my fantasies, which certainly were as free and 
 bold as any in Europe, as I knew neither note nor touch ; 
 for my accomplished pianist father would teach me 
 neither note nor finger. 
 
 But if accidentally, like the tune-setter for a rope or fairy 
 dance, I attained with my fingers on the piano a short mel- 
 ody or harmony of three or six strings, I was like a man 
 in an ecstasy, and repeated this discovery of my fingers 
 as incessantly as any new German poet repeats the idea 
 or discovery of the brain by which he gained his first ap- 
 plause. He acts, at least, in a more fi'iendly manner than 
 Ileliogabalus, who condemned liis cook to continue eating 
 a bad soup until he had discovered a better ; on the con- 
 
 * The annual commemoration of the consecration of the church. 
 A church consecration is one of the principal religious ceremonies in 
 the German villages, at which, as Paul relates, foreign musicians and 
 strollers of all sorts collected. — Tk.
 
 36 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 trarj, the Leipzig book-fair has entertained the reading 
 world with many an excellent soup that they have tasted 
 as continually as the imperial cook tasted the bad. 
 
 In the future literary history of our hero, it Avill appear 
 doubtful whether he were not perhaps born more for the 
 philosophic than the poetic art. In the earliest time, the 
 word philosophy was but a second name for the Orient, 
 and to me, like the open gate of heaven, through which 
 I saw far extended gardens of joy. Never shall I forget, 
 that which I have never yet related to human being, — 
 the inward experience of the birth of self-consciousness, 
 of which I well remember the time and place. I stood 
 one afternoon, a very young child, at the house door, and 
 looked at the logs of wood piled on the left, when, at 
 once, that inward consciousness / am a Me came like a 
 flash of lightning from heaven, and has remained ever 
 since. Then was my existence conscious of itself and 
 forever. Deceptions of memory are here scarcely imag- 
 inable, for no exterior occurrence could mingle with a 
 consciousness so concealed in the holy sanctuary of man, 
 whose novelty alone has given permanence to the every- 
 day circumstances that accompanied it. 
 
 It appears to me best, in order to represent the Joditz 
 life of our Jack Paul (for so we must continue to call 
 him) in the truest manner, to lead him through the whole 
 of an Idyllic year, and to divide the normal year of four 
 seasons into four Idyllic quarters. Four Idyls will ex- 
 haust his happiness. 
 
 Let no one wonder at an Idyllic reign, or Arcadian 
 world in a little village and humble jiarsonage. A tulip- 
 tree, whose flower-branches shall overshadow the whole 
 garden, may grow in the smallest bed, and the life-giving 
 air of joy can be breathed from a window as well as in
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 37 
 
 the wide wood under the broad heaven. Is not the human 
 spirit, with all its mfinite, heavenly expansion, enfolded in 
 a body of six feet high, with a covering of Malpighian * 
 nerves, and capillary tubes, with only five narrow world- 
 windows of senses to open for the boundless round-eyed, 
 round-sunned All ! And yet it discerns and reproduces 
 an All! 
 
 I scarcely know witli which of the Idylline quarters to 
 begin, for each is a little heavenly introduction to tlie 
 next ; however, the climax of joys will be most ajiparent, 
 if we start with winter, and January. In the cold, our 
 father, like an Alpine herdsman, came down from the 
 upper altitude of his study ; and to the great joy of tlie 
 children, dwelt in the plain of the common every-day- 
 room of the family. In the morning he sat by the win- 
 dow and learned his Sunday's sermon by heart, and the 
 three sons, Fritz (who I myself am), Adam, and Gotlieb, 
 for Henry came afterwards, carried by turns the full cup 
 of coffee to him, and still more gladly the empty one back, 
 as the bearer could pick out the umnelted remains of the 
 sugar-candy, which he took against a cough, from the bot- 
 tom. Out of doors, the sky covered all things with si- 
 lence, — til* brook with ice, the village with snow ; but 
 in our room there was truly life ; under the stove, a pig- 
 eon-house, on the windows green and goldfinch cages ; on 
 the floor the invincible bull-dog, our Bonne, the night- 
 guardian of the courtyard, and a poodle, the pretty 
 Scharmantelle, a present from the Lady von Plotho, 
 and close by, the kitchen, with the two maids; further 
 off, towards the other end of the house, .our stable with all 
 sorts of neat, swinish, and feathered animals, and all their 
 
 * Malpighi was a celebrated physician who decomposed the skin. 
 — Tk.
 
 38 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 possible noises ; * the tkresliers also with their flails might 
 be heard in the court of the parsonage. lu tins way, 
 suiTounded by society, the male portion of the house- 
 hold spent their forenoons in tasks of memory, while the 
 female portion were as busily employed in cooking. 
 
 No occupation whatever excludes holidays. I also 
 had my ailing festivals, equivalent to a holiday upon 
 the water, when I could travel out in the snow of the 
 courtyard, and to the threshing in the barn. Nay, was 
 there a difficult embassy to be transacted in the village, — 
 for example, a message to the schoolmaster or the tailor, — 
 I was sure to be despatched in the middle of my lesson ; 
 thus I could breathe the free, cold air, and measure my- 
 self in the new snow. At noon also, before our own din- 
 ner, we chikken could have the hungry satisfaction to see 
 the threshers in the kitchen fall to and devour theirs. 
 
 The afternoon was still more significant, and richer 
 in joys. Winter shortened and sweetened our lessons. 
 In the long twilight, the father walked to and fro, and 
 the childi-en trotted after him, creeping under his night- 
 gown, and holding on, if they could reach his hands. At 
 the sound of the vesper bell, we placed ourselves in a 
 circle, and devoutly chanted the hymn, Die ^nstre Nacht 
 hricht stark herein, — "The gloomy night is gathering in." 
 In villages only, for in towns there is more night than 
 day work, have the evening chimes a meaning and beau- 
 ty, and are indeed the swan-song of the day ; the evenmg 
 bell is, as it were, the muffle of the overloud heart, and 
 like a Ranz -des Vaches of the plain, calls men from toil 
 and tumult into the land of silence and of dreams. After 
 watching for the moonlight of the candle-lighting to ap- 
 
 * The reader will recollect that in the Fichtelgebirge houses all the 
 domestic animals were under the same roof with the family.
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 39 
 
 pear under the kitelien door, we saw the wide room at 
 once iUuminated and secured ; namely, the window siiut- 
 ters were closed and bolted ; behind these window breast- 
 works and bastions the children felt secure, and closely 
 nested against Knecht Ruprecht, who could not entex", but 
 only gi-umbled and gi-owled from without.* 
 
 About this time also, we children might undress and 
 skip up and down in long traiUng night-gowns. Idyllic 
 joys of various kinds alternated. Our father either had 
 his quarto Bible, interleaved with blank folio sheets before 
 him, and was marking at each verse the book that had 
 commented upon it ; or he had his ruled music paper, 
 and, undisturbed by the noise of the childi-en, was com- 
 posing whole concerts of church music. In both cases, 
 and especially in the last, I observed the writing, and was 
 rejoiced when, through the pauses of various instruments, 
 whole quarters of pages were at once filled up. He con- 
 structed his internal melody without help from external 
 tones (as Reichardt advises), and in spite of the chil- 
 dren's noise. 
 
 The children sat playing on that long writing and eat- 
 ing table, and even under it. Among the joys that be- 
 longed to tliis sweet time of childhood was this ; that 
 during the severe winter's frosty weather, the long 
 table, on account of the warmth, was shoved to the 
 stove-bench,t and our gain consisted in tliis, that we 
 could sit or run upon it 
 
 * Knecht Ruprechl is the hobgoblin or Raw-head-and-bloody-bones 
 of German children. — Tr. 
 
 t To understand this passage, the reader must recollect the one 
 apartment of the houses of the Fichtelgebirge, the large porcelain 
 stove, and the table used for all domestic purposes, which, when 
 shoved to the bench that surrounded the stove, must have formed 
 the coacli-like domesticity that Richter loved. — Tk.
 
 40 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 Then how did tlie winter evening rise in value when, 
 once a week, the old errand-woman coated in snow, with 
 her fruit- and flesh- and general ware-basket, entered the 
 kitchen from the city of Hof, and we all had the distant 
 town in miniature before our eyes, nay, before our noses, 
 for there were pastry-cakes also. 
 
 In our first childish years, the father permitted, after 
 the early supper on winter evenings, yet another joyful 
 repast, when the housemaid brought her distaff into the 
 common apartment, illuminated with all the light the pine- 
 torch could afford, kindled, as in Westphalia, from a pine- 
 branch. 
 
 At this supper-table, as I now remember it, beside con- 
 fectionery and ices, and the popular tale of Aschenbrodel,* 
 was also that pine-apple artificially raised by the maid 
 herself, — namely, the history of the shephei'd and his 
 wolf-fight with wolves, with whom at one time his own 
 danger, and at another that of his provision, was the gi-eat- 
 est. Yet I felt the increasing happiness of the shepherd 
 as my own, and remark only from my own experience, 
 that children in fictitious stories are far more interested 
 in the gradual progression of happiness than in that of 
 misfortune, and that they wish the path of heaven should 
 lead up eternally, but the path of hell should go down 
 only as far as is necessary to glorify and exalt the throne 
 of heaven. These childish wishes would also later be 
 the wishes of men, and they would for their fulfilment 
 make stronger demands upon the poet, were only a new 
 heaven as easy to create as a new hell. Every tyrant 
 can invent unheard-of pains, but to discover unknown 
 joys, they must themselves know the value of them. 
 
 * " Aschenbrodel " is probably the name of a popular German tale, 
 with which the translator is unacquainted.
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 41 
 
 The seat of torture is the skin ; upon which a hundred 
 hells, from inch to inch, may pitch their tents, but the 
 heaven of the five senses hovers, airy and uniform, 
 above us. 
 
 At the end of the winter evening, a horrible wasp-sting 
 or vampire's tongue threatened our hero. The children 
 at nine o'clock were sent tq bed in the guest's chamber, 
 in the second story ; my brother in a bed in the common 
 apartment, and I in a room that I shared with my father. 
 There, until he had finished his two hours' long night- 
 reading, I lay with my head under the bed-clothes, in the 
 cold agony of fear of ghosts, and saw in the darkness the 
 lightning from the cloudy heaven of spirits ; and it seemed 
 to me as if man himself was spun round by spirit-worms. 
 I suifered thus helplessly two long hours, until, at last, 
 my father came up, and, like a morning sun, chased away 
 the spectres, like dreams, and the next morning the ghostly 
 torment was as completely forgotten, as if it had been a 
 dream ; but only to appear again the next evening. Yet 
 have I never mentioned this to any one, until to-day I 
 tell it to the world. 
 
 This fear of ghosts was not so much created as nour- 
 ished by my father himself. He spared us not one of all 
 the spiritual appearances of which he had heard, and even 
 told us som& which he believed himself to have experi- 
 enced ; but, like the old theologians, he united with a 
 firm belief in them, a firm courage against them, and 
 Christ upon the cross was to him a shield against all 
 spirits. Many children who are physically timid appear 
 courageous against spirits, but this is merely from a want 
 of imagination. On the contrary, a child like myself 
 trembles before the invisible world, which his fancy forms 
 and peoples, but arms himself easily against the visible,
 
 42 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 as this never reaches the depth and greatness 'of the in- 
 visible. Thus an eminent physical danger, such as a furi- 
 ous horse, a clap of thunder, war, or an alarm of fire, 
 made me tranquil and self-possessed, as I was susceptible 
 of fear only through the itoagination, and not by the 
 senses. A ghost, could I have survived the first shudder, 
 would have restored me again to common life, if it did 
 not, through gesture or sound, precipitate me into the 
 endless kingdom of Fantasie. But how are we now to 
 be preserved by education from the tragical over mastery 
 of the spirit-invoking imagination ? Not through contra- 
 diction, and the Wagnerish solution of the monsters in 
 the light of day, for the possibility of the unexplained 
 exceptions, retains firm hold of our deepest convictions ; 
 but sometimes, partly through prosaic solutions, and famil- 
 iarity with places and times, where formerly the imagi- 
 nation kindled its enchanted vapor, and pai'tly through 
 means by which the imagination is armed against the 
 imagination, and spirits are opposed to spirits ; to the 
 Devil — God ! 
 
 It happened, througli peculiar circumstances, that I was 
 sometimes afraid of ghosts in tlie daytime. Thus at a 
 funeral, before the procession, headed by the pastor and 
 schoolmaster, with the children, and the cross, moved 
 from the parsonage by the church, over to the church- 
 yai'd, passing through the village, where it was joined by 
 the singers, I was obliged to carry my father's great Bible 
 through the clmrch into the sacristy. Carelessly and full 
 of courage, I went at a gallop through the shadowy, 
 silent, listening church into the narrow sacristy, — but 
 who can represent to himself the pale, trembling rush of 
 fear, before the after-rushing world of spirits at one's 
 heels, with which I shot from the church door, — and if it
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 43 
 
 could be described, who would not laUgh ? Nevertheless 
 I always undertook, without opposition, the office of car- 
 rj'ing the Bible to the sacristy, and concealed my terror 
 in my own breast. 
 
 We come now to the gi-eat Idyl time, the Joditz spring 
 and summer. Both seasons fall from various causes, 
 especially in the country, into one Idyl. The spring 
 dwells only essentially in the lieart ; out upon the earth, 
 it is mei'ely summer, that is everywhere established upon 
 the present, upon fruition.* It is merely necessary in 
 villages to draw away the curtain of snow from the stage 
 or earth for its joys to begin. The city has its pleasures 
 only in the winter. Ploughing and sowing are a country- 
 man's pleasure-harvest, and for a Pastor who does his 
 own farming, they open new scenes to his secluded sons. 
 Then were we poor children, who had been imprisoned by 
 the winter in the narrow parsonage court, by that heaven- 
 commissioned angel, the spring, freed and emancipated 
 into the fields and meadows and gardens. Then we 
 ploughed, sowed, planted ; mowed and made hay, cut 
 the corn and harvested it. Everywhere, the father 
 stood by and helped, and the children assisted him, I 
 especially, as the oldest. Only imagine, dear hearer, 
 what it was to be freed, not merely from city walls, 
 wliich sometimes enclose whole fields, but from the 
 walls of a court, and to flee away over a whole village, 
 into the unenclosed circle, and to look down from above, 
 into the village, and see what they could not see from 
 beneath. 
 
 My father did not stand by the field laborers as an 
 
 * Jean Paul means here to indicate the rapid changes of season in a 
 northern climate. He means to say, that while the heart is anticipating 
 spring, it is already summer out upon the earth. — Tk.
 
 44 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 overseer or taskmaster (although they wore feudal ten- 
 ants), but as a friendly shepherd of souls that would take 
 part at the same time with nature, and with his spiritual 
 children. Wliile I see ecclesiastics and proprietoi-s and 
 avaricious men so richly furnished from head to foot with 
 suckers, so that they draw everytliing to themselves, I 
 find in my father rather the diffusing system, and that he 
 thought ten times a day of giving, although he had little 
 for the purpose, but scai'cely once of taking, by which he 
 might have had something to give. And then, later in 
 life, I have seen so many human insects furnished only 
 with pincers good to wound, while he held in his hand 
 nothing but those birth-forceps which merely bring the 
 new life to its birth, and preserve it. Heavens ! what a 
 difference, and why is it not more considered ? Are they 
 just merchants, pastors and noblemen, who, knowing also 
 what belongs to them, open their hands only as bird- 
 climbers, to clutch at what is above them, or open merely 
 to shut them again ? 
 
 Now, in fact, life began under a pure heaven. Tlie 
 morning sparkled with the undried dew, when I carried 
 his coffee to my father, to the pastor's garden, lying out- 
 side the village, where, in a small pleasure-house open on 
 every side, he committed his sermon to memory. In the 
 evening, our mother bi'ought us, for our second meal, the 
 salad prepared by hei'self, and currants and raspberries 
 from the garden. It belongs to the unacknowledged 
 country pleasures, that of being able to sup in tlie even- 
 ings without kindling a liglit. After we had enjoyed this, 
 the father seated himself with his pipe in the open air, — 
 that is, in the walled court of the parsonage, and I and 
 my brother sprang about in our nightgowns in the fresh 
 evening air, as freely as the crossing swallows above us.
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 45 
 
 "We flew nimbly, here and there, till, like them, we bore 
 us orderly to our nests. 
 
 The most beautiful of all summer-birds, meanwhile, 
 was a tender, blue butterfly, which, in this beautiful sea- 
 son fluttered about our hei-o, and was his first-love. This 
 was a blue-eyed peasant-girl of his own age, with a slen- 
 der form and an oval face somewhat marked with the 
 small-pox, but with the thousand traits that, like the 
 magic circles of the enchanter's wand, take the heart a 
 prisoner. Auguste or Augustina dwelt with her brother 
 Romer, a delicate youth, who was known as a good ac- 
 countant, and as a good singer in the choir. It did not, 
 indeed, come to a declaration of love on the side of Paul, 
 or it would appear in this division of the readings already 
 printed, but he played his little romance in a lively man- 
 ner, from a distance, as he sat in the pastor's pew in the 
 church, and she in the seat appropriated to women, ap- 
 parently near enough to look at each other without being 
 satisfied. And yet this was only the beginning ; for 
 when, at evening, she drove her cow home from the 
 meadow pasture, he instantly knew the well-remembered 
 sound of the cow-bell, and flew to the court wall to see 
 her pass, and give her a nod as she went by ; then ran 
 again down to the gateway to the speaking-grate, she, 
 the nun without, and he the monk within, to thrust his 
 liand through the bars (more he durst not do on account 
 of the children without), in which there was some little 
 dainty, sugared almonds, or something still more costly, 
 that he had brought for her from the city. Alas ! he did 
 not arrive in many summers three times to such happi- 
 ness as this. But he was obliged to devour all the pleas- 
 ures, and almost all the sorrows within his own heart. 
 His almonds, indeed, did not all fall upon stony ground,
 
 46 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 for there grew out of them a whole hanging garden in 
 his imagination, blooming, and full of fragi'ance, and he 
 walked in it whole Aveeks long. For pure love will only 
 bestow, and through making the beloved happy, is happy ! 
 And, could it give an eternity of ever-increasing happi- 
 ness, what were more blessed than love ? 
 
 The sound of this cow-bell remained for him a long 
 time the Ranz des Vaches from the high, distant Alps of 
 childhood, and yet will liis old heart's blood roll in billows 
 through his veins, when this sound again hovers in the 
 air. There are tones from the wind-harp that, playing 
 on the spot are beautiful, but farther off more beautiful 
 still, and in the distance, I might, at their softened sound, 
 weep for pleasure. We associate love with eveji the 
 slightest sound ; be it only a cow-bell, its Oii^hic enchant- 
 ment is doubled, and the distant, invisible waves of har- 
 mony lead the heart into the eternal, and we know not 
 whether it is near or distant, and man weeps joyfully 
 at the same time over what he possesses and what he 
 desires. 
 
 In this focus of love, Paul remained opposite to Augus- 
 tina, and lived Avhole years, witliout so mucli as touching 
 her hand. Of a kiss indeed, he could never dream. If 
 sometimes a homely servant-maid of his parents, whom he 
 did not love, rashly and bashfully laid one upon his lips, 
 soul and body rushed unconsciously and innocently to- 
 gether in that kiss, — but the lips of a beloved, which, at 
 a distance, shone w^armly down like the sun upon the most 
 inward sj^iritual love, would have immersed him in the 
 warmest heaven, and left him entranced, and evaporating 
 in a glowing ether, — and yet it must be confessed, that 
 once or twice in Joditz he was thus entranced. In his 
 thirteenth year, when his father received a much richer
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 47 
 
 parsonage, he, ov rather his eyes, were driven two miles 
 distant from his beloved. His father, out of love for his 
 old residence, had taken with him to his richer parish 
 a young tailor, whom he entertained for many weeks. 
 When he returned, our hero furnished him with many 
 pretty Potentates, that he had sketched with wax and 
 soot, and with his color-box had colored after life, to carry 
 to Augustina, with the commission that the knights and 
 princes were made by himself, and he presented them to 
 her as an eternal souvenir. 
 
 Another love passage from the same period, and that 
 endured no longer than dinner-time, belongs entirely to 
 him, for the young lady knew notlting of it. As he sat 
 wholly sunk in deep silence at a respectable table in 
 Koditz, surrounded with grown-up young people, the 
 above-mentioned young lady sat opposite, and, in ap- 
 pearance, was one of them. There swelled in his heart, 
 as he looked at her, a love inexpressible in sweetness, 
 seemingly inexhaustible, a gushing of the heart, a heav- 
 enly annihilation and dissolving of the whole being into 
 her eyes. She said not a word to the enchanted boy, nor 
 he to her. Had she only bowed, or wafted a kiss to the 
 poor parsonage boy, he had passed from heaven to heaven. 
 Nevertheless, there remains the memory of the feeling of 
 the moment, more than of her face, of which he retains 
 nothing but the scars. As this beauty is already the 
 second that has been thus marked (in later readings more 
 will enter), the Professor considers it his duty to declare 
 to all vaccinated fair readers, that he knows how to value 
 their beauty as well and as highly as he did at that time 
 a different fashion of face. And he pledges himself, in 
 connection with this discussion of beauty, that every 
 female face whose so-called ugliness has no moral cause,
 
 48 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 he can without cosmetic artifice, Avithout paint or poma- 
 tum-box, witliout snow or soap-water, and without night- 
 masks,* make in the highest degree charming and en- 
 chanting ; — if she will only sing to him some evening a 
 song composed of heart-words, no one shall be more beau- 
 tiful than the singer, — but naturally only in his eyes, — 
 for who can speak for another ? 
 
 This was confirmed by the very person in question ; for 
 when, twenty years afterwards, he found himself opposite 
 to her in Hof, the scai'S only, the pit-marks remained. 
 She was faded and bent, and I name her not ! 
 
 Pure love has as illimitable power to create and elevate 
 as the common has to depress and destroy. It would 
 obtain a more powerful hold of us in representation, had 
 it not been so often described ; but for tliis reason only 
 are so many thousand books endured, that only paint it. 
 Take from a man who, in the enclianting time of love, 
 looks upon the landscape, the stars, flowers, and moun- 
 tains, sounds and songs, pictures and poems, yes, even the 
 living and the dead with poetic enjoyment ; — take from 
 him love, and he has lost the tenth Muse, or rather the 
 mother of all the Muses ; and every one feels in later 
 years, when he prohibits himself this sacred inspiration, 
 that of all the Muses, the tenth has failed him. 
 
 "We come now to the Sunday of our Paul, in which his 
 Idyl gains in splendor. Sunday appears to have been 
 created for pastors and pastors' children. Our Paul en- 
 joyed especially a great many trinity Sundays, although, 
 through all the twenty-seven, not one more summer Sun- 
 day came into the world and the cluirch than in other 
 years. 
 
 * Ladies sometimes slept in medicated masks in order to procure a 
 delicate complexion, or to defend a delicate one from the severe air of 
 a northern climate.
 
 AUTOBIOGRArilY. 49 
 
 In cities, there are birthdays of princes and great men, 
 and fair-time, the true Trinitatis. Paul began, on splen- 
 did, shining Sunday mornings, his enjoyment in this way: 
 Before church, he went through the village with a bunch 
 of keys, jingling them by the way, to show himself, and 
 opened the pastor's garden with one of them, to bring 
 roses from thence to adorn the reading-desk. In the 
 church itself it was already cheerful, as the long win- 
 dows admitted the sun, and the cold ground and the 
 women's seats were already penetrated with broad beams 
 of light that circled about the seat of the enchanting 
 Augustina. The joy also is not to be despised, whicii 
 he, together with his brothers in office, felt, when, after 
 church, and before dinner, they carried to the feudal peas- 
 ants of the week the lawful half-pound of bread and the 
 money collected, — especially as the father cut the bread 
 very large, which was a joy to the peasants ; and chil- 
 dren, Paul particularly, love to cany joy into a house. 
 
 He had also to carry to the peasant Romer his portion 
 of the bread, and found himself thus nearer to the saint 
 of his church and heart, — but always in vain. For in 
 his perspective painting of love ten steps more or less 
 were something ; and only imagine him, by some singular 
 good Fortune, to have stood but half a step from her ! — 
 But I will not hint — (for in that case he would have 
 spoken out audibly for himself) — of such unrealized 
 blessedness. 
 
 I assert that no magistrate, prince, teacher, or other 
 official, can form to himself an idea how a Sunday's ves- 
 per hour is enjoyed by the children of a pastor, wlien both 
 church services are over, especially of one who lias him- 
 self preached. How they, together with their father, re- 
 joice when the labors of the church are linished, and he 
 
 3 D
 
 50 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 can exchange his priest's mantle for the lifi^ht eveiy-tlay 
 frock, and enjoy the calm repose of the Sabbath evening, 
 while, at the same time, the whole village visit, and enjoy 
 the sight of each other. 
 
 I should be reproached with incompleteness, if I should 
 forget to relate another Trinitatis joy, merely because it 
 was less frequent. It was therefore so much the greater, 
 that the pastor's family from Koditz, in order to hear the 
 father preach and to see him, appeared in the midst of 
 the sermon, and Paul's playmate, the pastor's little son, 
 suffered himself to be seen before the church door. If 
 Paul and his brother discovered him from their not very 
 distant grated seat in the choir, there began on both sides 
 fluttering and dancing, heart-beating and sign-greeting, — 
 and as to hearing the sermon, had the Propaganda, the 
 ten first court preachers, one behind the other, risen in 
 the pulpit and spoken out, there would have been no 
 more listening. The anticipation of this Sabbath, this 
 mountain of precious hopes, the breakfast a la fourchette 
 in the middle of the day, must be enjoyed afar off in the 
 church. But who, after the first joyful storm of parental 
 and childish preparations are over, can describe the blessed 
 zephyr-calm of the evening ! At furthest, it may be pos- 
 sible to paint, that, late in the evening, the .Joditz family 
 accompanied the Koditz far beyond the village on their 
 return, and that, consequently, this sublime and wide ex- 
 tension of bliss, by the parents and by the little curate's 
 sons, went far beyond the village, and into space, and 
 left impressions in after life, of which we shall hear more 
 in future.* 
 
 We come now, my dear hearers, to those Joditz Idyls 
 
 * It must be remembered that Paul at tliis time was under ten years 
 of a";e.
 
 AUTOBIwG.RAJ'M* .5^ 
 
 that were enjoyed by P-aul -mthout. uoqrs,;in,4]ie village, 
 and may conveniently he, clividcd into those wfi-in Le v^f.!^ 
 not at home himself, and those when his father was ab- 
 sent. I begin with the last, as among the unacknowledged 
 pleasures of childhood, when the father journeys from 
 home, when the power of academical censure and freedom 
 of direction for the childi-en is conferred on the mother. 
 Paul and his brothers were able, e\en under the eyes 
 of the business-entangled mother, to leap over the door 
 of the courtyard, to hunt the wild game of the village, 
 such as butterflies and gudgeons, to draw sap from the 
 birch-trees, or make pipes from the meadow-reeds, to 
 bring home a new playmate in the schoolmasters Fritz, 
 or help ring at noon, merely to be lifted from the ground 
 by the turning of the bell-rope. 
 
 One particular pleasure could be enjoyed inside the 
 courtyard, except that Paul jnight easily have broken his 
 neck, and thus put an end beforehand to his whole Pro- 
 fessorship. It consisted in climbing by a ladder to a sort 
 of balcony that hung in the stable, and from thence jump- 
 ing upon the hay, that lay heaped upon the lower floor, 
 merely to enjoy in the transit the pleasant sensation of 
 flying. Sometimes he placed the old piano at the open 
 window of the upper story, and played beyond all measure 
 down into the village, and sought to attract hearers from 
 the passers-by. He increased the descent of the sounds 
 by means of a quill, which he passed over the chords with 
 his right hand, while he struck the keys with his left. 
 Sometimes he struck with his quill upon the strings ex- 
 tended over the bridge, but he could not get much har- 
 mony there. 
 
 The Joditz summer Idyls were naturally much richer, 
 when we left our village wholly, and went to another, or
 
 rz^ HF5S', OF JE'AN PAUL. 
 
 touthe .city., . "Was there a-beautiful summer day, after the 
 lessaa had" befciiv recited from :Lang's Grammar, a more 
 blessed order could not be heard than " Dress yourself, 
 for after dinner you shall go with me to Koditz." Dinner 
 never tasted worse. Paul was obliged to run after the 
 long strides of the father ; but at the end of an hour he 
 had his little Pastor's son to play with in the open air, 
 and his splendid mother, the sound of whose voice yet 
 echoes in his heart like the string of a lute, or the har- 
 monica-bells through the distance ; and at the same time 
 one or two tiny laurel-crowns, large enough for his little 
 head. 
 
 The father's paternal heart rejoiced, when he found his 
 Sunday's sermon understood and remembered, of which, 
 indeed, on Sunday evening, he repeated the principal 
 heads, and the polished passages, and he ordered him to 
 repeat the same again before the pastor's family, — and 
 the little one, I may safely say, went on without fear or 
 faltering. In a boy who, during his whole life, had seen 
 notliing great, — neither count, nor general, not even a 
 superintendent, and rarely a nobleman, — perhaps twice 
 in a year the Ilerr von Reitzenstein, — in such a boy it 
 shows courage to speak publicly in the apartment of the 
 pastor's family. But, timid as he was when he stood 
 there in silence, as soon as he began to speak, courage 
 and animation appeared. Yes, — he ventured upon some- 
 thing yet more bold one afternoon when his father was 
 absent. He took the psalm-book and went to visit an ex- 
 tremely aged woman, old as tlie hills, who had been bed- 
 ridden for many years, and placing himself at the bedside, 
 like the pastor visiting the sick, he began to read the 
 psalms for the dying. But he was soon interrupted by 
 tears and sobs, not of the old woman, at anything she
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 53 
 
 heard from the psalm-book, for she remained cold and 
 unmoved, but by his own. 
 
 The father took our hero once with him to the court of 
 Versailles, as they might indeed without exaggeration 
 call Zedwitz, since it was the residence of the patroness 
 of the Joditz pastor. Every time he went to court, and 
 in summer it was twice a month, he excited, in the even- 
 ing, the utmost rustic astonishment, both in his wife and 
 children, by telling about the exalted personages, and 
 their court ceremonial, the court entertainments, the ice- 
 houses, and Swiss cows, — and how he was very soon 
 invited from the domestics' apartment to the Herr von 
 Plotho, or even to the Frjaulein, to whom he gave exer- 
 cises and imitations upon the piano, and at last was intro- 
 duced to the Baroness von Plotho (born a Bodenhausen), 
 and always on account of his liveliness and wit was taken 
 to the same table even, for it made no ditFerence if the 
 most distinguished noblemen of Voigtland sat there and 
 dined, — Init, like an old Lutheran court preacher, he 
 knew how to look at the illimitable greatness of rank, 
 as at the appearance of spectres, without trembling at 
 either. 
 
 And yet I would say, how much happier are the chil- 
 dren of the present day, who are justly educated to no 
 prostration before exalted rank, and are strengthened 
 fi-om within against outward splendor ! Wliile the Joditz 
 pastor's sons were waiting, expecting in one short hour to 
 prosti'ate themselves before the Zedwitz throne, the inter- 
 est of the occasion was heightened by the ornamented 
 coach, which was sent the Thursday preceding Good- 
 Friday, before the evening solenmity, to carry the father 
 as Confessor to the whole household. The sons can 
 speak of the coach, for, before the evening they were
 
 54 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 carried round a little, with infinite delight, in the 
 village. 
 
 Picture to yourself our hero going to Zedwitz, to be 
 presented to the reigning family, along with the Court- 
 Confessor, who had spoken of him there with too much 
 praise and love. The Baroness von Plotho received 
 him, after he had been waiting a long time before the 
 pictures of her ancestors in the castle below, upon the 
 steps above, as if it had been the presence-chamber. 
 Paul, in true court style, rushed up and caught at her 
 dress, and gave it the usual kiss of ceremony. And 
 thus the whole audience, without court-sword and upper 
 court-marshal, was finished, and the boy was permitted 
 to run down again ; and this he did into an ornamental 
 garden. 
 
 It would have been difficult for any other ambassador 
 than our at that time little Hildburghausen Legationsrathy 
 immediately after such formal etiquette in his reception, 
 to breathe through the romantic hours that the shaded 
 walks, the fountains, the perfumed hot-beds, and leafy 
 balconies must have offered to a village child, rich in 
 fancy, wlio wandered with widely-expanded breast, for 
 the first time, in the midst of all these splendors. But 
 the elevated Paul was drawn again into reality by a 
 wooden bird, suspended by a cord, whose iron bill he was 
 permitted to shoot into the black centre of a shield ; 
 while a rich fruit-cake, sent down from the castle, held 
 him between flight and perch. Its sweet aftertaste re- 
 mains' uneffaced in the reUquiarium of our hero. Oh ! 
 splendid solitary hours and walks for the indigent village 
 child, who.-?e heart so delighted to be filled, were it only 
 with longing, in the outward world ! 
 
 Among the summer Idyls of little court splendor, were
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 55 
 
 the frequent errands that Paul, with a sack across his 
 back, must make to the grandparents in the city of Hof, 
 to bring meat and coffee, and all that was not to be had 
 in the village, at least not for the extremely small prices 
 of the city. His mother, that these things might not 
 appear as gifts, furnished him with a few small pieces of 
 money. The grandmother, liberal to her daughter and 
 grandson, and avaricious to all the rest of the world, filled 
 the sack with everything that could at that time be placed 
 in a bill of fare. 
 
 Tlie two hours' walk led over places with few charms ; 
 through a wood, where babbled a brook full of stones, till 
 at last, upon an elevated field, the city with its two united 
 church towel's, and the Saale in its level plain, overpow- 
 ered the little traveller with excessive satisfaction. Be- 
 fore an excavated chasm, near the suburbs, through wliich, 
 according to report, the Hofers fled in the Thirty Yeai's' 
 War, he passed with that shudder at all war and martyr 
 times that belongs to cliildhood ; and the adjoining cloth- 
 fulling mill, with its perpetually thundering strokes, and 
 apparently unmanageable machinery, expanded his vil- 
 lage soul wide enough to take in the whole city. 
 
 When he had kissed the hand of the tall, serious grand- 
 father, seated behind his loom, and given his mother's let- 
 ter (for his father was too proud to beg) to his delighted 
 grandmother, the little money was publicly delivered, and 
 what had been the secret article of the petition, privately, 
 behind the door of the passage. Then came the after- 
 noon ; and with his full knapsack, and his sugared al- 
 monds for Augustina, in the highest spirits on account of 
 the parental provision-ship upon his back, he trotted home 
 again. He yet remembers a summer's day, when he was 
 returning about two o'clock, watching the splendid sunny
 
 S6 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 mountain-side, with its waving cornfields, traversed by 
 the coursing shadows of the clouds ; and when a till now 
 unexperienced, undefined longing came over him, of min- 
 gled pain and pleasure, and unremembered wishes. Ah, 
 it was his whole nature awaking and tliirsting after the 
 heavenly gifts of life, that lay as yet concealed, unde^ned, 
 and colorless in the deep folds of the heart ; but an acci- 
 dental sunbeam partially reveals them. There is a time 
 of longing, which knows not the name of its own object, 
 which at best can only name itself. It is not the hour of 
 moonlight, whose silvery sea so softly melts the heart and 
 makes it feel the Infinite, so much as it is the light of 
 the afternoon sun, spreading itself over a wide prospect, 
 which exercises this power of awakening a painful, bound- 
 less longing. In the works of Paul we find this several 
 times described. 
 
 In the winter's snow, Paul was often obliged to travel, 
 like a court runner, when money was wanted, to nego- 
 tiate a loan at his grandfather's ; so too in the coldest 
 weather he would follow his father to the neighboi-ing 
 parsonage. He may thank these weekly excursions for 
 many later cherished powers, and especially for the best 
 antidote to his opposing physical education ; for at that 
 time fur caps, medicines, and exclusion from the air, united 
 with wannth and carefulness, did not arm one against, 
 but prepared the way for, un unhealthy future. But this 
 is the blessed fortune of poor and village children, that 
 the summer, witli its spring and autunm on the right and 
 left, happily roots out the noxious weeds of winter. The 
 pale winter hot-house plants spring at once into showers 
 and healthy air, and bareheaded and barefoot, grow and 
 strengthen upon uncooked nourishment. It is only the 
 dear little delicate Princesses who flourish in no season.
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 57 
 
 The good people meanwhile will not believe that the 
 summer repairs the ravai^es of whiter ; but, on the con- 
 trary, that this domestic Avinter season is tlie physician of 
 those spent in the open air. 
 
 I come now to the last and greatest, and never-to-be- 
 forgotten summer Idyl, that always happened the Mon- 
 day after St. James's day, when the grandparents sent to 
 bring Paul's tender mother in a coach to the Hof annual 
 fair, and Paul was permitted to ride with her. And 
 here, not to wrong the cold historian, I would merely say, 
 calmly and simply, that if to a villager a common city is 
 more than a market town, it follows that a city in time 
 of the fair must be a twofold city, and consequently 
 excel in splendor all that a village youth could imagine. 
 Thus it was with Paul, whose imagination was ever 
 active. 
 
 As emperors were formerly presented with draughts of 
 honor, the mother was received by her parents with sweet 
 wine, and the son went with a little of it in his head to 
 Silberer, the hair-curler. He cooled the head from with- 
 out by means of lieated irons and sharp screwing of the 
 curled locks ; but Paul came so much fresher, newer, and 
 whiter with liis curls and tonsure from the powder-puff 
 back to dinnei", which could not indeed be very consider- 
 able, as the grandfather must hasten back to the Rath- 
 house, to watch over the selling of his bales of cloth. 
 At the evening meal, as with the ancient Romans, there 
 was more time and less frugality. The afternoon was 
 splendid ; when, free from all surveillance., and deafened 
 and dazzled by the variegated and loud tumult of men 
 and goods, Paul, rich with his groschen of fair-money 
 from his grandmother in his pocket, could purchase 
 everything ; he would secretly purchase something to 
 3*
 
 58 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 carry to the solitary house, but as all were absent and 
 it was gloomily lonely, he mingled again with the throng- 
 ing multitude. 
 
 The most respectable and beautiful ladies sat at the 
 windows in the second stories of the houses. As he passed, 
 Paul fell in love with them, and as they were ignorant of 
 his existence, from the street below lie fell in imagination 
 upon their necks. Yet none was so distinguished, through 
 the elevation of the apartment, or the ornaments upon 
 her head, as his favorite sultana the little country girl, 
 Augustina, in Joditz, for wliom he bought almonds and 
 raisins. Towards seven o'clock, under the beams of the 
 evening sun that embellished and gilded every object, the 
 noise and pleasure were continually augmenting; but 
 he must now return to the house, for the gi-andfather, 
 having completed his sales, supped at this hour, and aU 
 the family must be together. I would fain present every 
 one at this evening meal, for Paul, having eaten enough 
 before, tasted little of it ; but so much more willingly 
 shall I follow him, after the second grace, to the street 
 again, where he was as blest as a young soul could be 
 that had just escaped from a country parsonage. 
 
 In the deepening twilight, and as the night approached, 
 the youth was wholly enclianted and inspired. During 
 the fair, Turkish music was heard in the princii)al streets; 
 deafened and silent, the people and children followed tlie 
 sounds, and the village boy heard for the first time drums 
 and fifes, and the Turkish cymbals. " In me," these are 
 his own woi'ds, " wlio never ceased to tliirst after musical 
 sounds, they produced a music-intoxication, and I heard, 
 as the drunken see, the world doubled and in fiight. The 
 fife carried me away most powcrfidly through the high 
 notes of the musical scale. How often did I seek before
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 59 
 
 falling to sleep, when fancy was the finger-boai'd that 
 came easiest to hand, to hear again those echoing sounds ; 
 and how am I blessed when I liear them again, as deeply- 
 blest as if my childhood had become immortal, merely 
 through the power of sound, and with it spake to me 
 again ! Ah ! faint, thin, invisible sounds bear and harbor 
 whole worlds for the heart, and are in themselves soids 
 for the soul." 
 
 Perhaps the tones of the higher octave penetrate deep- 
 est into the soul. Engel asserts, indeed, that the peculiar 
 harmony is sustained between the low and the high tones, 
 but one may say that poetic music extends over both. In 
 the dark, deep bass, the lowest bass sounds move slowly 
 among the past, and in the passing time. On the contrary, 
 the sharp heights of the extreme alto shriek and sink 
 deep into the future, or summon it to us, while these 
 sharp, acute tones speak out. Thus the high, sharp fifcing 
 of the little fifes in the Russian field music is fearful to 
 me, and sounds like a herald calling to battle, like a mel- 
 ancholy early Te Deiim for future bloodshed. 
 
 I fear they will say in Germany and elsewhere, that 
 I have reserved the autumn as the highest Joditz Idyl, 
 when it can lead to nothing but a snow-path. But in the 
 autumn a fanciful spirit, like Paul's, enjoys not only the 
 autumn itself, but the winter beforehand, with its domestic 
 joys, and the spring also, with its poetic prospect-sketch- 
 ing. In the mean time, the approaching spring has melted 
 into summer, and the summer — which, in the tranquil 
 and usual state of his fancy — the summer is allied to 
 autumn, and yet more distinctly to spring. But now, in 
 the late summer, through the half-denuded trees, far oflp 
 in other years, he sees snow-mountains all covered with 
 flowers, and goes to them, in fancy, like a bee intoxicated
 
 6o LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 with honey ; but when he approaches them they melt 
 away. The widely-extended plans of summer journeys 
 and summer harvests are anticipated and enjoyed, and 
 when the spring itself arrives, the chief business is already 
 over. As the landscape-painter prefers the autumn, so 
 does the spiritual painter, the poet, especially in old age. 
 
 But in the autumn our hero turned with wonderful 
 facility to the reverse of the picture, and nurtured within 
 himself the strong inclination to quiet domestic Life, and 
 to spiritual nest-making : he became a domestic snail, 
 who withdraws contentedly, and loves to live in the nar- 
 rowest recesses of his house. Only he will sometimes 
 open his snail-shell sufficiently to thrust out his four 
 feelers, not wide enough to spread them like butterflies' 
 wings in the air, but to stretch them ten times higher 
 towards heaven, at least reaching with every filament one 
 of the four satellites of Jupiter. Of this foolish union of 
 desires for near and distant objects — which, like the 
 telescope, by mere reversion, doubles either the distant 
 or the near — more will appeal* in our readings than I 
 desire, or than autumn alone has room for. 
 
 This domestic disposition showed itself in the reveries 
 of the boy. He deemed the young swallows happy, be- 
 cause they could sit so secretly and safe througli the 
 night in their walled nests. If he climbed upon the roof 
 of the great pigeon-house, he was immediately at home 
 in this apartment full of little chambers, or pigeon-holes, 
 and the front was to him like the Louvre or the Escurial 
 in little. I fear that I shall injure myself, if I take up in 
 my lectures such childish trivialities as that he made a 
 complete fly-house out of fine clay, and built a castle as 
 long and as broad, and somewhat higher tlian a man's 
 hand. The whole house was red, striped with ink, and
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 6l 
 
 divided into square tiles. Within, it was of two stories, 
 with stairs, galleries, chambers, and a spacious garret ; on 
 the outside it had balconies and projections. A chimney 
 was provided, covered witli glass, that the flies might not 
 pass out instead of the smoke. In no part were windows 
 spared, and I dare assert that the palace consisted far 
 more of windows than of walls. "When Paul saw innu- 
 merable flies in this wide palace, up stairs and down stairs, 
 and running into all the great apaitments, and from them 
 into the balconies and projections, he represented to him- 
 self their domestic happiness, and wished to enter with 
 them, and put himself in the place of the landlord, who 
 could withdraw from the spacious apartments to the lower 
 and smaller : then how insignificant and little the parson- 
 age appeared to him ! 
 
 He has later, as an author, described this domestic, 
 comer-loving disposition, in Wuz, in Fixlein, and in Fibel; 
 and yet the man remains full of longing for every little 
 neat, humble shepherd's cottage of two stories, with flow- 
 ers before the windows, and a little garden which he could 
 water from the window ; and the good domestic fool can 
 sit contentedly in a coach, and, looking out at the side- 
 windows, say, " What a pretty, quiet, convenient, fire-pi'oof 
 apartment ! while out there, the great villages and gardens 
 sweep along by us." This is certain, that he could not 
 live, still less write, in a knight's-hall, or St. Peter's 
 church, — it would be to him a market-place covered 
 by a roof. At the same time he would be able to write, 
 or live upon Mont Blanc or ^tna, where all is adapted 
 and fitting environment ; lor the works of man only are 
 not small enough for him, but great nature cannot be too 
 much expanded. The littleness of the works of man is 
 yet diminished through the vastness of nature.
 
 62 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 The Joditz autumn Idyl is painted by what I have 
 already said. Autumn leads people to tlieir homes, and 
 the harvest fills the home with plenty for the winter nest ; 
 prepared for winter, like the crossbill, who in icy months 
 builds her nest and has her young. From this time, after 
 the first threshing, Paul must follow the traces of the 
 crows in the woods, and the cries of birds of passage, 
 Avhose long processions he followed with infinite delight, 
 because they were the prelude to that intimate domestic 
 winter in-nesling^ — and it pains me now, on his account, 
 to think how he could enjoy the shrieks of the geese, 
 flying over in flocks in the autumn, as forerunners of 
 winter time. From this cell and winter disposition of my 
 hero, I understand why he read with such singular delight 
 all travellers' descriptions of winter climates, like Spitz- 
 bergen and Greenland ; for the representation of simple 
 distress upon paper hardly explains his delight thereat, 
 for then he would have felt the same delight in reading 
 of glowing distress in hot countries. On the contrary, 
 the well-known joy of the man over every quarter of an 
 hour that is taken from the length of the day in autumn, 
 I would ascribe to his love for superlatives, even of oppo- 
 site kinds ; in short, for everything infinitely great or 
 infinitely small, for the maxima and minima of every- 
 thing, lie rejoiced just as much over the increase of the 
 length of the day, and wished for nothing so much as a 
 Swedish summer, day. We everywhere observe with 
 what innumerable satisfactions and conveniences God 
 arms and furnishes man upon his path of life, — while 
 little is to be found on the right or left of it, — so that, 
 be it never so dark about him, he can always discern 
 black from white ; and a double instinct is given him 
 both for land and water, that he may neither drown nor 
 thirst.
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 63 
 
 These are merely autobiogi*aphical touches, which a 
 future biographer may conveniently work into a portrait, 
 and for which he will perhaps thank me. I must refer 
 to this contented winter predilection, to understand why 
 Paul recalled another dry autumn pleasure with so much 
 satisfaction. In the autumn evenings the father went 
 with Paul and Adam to a potato-field lying on the other 
 side of the Saale. One boy carried a hoe upon liis shoul- 
 der, the other a hand-basket ; and while the father dug 
 as many new potatoes as were necessary for supper, and 
 Paul gathered them from the ground and threw them 
 into the basket, Adam gathered the best nuts from the 
 hazel-bushes. It was not long before Adam fell back 
 into the potato-beds, and Paul in his turn climbed the 
 nut-tree. Then they returned home, satisfied with their 
 nuts and potatoes, and enlivened by running for an hour 
 in the free, invigorating air ; every one may imagine the 
 delight of returning home by the light of the harvest 
 festivals. 
 
 Wonderfully fresh and green are two other harvest 
 flowers, preserAjed in the chambers of his memory, and 
 both are indeed trees. One w^as a full-branched muscatel 
 pear-tree in the pastor's courtyard, the fall of whose splen- 
 did hanging fruit the children sought through the whole 
 autumn to hasten ; but at last, upon one of the most im- 
 portant days of the season, the father himself reached the 
 forbidden fruit by means of a ladder, and brought the 
 sweet paradise down, as well for the palates of the whole 
 family as for the cooking-stove. 
 
 The other always green, and yet more splendidly 
 blooming, was a smaller tree, cut on Saint Andrew's 
 evening from the old wood, and brought into the house, 
 where it was planted in water and soil in a large pot,
 
 64 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 that on Christmas night, when it was hung with golden 
 fruit, it might retain its verdant leaves. This birch, not 
 a weeping, but a festive tree, is the only one which, in 
 the dark month of December, even till Christmas, is 
 strewed with the blossoms of joy, namely, its own orna- 
 mented leaves ; every one of which indicates a cherished 
 pleasure, and shows that every child under tliis May- 
 tree of winter may celebrate his tabernacle feast of hope.* 
 
 My hearers will suffer me to describe Paul's Christ- 
 mas festival, for in his works we meet with pictures of 
 the same that far exceed mine, and merely two circum- 
 stances may be added as features of the picture. When 
 Paul on Christmas morning stood before the lighted tree 
 and the lighted table, and saw this new world of gold and 
 splendor and gifts lying around, and discovered and took 
 possession of one rich gift after another ; the first emo- 
 tion that arose in him was not a tear, not even a tear of 
 joy, but a deep sigh over life, — in one word, the transi- 
 tion, the leap, or the flight (call it as you will), from the 
 wild-swelling, sporting sea of Fancy, to the firm land, 
 limited and limiting, — this transition the boy expressed 
 with a sigh for a greater and more beautiful land. But 
 before the sigh was breathed out, Paul felt that the 
 highest degree of gratitude was due to his mother ; this 
 thought exerted its power in a short time, and the day- 
 break of reality soon scattered and extinguished the 
 moonlight of fancy. 
 
 Here may be mentioned a peculiarity of Paul's father 
 that occurred at the same moment. The father, so joy- 
 fully sympathizing with every joy, so willingly consent- 
 
 * We have become so familiar with the beautiful German custom 
 of the Christkind tree, that it is unnecessary to add any explanation to 
 the text. — Tr.
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 65 
 
 ing to every gift, came on Christmas morning, as with a 
 mourning veil on his face, from his own room into the 
 splendidly lighted common apartment. The mother her- 
 self assured them of her unconsciousness of the cause of 
 this yearly melancholy, and no one else had the courage 
 to question him. He left to the mother the whole trouble 
 and joy of being table-decker for the holy Christkind 
 night. In this he was not like Paul, who always at the 
 Christmas festival helped liis wife to prepare for the chil- 
 dren, if he did not himself do the whole. In fact, he had 
 earlier. — when they were simpletons, months before the 
 representation of this enchanting opera, — lying upon the 
 sofa, played the part of pretended ticket-bearer {Lugen- 
 Zettel-Trdger) or theatre-poet, and scene-painter, and 
 when the evening came he was perfect, as opera-director, 
 and master of machinery. For every one of the three 
 children he had divided the sections of the table with 
 lights, and placed the presefits for the maid aside, upon a 
 near table. In short, all upon the tables and the tree 
 were so advantageously arranged, and so perfectly or- 
 dered, that the whole shone with splendor, and his eyes 
 with delight. 
 
 Nevertheless, the father's mourning may be explained 
 by the son, and indeed by this, that the latter has had for 
 many years, notwithstanding his outward joyfulness and 
 activity, the same thing to conceal. It is with both only 
 that weary, sad feeling of comparison between the manly 
 harvest of reality, and the childish spring befoi-e them, 
 where luxuriantly from the very trunk of reality the blos- 
 soms of the ideal flourish without waiting for leaves or 
 branches. 
 
 The childish honey and wine of joy still required the 
 ideal ether of faith in a Christkindlein who brousht
 
 66 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 them ; for as soon as lie had accidentally observed, by 
 the witness of his senses, that only human and not spir- 
 itual hands had broken off and laid upon the table the 
 flowers and fruits of joy, the Eden splendor and Eden 
 perfume went out, and were extinguished, and there re- 
 mained only the common earth of the garden-bed. But it 
 is incredible how he, like all children, anned himself 
 against the heaven-disturbers of this divine faith, and how 
 long he held fast his supernatural revelations against all 
 the discoveries of his growing years, against all the hints 
 of accident, until he at last saw and conquered, rather 
 than was conquered. So difficult is it for man, in all re- 
 ligions, to descend to the men, who up in tlie air of heaven 
 act the benevolent gods. 
 
 Thus far extend the Joditz Idyls, that endured for 
 parents and children as long as the Trojan war. The 
 expenses for four sons were always increasing, and for 
 these sons tbe prospect of 'better schools was neces- 
 sary. Upon the father, also, the discouragement weighed 
 heavily, that his best years and finest powers should be 
 wearied and consumed in so narrow a village church. 
 At last the pastor Barnikel died, in Schwarzenbach-on- 
 the-Saale, a little city or a great market-town.* Death is 
 the only theatre-director and machinery-master on the 
 earth. He takes a man as a cipher from a row of num- 
 bers, from the left, the middle, or the right, and behold, 
 the whole collection changes its value and order. The 
 right of presentation, which the Baron von Schonburg- 
 "Waldenburg and tlie Frau von Plotho possessed alter- 
 nately, came at this time into the hands of Richter's 
 
 * Markt-Jlecken, a borough town that has the privilege of holding 
 one or more annual fairs, and is tho medium between a city and a 
 village. — Tk.
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 6-J 
 
 patroness, who rejoiced long and undisguisedly at the op- 
 portunity of serving and rewarding the good, disinterested, 
 and indigent pastor. But on this account he did not go 
 oftener, but more rarely to Zedwitz. In fact, a petition 
 for a pastorship, or merely a verbal request, would have 
 been to him, who, from his old faith, believed that the 
 holy spirit alone could call to the sacred office, an act of 
 impure simony ; thus the {)ride of l)irth in the patroness 
 must fall, without a petition and without a visit, before 
 the pride of office in the poor indigent black coat. I will 
 impart to you here a secret of the Zedwitz court, which 
 he has himself long since forgotten, although I relate it 
 from the mouth of the old pastor as it happened on the 
 day of his calling. As he was usually admitted first by 
 the old Herr von Plotho, he could not withhold from my 
 father the news of his good fortune, but gave it to him 
 himself, or rather gave him the presentation, while his 
 wife was, in fact, the patroness, and was entitled to inform 
 the pastor formally of his appointment. It naturally 
 happened, as the newly-created pastor entered her apart- 
 ment, that he presented his thanks, and her extreme 
 displeasure was excited against her husband, that he did 
 not leave the discovery to herself. For the rest, they 
 were both disposed, while they presented the vocation 
 with their own hand, to spare the penniless friend the 
 mortification of all the graces and douceurs of the donor. 
 
 As I so well know your benevolent dispositions to both 
 father and son, I can easily guess that you are calling out 
 with delight : " This is indeed precious news, that at last 
 the moon has changed in the parsonage, and promises 
 more beautiful weather. We see the jovial amateur in 
 music, coming earlier than usual from the barony (he 
 would gladly have entertained them longer from grati-
 
 68 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 tude), and running with his bull-dog to his home, to im- 
 part as early as possible liis own delight to his family, 
 especially to the poor wife, who had hitherto suffered 
 enough in gleaning the tithes from the parental fields." 
 
 Serious and melancholy, he arrived with the joy-post ; 
 but not merely because upon the flower- and haj-vest- 
 crown of happiness, as upon the bridal-crown, there is 
 commonly hanging a dew-drop that looks like a tear, but 
 because he could not take leave of the beloved flock, 
 which had been to him for many years his second family, 
 in that great family praying-hall, the church, without 
 weeping; and then the quiet, calm, unrestrained, simple, 
 still life of the village would in futux-e hang as a distant 
 picture in his memory. Indeed, the country life is like 
 life at sea, of a uniform color, without the interchange of 
 little and great events ; but it affords a species of unifonn 
 tranquillity, which works healthily, as the equal and 
 uniform sea favorably, upon the consumptive, while no 
 clouds of dust are breathed, and no insects torment. 
 
 I believe I have now fulfilled my obligations as Pro- 
 fessor of my own history in reference to the village of 
 Joditz, the place of my education, in such a manner, that 
 in the next reading I may accompany the hero and his 
 family to Schwarzenbach-on-the-Saale, where indeed the 
 curtain of his life may rise a few turns higher, and we 
 may see sometliiiig more of the principal actors than, as 
 hitlierto, the mere infancy. For in fact we send him out 
 of the present reading into the next as a twelve-yeared 
 man, with ten times less knowledge than the five-yeared 
 Christian Ileinrich Ileineke von Lubeck (who after his 
 examination returned again to the bosom of his nurse),* 
 
 * The biographer of this miraculous child, in his " Lehen, Thaten, 
 Beisen, und Tod," tells us that at five years old he understood the Latin
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 69 
 
 without knowledge of nature, country, or world-histoiy, 
 except the little part which was himself; without French 
 or music ; in Latin, only a little bit of Lange and Spec- 
 chis ; in short, such an empty transparent skeleton with- 
 out learned nourishment or muscle, that I can scarcely 
 wait for the time and place, Schwarzenbach-on-the-Saale, 
 where he must begin to know something, and to nourish 
 his skeleton. 
 
 We leave now mth him that unknown village ; and, 
 although it has not gained a laurel-crown through a bat- 
 tle, as many other villages, yet he dares, I believe, hold 
 it high in liis heart and say even to-day, as if he had left 
 it only to-day : " Dear village, thou art to me dear and 
 precious. Two little sisters lie in thy bosom. My con- 
 tented father found in thee his fairest Sundays. Under 
 the morning glow of life, I saw thy waves shining. Thy 
 well-known inhabitants, whom I would thank, have, hke 
 my father, long since left thee, — but to their unknown 
 children and grandchildren my heart wishes happiness, 
 and that every battle may pass far from them." 
 
 [Here ends the Idyllic life of Jean Paul. In this little 
 village of Joditz, too insignificant to be mentioned in any 
 Gazetteer, lie went as a little child of two years old, and 
 remained till his thirteenth year. Here he received those 
 impressions, and his genius that direction wliich followed 
 him through life and influenced all his works. He greets 
 this village as his spiritual birthplace, the first and long- 
 est place of his education, and where he lived the most 
 important, the boys' Olympiad. Never is he so much at 
 
 and French language?, had read history, geography, and the Institu- 
 tions of the Roman Laws, had a good knowledge of anatomy and the- 
 ology, was witty and penetrating in conversation, but lived altogether 
 upon the milk of his nurse.
 
 7° 
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 home in his descriptions as in the little village parsonage 
 and church. The joys of humble domestic life are the 
 joys he delights to describe. The village festivals, the 
 church consecrations, are all dear to his religious spirit ; 
 and his grandfather's altar, the Culmberg, was the spot 
 he had always before him.]
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 Schwabzenbach-on-tiie-Saale. — First Kiss. — Rector. — The 
 Lord's Supper. 
 
 ILL my hearers believe that Paul, a.d. 1773 
 through the whole packing and mov- '^'- 1^. 
 ing, going forth and going in, thought of noth- 
 ing, took no leave of jiarents or children, ob- 
 served nothing on the way of two miles long, except the 
 already mentioned tailor's son, in whose pocket he had 
 tucked the soot-sketched kings for his beloved ? But so 
 it is in childhood and boyhood, — tliey retain the little, — 
 they forget the great, and they know no reason for either. 
 The child, that is everywhere, and above everything 
 wishing for the open air, retains less the departure than 
 the arrival; for the child severs ten times more easily 
 long-accustomed relations, than transient ones ; and first 
 in manhood, exactly the contrary disposition appears. 
 For children there is no leave-taking, for they acknowl- 
 edge no past, only the present, that to them is full of the 
 future. 
 
 Schwarzenbach-on-the-Saale * contained indeed much, 
 — a parish and a chaplain, — a rector and a chanter, — 
 
 * Scliwarzenbach-sur-la-Saale is a town of about sixteen hundred 
 inhabitants, six miles from Hof. Paul tells us its capabilities. It had, 
 besides, large quarries of marble. — Tr.
 
 72 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 a parsonage full of liltle apartments, and two large ones. 
 These were opposite the two great bridges, with the 
 thereto belonging* Saale, and immediately beside it a 
 school-house, that was as large, if not larger, than the 
 whole Joditz parsonage. Among the houses there was 
 a council-house, not to reckon the tall, empty castle ! 
 
 At the same time with the father, a new rector en- 
 tered upon his duties. Werner, from Merseburg; a 
 handsome man, with a high brow and nose ; — full of 
 fire and feeling, — with overpowering natural eloquence, 
 — as full of questions and comparisons and speeches as 
 father Abraham, but without any depth either in conver- 
 sation or in other sciences. Meanwhile he helped his 
 poverty on this reverse side by a head full of liberty- 
 speeches and zeal. His tongue was the lever to childish 
 minds. His principle was, to let us learn in the grammar 
 only the most necessary forms of language, by which he 
 understood the declensions and conjugations, and then 
 skip at once to the reading of an author. Paul must 
 immediately make the leap, high over Langen's Gollo- 
 quia, into Cornelius, — and he went. The school-room, 
 or rather the school-ark, contained alphabetiers, latin- 
 ers, great and little maidens (who, like a scaffolding of 
 steps in a greenhouse or an old Roman theatre, led 
 from the ground to the ceiling), rector, and chanter, 
 and all the crying, humming, reading, and whipping. 
 The Latin pupils formed a school within a school. Very 
 soon the Greek grammar with the declensions and the 
 necessary verbs was begun, and without further delay 
 with the grammar we were passed on to translating the 
 New Testament. Werner, who often in the excitement 
 of speaking |)raised himself so much, tliat lie was aston- 
 ished at his own greatness, looked upon his faulty method
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPUY. 73 
 
 of teaching as wholly origintil, although it was that of 
 Basedow ; and Paul's fljnng progress was to him a new 
 proof of its excellence. About a year afterwards, some 
 few declensions and verbs fi-om Danzen's Hebrew gram- 
 mar, written in Latin, were put together so as to form a 
 bridge of boats to the first book of Moses, the beginning 
 of which, the threshold of exegesis to young Hebricians, 
 was not allowed to be i-ead by the uncultivated Jews. 
 
 I shall immediately proceed chronologically with the 
 life of my hero, as soon as I have thrown an eye cursorily 
 over the present time, that you may see how much he 
 had at once to do and to know. 
 
 The Greek and Hebrew Testaments he must translate 
 verbally into the Latin, like a Vulgate-maker. While 
 Paul was translating (he was the only Hebrew scholar in 
 the school), the rector had a printed translation at his 
 elbow. The present romance writer loved the Hebrew 
 grammar and analyzing trumpery and trifles, especially 
 as it was a secret feature of his predilection for domestic 
 life ; he collected from all the Schwarzenbach corners all 
 the Hebrew grammars he could find, so that he might 
 possess upon critical })oints, vowels, accents, and the like, 
 all tliat had been brought upon the table, at the analyzing 
 of any particular word. For this purpose he stitched to- 
 gether a quarto book, and began at tlie first word, of the 
 first verse, in the first book of IVIoses, and gave upon that 
 first word, upon its six letters and vowels, its Dagesh and 
 Sheva such rich instruction, so many pages from all the 
 most learned grammarians, that this very first word 
 anfangs, " In the Beginning" (as he would have gone on, 
 from chapter to chapter,) would have made an end of 
 him, if he had not proceeded to the second. "What is 
 said of Quintus jFi^Iein's self-impelled hunting in the 
 4
 
 74 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 Hebrew folio Bible after great and small and reversed let- 
 ters, described in the " first letter-box," may be compared 
 exactly with the circumstance in Paul's own life.* .... 
 
 Immediately after the arrival in Schwarzenbach (I yet 
 go on cursorily), he received instruction upon the piano 
 from chanter Gressel, and here also, after some dancing 
 pieces, he learned only the common choral accords, and 
 general bass. I wish God would give the poor boy only 
 once a thorough teacher, little prospect as there is at 
 present of it. Soon, in this absence of all instruction, he 
 began to play all the pieces that could be collected in the 
 place, and to improvise (phmitasieren) upon the piano. 
 He learnt the grammar of music, and general bass, 
 through perpetual improvising and note-playing, as we 
 learn German through speaking. 
 
 At the same time he began to read the belle-lettre 
 literature of Germany. But in Schwarzenbach there 
 was only the romantic to be found, and of this, the worst 
 romances from the first half of tlie last century ; but of 
 these materials he formed a little Babylonian Tower, al- 
 though he could only draw out one at a time for reading. 
 Among all the histories upon the book-shelves, none (for 
 Schiller's Armenian at that time only exercised half its 
 power over him) poured such oil of joy and oil of nectar 
 through all the veins of his being, till it amounted to 
 physical ecstasy, as the reading of old Robinson Crusoe. 
 He knows yet the hour and place (it was evening and at 
 the window opposite the bridge) when this delight oc- 
 curred. A second romance, " Veil Rosenstoch von Otto" 
 (the father read and forbade it,) repeated only half of the 
 former excitement; but only as a plagiary and book-thief 
 
 * There is an admirable translation of this work of Jean Paul by 
 Carlyle, which has been reprinterl in this cc mtry. — Tr.
 
 AUTOBIOGKAI'IIY. 75 
 
 could lie enjoy it, wliilc the father was absent from his 
 stu(l3^ Once he read it while his father was giving a 
 week-day's sermon, lying upon his breast in an empty 
 loft. I envy little tlie present childi-en, from whom the 
 first impression of the child's, and the child-like Robinson 
 is withdrawn in favor of the improved versions by later 
 workmen, who change the quiet, solitary island into an 
 audience hall, or into a valley for woodcocks, and send 
 the shipwrecked Robinson round, with a book in his hand 
 and a dictatis in his mouth, to turn every corner of the 
 island into a corner school, although the poor, solitary 
 man has employment enough to provide the absolute 
 necessaries of life. 
 
 About the same time, or shortly after, the young chap- 
 lain, Volkel, prayed the father to let the youth come to 
 him two hours after dinner daily, that he might leach 
 him geography and philosophy. What excited him, who 
 had no particular talent for education, to think my village 
 helplessness so worthy assistance as to sacrifice to it his 
 hour of rest, is incomprehensible to me. In philosophy, 
 he read, or rather I read to him " The Philosophy of 
 Gottsched" which, with all its dryness and emptiness, 
 refreshed me like fresh water, by its novelty. After- 
 wards he pointed out upon a map, I believe of Germany, 
 many cities and boundaries. What I saw upon tlie map 
 1 know not, and have sought in vain for it to-day in my 
 memory. I trust I shall prove, that among all living 
 authors (which sounds indeed very strong) I, perhaps, 
 understand the least of the maps of countries. An atlas 
 of maps, if I endeavor to carry them in my head, be- 
 comes, instead of a mythological heaven, a hell to me. 
 If any description of city or country remains in my head, 
 it is tlie little T liave acquired in geographical courses, of
 
 76 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 which part is the statistics of the post-wagon, part what 
 the post-jockey has cursorily told me in good gymnastic 
 German. 
 
 But I thank the good chaplain so much more for his 
 guidance to a German style, which consisted in nothing 
 but an introduction to the so-called theology. He gave 
 me, namely, the task of carrying out the evidence of a 
 God or Providence without the assistance of the Bible. 
 For this purpose, I received an octavo leaf upon which 
 the propositions were barely hinted, and the proofs and 
 indications from Nosselt and Jerusalem in the same 
 rnanner. These cii)hei'ed indications were explained to 
 me, and from this leaf, like Goethe's botany,* my leaves 
 wei*e developed. I began every essay with warmth, and 
 the glow continued, for I always came finally to the end 
 of the world and of life, to the joys of heaven, and to all 
 that exuberance in which the young vine, in the warmth 
 of its spring, gushes out, although in harvest only it shows 
 its spiritual power. To whom belongs the praise and the 
 merit, that these writing hours were not hours of toil, but 
 of joy and liberty, save to him who gave the flower and 
 fruit-bearing theme ? For one might think and maintain, 
 that the filling up of these ex< iting propositions may be 
 too difficult ; but only on account of the custom of school 
 teachers to give such diffuse and undefined themes, so 
 uncongenial to the heart of youth, or extending so far be- 
 yond the limits of their circle of ideas, such as in the note,! 
 
 * See that exquisite poem of Goethe's, tlie Metamorphosis of Plants, 
 where he expresses his idea that all parts of the plant are only a modi- 
 fication of the leaf, and are evolved in succession till the circle is 
 complete, and a new leaf springs again from the ripened germ. Mr. 
 J. S. Dwight has given an accurate and very poetical translation of 
 this poem. 
 
 t From such common, cohl, empty, all and nothing-demanding
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 77 
 
 of wliicli T could mention a thousand, — so that I earnestly 
 wish a man, who understands-youth t\'ell, would set him- 
 self to write (notwithstanding the good thoughts and in- 
 vestigations that he may have formerly delivered) for the 
 present nothing, but, after the measure of innumerable 
 dissertations upon the Sunday's text, a volume of prize 
 questions for teachers, that they might among them choose 
 themes for their pupils. 
 
 Yet better than all subjects for themes are perhaps 
 none. The youth will choose for himself, as he would a 
 beloved mistress, the matter of which he is full, and with 
 it alone he can create that which is vital. Leave the 
 young mind in freedom with its time and its themes, as 
 older Avriters require, and he will speak out, undisturbed 
 by your touch ; otherwise he is like a bell tliat rests 
 upon 'the ground ; it can emit no sound until it hangs 
 untouched in the free air. 
 
 But thus are men through all offices, up to the high- 
 est. They find higher renown in forming fi'om free 
 spirits merely servile machines, and proving thereby 
 their creative mastery and business powers. They be- 
 lieve they shall prove in this manner, that they can make 
 of a spirit a higher machine, and from this produce an 
 intermediate, and upon this intermediate another may 
 appear to be hooked, so that at last a mother marionette 
 appears, who leads a mai-ionette daughter, who on her 
 
 themes as " the praise of industry," " the importance of youth," 
 &c., could scarcely the ripest and richest mind draw anything 
 lively or original. Other themes, such as "comparison of heroes 
 and poets," weighing of " forms of government," &c., are ostrich 
 eggs, upon which the poor pupil sits and broods with his too short 
 wings, and makes nothing warm but himself. Between both, histori- 
 cal themes are the best, such as the description of a fire, a plague, a 
 flood, and proofs that they are not common, &c., &c.
 
 78 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 Bide is able to raise a little dog on liigli. All accom- 
 plished by one ho(^ing-together of the same machine- 
 master. God, the purely free, educates only the free ; 
 the Devil, purely servile, educates only his like. 
 
 My weekly exercises I would not exchange for any 
 modem ones. These may do much to educate the 
 world; but the old way was best for me, as it ex- 
 panded the limits of my philosophical impulse, and suf- 
 fered it to outrun itself, — an impulse tliat found its way 
 out from my own head into a small octavo book, in which 
 I sought logically to establish the pliilosophy of seeing 
 and hearing. I related some of it to my father, wlio 
 blamed and misunderstood me, as little as I did myself. 
 Can we too often say to the teachers of youth — very 
 often indeed have I already said it — that all hearing 
 and reading does not half as much strengthen or delight 
 the mind as writuig and speaking. 
 
 Do not life-long translators of the most spiritual and 
 sententious authors (such as Ebert of Young) write their 
 prefaces, notes, and poems wtli their original wateriness ? 
 And yet some improvement might be expected to result 
 from the repeated readings of a work, by wliich its deli- 
 cacy and peculiarities are better understood ; and every 
 translator of a gonial work understands and enjoys it bet- 
 ter than a mere reader. Reading may be called gather- 
 ing into the school-money chest, or poor's purse ; writing 
 is to found a mint ; and the die that stamps a dollar 
 makes richer than the jingle of the poor's purse.* In 
 England, language is formed by the court and by people 
 of the world, and is rarely helped by reading. 
 
 * Kllngelbeulel, a purse or bag with a long handle and bell attached 
 to it, used iu the church to collect alms during divine service, or the 
 mass.
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 79 
 
 These hours at the chaplain's were to end with chess- 
 playing. That is to say, sometimes the chaplain proposed 
 to unite a lesson in geography with one in chess ; but in 
 this, as in everything else, I remained only a beginner ; 
 for although I went at the appointed hour, notwithstand- 
 ing the headache, as a game of chess was promised me, 
 it was forgotten by the chaplain, and I never went again. 
 One circumstance I can hardly understand, that my fa- 
 ther never by a single word induced me to stay away, 
 but suffered it in silence. I was a fool to run away from 
 the chaplain, while I still continued to love him. Indeed, 
 I joj'fuUy remained the little foot-post messenger between 
 him and my father ; and looked at him with love-glances 
 and pulses of joy after every child's baptism (the baptism- 
 bell rung a joy -mass in my ears), when he came in to see 
 my father, while I read or worked not far from the table 
 where they gossiped away the half or the whole evening ; 
 but I had, as I have said, the chess-board in my head and 
 remained at a distance. 
 
 Heavens ! how can men gather into the best honey- 
 cells of mine and of so many poetic and female natures 
 such summer honey, or honey-vinegar of love and jeal- 
 ousy, such a contradictory mixture, by which too often 
 the fairest days, yes, perhaps the tenderest hearts, are 
 poisoned and fretted with wounds ? Truly the warmest 
 hearts have often only half a grain of brain or under- 
 standing : — I knew of nothing but the warmest love ; and 
 so the sweet soon settled down to acid lees and sediment. 
 
 A 
 
 MY FIRST KISS. 
 
 S earlier in life, on the opposite church bench, so I 
 could but fall in love with Catharine Barin, as she
 
 80 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 sat always above me on the school bench, with her pretty, 
 round, red, small-pox-marked face, — her lightning eyes, 
 — the pretty hastiness with which she spoke and ran. In 
 the school carnival, that took in the whole forenoon suc- 
 ceeding fast nights, and consisted in dancing and playing, 
 I had the joy to perform the irregular hop dance, that 
 preceded the regular with her. In the play, " Hoio does 
 your neighbor please you?" where, upon an affirmative 
 answer, they are ordered to kiss, and upon a contrary, 
 there is a calling out, and in the midst of accoUades all 
 change places, I ran always near her. The blows were 
 like gold-beaters' by which the pure gold of my love was 
 beaten out, and a continual change of places, as she al- 
 ways forbid me the court, and I always called her to the 
 court, was managed. 
 
 All these malicious occurrences (desertiones malitioscB) 
 could not deprive me of the blessedness of meeting her 
 daily, when with her snow-white apron and her snow- 
 white cap she ran over the long bridge opposite the par- 
 sonage window, out of which I was looking. To catch 
 her, not to say, but to give her something sweet, a mouth- 
 ful of fruit, to run quickly through the parsonage court 
 down the little steps, and arrest her in her flight, my 
 conscience would never permit ; but I enjoyed enough to 
 see her from the window upon the bridge, — and I think 
 it was near enough for me to stand, as I usually did, with 
 my heart behind a long seeing and hearing tmmpet. Dis- 
 tance injures true love less than nearness. Could I upon 
 the planet Venus discover the Goddess Venus, while in 
 the distance its charms were so enchanting, I should have 
 warmly loved it, and without hesitation chosen to revere 
 it as my morning and evening star. 
 
 In the mean time I have the satisfaction to draw all
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 8l 
 
 those, who expect in Schwarzenbach a repetition of the 
 Joditz love, from their error, and inform them that it 
 came to something. On a winter evening, wlien mj 
 Princess's collection of sweet gifts was prepared, and 
 needed only a receiver, the Pastor's son, who, among all 
 my school companions was the worst, persuaded me, when 
 a visit from the chaplain occupied my father, to leave 
 the parsonage while it was dark, to pass the bridge and 
 venture, which I had never done, into the house where 
 the beloved dwelt with her poor grandmother up in a 
 little comer chamber. We entered a little alehouse un- 
 derneath. Whether Catharine happened to be there, or 
 whether the rascal, under the pretence of a message, al- 
 lured her down upon the middle of the steps, or, in short, 
 how it happened that I found her there, has become only 
 a di'eamy recollection ; for the sudden lightning of tho 
 present darkened all that went behind. As violently as 
 if I had been a robber, I first pressed upon her my pres- 
 ent of sweetmeats, and then I, who in Joditz never could 
 reach the heaven of a first kiss, and never even dai'ed to 
 touch the beloved hand, I, for the first time, held a be- 
 loved being upon my heart and lips. I have nothing fur- 
 ther to say, but that it was the one pearl of a minute, that 
 was never repeated ; a whole longing past and a dream- 
 ing future were united in one moment, and in the dark- 
 ness behind my closed eyes tlie fireworks of a whole life 
 were evolved in a glance. Ah, I have never forgotten it, 
 — the ineffaceable moment ! 
 
 I returned like a clairvoyant from heaven again to 
 earth, and remarked only that in this second Cliristmas 
 festival Ruprecht * did not precede, but followed it, for 
 
 * Ruprecht may be called the Father Nicholas, who comes on 
 Christmas eve, and plays all sorts of tricks. 
 
 4* S-
 
 82 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 on my way home I met a messenger coming for me, and 
 was severely scolded for running away. Usually after 
 such warm silver beams of a blessed sun, there falls a 
 closing, stormy gust. What was its effect on me ? The 
 stream of words could not drain my paradise, — for does it 
 not bloom even to-day around and forth from my pen ? 
 
 It was, as I have said, the first kiss, and, as I believe, 
 will be the last ; for I shall not, probably, although she 
 lives yet, journey to Schwarzenbach to give a second. 
 As usual, during my whole Schwarzenbach life, I was 
 perfectly contented with my telegraphic love, which yet 
 sustained and kept itself alive without any answering 
 telegram. But truly, no one could blame her less than I, 
 that she was silent at that time, or that she continues so 
 now, after the death of her husband ; for later, in stranger 
 loves and hearts, I have always been slow to speak. It 
 did not help me, that I stood with ready face and attrac- 
 tive outward appearance ; all corporeal charms must be 
 placed over the foil of the spiritual, before they can sufii- 
 ciently shine and kindle and dazzle. But this was the 
 cause of failure in my innocent love-time, that without 
 any intercourse with the beloved, without conversation 
 or introduction, I displayed my whole love bursting from 
 the dry exterior, and stood before her like the Judas-tree, 
 in full blossom, but without branch or leaf. 
 
 A 
 
 JOKE WITH THE RECTOR. 
 
 S the Joking companions* knew that the rector read 
 the newspapers in his school, and that in liis school- 
 
 * " Schrauhgenossenschaft " may be translated mystifi/iny society, 
 that consisted of the acquaintance of the rector, who permitted 
 among each other such practical jokes as the one related. — Tr.
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 83 
 
 room sennons he made use of every passing occurrence, 
 they sent him, from the Erlangen commercial newspaper, 
 an old sheet of the seventieth year, describing, in the most 
 terrible manner, the frightful famine that prevailed in 
 Italy, especially in Naples. The date of the newspaper 
 was concealed with some well-stamped ink spots. The 
 school-boys listened attentively in their places as the rec- 
 tor, kindled by the veracious sheet, could scarcely wait 
 for the retreat of the chanter, to break out into explana- 
 tions ; and as with glowing colors (the Erlangen news- 
 paper-writer had used only water-colors) he brought so 
 near before the Schwarzenbach school-boys the hungry 
 beggars, the shrieks, the fainting and sobbing in the 
 streets of Naples, it is doubtful which was hottest, their 
 tears or their hunger, as they went home. And, in fact, 
 in such cases of description, men scarcely believe that 
 there is anything more to eat upon the earth. 
 
 Every one may imagine througli what triumphal arch, 
 or upon what bed of honor, in the evening, the good 
 herald of hunger was conducted by the jest-shooting 
 society, for his exciting and stirring news, — as the said 
 shooting society saw and questioned the school children : 
 — but I cannot inform you, as it was dark and late when 
 I first learnt the contradiction of the newspaper story. 
 Old, well-meaning rector, be not unduly ashamed or 
 angry, that birds of jest or of prey descend upon thy dove 
 chancel, — the sacred dove has already with warm out- 
 spread wings hovered and brooded upon our hearts ; and 
 it is the same thing for a heart already warmed, whether 
 it be for an old or a near famine, that it trembles with 
 the pulses of compassion.
 
 84 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 THE LORD'S SUPPER. 
 
 THE Lord's Supper, as it is observed in the country, 
 or among true Christians, is not merely a Christian 
 moral toga virilis ; not, as in cities, is it assuming less the 
 garment of nuns than of virgins ; but it is the first and 
 highest spiritual action, it is becoming a citizen of the 
 holy city of God. Now fii'st is the earlier water-baptism 
 a true baptism of fire, and that first sacrament becomes 
 through the second full of life and meaning. Being the 
 children of a clergyman, and frequently eye and ear 
 witnesses of the preparation of others for this sabbath of 
 the heart, we approached it ourselves with the greater 
 reverence. It arose yet higher in me through the 
 delay of a year, as my father thought the legal age of 
 twelve years was not completely attained until the 21st 
 of March. 
 
 As the rector held glowingly before our souls the pecu- 
 liar conditions of this religious act, — that the impenitent, 
 partaking of the holy supper, like a perjured soul, instead 
 of enjoying lieaven was swallowing hell, and that if a 
 Redeemer and Holy One drew near to an imjjure sinner, 
 the power of his presence to bless would be changed to 
 poison, — streams of hot tears, which he himself helped to 
 swell, were the least that his heart-eloquent address pro- 
 duced from me and others. Glowing repentance for our 
 former lives, and warm resolutions of a blameless future, 
 filled the breast and wrought strongly in it when he 
 closed. How often I went, before the Sunday evening 
 of confession, into the garret and kneeled that I might 
 repent and confess ! And how sweet was it on the day of 
 confession, to pray all the people that we loved, parents
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 85 
 
 and teachers, with stammering tongue and overflowing 
 heart, to forgive all our faults, and thereby to purify 
 equally themselves and us. 
 
 But, after the evening of confession there came a gen- 
 tler, lighter, purer heaven of peace into the soul ; an in- 
 expressible and never again to be repeated bliss, namely, 
 that of feeling one's self wholly pure and free from all sin, 
 and a cheerful, far-extending peace established both with 
 God and man. And yet I looked from these evening 
 hours of mild, warm peace of soul with ecstasy to the 
 morning hours of excitement around the altar. 
 
 Blessed time, when men have thrown off the foul past 
 and stand, pure and white, free and fresh in the present, 
 and enter so courageously upon the future ! 
 
 Who would not become again a child ? For in the 
 happy time of cliildhood the full peace of the soul is so 
 easy to win, as the circle of sacrifices it demands is so 
 much less, and the sacrifices more trifling. The weighty, 
 intricate, and extended relations of older men, through 
 breaks and delays, leave the heavenly rainbow of peace 
 imperfect ; and not as in the spring time of life, when it 
 bends into a completed arch. In the twelfth year, but 
 not in age, enthusiasm can create one wholly pure. 
 
 The youth, like the virgin, finds, through all his warm 
 impulses, less in their circle to conquer, and may gain the 
 highest purity of manners by a nearer and easier path, 
 than the man and the woman by then' cold and selfish 
 exertions through cares and plagues and toils. The pure 
 and upright man is always once, in the earliest time, a 
 diamond of the first water, transparent and colorless ; 
 then is he one of the second water, and many and various 
 colors play in its beams, imtil finally he becomes as dark 
 as the stone which grinds the colors.
 
 86 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 Sunday moruing the boys and girls, already adorned 
 for the altar, collected in the court of the parsonage to 
 form the festival jarocession to the church, amid the sound 
 of ringing bells and hymns sung by tliemselves. All 
 these festive appearances, the wreaths of flowers, and the 
 dark, perfumed birches that ornamented the house and 
 the temple, completed the powerful emotion in those 
 young souls, whose wings were already stretched on high. 
 During the long sermon the fire kindled and increased in 
 the heart, and the only contest was against thoughts that 
 were too worldly, or not holy enough for the occasion. 
 
 As I at last received the sacrament bread from my 
 father, and the cup from the now entirely beloved 
 teacher, the festival of my heart increased, not through 
 the thought of what they were to me, — but my heart 
 and soul and warmth were for heaven. It was the bliss 
 of receiving the Most Holy, that would unite itself with 
 and purify my whole being, and the bliss arose even to 
 the physical sense of an electrical touch at the miracle of 
 the union. 
 
 I left the altar with the purity and the infinity of 
 heaven in my heart. But this heaven manifested itself 
 in me through an unlimited, gentle love, which no fault 
 could impair, which I felt for every human being. The 
 recollection of the happiness I felt, as I looked upon all 
 the church-goers with love and took them all into my 
 heart, have I preserved till this hour, living and fresh in 
 my memory. The female partakers with me at the holy 
 table were to me, with their bridal crowns, like the brides 
 of Chi'ist, not only beloved, but holy, and I enclosed them 
 all in a love so pure and wide, that Catharine, as I recol- 
 lect, was not at that moment dearer to me than all 
 the others.
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 87 
 
 The wliole earth remained, through the whole day, an 
 open unlimited festival of love, and the whole woof and 
 web of life seemed to move before me like a softly gentle 
 -Siolian or wind harp, through which the breath of love 
 was breathed. If misanthropy can find an artificial 
 satisfaction in an antipathy limited by no exceptions, 
 of what inexpressibly sweet satisfaction is a universally 
 loving heart susceptible, in that beautiful period of life, 
 when, unfettered by circumstances and uninjured by age, 
 although the field of vision is narrower and the arm 
 shorter, the glow is so much deeper ! And shall we not 
 give ourselves the joy of dreaming our dream of that 
 overflowing heaven which must at last be ours, when in 
 the higher and warmer focus of a second world of youth, 
 loving with higher powers, embracing a larger spiritual 
 kingdom, the heart from life to life will open wider to 
 receive the All ? 
 
 In susceptible and impulsive men, everything remains 
 more easily at the top than the purest and best qualities, 
 as in quicksilver all metals remain on the surface except 
 gold, wliich sinks to the bottom. Life will allow of no 
 ])ure white, as Goethe says of the sun. After a few days 
 this precious consciousness of a state of innocence stole 
 away, and I believed that I had sinned, because I threw 
 a stone and wrestled with one of my school companions, 
 and in neither case from enmity, but from a blameless 
 love of play. 
 
 Every festival is followed by a Avorking day ; but we 
 go from the one fresh-clad to the other, and the past leads 
 us again to new ones. These spring festivals of the heart 
 became, later, in the years of youth, only calm, cheerful 
 sabbaths, when for the first time the ' ancient great stoical 
 spirits, from Plutarch and Epictetus and Antoninus, ap-
 
 88 
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 peared before me, and took from me all the pains of 
 earth, and purified my heart from all anger. From 
 these sabbaths I hoped, perhaps, to have brought to- 
 gether a whole sabbath year, or to have borne on with 
 me what belonged to them.* 
 
 * The Autobiography here abruptly terminates.
 
 PART II. 
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 Remarks xjpon the Autobiography. — Removal to Schwaezen- 
 BACH. — Self-Education. — Loss of Childish Faith. 
 
 PECULIAR characteristic of Jean Paul was 
 the transparent light in which his childhood 
 and boyhood were reflected in memory, even 
 to his latest age. The peculiarities of his 
 birthplace had less influence upon his character and writ- 
 ings than the remembrance of them, which in after life he 
 wove into a wide romantic picture. He left Wunsiedel 
 before the time when spiritual consciousness is usually 
 unfolded ; but his fancy created later, from remembrance, 
 pictures that he refused to disturb through the reality, 
 and tlierefore he never again would visit his birthplace. 
 
 The beginning of his self-biograpliy furnishes the means 
 for understanding how in this he is distinguished from so 
 many other geniuses ; and before we proceed in liis Life, 
 we would recall those peculiarities which caused him to be 
 regarded by the Germans as " Jean Paul der Einzige" * 
 
 * The only one. Unprecedented.
 
 90 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 He is in this remarkably distinguished from Goethe, to 
 whom the memory of his childhood presented only out- 
 ward circumstances. In his " Dichtung und Wahrheit " 
 Goethe recalls only the outward events of his boyish 
 years ; the workings of the spirit were forgotten, or had 
 never been observed. Jean Paul, on the contrary, traced 
 to his boyhood all his poetic feelings, and those acquaint- 
 ed with his works will find, that in his first novels they 
 have only repetitions of his early life under the humble 
 roof of his parents. He goes back even further, and 
 poor as he was, Providence gave him a rich source of 
 poetic enjojTiient in the time of his birth. He came into 
 the world on the twenty-first of March. He was born 
 with the Spring. He was the child of this white-robed 
 season ; and aU who are familiar with his works will 
 remember that they are an apotheosis of this deliglitful 
 season, and that he remained the poet of the Spring, 
 the chosen priest in her temple, to his latest age. 
 
 But this circumstance not merely excited and nour- 
 ished his poetic fancy ; many of his aphorisms, whether 
 uttered in jest or earnest, show that he really believed in 
 the physical influence that such a circumstance as the 
 equal division of day and night, and other equinoctial 
 phenomena would have upon his birtli. It led him to 
 observe all astronomical and meteorological signs and 
 prognostics that could have any influence on the com- 
 ing seasons. Sun, moon, and stars, and all the appear- 
 ances in nature, touched him nearly, and were all dear to 
 him. The ever-changing clouds upon the Fichtelgebirgo 
 were not watched merely with the eye of a poet or paint- 
 er ; he was the listener and interpreter of Nature in all 
 her relations with man, and his acute and deep observa- 
 tion and knowledge are expressed in many humorous and 
 many serious aphorisms.
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. . 91 
 
 Another circumstance of his infancy, as he says, breathed 
 an ever-increasing breath of poetry through his hfe. It 
 ■was the dying blessing of his ohl grandfather. The by- 
 standers said, " Let the old Jacob lay his hand upon the 
 child, and bless him," and he was placed in the bed be- 
 side the dying man. The wondering and innocent babe 
 remembered the cold, blessing hand, and in after life the 
 man recalled it, " when Destiny led him from dark into 
 brighter hours." 
 
 An incident also in his fourteenth month resembles the 
 pale blossom of the snow-drop out of the dark wintry 
 eai'th. A poor pupil of the school carried him in his 
 arms, and gave him milk to drink, and cherished in him 
 the fondest affection. This poor pupil remained ever 
 afterwards a type of one of the characters in his novels. 
 
 Of not less consequence was the memory of his poor 
 and pious grandfather, and the bench where he kneeled 
 to pray, and the poor apartment, still known in Neustadt, 
 where he contended with sharp poverty, and where the 
 harvest of the day and the spiritual seed that were to be 
 sown on the morrow were carefully collected. 
 
 The elevated spiritual position of the father, who, in 
 the consciousness of his own worth, bowed down with 
 servile reverence before no one, had a still more signifi- 
 cant poetical influence upon the son. The passionate 
 love of music, that consoled the father under poverty and 
 solitude, and filled him with a holy religious peace, ex- 
 cited also the imagination of the son. But I will men- 
 tion only one of the peculiarities of the father. 
 
 " He came," says the son, " on Christmas morning into 
 our light and festive apartment from his own, as it were 
 with a mourning veil. No one had courage to question 
 him ; our mother even was silent over this annual mourn-
 
 92 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 ing. But he entered into all the joys of the children, and 
 distributed the Christkind gifts with more delight than 
 any one, — with tears of joy for us, but with sorrow over 
 the life which most of the sons and daughters of men had 
 to endure." This inward mourning of the father is re- 
 peated every year by the son, and holds a prominent 
 place in his romances, although concealed by outward 
 joyfulness and activity. It was, in both, the melancholy 
 comparison of the autumn of reality with the childlike 
 spring and bloom of the ideal. 
 
 The solitude in which Jean Paul was educated, de- 
 prived of the village school, and cut off from so many 
 childish joys, was the fountain of that deep, continued, 
 unappeased longing for fellowship, that runs through his 
 life and all his works ; the reason that he embraced every 
 man Avith equal love, for every man seemed to him worthy 
 of equal love, and no deception in his boyish yeai'S had 
 laid the foundation for tlie conflicting emotions of love 
 and hatred. His exclusion from the village school and 
 the society of his equals was his severest boyish afflic- 
 tion ; therefore this village school remained through his 
 whole life in the rose-light of memory. The thin, con- 
 sumptive schoolmaster, whom he helped to hang out the 
 cage to take the rising goldfinch, and spread the net over 
 the cherry-trees, has held his place, with the halo of 
 memory around his pale forehead, in all his works. 
 
 His domestic education had the same influence upon 
 his predisposition to domestic still life, to " spiritual nest- 
 making," as upon the direction of his genius. As a boy, 
 he considered the young swallows happy because they 
 could sit so secretly in their walled nests ; and he pre- 
 served the same taste to his old age. A few years be- 
 fore his death he said, " The good domestic simpleton can
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 93 
 
 sit completely contented in a coach, and, looking out of 
 the side windows at the villages and gardens, say, ' A 
 pretty, quiet, fire-pi'oof apartment.' " 
 
 The enlightened spirit of his father remained always 
 a rich legacy to the son, and his disinterested human 
 love fell as a mantle upon him. " AVlien I think," he 
 says, " that I never saw in my father a trace of selfish- 
 ness, I thank God ! He stripped off his own garments 
 to clothe the poor ; the bread for the bond peasants was 
 cut larger than he could afford ; and he sent the school- 
 master, spite of his own poverty, a part of everything he 
 had." When he went from the little village of Joditz 
 to Schwarzenbach, he was followed by the tears of the 
 whole jjai'ish, who had become for many years as his own 
 family. 
 
 Yet one other circumstance I would mention before 
 we follow the poet to Schwarzenbach ; what he calls his 
 " first love." A mere fancy, awakened by the blue-eyed 
 peasant girl, who led the cows to the meadows. He lived 
 long upon only one pressure of the hand ; but it served 
 to add the charm of memory to the sound of the cow- 
 bell, which, he says, was to him through Hfe, " the Jcuh- 
 reigen* from the high, distant Alps of childhood, and 
 like the sounds from the wind-harp that came from afar 
 off and melted into more lovely distances, till he wept 
 from pleasure and regret." 
 
 In January, 1776, Paul's father removed to a.d. 1776, 
 Schwarzenbach-on-the-Saale, to a larger and 
 more respectable parsonage, and a not less agreeable 
 parish. For some time, Paul's life was without shad- 
 ows. He says in his journal, " no season liad trouble 
 
 * The song of the cow-keeper.
 
 94- LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 for me ; I remember only the bright side of every- 
 thing." 
 
 Yet there was hanging on his youth's horizon a dark 
 cloud, which soon he was obliged to observe, for already 
 in Schwarzenbach the day began to darken. The im- 
 provement in his father's situation did not contintie long. 
 Paul allows us a glance into tlie domestic affairs of his 
 parents. He says, " My father had already incurred debts 
 in Joditz, which were afterwards increased in consequence 
 of the imagined, rather than the real, impi'ovement in his 
 fortune, and the time for cancelling them was always too 
 short." 
 
 Then came, to torment his old age, continued bodily 
 pain, and inseparable despondency of mind. This de- 
 spondency spread over the whole family, and Paul him- 
 self did not escape. Although with the same filial piety 
 he touches lightly on the faults of his parents, he yet ex- 
 presses the painful apprehension that he shall at last be 
 obliged to love his father less ; and, on this account, he 
 somewhere exhorts parents always to preserve the esteem 
 of their children, that they may never lose their affection. 
 
 In his journal he says, " Our father now sat alone in 
 his study, and could thmk only of himself, or he rode 
 alone to the neighboring parislies ; all our joyful pedes- 
 trian journeys to visit his brother pastors were over ; we 
 were without teachers and without spiritual food." 
 
 Paul was now permitted to attend the common school ; 
 and while the poetic charm attached to the friendship of 
 numbers was thus destroyed, that heartfelt thirst for one 
 with whom he could sympathize awoke, that followed 
 him through life. " In the school," he says, " there was 
 not one industrious, or noble, or talented," Wolfmann 
 " was the only boy with whom I could associate, and he
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 95 
 
 was clistingijished only for beautiful penmanship." From 
 him Paul learned that exquisite handwriting, like print, 
 in which he wi'ote his immense extract and manuscript 
 books, that gave him the sobnquet of the Dr. Faustus of 
 the Parish. 
 
 The want of that highest hap|)iness of a sensitive 
 youth, the sympathy of a friend, which thrust all expan- 
 sion of feeling back upon his own heart, was of deep 
 significance to the unfolding of his genius. In each of 
 his elevated characters, — Victor, Albano, Gustavus, — 
 he paints the longing for friendship, in colors as true as he 
 afterwards describes the thirst for love ; he is the poet 
 of the one sentiment, as he is the high-priest of the other. 
 
 From this time Paul dates the loss of many childish 
 feelings, and also of his faith in that, the most beautiful 
 illusion to German childi-en, the real and actual Christ- 
 kind gift at Christmas. Pie regrets also the decay of that 
 religious enthusiasm that opened to him the gate of 
 heaven at his first communion, and laments that, after 
 his thirteenth bii'thday, he became too indifferent to the 
 return of such seasons. 
 
 But from tliis time he also dates the beginning of his 
 self-instruction. He began to understand the inefficiency 
 of Ills old master, Werner, and took his education into his 
 own hands. It is a fatal period for the influence of the 
 master, when the boy discovers that he can be no longer 
 his guide to the temple of Science ; and Werner lost his 
 influence from the moment Paul discovered that he used 
 a Gei'man printed translation, when hearing his lessons 
 from the Hebrew Bible. 
 
 The chaplain V'olkel,* whose instructions have already 
 
 * The reader will recollect Volkcl was the friend who proposed 
 teaching Paul chess and philosopliy.
 
 96 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 been mentioned in liis self-biography, and whom Paul 
 loved, notwithstanding his angry and splenetic temper, 
 introduced him to the study of philosophy, and led him 
 to the belief that, even witliout the Bible, a God and a 
 Providence could be proved. 
 
 Another young man, Vogel, a friend of Volkel, had 
 perhaps more influence upon the formation of his charac- 
 ter than any other person, for he encouraged him in being 
 his own self-teacher, and the industrious pupil of his own 
 exertions. Both wondered at the boy, and admired, not 
 only his unlimited zeal for knowledge and science, but 
 acknowledged his extraordinaiy talent and the ripeness 
 of his mind. By admitting him to an equality of intel- 
 lectual rank with persons so much his seniors in years, 
 they strengthened his belief in his own powers. In 
 youth, great humility is almost invariably the attendant 
 of superior genius. The future prophet knows not that 
 his face is radiant as that of Moses when he descended 
 from the mount, until it is reflected from another. It is 
 necessary to make a young mind believe in itself, before it 
 will trust to its own success. Paul was happy in the 
 encouraging esteem of these friends, and he wrote after- 
 wards to Vogel in these terms : " The praise that you 
 add, I will not contradict, nor mistrust, except that I may 
 hear it again. Be you my guide in the path to truth and 
 happiness. Lead the youth who is so willing to follow. 
 Your applause will be impulse enougli to make me indus- 
 trious, and your censure will spur me on to improvement. 
 I am much indebted to you ; yes, truly, I am much in- 
 debted to you. It is my good fortune to have known you. 
 Gratitude and love will never be extinguished in my 
 heart." 
 
 This friend possessed, and increased daily, an exten-
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 97 
 
 sive library, that was equally valuable for the number 
 and the importance of the books on many sciences. This 
 was a I'are thing in a country parish, and an extraordinary 
 happiness for Jean Paul, or rather a work of Providence 
 that, through these dead teachers, he should enjoy the 
 means of self-education. 
 
 His thirst for knowledge constrained him to read books 
 of every species, and of the most heterogeneous contents ; 
 hence the origin of that wonderful universality in knowl- 
 edge, as the Germans call it, which, indeed, all richly- 
 gifted minds seek, and of that power of illustration, which, 
 to the readers of Jean Paul, is a perpetual subject of 
 wonder and astonishment. 
 
 To the boy of fifteen years these books opened a mine 
 of knowledge and of new ideas ; he could not make them 
 all his own, and the books must be returned ; therefore he 
 adopted his plan of extract-books, that afterwards became 
 a rich libraiy by itself. Before his seventeenth year he 
 had made many thick volumes, each of more than three 
 liundred quarto pages. 
 
 In the beginning, his extracts were from philosophical 
 theology ; then from books of natural history, medicine, 
 ])oetry, jurisprudence. In his fifteenth year, one of his 
 extracts is entitled, " On the eternity of hell punish- 
 ments." * 
 
 We may form an idea of the penetrating judgment and 
 discrimination with which he read, from the following 
 extract of a letter, in his sixteenth year, to his friend 
 Vogel : — 
 
 "Adding so much benevolence to the old, makes it 
 
 * That Jean Paul was intended by his father for the study of 
 theology may account for his earlier extracts being upon subjects 
 of theology and contrnvprsial divinity.
 
 98 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 difficult to find words to express sufficient gratitude, and 
 yet more difficult to be bold enough to ask for more. 
 Shall I venture to ask for more books ? Your goodness 
 gives me courage, and I pray for the third part of Semler's 
 Investigatio7i of the Canon, Goethe s works, the second 
 part of Lavater's Journal, Helvetius, and Lessing'sFrag- 
 nieiits. I do not distrust your willingness to serve me, 
 when I humbly pray a second time for a book, from 
 which I promise myself the most valuable views. 
 
 " The following proposition appears to me at all times 
 safe : either this book contains truth or error, — if the 
 first, nothing should prevent me from reading it ; if the 
 last, it will not convince me if the errors are too obvious, 
 and then it cannot injure ; or it does convince. But in 
 the last circumstance, what danger have I to fear, if I 
 exchange a truth, of which I am not convinced from rea- 
 son, but which is merely an opinion with me, if I exchange 
 this, I say, for an error tliat enlightens me. Dare I once 
 more ask for it ? Yet I would rather want a hundred 
 books, than in the smallest degree make myself unworthy 
 of your benevolence and love." 
 
 The sophistry of the youth of sixteen, and the reluc- 
 tance of his friend Vogel to lend him " Lessing's Frag- 
 ments," will not permit us to pass over the change that 
 had taken place in the poet since the celebration of that 
 first communion, which in his autobiography he describes 
 with such elevation of religious entliusiasm. At this time 
 he had exchanged the tenderness of a devout heart for 
 " the most zealous heterodoxy." Such experiences as 
 these have often been observable in minds of the highest 
 order ; with the intense fervor with which the mysteries 
 of religion take hold of these young hearts, do they pur- 
 sue the painful doubts that afterwords arise, till they are
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 99 
 
 led back, tln'ough faith and love, to the clear atmosphere 
 of truth. 
 
 Jean Paul's Schwarzenbach life had at this time a 
 jiowerful influence upon the direction of his mind and 
 studies. He found no time and no object to satisfy the 
 wants of the heart, and no food for the imagination. 
 The little, round, red, pock-marked face of the little girl 
 could scarcely have filled his fancy, and all his efforts 
 were directed to tlie cultivation of the reason and intel- 
 lect. A perfect cultivation consists in the equal unfold- 
 ing of the affections, the imagination, and the reason ; but 
 he was entering that cold epoch of the understanding, 
 when his only desire was to heap up knowledge and the 
 warm lava-world of glowing feeling was for many years 
 built over with a heavy crust of earth. A powerful 
 genius will sooner or later recover the complete harmony 
 of its nature ; but that Kichter injured the faculty of 
 poetic creation by filling his mind with the sciences is 
 certain, from the wonderful self-deception with which he 
 expresses the doubt whether lie had not been created for 
 a philosopher rather than a poet. 
 
 AVe cannot follow our young Philosopher to another 
 residence without remarking the change in his disposition, 
 which appears in full contrast with the simple faith and 
 warm religious enthusiasm of his first communion. Four 
 years only had passed, and how far removed he is from 
 tlie orthodox " law preaching " of his father ! Volkel and 
 Vogel, who in Schwarzenbach were both his teachers, 
 must have gained a very remarkable influence over the 
 mind of the youth who made such giant footsteps in 
 knowledge and in spiritual unfolding. We learn from 
 the extracts made from the Library of Vogel, with 
 wliat theological studies his mind was busied. The war
 
 lOO LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 against the old dogmas of theology, which was spreading 
 from the universities over Germany, perhaps helped the 
 timid village boy to assert his spiritual independence.* 
 
 * A few of the subjects of the extracts from Vogel's Library are: — 
 " Hutcheson's Livestigation of onr Ideas of Beauty and Virtue." 
 " Connection of Natural Eeligion with the Christian Revelation." " Of 
 the Existence of the Devil." " Of the Lifluence of tlie Devil." " How 
 our Souls and our Bodies are linked to each other." " Of the Eternity 
 of Hell Punishments," etc.
 
 CHAPTER II, 
 
 HoF Gym>asium.- 
 
 -ScHooL Anecdotes. — Death of the Father. 
 — Domestic Troubles. 
 
 T Easter, in 1779, the father of our j^j, j^^g 
 Poet took an important step, and ^t- 16. 
 placed him at the Gymnasium, or town school, 
 in the little city of Hof. The examining rec- 
 tor would have placed him in the Jirst division of the 
 Primaner, or first class ; but his father, to protect him 
 from the ill-will of his companions, chose to have him 
 placed in the middle division of the first class.* It de- 
 pended on the talents and industry of the pupil to bring 
 his place to honor, and his companions were a silent jury, 
 who decided upon his merits. Paul was placed under 
 peculiar disadvantages ; for to preserve his rank he had 
 only two years to stay in the school, while the others 
 remained three years without exception. So great a dif- 
 ference brought Paul into a false position, and he soon 
 remarked that he stood alone among his companions. Pie 
 has left a humorous description of his ajtpearance when 
 he entered the school, and the ridicule it excited in the 
 city pupils. 
 
 * To understand many partioulur^ ihat cccui* in tWe Life, it will be 
 necessary to bear in mind that a gymnasium consists of eighty classes, 
 and that tlie Primanjr, o- first chzs' i^ instru-.tf^d by tlio rector.
 
 102 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 The stuff aiid the form of his clothes were of village 
 manufacture, probably woven by his grandfather, made 
 by his mother, and negligently put on. With a self-pos- 
 sessed inward look, which seemed wholly unconcerned at 
 outward circumstances ; yet with penetrating glance, and 
 true-hearted, unconstrained confidence, he met those who 
 gave him only ridicule in return. Two instances are 
 mentioned, which, although trifling in themselves, must 
 not be omitted, as they threw a pure light on the youth 
 of the poet. 
 
 There was one among the boys, that took a malicious 
 pleasure m tormenting him ; one, too, from whom Paul, 
 in his warm-hearted and genierous confidence, looked for 
 sympathy, as he had been a previous acquaintance, and 
 belonged to a family connected with his own. The 
 French master was an indifferent and poorly-paid in- 
 structor, who had been a tapestry-worker. He had but 
 one book, which he carried in his pocket ; and when he 
 laid this book upon the long table, at the head of wliich 
 he sat, only one, of twenty or thirty pupils, could look 
 over to translate a passage. The mischievous boy, al- 
 ready mentioned, told Paul that it was an established 
 custom for the pupil, when he first entered the French 
 school, to kiss the hand of the master. This seemed to 
 Paul but a suitable custom, and by no means extraordi- 
 nary, as in his own family it was an established expression 
 of reverence from the young to the old, and Paul, when- 
 ever he went to«his grandfather's, kissed his hand behind 
 his loom. When he entered the French school, there- 
 fore, he approached bashfully to the master, and, witli 
 honest faith, oa.Tieil the bi-awny hand to his lips. 
 
 The poor l^'rencnman, suspecting some mystification or 
 insult, l/rokp, Ou,t:into the most violent, anger, and Paul
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. I03 
 
 barely escaped a blow from the hand on which lie was 
 imprinting his loyal homage. The mirth of the class was 
 expressed in loud jubilee ; and, between them both, Paul 
 stood confused, ashamed, and in the highest degree mor- 
 tified. 
 
 In tliis instance, he was taken by surprise, and betrayed 
 by his loyal nature ; but in another attempt to impose 
 upon him, he asserted his rank as a scholar with firmness, 
 nay, with a dignity that compelled them ever after to 
 respect him. 
 
 Every week, two of the pupils among the under Pri- 
 maners were called out in succession to bring in the bread 
 ■with which they were regaled between the lessons when 
 the teachers were exchanged. As before mentioned, his 
 companions were determined not to acknowledge the rank 
 of Jean Paul as a first Primaner, and therefore called 
 upon the village boy to be their purchaser of bread. But 
 the village boy, who would have sacrificed everything to 
 them in honest love, stood firm in his rank as Primaner. 
 When they pressed the kreutzers upon him for the pur- 
 chase of the bread, he let his arms sink down with his 
 closed hands, and stood firmly in that position. Thus, 
 without complaint to the teacher, or a word of contest 
 with his companions, he gained forever that ascendency 
 which a firm will asserts over the wavering multitude. 
 
 But if Paul was always victorious, he had many dark 
 hours to conquer, that left a life-long impression upon his 
 mind. Although his companions unwillingly acknowl- 
 edged liis first rank in almost all branches of knowledge, 
 it is impossible they could have ai)preciated the splendid 
 gifts of his mind, or the extent of his already acquired 
 knowledge. He overcame with his mighty power the 
 difliculties of his school life, though he felt keenly the
 
 I04 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 want, of what he says in his notes Heaven had denied to 
 his youth, — " teachers and love." 
 
 Between the conrector and Paul no good understand- 
 ing coukl exist. However judicious may be the arrange- 
 ments of a school, and the prescribed method of teaching, 
 everything depends on the talent of the instructor for 
 teaching. This talent, like every other, must be native 
 or original, and united with a cheerful, unsuspicious, and 
 hopeful disposition, that strives for nothing so much as to 
 be always young, that it may enter into the sympathies 
 of youth, anticipate and help its efforts to rise into the 
 higher resrions of knowledge and wisdom. This talent is 
 alone able to excite pure scientific zeal, and to awake a 
 grateful disposition in j^outh. 
 
 Sometimes this honorable aim is found in men who 
 have devoted the whole of life from free choice to the art 
 of teaching ; but it can scarcely be expected of those 
 scantily-paid teachers who have stepped into tlie office 
 as a passing resting-place, while they are waiting upon 
 Providence for sometliing better, and their compelled 
 and reluctant instruction can hardly fail to disgust an 
 ingenuous youth. 
 
 Neither of the instructors of Paul in the Hof school 
 possessed tlie great and generous art of teacliing, and, 
 from the conrector's method alone, the elevating science 
 of history became absolutely disagreeable to Paul. 
 
 One of the bi()grai)hers of Jean Paul remarks, tliat, dur- 
 ing his school time in Hof, the sudden change in the circum- 
 stances of his family appears not to have troubled him or 
 even scarcely to have been considered by him, so intensely 
 was he thirsting for learning, tlirown as he was upon his 
 own resources by tlie deficiencies of the Hof school. In 
 the first year of his residence he relied upon the Library
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 105 
 
 of Vogel, and occupied himself in adding to his extracts 
 from theological works. Up to his second year he had 
 held to the course his father pi-escribed for him, and con- 
 tinued to prepare himself for the pulpit. The expanding 
 independence of liis mind was aided by an incident which 
 gave notoriety to his heterodox opinions. 
 
 The brave conrector had adopted the well-meant but 
 doubtful experiment of holding disputations, in which the 
 leading and always victorious side was taken by him- 
 self. The parts of respondent and opponent were di- 
 vided among the Priraaners, or first class. Unfortu- 
 nately a thesis was taken from the infallible dogmas of 
 the Church, with the not unreasonable expectation that 
 it would be only so far and so earnestly contended as to 
 re-establish its truth and the triumph of tlie conrector. 
 Paul was chosen the opponent, and entered upon this 
 duty with the conviction that in this, as in all search 
 after truth, one should be, not anxious about the issue, 
 but find out and assert only what would establish that 
 truth. Paul had now an opportunity to bring out the 
 treasures of heterodox argument he had drawn from the 
 Vogel Library, and this he did with so much zeal as to 
 threaten danger to the symbolical church article, and that 
 not so much from the contestible subject of dispute as that 
 the President was not so well prepared mth arguments, 
 as his opponent with weapons from the heterodox armory. 
 Paul was silenced not by argument, but by the President 
 alone becoming orthodox word-leader, and the disputa- 
 tion was ended without the usual praise of the manner in 
 which it had been conducted. 
 
 This school occurrence had for Jean Paul opposing 
 consequences. The unconsidered angry command to 
 silence with which the President met the argument of
 
 Io6 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL 
 
 his opponent, in the eyes of the Primaners was a victory 
 on their side, and gained for Paul an esteem which for- 
 bade them to follow hun in future with ridicule. On 
 the contrary, these heterodox opinions wei-e bitterly con- 
 demned by the public voice in Hof. " The free-think- 
 ing," remarks Otto, " who did not declare themselves or- 
 thodox were called atheists." This fate had Paul in the 
 most unfortunate period of his life ; and not he alone, but 
 all those who were attached to him in confidential friend- 
 ship. 
 
 As, through the accident of his birth, theology occupied 
 much of his attention, and his mind had been so early 
 turned to philosophy, he followed the critical judgments 
 of the age, and looked upon the heterodoxy of the time 
 as the companion of philosopliy. History, in as far as it 
 is a collection of names and dates and places, without 
 claiming the exertion of any particular talent, or of any 
 faculty except that of memory, had no charm for him ; 
 but as his theology or his scepticism led him to study the 
 history of the Church, which introduced him to the gen- 
 eral history with which it is inseparably connected, his 
 aversion yielded, and, some years after, he wrote thus to 
 a friend: " History has the highest value, in so far as we, 
 by means of it, as by the aid of nature, can discover and 
 read the Infinite Spirit, who in nature and in history, 
 as with letters, legibly writes to us. He who finds a 
 God in the physical world, will also find one in the 
 moral, which is liistory. Nature reveals to our heart 
 a Creator ; history, a Providence." 
 
 "When Paul entered the Hof gymnasium, he was taken 
 under the roof of the honest cloth-weaver, where a little 
 " cliamber in the wall " was prepared for him, and where 
 he was soon furnished with a complete suit of clothes
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 107 
 
 woven by his grandfather. The situation of the house, 
 and the comparative abundance of his grandfather's 
 means of living, had for Paul's mind a peculiar charm ; 
 for we cannot forget how the old errand-woman, in his 
 childhood, coming from Hof to Joditz, laden with his 
 grandmother's presents, was anxiously looked for, and 
 when after any delay she arrived, all the joyful family 
 were collected in the common apartment to receive her. 
 His romantic walks also from Hof, when he returned se- 
 cretly laden with presents, and the retlection of the set- 
 ting sun upon the Saale awoke those vague longings in 
 the boy that were never appeased, but that could not be 
 forgotten. 
 
 Soon after Paul entered the Hof school his father, who 
 had long been an invalid, died, leaving to Paul, the eldest 
 of his children, the care of his mother and the payment 
 of his debts. With his father's death began that ten years' 
 war with poverty which the eldest son had to carry on 
 alone. He had not been many weeks under the roof of 
 his grandparents, when both, within a short period of each 
 other, paid the debt of nature. The favorite daughter, 
 Paul's mother, had the misfortune to be invidiously dis- 
 tinguished in their will, and that which might have been 
 a blessing, became, through her character and the envy 
 of the other relatives, a perpetually increasing evil. 
 
 His mother, however tenderly loved by Paul, appears 
 to have been a weak-minded and obstinate woman. She 
 was, however, no less the favorite of the grandmother, 
 and the presents she used to send to her under the pre- 
 tence of payments gave offence to another daughter, who 
 was less favored by the grandmother. This injudicious 
 partiality was continued after death, as already mentioned, 
 by leaving to Paul's mother the house and estate at Hof.
 
 Io8 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 Envy and displeasure were now no longer silent, and a 
 lawsuit was instituted by the other relations to break tlie 
 will. Meantime, as the produce of the small family es- 
 tate was contested, the ground was left uncultivated, and 
 became every day less and less valuable ; so that Paul, 
 when he was scarcely eighteen, was called upon to be 
 the adviser and guardian angel of his mother, and, as far 
 as it was in his power, the protector of his family. 
 
 His mother, notwithstanding the earnest dissuasion of 
 Paul, and the advice of friends whose countenance and 
 support she enjoyed there, determined to leave Schwar- 
 zenbach and remove to Hof, where she was drawn by the 
 possession of two small houses, and her love for the grave 
 of the buried parents. In Hof she was Avholly isolated, 
 \\dthout friends or advisers, as Paul had already gone to 
 Leipzig. The successor of the painstaking cloth-weaver, 
 whose whole life had been spent in gaining and saving, 
 could hardly escape the charge of extra^'agance, if she 
 only spent, in the most frugal manner, what had been 
 so industriously gained and so thriftily hoarded. The 
 proverb was soon applied to the poor widow : " The 
 sparer will have a spender." With debts which she 
 could not pay without incurring new ones, and in con- 
 test with her nearest relations, while the house that she 
 inherited was fast going to decay for the want of repairs, 
 which her wasted funds prevented her from making, the 
 situation of Paul's mother was far from enviable. Added 
 to all this were the reproaches of her neighbors, who did 
 not fail to ascribe to her own unthriftiness and incapacity 
 the decay of such a long-honored family, so that she soon 
 learnt the truth of the adage : " The unfortunate stand 
 alone." 
 
 But not alone stood the mother of Jean Paul. Her
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 109 
 
 widowed, deserted, and humiliating position seemed oidy 
 to excite the generous and self-sacrificing affection of 
 Paul, and to stimulate his filial piety. 
 
 From this glance into his domestic circumstances we 
 see how much Paul's youthful years were darkened and 
 oppressed by the cai-es and sorrows of his mother, as well 
 as by his own sharp contests with actual want.
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 Youthful Fkiendships. — Werther Period. — First Book-mak- 
 ing. — "On the Practice of Thinking." 
 
 A.D. 1780, 
 ^t. 17. 
 
 HAVE anticipated the time of our 
 narrative, to give the reader a 
 glimpse into the domestic circumstances of 
 Paul's family. We return to the gymnasium 
 at Hof, to mention the youthful friendships of one, of 
 whom it has been said, "his writings Avould have created 
 friendship if it had had no existence before." We find 
 that, although his friendships ripened slowly, they were 
 life-long, living in his memory even after the death of his 
 friends, and cherished as the memorials of buried love to 
 the day of his own death. 
 
 His acquaintance with John Bernard Herman began 
 at the gymnasium in Hof. He was the son of a poor tool- 
 maker, and his late appearance every morning at the 
 school was reluctantly consented to by the teachers, be- 
 cause he was a mechanic's apprentice, and had daily a 
 prescribed quantity of sheep's wool yarn to reel off and 
 prepare for his younger sister's knitting, before he could 
 think of the necessary preparations for the hour of school. 
 The generous nature of Paul led him to be the friend and 
 helper of one more indigent than himself, and to offer him,
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. Ill 
 
 not only his personal assistance, but the use of all his 
 extract books and manuscripts. 
 
 But Paul must have been irresistiljly drawn to a char- 
 acter like Herman, who had the power of rising above 
 the discouraging circumstances of his life, and of devoting 
 himself to elevating pursuits ; and Hei-man's influence 
 upon the moral and spiritual being of Paul was so much 
 greater, as his present devotion to philosophy and the 
 natural sciences coincided with the berit of Herman's 
 genius. It is to be regretted that scarcely anything 
 remains, by which we can know the influence which so 
 remarkable an individuality of character as that of Her- 
 man's must have had upon Jean Paul. We know only 
 that his was the germ of a character often introduced in 
 Richter's later works. 
 
 The next, but perhaps the first friend in confidential 
 intercourse, was Adam Lorenzo von Oerthel, the eldest 
 son of a rich merchant, who possessed many estates in 
 the neighborhood of Hof. Topen was his place of resi- 
 dence, after he left off" business ; but for his son be had 
 built a small garden-house in Hof, and devoted it to the 
 use of the young man while he was at the gymnasium. 
 This retreat, situated in the bend of an arm of the Saale, 
 and surrounded with lofty trees, looked upon rich meadow- 
 gi'ounds, which were terminated by a beautiful lake. 
 Delightful must it have been to the youthful friends, after 
 their school duties were over, to wander here in the 
 mooidight, and with harpsichord or singing, or listening 
 to the music in the neighborhood (for all Germany is 
 musical), to have ])assed their confidential hours. Had 
 Paul continued liis autobiography to this time, how would 
 he have delighted to describe this place, and to recall the 
 friendship here knit so closely with Oerthel.
 
 112 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 This was the remarkable Werther period, when every 
 youth was infected with sentimentality. Paul also 
 passed through this period, and was only slightly, and 
 for a very short time, touched with the disease. His 
 slight symptoms were more from sympathy with his 
 friend than from a real infection. One fragment only 
 of a sentimental letter remains, which should be liter- 
 ally translated. 
 
 " Ah ! thy few lines have caused me tears, — me, who 
 have so few joys ! and these also I shall soon miss, for I 
 perhaps shall be absent. I shall imagine thy walks in 
 the garden at night, when the full moon shines, and think 
 how we formerly looked together over the flashing water ! 
 how we raised our eyes, filled with warm tears, to the 
 universal Father ! Ah, the days of childhood are passed ; 
 soon, with both of us, will these of the pupil be com- 
 pleted ! soon the whole of life ! 
 
 ..." At this moment you came in and interrupted me. 
 I read the paper you gave me ; and now I can write no 
 longer. My tears flow ! Yet something more, — distinct 
 thoughts of death occupy me now, — perhaps you also. 
 Now shimmers the moon calmly. Peace sinks into the 
 troubled soul ! How awful, under the pale shimmering 
 of the moon, to imagine all the neighboring hillocks 
 turned to graves, and there to wander, to watch ! 
 
 " How awful the death-stillness that surrounds me, and 
 the immeasurable feeling that seizes upon me ! How 
 elevating is it nightly to visit the graves of sweetly slum- 
 bering friends, and, ah ! the trusted heart that now the 
 worm feeds upon! 
 
 " Read, in Yorick's journey, where he was by the grave 
 of the monk ! But of this description, speak not a word ! 
 You can write at any rate."
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. I13 
 
 One of Jean Paul's biographers cannot understand 
 how he could so soon rise from the depression caused 
 by a work like the " Sorrows of Werther," a book that 
 for a time threw the whole youthful world into a state of 
 mental intoxication. AYlien Paul went to Hof, the book 
 had already been published four years. One Avriting of 
 the time says : " It is but the cry of that dim-rooted pain 
 under which all thouglitful men were languishing. It 
 paints the misery, it passionately utters the complaint, 
 and heart and voice all over Europe loudly and at once 
 respond to it." How could a boy of twelve years old 
 enter into or respond to the description of what Carlyle 
 calls " the blind struggles of a soul in bondage, which 
 every one felt and which drove Goethe almost to de- 
 spair " ? 
 
 From this fragment we see how, at this time, Jean 
 Paul was ashamed, even before his most intimate friend, 
 of his own emotions, and could only trust himself to 
 wiite of wliat interested him. He who at a later ])e- 
 riod had the courage to give to the world the tenderest, 
 most touching, and most enthusiastic emotions, without 
 even the veil of rhyme or verse, and without seeking 
 to conceal himself behind the mask of a fictitious char- 
 acter. 
 
 These emotions, that at the same age in Goethe took 
 the form of poetry, and were embodied in the romance of 
 Werther, were guarded with the strong armor of science 
 in Jean Paul. But the deep fountain was in his breast, 
 gathering fulness from every little rill, and from eveiy 
 summer sliower, till the time was ripe for it to be un- 
 sealed, and to pour its streams around. 
 
 The reason that Werther, and the sensation which the 
 publication of so remarkable a woi-k produced, made so
 
 114 t'IFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 little impression on Jean Paul, appears to have been that 
 his mind at this time, together with his friend Herman's, 
 whose enthusiasm for the natural sciences was boundless, 
 was turned to subjects of natural history and philosophy, 
 as the titles of his Essays in his manuscript books show : 
 " Is the world in perpetual motion ? " " What is univer- 
 sal in Physiognomy ? " " How are men, animals, plants, 
 and still smaller beings, made perfect ? " 
 
 Although Jean Paul had not at this time found tlie 
 true direction of his genius, yet that spiritual activity 
 was thoroughly awakened that never permitted him 
 afterwards to be idle, but continued unwearied till his 
 death, when the pen dropped from his hand, and an 
 unfinished work was borne on his coffin to his grave. 
 As a child, he played at book-making ; he now as a 
 school-boy made a book for his own benefit, " On the 
 Practice of Thinking." 
 
 It is remarkable that in this book there are none of 
 those peculiarities of expression which have been called 
 affectations, which make his books the despair of English 
 students. On the contrary, the style is clear, concise, and 
 remarkably simple. The limits of this work will allow 
 but a few short extracts. 
 
 After the title-page he writes : — 
 
 " These essays are merely for myself. They are not 
 made to teach others anything new. They are not ends, 
 but means ; not new truths themselves, but means to find 
 them. I shall often contradict myself; declare many 
 things truths here, and errors there. But man is man, 
 and not always the same." 
 
 The passage in which Paul speaks of florid and orna- 
 mented writing is remarkable, as he condemns a style 
 that was afterwards so singularly liis own.
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. II5 
 
 " The writer who produces many comparisons, who 
 composes in an ornamented style, appears to me to 
 have little depth ; at least, comparisons and figures can- 
 not occur when he thinks severely. Whoever reflects, 
 places the subject upon which he thinks alone before 
 him ; all his views are turned to that alone ; there is 
 room for no ideas but such as immediately concern it. 
 On the contrary, when he revises his work, he can bring 
 comparisons and figures to illustrate the subject. But is 
 that useful with heavy materials ? . . . . 
 
 " Many think themselves to be truly God-fearing, when 
 they call tliis world a valley of tears. But I believe they 
 would be more so, if they called it a happy valley. God 
 is more pleased with those who think everything right in 
 tlie world than with those who think nothing riglit. "With 
 so many thousand joys, is it not black ingratitude to call 
 the world a place of sorrow and torment ? " 
 
 In tlie next extract, Paul differs widely from the prac- 
 tice of the present day. 
 
 " Many theological propositions that the enlightened 
 consider false may have their use, their manifold use, 
 with smaller and less enlightened people. They are 
 spurs to certain actions that would not be done without 
 them. To people who believe them, because they have 
 not power to investigate them, they have their use ; but 
 to the wise the benefit ceases, for he believes them not, 
 and cannot, because he is too enlightened. In the world, 
 truth and error are as wisely distributed as storm and 
 sunshine. TIiou rejectest certain dogmas that are false ; 
 but canst thou substitute truths in their place that wiU 
 be as useful as the errors ? Perhaps an error has more 
 
 useful results than a truth in its place In God's 
 
 best world is there no error without useful consequences.
 
 Il6 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 Wherever an error is, it is not in vain. It is, in its place, 
 better than a truth !*,... 
 
 " Leave the ignorant an error of which he is himself 
 convinced, and bring no truth before him whose proofs he 
 is incapable of understanding. Observe especially what 
 promotes the piety of thy brother, and do not mi:^-v»'ith 
 the benefit of his faith tlie proofs of its truth, but observe 
 its good or evil influences. The wise love truth, for truth 
 itself, as they delight in reason ; the unwise, as it is of 
 use to them. Take away the usefulness of truth, and, as 
 they are no pliilosophers, they liave nothing left 
 
 " We do not discover our weaknesses to those whom 
 we believe to have none themselves. For this cause ge- 
 niuses appear to form fi'iendsliips most readily with those 
 who are in understanding far beneath them. 
 
 " Weak people live more in confidential friendship with 
 each other than geniuses 
 
 " Words never can express the whole that we feel ; 
 they give but an outline. When violent affections press, 
 the word is never found that can paint the circumstances 
 of the soul. We say only that something is there, but 
 not what, and how it is. Only he whose soul is equally 
 tuned feels the same ; but he feels not merely what the 
 other expresses, but what he cannot express. He paints 
 out the picture tliat the other has only faintly sketched in 
 outline. Two words are often enough to place a soul in a 
 situation that no ailded words can paint. But the better 
 the skctcli is that the full soul makes, so much easier is it 
 for the reader to complete the picture. Goethe is such a 
 sketcher. He touches the sympathizing heart at every 
 point. Has not all Germany wept with liim ? . . . . 
 
 * The reader must bear in miiid that this was written by a youth 
 of sixteen years. *
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 117 
 
 " Writings where the author has thought please us ; but 
 those please us more that excite thought in us. "We 
 appropriate to ourselves what the author has found, and 
 flatter ourselves tliat we have already known what he has 
 done for us 
 
 '• Every one is pleased when a writer is humble, when 
 a genius says he is none. We praise this apparent blind- 
 ness to one's own merit ; but, I believe, with injustice. 
 Wherefore should a man that feels his own greatness 
 not acknowledge it ? Wherefore should a wise and en- 
 lightened man appear before the public making a leg,* 
 like a dunce ? Perhaps this is the cause : We allow 
 such a one to be a great man, but we will not learn it 
 from himself; our self-love is too much offended. If a 
 man says of himself, that he is great, it is as much as if 
 he said, toe are little. But geniuses, in seeking to I'ecom- 
 mend themselves, show too much humiliation. They can 
 be just, but they need not on that account lower them- 
 selves. Man is just, when he does not appropriate to 
 liimself more merit than belongs to him, or rob another 
 of what is his due." 
 
 I have given these extracts, not so much for their 
 intrinsic value, but as private memoranda of a youth of 
 sixteen, at the time he was contending with poverty at 
 home and with enemies at school. 
 
 The pa.stor Vogel, to whom he had lent the manuscript, 
 sent him the day before his departure for the University 
 of Leipzig a letter, that would be injured without a literal 
 translation. 
 
 " Excellent young German ! from whom I promise the 
 world much in future : My dear triend ; you go, then, in 
 
 * Tlie German word is Bucklingen, which means literally to make 
 a leg;.
 
 it8 life of jean PAUL. 
 
 the morning, to Leipzig ? Go, then, in God's name, and 
 come not again until you are the — that you must and 
 shall be. My good wishes follow you. I know your 
 mind, I know your heart. Upon mine you have, with 
 your goodness, imi)ressed the most grateful emotions ; and 
 you may yet acquire more desert with me than, I at 
 present possess with you. Fulfil only my prophecy ! and, 
 yet once more, farewell ! " 
 
 The University of Leipzig was chosen for Jean Paul, 
 instead of Erlangen in his native principality, in the mis- 
 taken idea that a youth needed nothing in Leipzig but a 
 certificate of his poverty, and free tables and free lectures 
 would be open to him. 
 
 The fame of the professors, especially in theology, to 
 which Paul had been destined by his parents, offered 
 another inducement ; and the gi'eat mercantile activity of 
 the place presented a theatre where a young man could, 
 with most facility, by the exertion of almost any species 
 of talent, gain the means of support for himself and his 
 indigent family.
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 richter enters the university of leipzig. — letters from 
 Leipzig. — Change of Studies'. — Letters to his Mother. 
 
 A.D. 17S1, 
 JEt. 18. 
 
 N" the 19th of May Richter entered 
 the University of Leipzig, and was 
 on the same day matriculated. He soon found 
 himself deceived in almost all his hopes. At 
 this time, without any especial choice of his own, he was 
 destined to the study of theology, as it was understood by 
 others, as well as himself, that the preacher's son must 
 follow in his father's footsteps ; but before he entered the 
 university, the philosophical theology and the heterodox 
 critical direction of the age had had much influence upon 
 his mind, and the lectures he heard there were only aids 
 and accessories to his own self-instruction. Yet he per- 
 severingly attended, the first two years, the philosoi^hical 
 lectures of Platner, the exegetical and dogmatical in- 
 structions of Morus, and the lectures upon morals by Wie- 
 land. He listened with the most anxious attention, and 
 when the proposition of the teacher excited an idea, or 
 awakened an objection, made a minute of it in his com- 
 monplace-book. 
 
 At this time, also, he began to learn English ; but his 
 only instruction in tliat language was a two hours' public
 
 120 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 lecture, once a week ; the rest he gamed by private 
 reading. 
 
 But his life at Leipzig may best be learnt by extracts 
 from his letters, premising that the enthusiastic youth 
 found himself alone, without friends, in a noisy and ex- 
 pensive city, where he had gone with the mistaken jdea 
 that he could live without money. 
 
 In his first letter to the rector Werner he had not been 
 wholly undeceived.* 
 
 " Leipzig. 
 
 " The city is beautiful, if a city can be called so that 
 has only great houses and long streets. The splendid 
 places that you promised I find not ! Everywhere an 
 eternal uniformity, — no valleys, no hills ; it is com- 
 pletely without the charm that makes our native region 
 so agreeable. In many tilings it is as you promised, in 
 others not. I can dine for eighteen pfennige.^ Further, 
 I have been presented by the rector Clodius to all the 
 colleges. 
 
 " For my beautiful room at the Three Roses, Peter- 
 strass, No. 2 in the third story, precisely where Oerthel 
 lives, (our chambers are together,) I have to pay only 
 sixteen rix dollars ; J but I must leave it in the time of 
 the fair. The students also are as courteous and polite 
 as you led me to expect. In the following particulars 
 alone your information appears to me incorrect. The in- 
 formazions § are rare, or the number of those who inform^ 
 is immensely great. In the great houses they take only 
 
 * In these letters, as in all that I have translated, I have selected 
 merely such passages as will throw light oa the biography, as they 
 are too long for entire insertion. 
 
 t About twopence English, equal to thirty-seven mills. 
 
 I A rix dollar is sixty-seven cents. 
 
 \ Informnzinn nppenrs to be giving private lessons.
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. I2r 
 
 those wlio have a recommendation, and a good one is 
 rare. From every one I have heard that not very con- 
 soling provei'b, Lipsia vult expectari ; and that expectari 
 is so undecided, that if one has lived fifty years in 
 Leijizig, and all this time has received no oflice, they yet 
 preach to him ' to wait^ they will give it to him 
 
 " Herr M, Kirsch is with me from Hof ; his presence 
 has helped me much, and he has written me a right good 
 testimonium paupertatis. I need only produce this to 
 receive presents from the colleges. Tliis testimony has 
 helped me also with Professor Platner, who loves philos- 
 ophy so much." 
 
 Paul wrote again soon after : " My conjecture of the 
 expectari is not contradicted, it is rather strengthened. I 
 have yet no Informazion, no free table, no acquaintance 
 with students, in truth, nothing ! It is not easy to obtain 
 an Lnti'oduction to the professors. The most renowned, 
 whose esteem would be most useful to me, are oppressed 
 with business, surrounded by a multitude of respectable 
 people, and by a swarm of envious flatterers ; so that 
 those who are not distinguished by dress or rank ap- 
 proach them with difficulty. If one would speak to a 
 professor without an especial invitation, he incurs the 
 suspicion of vanity. When I think of the multitude of 
 students who are particularly recommended to them, of 
 the numbers of bad students who get the ear of the pro- 
 fessor, and prejudice him against the better, the whole 
 jihcnomenon is explained. But do not give up your 
 hoi)es. I will overcome all these difficulties. I shall 
 receive some little help, and at length I shall not need it. 
 Here I touch upon a riddle, whose solution you must wait 
 for. To my mother I lui\e only darkly hintcnl it, ibr at 
 present it has no solution ; only tliis will_ 1 say to you : it 

 
 122 LIFE OF J P: AN PAUL. 
 
 is neither stipendium, noi* table, nor informazion, nor any- 
 thing of the kind. It relates to something that you do 
 not expect, and that I cannot speak of until my anticipa- 
 tions are answered. 
 
 " But know you what especially impels me to industry ? 
 Precisely what you have said in your letter — my mother. 
 I owe it to her to endeavor to sweeten a part of her life, 
 that otherwise has been so unfortunate, and to lessen, by 
 my help and sympathy, the great sorrow she has suffered 
 through the loss of my father. It is also my duty to do 
 something for the happiness of my brothei-s. Were it not 
 for this, my studies would be wholly different. I would 
 only work at what pleased me ; for what I felt strength, 
 power, inclination. Were it not for my mother, I would 
 never during my whole life take a public office. This 
 assertion, which perhaps surprises you, did you know the 
 whole circumstances of my situation, the disposition of my 
 mind, and the strange direction my destiny has taken, 
 would appear to you reasonable.* .... 
 
 " Dr. Ernesti was buried on the 15th of September. 
 He will allow himself many hours in heaven with Cicero. 
 His noble Roman head now moulders in dust. His fame 
 flutters over his grave, but he hears it not. Truly, Pope 
 is right : Fame is an imagined life in the breath of others. 
 Thus the blow of death scatters all the frippery of our 
 follies. The wish falls often warm upon my heart, that I 
 may learn nothing here, that I cannot continue in the 
 other world ! that I may do nothing here but deeds that 
 will bear fruit in heaven ! Enougli 
 
 " And you — O, a thousand thanks for your excellent 
 letter ; a thousand thanks for the love you express to me ! 
 But I wish more than merely to sat/ my tlianks to you for 
 
 * Paul no doubt hints at the scepticism under which his mind was 
 now (iti'ng(2;ling.
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. I23 
 
 all tliat I owe you ; for the foundation of my mind and 
 heart. In that for which u })upil can never repay his 
 teacher, I can only shed a tear of gratitude, and offer up 
 a wisli to the All Good ! . . . . 
 
 " I write to you very differently from what I write to 
 others. Everywhere else I may put on a little mask, or 
 paint, at least, a little ; but with you I do it not ; I show 
 myself to you as I am. You know my fiiults, and I give 
 myself no trouble to conceal them ; therefore will you let 
 no one see my letter, for everybody will laugh at one who 
 is honest enough to let his heart be seen at the expense 
 of his understanding. There are people who take every 
 one for a fool, who is not as frivolous as themselves. 
 
 " . . . . Fashion is here a tyrant under whom all bow. 
 Beaux cover the streets, and in fine days they flutter 
 about like butterflies. One like the other, they are all 
 puppets, and none has the heart to be himself. These 
 gentlemen flutter from toilette to toilette, from assembly 
 to assembly, till they sleep from weariness." 
 
 In another letter to the same friend, w^e find Paul's 
 views upon the present direction of his reading, and that 
 he had already thouglit of relinquishing the study of the- 
 ology as a profession. 
 
 " The latest that I can tell you of sacred dogmas in 
 Leipzig can be very shortly said. Most, or indeed all, 
 the students incline towards heterodoxy. I have heard 
 from a Professor, who is also a preacher continually of 
 the mystical significance of the Bible, of its allegorical 
 meaning; of its dependence upon doubtful evidence; of 
 our ignorance of the Hebrew in the interpretation of the 
 Old Testament, etc. Nevertheless, the Professor dares 
 not deny a free belief. lie merely speaks of the difficul- 
 ties of the same, and leaves the decision to his hearers."
 
 124 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 " In permitting me to answer with frankness and can- 
 dor the questions that your kindness has led you to ask 
 respecting my present employments, my only fear is that 
 
 I shall appear like an egotist I have heard, and still 
 
 hear, many exegetical lectures upon John, and the Epistle 
 to the Hebrews. Many on Paul's letters, and the history 
 of the apostles by Morus. Lectures on logic and meta- 
 physics by Platncr ; aesthetics by the same ; morals by 
 Wieland ; upon geometry and trigonometry by Gehlar, 
 and the English language by Hempel. When I tell you 
 what I study, you will understand the reason why I have 
 first heard these college lectures. The languages are now 
 my favorite employment, merely because I have acquired 
 a love for certain sciences. 
 
 " It is difficult for me to say certain things to you, that 
 I can scarcely say to myself, without the appearance of 
 self-pride and ostentation ; but it becomes easier to say 
 them when I recollect that you' know me too well to 
 suspect pride where it cannot, be, or to find it where 
 it is not. 
 
 " I have made it a rule in my studies not to force upon 
 myself that wliich is decidedly disagreeable to me. That 
 for which I am unsuited I fnid already useless. I have 
 sometimes deceived myself when I have followed this 
 rule ; but I have never repented falling into an ei-ror 
 that — * 
 
 " .... To study what one does not love ; that is, to 
 contend with ennui, weariness, and disgust, for a good 
 that we do not desire ; to lavish the talent, that we feel 
 is ci'cated for something else, in vain, on a subject where 
 we fear that we cannot succeed, is to withdraw so much 
 power from one where we could make progress. 
 
 * There is something left unfinished.
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 125 
 
 " But in this way can you earn your bread ? This is 
 the miserable objection that is made against it. I know 
 nothing in the world by which bread cannot be earned ; 
 I will not therefore say that he can never succeed, who 
 has for the end of his studies merely the relief of his 
 pi-essing necessities. 
 
 " In the one case there will be more, in the other less 
 success. 
 
 " Granted — and I know not whether I shall gain my 
 bread by that for which I feel no power, in which I find 
 no pleasure, and make no progress ; or in that in which 
 enjoyment stimulates, and my talents help me. 
 
 " One must live wholly for a science, sacrifice to it 
 every power, every enjoyment, every moment, and busy 
 one's self with the other sciences, only as they are acces- 
 sories to the favorite. If, through adverse outward cir- 
 cumstances, the insignificant reward of common inferior 
 talent should be lost, it will be repaid tenfold by the ex- 
 quisite enjoyment that springs from the pursuit of truth, 
 the charm that is found in the exercise of a favorite talent, 
 and perhaps the honor that sooner or later may be ac- 
 quired. This is my defence. 
 
 " Formerly 1 read only philosophical writings ; now I 
 read in preference the witty, elegant, imaginative authors. 
 Once I did not love the French language ; now I read 
 French books rather than German. The wit of Voltaire, 
 the eloquence of Rousseau, the ornamented style of Helve- 
 tius, and the ingenious remarks of Toussaint, all these 
 impel me to the study of the French language. I do not 
 believe that I leani much from them, but they ])lease me. 
 With the impression of the finest passages, and the witty, 
 the remembrance of the art with which they were com- 
 posed remains also.
 
 126 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 " I read Pope — he delights me ; so does Young. 
 There is undoubtedly nothing more splendid in the 
 English language ! I learn it now chiefly to read that 
 excellent weekly paper, the Spectator, of which we have 
 in German but a miserable translation. 
 
 " The eloquence of Rousseau enchants me. I find elo- 
 quence also in Cicero and Seneca. I love both these 
 now. above all things, and prefer reading them to the best 
 German authors. I love the ancients, and have given up 
 many of those foolish judgments by which I was misled, 
 through the poor instruction of my Latin master. 
 
 " Will you allow me a little digression, upon reading 
 the ancient authors in school ? What I say may be false, 
 but wath me it was ti-ue. To imitate an ancient author, 
 to find him beautiful, to love him and occupy one's self 
 with him, a boy must have taste." 
 
 Here Paul breaks off his digression about the ancients, 
 and his account of his own studies. We find no more 
 lettei-s upon the subject at this time. 
 
 Paul's coiTcspondeut objected to liis estimation of fame 
 in the case of Ernesti, and answered him thus : — 
 
 " If you believe that Ernesti has taken nothing with 
 him but his reputation, and that this is only an imaginary 
 possession, it appears to me you err, and would, like Pope, 
 depreciate this imaginary life in the breath of others. Is 
 it, then, not desirable that our memory should be honored, 
 that other minds, even after the lapse of centuries, should 
 enter into union with our own ? If man looks upon Fame 
 with indifference, he will not wish to be great himself, and 
 the world will become poor in splendid deeds." 
 
 Paul, in his next letter, sought to explain, rather than 
 to excuse, his assertions upon Ernesti's reputation. 
 
 " What you say of Fame is just ; what I have asserted
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 12/ 
 
 thereon is not just. I have never looked upon reputation 
 with indifference, never considered it an imaginary good ; 
 for what is more probable than that in eternity we shall 
 enjoy its richest and most enduring fruit ? At the time 
 I wrote my letters to you, I was, through the recent death 
 of Ernesti, tlirough the idle pomp of his funeral, and the 
 comparison of his former and present circumstances, ex- 
 actly in the temper to assert an erroneous opinion. 
 
 '' But perhaps they valued the depai'ted Ernesti more 
 than he deserved.* He spake Cicero's Latin, but he had 
 not his eloquence. He had good Latin words, but not 
 splendid thoughts ; he was astonishingly learned, with 
 moderate powers of understanding. He was more in- 
 debted for his reputation to his industry than to his 
 genius, more to reflection than to penetration. He was 
 a great philologist, but not a great philosopher. Even 
 this made him perhaps not half as great as a Lessing, or 
 even as a Platner. But wholly to paint the last, Platner, 
 I must be himself, or more. One must hear, or read himj 
 to know how to admire him. And this man, who unites 
 so much sound philosophy with so much grace, so much 
 knowledge of mankind with such extensive leai'ning, so 
 much knowledge of the ancient Grecian with the modern 
 literature ; who is equally great as a philosopher, physi- 
 cian, aesthetic, and learned man ; and who possesses as 
 much virtue as wisdom, is as much endowed with sensi- 
 bility as penetration, — even this man is not only the 
 envy of every inferior mind, but the object of the perse- 
 cution and secret slander of every blockhead. 
 
 " He was once called before the consistory at Dres- 
 den, to defend himself against the charge of Materialism. 
 There is nothing of which he is less guilty. No one can 
 
 * Ernesti was called the German Cicero.
 
 128 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 have read bis Aphorisms without perceiving that he is the 
 most enlightened enemy of Materialism 
 
 " I have often made the remark, that a gi-eat man, to 
 preserve his reputation, must not live long. New monu- 
 ments of his greatness are constantly expected of him. 
 By making his past actions the heralds of his future, they 
 raise him to an unattainable point. Tbey turn always 
 their eyes forwards, and seek what he is going to be, and 
 forget what he has been, ceasing to admire when they 
 have nothing new to admire, — he has overlived himself. 
 After his death, they go back with the great man over 
 the whole course of his path ; but before, they refuse to 
 give him unlimited praise, because they would allure him 
 to greater actions, and not, through too great appreciation 
 of the present, prevent him from striving for perfection. 
 Thus it was with the great Young, in England ; and thus 
 it has been with Ernesti in Leipzig. A great spirit may 
 only first attain that existence which unites him with the 
 whole of humanity, Avhen he has laid down the present." 
 
 From the above extract relating to Platner, we cannot 
 avoid the inference, that he exerted a powerful and long- 
 endui'ing influence upon Richter. He says, many years 
 afterwards, that '' Platner's manner in reading the lines 
 
 from Shakespeare, 
 
 ' We are such stuff 
 As dreams are made of, and our little life 
 Is rounded with a sleep,' 
 
 created whole volumes within him." Platner thouglit and 
 wrote in aphorisms ; and, as this bec:une Jean Paul's own 
 manner, we cannot avoid the conclusion that the pupil 
 imitated the master, osj)ecially as it cannot have escaped 
 the most careless reader that Richter's letters and jour- 
 nals are at this time entirely free from his later acquired 
 peculiarities.
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 1 29 
 
 He appears to have approached no nearer to Plainer 
 than the lecture-room. Paul's poverty and modesty held 
 him in obscurity ; the warmest wish of his heart, the deep 
 thirst of his soul to become personally acquainted with 
 intellectual men, was wholly disappointed in Leipzig. 
 But that he might not fail in everything, he then turned 
 with renewed ardor, with more intense industry, upon 
 books. His studies had taken a new direction ; foreign 
 literature, the French as well as the English, particu- 
 larly Rousseau, held captive the youth of eighteen years. 
 Richter must have found in many of the characteristics 
 of Rousseau a reflection of his own nature. 
 
 It is remarkal)le that, in the copious extracts he made 
 from Rousseau, he copied not the sentimental and impas- 
 sioned passages, but rather rules of practical wisdom and 
 directions for good mannere ; from the Neiv Heloise, a long 
 description of social life in Paris ; — the reason is obvi- 
 ous, — at this time he longed to become acquainted with 
 the more refined forms of social life in Germany.* He 
 could see little of life in Leipzig, except what he observed 
 in the streets, at the theatres, and in the public gardens. 
 So strong was his desire, that he^ays " he stood hours at 
 the door of the hotel of l^avaria to see an ambassador 
 enter, that he might be able to describe one." 
 
 At this period, his intellectual activity alone was cher- 
 ished, to the exclusion of the emotions of the heart, and 
 this too united with the coldness of a heterodox theology ; 
 added to all this was his admiration of Pope and Boileau, 
 and the study of the French philosophers. But his heart 
 was still full of the tenderest sympathy for his mother, as 
 
 * The inmost poetic impulses of his nature were kept in subjection 
 by his social desires, and the impassioned eloquence of Rousseau sank 
 deep, but left no outward trace in his mind. 
 
 6* 1
 
 130 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 his letters to her at this time will show. Speaking of 
 her lawsuit, he writes to her, in November : " A ^ j, j^gj 
 day will perhaps come when your enemies will -^t- 18. 
 not be as happy as they now are, and when you will 
 enjoy more rest, more satisfaction, more joy. If you are 
 a Christian, (and this you must be I) truly then I cai>oot 
 understand how things that concern only this short life 
 can make you so uneasy. Do you suffer from the little 
 vexations that now afflict you, remember Him also by 
 whom the smallest good deed will not be left unrewarded, 
 who looks upon every one of his creatures with love, who 
 has formed for all a heaven, and will give one to all. 
 Pray ! If you have no friend to whom you can complain, 
 complain to Him who is the friend of all men ! Wait 
 from him the help that, however long delayed, never 
 fails. Remember that our greatest troubles can rob us 
 of nothing but life, and that death will give us that sweet 
 rest that life has denied ; that hereafter our sorrows will 
 sleep calmly till we awake from slumber to that blessed 
 day when an open heaven will receive the pious ; wlien 
 friend shall meet friend ; the wife the husband ; the child 
 shall find tlie father that he has so long lost, and eternal 
 happiness sliall stream through the heart of the blessed." 
 Paul writes again, on the 1st of December: "I daily 
 hope and expect to receive news of what passes with you, 
 and the help I have so long prayed for ; but I learn noth- 
 ing from you. You leave me between hope and fear. I 
 have lately written to inform you that I have already been 
 trusted ; and, as I have no longer any funds, I must con- 
 tinue to be trusted. But what can I at last expect ? Be 
 so good as to give me some counsel. I must eat, — and 
 I cannot continue to be trusted by the traiteur. I cannot 
 freeze, — but where shall I get wood without money ? I
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 131 
 
 can no longer take care of my health, for I have warm 
 food neither morning nor evening. It is now a long time 
 since I asked you for twenty rix-dollars ; when they come 
 I shall scarcely be able to pay what I already owe. Do 
 you believe that I would ask you unnecessarily for money 
 to spend extravagantly ? Ah ! I know how indispensable 
 it is to you ! If you can help me now, I trust you will 
 not, with God's help, be called upon to assist me again. 
 Perhaps the project I have in my head will enable me to 
 earn for you and myself. But at present I know not 
 truly what I shall do if you suffer me to wait longer." 
 
 He writes again : " Now tell me of yourself. Are you 
 already in Hof, and how are you pleased ? and how stands 
 it with your lawsuit ? Do you win or lose ? I expect 
 bright news from you. I pray only that you be not mel- 
 ancholy. Take care of your health. Be steadfast, and 
 bear the sorrows that you may yet expect in greater num- 
 ber, with increased resignation. Keep my brother in- 
 dustrious I " 
 
 After Paul had received the money, wrung with so 
 much difficulty from his mother, he writes : " I thank you 
 so much the more, as it cost you so much trouble to col- 
 lect it. 0, how gladly would I refund this, and never 
 receive more of that which you need so much yourself!" 
 
 At this time also his mother wrote to him, in great 
 distress, that his idle brother had enlisted as a soldier. 
 Paul answered : — 
 
 " I am much less troubled that my brother is a soldier 
 than that you are so anxious about it. Indeed, it would 
 have been better had he remained at his craft. But when 
 you tliink how unsteady he was, and that no master could 
 keep him long, the evil is not so great. You err, when 
 you think of the soldier's situation as anything contempti-
 
 132 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 ble. Are not noblemen's, counts', and even princes' sons 
 soldiei-s ? Is not the son of" the old Frau Pfarrarinn in 
 Koditz also one ? 
 
 " Adam may be promoted, and, in any event, a soldier 
 is better than a barber. Write to my brother to conduct 
 himself well, — for the rest God will care. Do not 
 trouble yourself so much about it, and, above all, dismiss, 
 that contemptuous notion you have of a soldier's life. 
 The state could not exist without him 
 
 " I would gladly send you some coffee, but my want 
 of funds is as great as yours. If only my expedient suc- 
 ceeds as I hope, in four weeks it will be decided,* and 
 I shall certainly know whether I shall be able to earn 
 money by it or not. Guten Mutter, trouble yourself not 
 so much ; for with all your anxiety you cannot alter any- 
 thing, and your cares Avill injure your health." 
 
 Paul writes thus to her on the death of the relation 
 who had contested the vAW and the inheritance of the 
 
 cloth-maker : " Leave R to rest in peace. He is in 
 
 his grave, — hate him then no longer ! Death ends all ! 
 even our enmities. Has he been unjust to you? he has 
 now failed like other men." 
 
 His poor mother was much dissatisfied that Paul should 
 think of writing books, instead of preparing himself to 
 tread in his father's footsteps, and occupy the pulpit in 
 Joditz or Ilof. She had flattered her imagination witli 
 the thought of sitting a devout hearer under his pulpit, 
 and listening to the pious eloquence of her gifted son. 
 Paul wrote to her : — • 
 
 " You ask what kind of books I write ? They are 
 neither theological nor juridical, and if I should tell you 
 the titles it woukl signify nothing. They are satirical or 
 
 * This was his intention of becoming an author.
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 133 
 
 droll books. Indeed, I cannot but smile when you make 
 me the edifyinq; offei" to listen to my preacliing in the 
 Spital Klrche in Ilof. Think you, then, it is so much 
 honor to preach ? This honor, however, can any poor 
 student receive, and it is easy to make a sermon in one's 
 dreams ; but to make a book is ten times more difficult. 
 Besides, you do not know that a poor student like myself 
 dare not preach in Hof without gaining a permission from 
 Bayreuth, which costs fourteen gulden.* 
 
 " • . . . You think that I lay up my clothes. How 
 can I do this when I have no new ones ? I have indeed 
 worn-out garments, but no new ones. Now, dear, good 
 mother, I must speak of myself. If you only knew how 
 unwillingly I do it ! But can I do otherwise ? Yet I 
 will not ask you for money to pay my victualler, to whom 
 I owe twenty-four dollars, nor my landlord, to whom I 
 am indebted ten dollars, or even for other debts that 
 amount to six dollars. I can let these rest till Michael- 
 miis, when I shall undoubtedly be able to pay these and 
 other future ones. For these great sums I will ask no 
 help from you, but for the following you must not deny 
 me your assistance. I must every week pay the washer- 
 woman, who does not trust. I must drink some mUk 
 every morning. I must have my boots soled by the 
 cobbler, who does not trust ; my torn cap must be re- 
 paired by the tailor, who does not trust ; and I must give 
 something to the maid-servant, who of course does not 
 trust. I know not, indeed, what I shall do if you do not 
 lend me a helping hand for these things. Can you be- 
 lieve that I would plague you thus if I could help it ? I 
 need not, indeed, much ; eight dollars of Saxon money 
 will satisfy all, and then I shall need your help no longer. 
 
 * A gulden is forty cents.
 
 134 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 Good mother, you must not believe my project for gain- 
 ing money is good for nothing, because nothing is yet 
 decided. Ah, no ! I trust even to maintain us both ; but 
 all depends upon the beginning." 
 
 The project which Paul, with so much mysterious con- 
 fidence, imparts to his mother, was liis hope of emolu- 
 ment from the books he was writing ; and so sanguine 
 was he of success, that he not only hoped to pay all his 
 debts, but to have the me^ns of making a journey to Hof. 
 
 " . . . . When I come to Hof at Whitsuntide, I shall 
 not only bring myself, but all my old linen, and you may 
 send my stockings and shirts after your recruit. I have 
 indeed no whole stockings, only some fcAV that are 
 patched. But what is that ? Do not be angry that I 
 am so merry, for I write the whole day nothing but 
 amusing l)ooks. Yet more ; I am not in my old cham- 
 bers, but in the summer-house of a beautiful garden. 
 The garden belongs to the same gentleman to whom my 
 former lodgings belonged." 
 
 His poor motlier, whose character boi'e a strong resem- 
 blance to that of Lenette, in his novel of " Siebenkas," 
 was not at all pleased with her son's writing all day noth- 
 ing l)ut amusing books, for Paul answers : — 
 
 " You have sent me a reprimand, in order that I should 
 preach a penitential sermon in Hof. Do you think, then, 
 that it is so very easy to write a satirical book ? Do you 
 believe that the ministers in Hof, understanding one line 
 of my book, would wish to silence it, and tliat the {)astor 
 in Rehau does not understand tlie thing tliat he praises 
 so much ? If I had studied theology only, by what should 
 I support myself? Yet once more, the permission to 
 preach costs fourteen gulden. I do not despise ministers. 
 I have no contempt, and shall never have, for linen-
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 135 
 
 weavei'S. Good mother, I trust yet to write books, little 
 as I have received for this, by -which I shall gain three 
 hundred Saxon dollars. Besides, is it not right that I 
 should write facetious books, when you write facetious 
 letters ? Over the conclusion of your last I could only 
 lausrh."
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 Extracts feom Jouenal. — First Literary Effort. — Green- 
 land Lawsuits. 
 
 HAVE rather anticipated the course a.d. 1781, 
 
 of events, in order to place the ex- ■^^' ^^' 
 
 tracts from Paul's letters, written while at the 
 
 University, together, to enable the reader to 
 
 understand the difficulties he had to encounter, and the 
 
 constant demands made upon his patience and sensibility 
 
 by his mother. I give a few extracts from his journal, to 
 
 show how he brought his philosophy to act upon his 
 
 daily life. 
 
 " August 11, 1781. 
 
 " Thou wouldst learn thy faults from thy friends ! 
 
 Thou errest much. Their sincerity goes not so far as to 
 
 discover to thee the undeniable spots upon thy character. 
 
 Their sincei'ity goes not so far as to tell you of faults that 
 
 you cannot excuse in yourself. The best means to learn 
 
 our faults is to tell others of theirs. They will be too 
 
 j)roud to be alone in their defects, and will seek them in 
 
 us, and reveal them to us. A friend cannot be easily 
 
 seen in his true form. ATe see him as in a glass, that 
 
 our warm breath renders opaque. An enemy is often 
 
 the truest discoverer of our feults. Our bosom friend, 
 
 who loves us, tells us of our virtues ; our enemy, who
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 137 
 
 hates us, of our faults. Both often say too much, but it 
 is easy between these extremes to discover the truth. I 
 believe the faults of many lively men liave more merit 
 than the virtues of the cold and unexcitable, that cost 
 tliem no trouble Our century is tolerant to opin- 
 ions and intolerant to actions. We dare express every 
 opinion freely, but practise no virtue without the fear of 
 ridicule. We dare judge without knowing the opinions 
 of others to guide us, but we dare not act without seeing 
 what others do. We tolerate all sorts of free-thinkers, 
 but not all sorts of saints." 
 
 Every extract from this journal would show how much 
 Paul's thoughts dwelt upon the manner of thinking and 
 being, and the outward relations and appearance of gifted 
 and great men. It anticipates that longing after sympa- 
 thy and fellowship with the beautiful and good that he 
 afterwards desci'ibes so faithfully in the life of his Walt. 
 
 " We have had great spirits," he says, " but not great 
 men. All our geniuses raise themselves by their undnr- 
 standing too far above this earth. We look sorrowfully 
 after their flight, and regret that we are only men. We 
 reverence, but we do not love them. Rousseau alone is 
 an exception. His talents made him great as an indi- 
 vidual ; his heart allied him to all humanity.* We love 
 him the more because he discovered his faults to us, and 
 
 was not ashamed to be our fellow-creature We 
 
 know more of the heads of celebrated men than of their 
 hearts ; they have sketched the former in their works ; 
 their heart is found in their secret actions, and they 
 would more certainly please if they represented their 
 
 thoughts, opinions, and feelings with less disguise 
 
 There are certain men that we do not willingly thank, — 
 
 * Literally, His talents made him a great man; his heart great men.
 
 138 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 those from whom we expect, even receive, good with 
 reluctance. We feel deeply humbled when another 
 makes use of our misery as a staif to raise himself to 
 higher honor. It is insupportable to be obliged to ac- 
 knowledge good in wickedness, and through our gratitude 
 encourage the vice of pride and vainglory - 
 
 " The learned man is only useful to the learned ; the 
 wise man alone is equally useful to the wise and the sim- 
 ple. The merely learned man has not elevated his mind 
 above that of others ; his judgments are not more pene- 
 trating, his remarks not more delicate, nor his actions more 
 beautiful than those of others. He merely uses other in- 
 struments than his own ; his hands are employed in busi- 
 ness of which the head sometimes takes little note. It 
 is wholly different with the wise man. He moves far 
 above the common level. He observes everything from 
 a different point of view. In his employments there is 
 always an aim, in his views always freedom, and all with 
 him is above tlie common level 
 
 " The great man is proud, for he would not have at- 
 tained the perfections he possesses if he had not seen 
 their worth and felt their value. But as he has acquired 
 true advantages, as liis excellences compel his own ap- 
 plause, sometimes even his own admiration, he feels it 
 unnecessary to beg the miserable praise of fools, and to 
 attain greatness through previous humiliation. He is in- 
 different to the applause of others : his own is sufficient 
 for him ; for this reason he appears humble when lie is 
 entirely the opi)osite : lie is only modest. He seeks his 
 own deserts, not in hearing it said that he is great, but in 
 proving it. He does not boast of his views in the pref- 
 ace ; in the book alone he sketches his image, and if 
 he often speaks of his weakness and imperfection, it is
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 139 
 
 not to place those above him who have the perfections 
 that he wants ; but in proportion as he is great, he knows 
 how much he needs to attain the greatness that he has 
 held before him in his ideal of perfection." 
 
 It is obvious, from Paul's letter to the rector Werner, 
 that he was' only withheld from giving up theology as a 
 profession from a sense of duty to his mother, and the 
 fear that liis jjroject of becoming an author would involve 
 her in deeper distress. A passage in his journal shows 
 the dread he had of being indebted to a patron, and no 
 doubt he felt as his father did, that the Spirit only should 
 call the laborers into the vineyard of the Church. He 
 says : " At length, O God ! if I must suffer, grant only 
 this, that I have not to thank foolish and wicked men 
 that through our misfortunes make demands upon our 
 gratitude." 
 
 At length, after long struggles, Paul decided to give 
 his thouglits to the public through the press rather than 
 the pulpit, to write rather tlian to speak, and, his resolu- 
 tion once taken, he never wavered. 
 
 The history of the first creation of every genius is very 
 interesting. He hears the whisperings of the Muse, that 
 assure him of his future power, but he conceals them as 
 a precious secret, till from his own consciousness he has 
 accumulated the materials of his future fame ; but Rich- 
 ter's first works were not written to lighten the laboring 
 mind of the riches that weighed upon it, as the Werther 
 of Goethe is said to have been. Tbe pressure came from 
 without ; the necessities of his mother prompted his in- 
 vention, and sharp hunger impelled the industiy of his 
 pen. This pressure from without solves also another 
 enigma. It has appeared incomprehensible, that an au- 
 thor of so much tenderness, and afterwards so full of
 
 140 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 sentiment, should have begun with works of Siitire ; but 
 Paul enhanced the splendid gifts of his genius by a dis- 
 trustful humility. vSpeaking of himself, he says : " I am 
 richer in a receiving than in a creative imagination, in 
 what may be called a negative poetic talent, in opposition 
 to the {)Ositive, which is the power of creation. I possess 
 only a lower order of imagination, — that of being pene- 
 trated and excited by the creations of others. In youth 
 it is dangerous, but very easy to mistake the one for the 
 other, and imagine that a day of pentecost has given us 
 the power to speak with inspired tongues." 
 
 Paul was a philosopher before he was a poet, and his 
 French and English studies determined the character of 
 his first book. He judged, humbly and wisely, that his 
 mind was not sufficiently furnished with materials, and 
 his imagination not ripe enough for great creations in the 
 regions of poetry. Tn his French and English reading 
 he had found a multitude of Essays, that, without charac- 
 ters or action, enjoyed the highest celebrity. They de- 
 manded only wit, satire, irony, and poetic illustration, and 
 he felt himself capable of producing a book of this spe- 
 cies. His studies of late had been almost wholly confined 
 to works of this kind ; and although Rousseau was his 
 favorite, yet with tlie \\\t of Voltaire, the satire of Pope 
 and Young in his memory, he could play witli tlie pov- 
 erty of his materials, and reproduce the same thought 
 almost without end. The pressure of reality, the cliill 
 and wet cold of outward life, liad closed, ami sequestered 
 in the bud all that rich bloom of imagination, that after- 
 wards, when opened by the sunbeams, became so beauti- 
 ful and luxuriant. 
 
 In a letter to his friend the pastor of Rehau, to wliom 
 he sent the manuscript of his first book, Die Lob der
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 14I 
 
 Dummheit, (" Eulogy of Stupidity,") he says : " You know, 
 perhaps, that I am poor, but perhaps you do not know- 
 that no one has lightened my poverty. If you would 
 gain a patron, you must not let it be understood that you 
 need one, — that is, if you would be rich, you must not 
 be poor. Yet more, God has denied me four feet, to 
 enable me to look up for the favorable glance of a patron, 
 and creep for a few crumbs from his superfluity. I can 
 neither be a false flatterer, nor a fashionable fool, nor win 
 friends by the motion of my tongue and the bending of 
 
 my back Think of all these things, and you will 
 
 know my situation, but you will not know how I am going 
 to improve it. It came into my head at one time, I will 
 write books, to be able to purchase books ; I Avill teach 
 the public, (pardon the false expression for the sake of 
 the antithesis,) to be able to learn at the University ; I 
 wiU put the horse behind the wagon, to get out of this 
 wicked hollow way. I altered only the species of my 
 studies. I read witty authors, — Seneca, Ovid, Pope, 
 Young, Swift, Voltaire, and I know not what. Eras- 
 mus's Encomium Morice gave me the notion of eulo- 
 gizing prosing stupidity. I began, — I improved, — I 
 found difliculties where I did not expect them, and none 
 where I expected them most ; and I ended my book the 
 very day I received your letter. You will exclaim, ' Won- 
 derful ! ' if you do not exclaim, ' Foolish ! ' 
 
 " Here you have my expei-iment, — the experiment of 
 a man of nineteen years. A professor, whom the manu- 
 script reached through a third person, did not wholly 
 deny me his applause. Dare I hope for yours ? Per- 
 haps you will review it in the following manner : ' The 
 author can easily substitute himself for the book, — cer- 
 tainly the Divinity that he praises inspired Jiini.'
 
 142 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 " I will owe you the utmost gratitude, if, before I hand 
 the manuscript to the publisher, you will give me some 
 information with regard to its value, and yet more, if you 
 will point out its frequent fjiults. But enoagh ; or 1 shall 
 write a bad letter over a bad book." 
 
 Yogel answered with all the delight and pride 6f one 
 who had discovered and prophesied Paul's future dis- 
 tinction. 
 
 " I praise not your folly, — but your splendid, wonder- 
 ful wisdom ! Confess ! did not Wisdom herself appear 
 to you in person, and, with her veil thrown back, reveal 
 to you her divine beauty? Nevertheless, I fear, if it is 
 published, half the world will quarrel with you, if not the 
 whole." 
 
 After waiting a year, and being unable to find a pub- 
 lisher for his Loh der Dummheit, Paul wrote to the same 
 friend : — 
 
 " I left Hof last year (at the end of the vacation) full 
 of hope, followed by the beautiful and variegated dreams 
 with which a too-easily trusting fantasy brightened my 
 future plans. No one, thought I, is happier than myself; 
 my Essay will bring me a hundred dollai'S. With that I 
 can live one summer, although the book will scarcely live 
 so long. But I can write another for the next fair, with 
 fewer faults, that will bring me more money. Ilerr Pro- 
 fessor Seidlltz will have already disposed of this satirical 
 abortion, and at my next visit will undoubtedly hand me 
 tlie author's reward. 
 
 "But — Ilerr Professor Seidlitz had not disposed of 
 my satire, and of course could not hand me the author's 
 reward. Yet had the gentleman so long and so kindly 
 patronized the book, by letting it lie on his desk, that the 
 time when it should have been published, at Michaelmas
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 143 
 
 fair, was half over. Now I had the book, but no pub- 
 lisher. I read it through to quiet my ill-humor, and 
 thanked God that I had found no publisher. ' Lie there 
 in the corner,' I said, with paternal expression to the 
 little Richter, ' together with school exercises, for thou 
 art thyself no better, /will forget, for the world would 
 certainly have forgotten thee. Thou art too young ever 
 to have been old, and the milk-beard upon thy chin 
 would never suffer me to believe that thou wouldst have 
 gray hair.' 
 
 " From this fit of angry enthusiasm my right hand 
 awoke me, that had accidentally come in contact with my 
 empty purse in my l)reeches pocket. The hand after- 
 wards struck my stomach, that through its murmuring 
 veto gave a wholly different direction to my resolutions. 
 In short, I undertook again a wearisome work, and cre- 
 ated in six months, observe, not in six days, a bran-new 
 satire, such as I now send you. Perhaps you will think 
 I have said nothing to excuse myself ; permit me to think 
 I have said all. Think only of the anxiety with which 
 one strives after a good, for the want of which the future 
 is armed with greater terrors, than even embitter the 
 present. Think only of the melancholy discord between 
 laughter at strange follies and discouragement over one's 
 own future 
 
 While Paul was so occupied in preparing for the press 
 his second book. The Greenland Laiosuits, he neglected 
 to write to his friend Vogel. After answering his re- 
 proaches, he says : — 
 
 " I thank God this steep mountain is passed now ; I 
 can write again to my friend with my former freedom. 
 Now I believe myself to be, by a sweet deception, not in 
 my own, but in your apartment. Again I believe that I
 
 144 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 press your hand, and that you read in my moist eyes the 
 remembrance of your past benevolence, and I read in 
 yours the forgetfuhiess of my past faults. But enough 
 of letter-writing, and something of book-writing. 
 
 " My book has a thousand faults. It is overladen witli 
 comparisons, as the Eulogy of Stupidity was with antith- 
 esis. I could collect out of it a regiment of six hundred 
 comparisons. My satire commands, with its scourge 
 nothing but thoughts, from which every one may furnish 
 himself with a comparison, as in the Persian camp every 
 soldier liad a mistress, and the king as many mistresses as 
 soldiers. 
 
 " You think, perhaps, I am wise to blame myself, lest 
 I should be blamed by others, as j^risoners, for fear of 
 being hanged, hang themselves in prison, and instead of 
 the gallows, use a nail, and for a rope, a garter ; or 
 through previous criticism defend myself from every 
 other, as the peasant, to secure himself from the thunder- 
 bolt, carries one that he has picked up about with him in 
 his pocket. 
 
 " .... I acknowledge that an excess of comparisons 
 is I'eally a fault ; but can cold criticism subdue the charm 
 of rich intemperance ? Does the wine-bibber with the 
 red nose know the poisonous effect of excess ? He knows 
 it well ; but he cannot fly from it. Even so consists the 
 cold disapprobation of lavish ornament with the warm 
 love of the same. There was a time when truth charmed 
 me less than its ornament, the thought less than the form 
 in which it was expressed. I was like the young painter 
 who sketches a picture on the canvas from Nature, and 
 then gives it the features of his beloved. 
 
 '' But how I radotire ! I cannot even lay aside my 
 faults wliile I condemn them. A l)ook without beauties
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. I45 
 
 is certainly a bad thing, but one without faults is not 
 therefore good. Toussaint asserts that such, even if it 
 could exist, would possess only moderate merit. Besides, 
 it is of little consequence wliether my Kindhin dies, and 
 is gathered to its brothers, with a quick apoplexy or a 
 slow consumption ; that is, whether the book is forgotten, 
 with its ten or its twenty faults. To prevent literary 
 death, no herb has yet grown, perhaps not even the laurel, 
 
 " There are always many objections to the value of 
 self-criticism. Who can pi'otect his ears from the grating 
 of his file ? The file shapes, but begets no beauties. Not 
 the poet merely, but his poem is born, not made. Jupi- 
 ter begets the gods, but those who are not immortal he 
 makes ; these are the work of his hands, but IMinerva 
 sprung ready-formed from his head. Besides, Genius, 
 like Love, is winged, but blind ; it feels, like the polypus, 
 the critical light, but sees it not. The self-critic lessens 
 indeed the number of faults, but also of beauties ; for the 
 time that would improve Genius shortens that in which 
 it Avould create ; as the one child nursed too long robs 
 the embryo of nourishment. Ohejam satis est, will you 
 exclaim ! 
 
 " I send you my book, not merely to remind you of 
 your kindness, but to invite your criticism ; that is, per- 
 haps, I am so selfish as not to requite your kindness, but 
 to hope for more. In your criticisms, or, which is the 
 same time, in your censure, I shall rejoice, because they 
 are not more painful than instructive, as Herr Cantor 
 Grossel in Schwarzenbach used to teach his pupils their 
 letters witli the same stick with which he whipped them. 
 
 " Decide, further, if the satire is not too bitter, though 
 I believe satire, like beer, derives its value from its bit- 
 terness ; but the bitterness sliould not \w. heightened, 
 7 J
 
 146 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 like that of the Bohemian beer, by the mixture with the 
 hops of soot and gall. Decide, finally, whether shimmer- 
 ing, modish bombast does not too often take the place of 
 genuine strength of imagination, and whether the whole 
 thing is not too much like certain birds, — the penguin, 
 with shining feathers, but little naked wings. This is cer- 
 tain, that, if the book is a bad satire upon others, it is the 
 best upon myself. But I shall write a book upon a book, 
 as Martorelli over an ancient inkstand emptied I know 
 not how many inkstands, for he wrote two great quarto 
 volumes upon it." 
 
 The Greenland Lawsuits were a collection of moral, 
 satirical sketches upon life, under the titles of " Litera- 
 ture," " Theology," " Family Pride," " Women and 
 Fops " ; of these last, at this time, the author could know 
 little. 
 
 Paul had at this time gained sufficient courage to 
 present himself personally, manuscript in hand, to the 
 Leipzig booksellers. It was refused by all, and he sent 
 it to the bookseller Voss, in Berlin. While he was wait- 
 ing the answer from Voss, he learnt well the severest 
 experience in physical existence, — that of a cold stovo 
 and an empty stomach. But a sunbeam soon entered his 
 cold and desolate apartment. On the last day of Decem- 
 ber, as he sat shivering in his chamber, a knock at the 
 door brought liim the joyful intelligence that Voss would 
 receive and furnish out this his lii-st birth of love, so that 
 it could appear with the other enfans perdus at the Eas- 
 ter fair in Leipzig. Through his whole life Jean Paul 
 looked back to this moment with the deepest emotions of 
 gratitude, — the moment when he received fifteen louis 
 d'ors,* the first-fruits of his industry and genius. 
 
 • A louis d'or is four dollars and fifty-seven cents.
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. I47 
 
 Vogel, to wliom he sent it, expressed the utmost de- 
 light and approbation of the book, and Paul answered : — 
 
 " Truth commands me to admire your letter, but I 
 must not listen to it alone, as you praise my book too 
 much. Did you forget that the same perfume that stim- 
 ulates the nose so agreeably brings clouds and tears into 
 tlie eves ? Your judgment of my book needs the other 
 half, the blame. You send the silver only earlier than 
 the pill, and the vapor of vinegar that perfumes comes 
 only a little earlier than the vinegar that bites. 
 
 " You ask after the plan of my life. Fate must first 
 project it. My prospects furnish none. I swim upon 
 occasion without rudder, but not without sails. I am no 
 longer a theologian, and I follow no science ex professo, 
 and all only so far as they promote my authorship. 
 Philosophy itself is indifferent to me, as I doubt of all. 
 But my heart is here so full, — so full that I am silent. 
 In future letters, and when I have more time, I will write 
 to you of my scepticism, and of my disgust at this foolish 
 masquerade and harlequinade that they call life. 
 
 " My Sketches have brought me fifteen louis d'ors. 
 
 The second part will be stronger and better than the 
 
 first, and will sell dearer. Farewell ! I know not why, 
 
 I am so melancholy that I could weep ! Oh ! we never 
 
 weep more sweetly than when we know not why we 
 
 weep. Love your friend. 
 
 " J. P. F. IJ." 
 
 This last extract allows us a glimpse into the real 
 feelings and dilficulties of Paul. He was writing face- 
 tious books, comic and satirical essays, while before him, 
 in the future, stood the grim spectre of Want. He was 
 trying to make others laugh, when he was so melancholy 
 that he could himself w^eep ; — like that poor comedian
 
 148 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 who was dying with melancholy, while he was exhausting 
 his brain to amuse the world. 
 
 We see also the origin of his peculiar manner of writ- 
 ing. It was not the spontaneous pouring out of an over- 
 full mind ; but his antitheses, and comparisons, and illus- 
 trations were souglit to embellish his ungrateful themes ; 
 his sparkling crystals were distilled with much care and 
 pains, and the poverty of his canvas thickly overlaid 
 with jewels and ornaments.
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 Extreme Poverty. — First Success. — Costume Controversy. 
 
 A.D. 1782, 
 ^t. 19. 
 
 jN the last extract I gave from Ricli 
 ter's letters, the reader is made ac 
 quainted with the real state of his finances, 
 and liis painful struggles with actual want. 
 His giving up all thoughts of a profession was as much 
 a matter of necessity as choice. The question was not 
 now, how he should live, but if he should exist at all. 
 As Carlyle expresses it, " he was at hand-grips w^ith 
 actual want." But at nineteen years of age, when he 
 wrestled wath poverty single-handed, there were added 
 to these outward difficulties also moral pains, partly over 
 the melancholy fate, partly over the sad and reckless in- 
 capacity of his brothers to take care of themselves. The 
 most hopeful threw himself from despair into the Saale, 
 and was drowned. Adam, tlie barber, left his mother, as 
 we have seen, and enlisted for a soldier, and Richter had 
 to reconcile her to a profession that at that time was 
 looked on with fear and aversion. But there lay within 
 him a giant's force, and stern, unbending resolution. "■ Pie 
 shook off the little evils of poverty and contempt and 
 pain, as the lion shakes the dew-drops from his mane." 
 
 With the fifteen louis d'ors, after paying his debts, he 
 was enabled to change his lodprinss to a summer-house in
 
 150 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 the garden of his landlord, consisting, indeed, of only one 
 small room, but where Paul could indulge the passion he 
 carried through life of studying in the open air. This 
 little circumstance led to a curious episode, which his 
 biographer calls his " costume martyrdom." Although 
 it continued through many years, it began about this 
 time. 
 
 Partly from necessity, partly from fancy, Paul had 
 adopted a peculiar style of dress, entirely at variance 
 with the fashion of the day. He writes to his mother: — 
 
 " As I can make my vests last no longer, I have de- 
 termined to do without ; and if you send me some over- 
 shirts, I can dispense with these vests. They must be 
 made with open collars a la Hamlet; but this nobody 
 will understand ; in short, — the breast must be open, so 
 that the bare throat may be seen. My hair also I have 
 had cut. (It was the day of cues and powder.) It is 
 pronounced by my friends more becoming, and it spares 
 me the expense of the hair-dresser. I have still some 
 locks a little curled." 
 
 As already mentioned, he had hired a small room that 
 opened into the Kornerchen garden, with the privilege 
 also of walking in the garden at all times, night or day. 
 The magister * Grafenheim had also hired the prin- 
 cipal building in this garden, which brought him into 
 near neighborhood with Paul. Paul, with good reason, 
 supposed that he had an equal right to enjoy all the 
 walks in the garden, and felt no disposition to imprison 
 himself in his little apartment. But the magister was 
 not of this opinion ; he chose to lun'c the garden wholly 
 to himself, and complained to tlie proprietor, requesting 
 him to restrain Paul's walks, and, moreover, complaining 
 
 * blaster of Arts, a title of dignity at the University.
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. IJI 
 
 of the oiFence against fashion and propriety in the bare 
 throat of his plebeian neighbor. 
 
 Paul defended himself with meek condescension in a 
 letter to the magister, in which he tells him, " that he 
 will no longer approach so near to his dwelling as he did 
 yesterday ; that he will visit the garden only at morning 
 and evening, so that he shall rarely be offended with a 
 dress that his convenience, health, and poverty oblige him 
 to wear. Moreover, he would, when walking in the gar- 
 den, cover his thi-oat, and that he should not be annoyed 
 by other students, as he had only one friend, who visited 
 him, and not the garden." 
 
 The magister was not satisfied with these four condi- 
 tions, and soon complained that they had bi^en infringed, 
 and that Paul had actually passed a certain statue that 
 stood without his limits. 
 
 At this Paul's patience vanished. He wrote again, 
 " that he revoked what he had said before ; that the 
 statue had nothing to do with his promises; that he 
 had hired the privilege of walking in the garden and 
 had paid for it ; and that he would walk whenever and 
 wherever he pleased, without fear of Herr Korner, or 
 the magister." And he closed with these remarkable 
 words : " You despise my mean name ; nevertheless, take 
 note of it, for you will not have done the latter long, be- 
 fore the former will not be in your power to do." But, 
 at the same time, with a generous spirit of accommodation, 
 Paul made this proposal : " 1 will freely consent to leave 
 the garden, where the satisfaction of one disturbs the en- 
 joyment of another, on condition that I pay for an apart- 
 ment that I had hoped to enjoy for half a year the rent of 
 three months only. It depends on you, therefore, whether 
 you will constrain Herr Korner to accept these condi-
 
 152 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL, 
 
 tions." They were accepted ; and Paul evacuated the 
 garden, and returned to his old room at the Three Roses, 
 Peterstrass. 
 
 Paul's martyrdom was not at an end. He went down 
 to Hof, to visit his mother, where his fomily were not in 
 great favor, and his appearance made the most astonish- 
 ing impression, not only upon the inhabitants of the little 
 city, but upon his own family. So important, indeed, was 
 the matter considered, that bis firm friend, the pastor 
 Vogel, remonstrated most earnestly in letters, that are 
 yet preserved, against this singularity. Paul seems to 
 have been partly sensible that it was affectation, and, 
 mild-tempered as he was, lie would not yield in this par- 
 ticular, but \*ent about a la Hamlet for seven years. 
 
 Some extracts from letters of this period will shoAV the 
 course of this costume controversy. 
 
 Vogel wrote to him : " You value only the inward, not 
 the outward, — the kernel, not tlie husk. But, with your 
 permission, is not the lohole composed of the foi-m and 
 the matter ? Is one disfigured, so is the other. You 
 condemn probably the philosophy of Diogenes, that sep- 
 arated its hero so much from other men that it placed 
 him in a tub. How can you justify yourself, if your 
 philosophy serves you in the same way ? No, my friend, 
 you must open your eyes and see that you are not the 
 only son of earth, but, like the ants in their ant-hUls, you 
 live in tlie tumult of life 
 
 " Would you not hold that painter unwise who sliould 
 offend in costume, — paint his Romans in sleeves and 
 curled hair ; the person of a man with petticoat and open 
 bosom? Oh! that is not to be endured! Yet, a couple 
 of proverbs, — 'Swim not against the tide'; 'Among 
 wolves, learn to howl.' * Vulgar proverbs ! ' will you say.
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 153 
 
 Yes, but elevated wisdom. The true philosopliy is, not 
 for others to adapt themselves to us, but for us to adapt 
 ourselves to others. Whoever forgets this groat axiom, 
 advances few steps without stumbling. But what do you 
 seek ? In the midst of Germany to become a Briton ? 
 Do you not in tliis way say, ' Put on your spectacles, ye 
 little people, and behold ! see that you cannot be what I 
 am.' Ah, to speak thus your modesty forbids ! Avoid 
 everything that in the smallest degree lessens your value 
 among your contemporaries." 
 
 To this gentle remonstrance Paul answered : " I answer 
 your letter willingly, for the sake of its argument, which 
 your good heart, rather tliau your good head, has dictated. 
 Your proverbs are not reasons, or if they are, they prove 
 too much, — for if I would swim with the stream, this 
 stream would often make shipAvreck of my virtue ; the 
 kingdom of vice is as great and extensive as the kingdom 
 of fashion ; and if I must howl with the wolves, why 
 should I not rob with them ? ' If the sliell is injured, 
 the kernel suffers also,' you say. But wherefore ? Let 
 us decide what does injure the shell. You consider that 
 an evil to Diogenes that others hold an advantage. Did 
 the so-called injury rob this great man of his philosophy, 
 his good heart, his wit, his virtue ? It robbed him not, 
 — but it gave him peace, independence of outward judg- 
 ments, freedom from tormenting wants, and the incapacity 
 of being wounded ; and with this consciousness he could 
 venture upon the punishment of every vice. Great man ! 
 Thank God that thou wert born in a country where they 
 wondered at thy wisdom, instead of, as at present, punish- 
 ing it. Fools would commit the only wise man to a mad- 
 house ; but, like Socrates, he would ennoble his prison. 
 
 " ' The painter would be ridiculous in offending against 
 7*
 
 154 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 costume.' This is true, but more witty than applicable to 
 me. I need only say, that the painter of costume is not 
 the greatest in his art ; he is great whose pencil creates, 
 not after the tailor, but after God ; paints bodies, not 
 dresses. The painter's creations can only please through 
 form, which is the shell ; and am I designed for that ? Is 
 it my destination, with my organized ugliness, to please ? 
 Scarcely, — if I would. 
 
 " But enough. I hold the constant regai'd that we pay 
 in all our actions to the judgments of others as the poison 
 of our peace, our reason, and our virtue. Upon this 
 slave's chain have I long filed, but I scarcely hope ever 
 to break it." 
 
 This humorous controversy was kept up for some 
 months on paper, as games of chess are played in Hol- 
 land, without either party saying check to the king. At 
 last Paul consented, as he called it, to inJndl his person, 
 and put an end to this tragi-comical affair, by the follow- 
 ing circular, addressed to his friends. 
 
 "ADVERTISEMENT. 
 
 " The undersigned begs to give notice, that whereas 
 cropt hair has as many enemies as red hair, and said 
 enemies of the hair are likewise enemies of the person 
 it grows upon ; whereas, further, such a fashion is in no 
 respect Christian, since otherwise Christian persons would 
 adopt it ; and whereas especially, the undersigned has suf- 
 fered no less from liis hair than Absalom did from his, 
 though on contrary grounds ; and whereas it has been 
 notified to him that the public proposed to send him into 
 hi? grave, since the hair grows thei*e without scissors : he 
 hereby gives notice that he will not willingly consent to
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 155 
 
 such extremities. He would, therefore, inform the noble, 
 learned, and discerning ])ublic in general, that the under- 
 signed proposes on Sunday next to appear in the various 
 important streets of Hof with a false, short cue ; and with 
 this cue, as with a magnet or magic rod, to possess him- 
 self forcibly of the affection of all and sundry, be they 
 
 who they may. 
 
 "J. P. F. E."
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 Love Passage. — Second Volume of Greenland Lawsuits 
 
 Pressing Poverty. — Flight from Leipzig. — Domestic Cir- 
 cumstances IN HoF. — Book of Devotion. 
 
 A.D. 17S3, 
 JEt. 20. 
 
 X the summer of 1783, after the 
 puljlication of the first part of the 
 " Greenland Lawsuits," Paul went to Ilof to 
 pass the vacation with his mother, and there 
 occurred a little love adventure, which must not be omit- 
 ted in an account of his life. 
 
 Instead of a universal acknowledgment of the value of 
 his book, it received only partial admiration, and from 
 o?ie especially, who appears under the name of Sophia. 
 This she expressed with so much enthusiasm, that Paul's 
 susceptible heart was instantly warmed, although, instead 
 of propitiating his beloved, as formerly, with sugared al- 
 monds and drawings of kings, he sent her volumes of rare 
 extracts, which he had made out of the latest literature. 
 Some love billets were exchanged, and it went even so 
 far that the young lady presented Paul witli a ring ; but 
 he was too jjoor to offer her anything in return but his 
 empty silhouette. 
 
 Upon his return to Leipzig he waited nearly a month, 
 and when he wrote the letter was fdled witli trivial ex- 
 cuses for not writing sooner. The young lady remon-
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 157 
 
 strated, and demanded back her ring. Paul answered : 
 " Every sort of dissimulation is hateful to me, therefore 
 it shall be Avhully removed from the answer to your late 
 letter. The letter that punislies my negligence pleases 
 me better than the one that pardons it, and you appear 
 to love me better when you are angry with me than when 
 you are reconciled. The letter contains the silhouette of 
 your head, but not that of your heart. The light of the 
 one has taken the place of the warmth of the other, and 
 I hear your reason speak in it, but not your love. Shall 
 the warmth of your love depart with the warmth of sum- 
 mer ? Tills suspicion your next letter will destroy or 
 confirm. The ring that I sent back yesterday, and the 
 want of which you so sadly regret, you need not send me 
 again. Not the ring, but the form it gilded was valuable 
 to me, and such an image, yes, a better likeness, you can 
 always present me." 
 
 This letter remained unanswered ; and Paul, whose 
 fancy represented the good he was losing in more charm- 
 ing colors, or who perhaps felt that he had not met the 
 young lady's love with the warmth it deserved, wrote 
 again : — 
 
 " The curtain is torn upon which so many hopes were 
 painted, and our love will fade with the flowers that put 
 forth their short bloom at the same period. This, and 
 nothing else, can I understand from your neglect to an- 
 swer my last letter 
 
 " We will not part from each other with reproaches. I 
 will leave you as we leave the grave that we love, and 
 must ever love ! You can take your love from me, but 
 not your image ; that will endure longer in my heart than 
 mine in yours. You cannot deprive me of the happiness 
 I have enjoyed, for the recollection of it will daily be re-
 
 158 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 peated. May he who has taken my place, oi' who will 
 
 take it, reward you for the happiness that you have given 
 
 me, and may you reward him by loving him better than 
 
 you have him who now is nothing more to you than, 
 
 " Yours, &c. 
 
 "J. P. F. R.\ 
 
 Thus philosophically, after asking for the return of his 
 letters, and telling her she could use his silkoiietie for 
 papillottes, ended the love passage between Richter and 
 the maiden of Hof, called Sophia. How different from 
 his later loves ! His letters to her are stiff, cold, and 
 poor in thought compared with letters to his male friends; 
 and when we recall that childish love for the little peasant 
 girl, whose first stolen kiss seemed ever to glow in his 
 memory, and when Ave think of the glowing, but pure light 
 in which he could paint a higher and more spiritual love, 
 so that he kindled the hearts of the German youth, and 
 made himself the idol of the women of Germany, we can- 
 not avoid the conclusion that the attachment was chiefly 
 on the side of the lady, and that Jean Paul suffered very 
 little from the disappointment of his hopes. 
 
 We can easily understand why the mother of Sophia 
 — for she was so fortunate as to have a mother — should 
 cut short the course of a love that promised only starva- 
 tion to botli parties. But that the young lady still cher- 
 ished a lingering attachment for Paul appears from her 
 refusal to give up the book of extracts, that he had only 
 intended to lend her. In December he writes to his 
 mother : — 
 
 " In Hof is a blue bound writing-book of mine, with 
 extracts from the latest authors. I gave it to Sophia to 
 read. Pray forget not to demand it back." His mother 
 did not succeed. The book was retained, and Paul wrote
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 159 
 
 again : " Sly book in ITof is only one copied out of other 
 authors. I will ask no more for it. I present it to 
 Mademoiselle with all my heart, and she knows Avell I 
 would also present myself" 
 
 Paul returned to Leipzig after the summer vacation, 
 with the most extraordinary hopes as to his literary suc- 
 cess, and consequently his introduction into the elevated 
 circles of Leipzig society. The absence of a court, and 
 of an arrogant aristocracy, together with the independence 
 of the commercial class, and the great number of young 
 literary aspirants, produced more equality of condition in 
 this than in many of the German cities. Successful talent, 
 or distinction in any art, was then in Leipzig a passport 
 to the most distinguished society ; and music, the passion 
 of the Germans, was the medium of union in all classes. 
 The circumstance, also, that the public offices were gen- 
 erally held by learned men created a rare esteem for 
 literature in a mercantile city like Leipzig. 
 
 Paul had seen only the outside of concerts, balls, the 
 theatre ; he had marked the charming exterior of the 
 beautiful women of the upper class, and his fancy painted 
 all these objects in ever-changing and ever-glowing colors. 
 The touching naivete with which he has described the 
 longing for the enjoyment of these scenes, in one of hi8 
 novels, does not exceed the vividness of his own desires 
 to be admitted to them.* 
 
 He had sold the second volume of his " Greenland Law- 
 suits" to Voss, at the Michaelmas fair, for one hundred 
 and twenty-six dollars, and he was at this time zealously 
 employed upon the third. 
 
 The singular infatuation of Richter, in imagining his 
 genius adapted to satire, was not yet enlightened, al- 
 
 * In the character of Walt, in tlie Flegeljakrt.
 
 l6o LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 though this second volume suffered more than the first 
 from poverty of materials. Strange that Richter should 
 believe, that, with the limited knowledge of mankind that 
 a secluded village at the foot of the* Fichtelgebirge and 
 a student's garret could yield him, without characters, 
 without action of any kind, he could write satires-that 
 would interest the reading public. Even Montaigne 
 could not carry out his satires without living examples, 
 and dramatic conversations with himself; and Carlyle, in 
 our own day, has introduced a shadowy dramatis personce, 
 in order to give a local habitation in the memory to his 
 beautiful satire of tlie Tailor. 
 
 Paul, as usual, sent his second volume to his friend 
 Vogel, assuring him " that, as it was smaller and dearer 
 than the other, it must be better." Not so thouglit 
 Vogel, and he had the honesty and candor to answer: 
 " Your second part will be read only by critics, and 
 will not be relished or understood by the rest of the 
 world. Whatever gives us trouble, that we are obliged 
 to see through a telescope, or to dig out of the depths of 
 the earth, fails to please. It may be heavy gold ; but 
 the tinkling money, that gives us our inheritance in the 
 easiest way, is more desirable." And, it must be con- 
 fessed, that the dearest lovers of Jean Paul, of the 
 present day, who read these satires as the first spiritual 
 embryo of their favorite, find them heavy and uninter- 
 esting. 
 
 For his third volume, which was now finished, Paul 
 could find neither editor nor puljlislier. He presented it 
 to booksellers' fairs and literai-y collectors in vain. Ne- 
 cessity at length suggested the only alternative, to send 
 it, with letters stating his necessities, to distinguished and 
 learned men. But he had not the irood fortune that
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. l6l 
 
 Crabbe has so well described, when he presented his 
 poems at the door of the magnanimous Burke, and 
 walked the whole night in anxious uncertainty as to their 
 reception. Paul received no answers to his letters, or 
 was repulsed, unheard, from every door. He wrote short 
 essays for periodicals and magazines ; but there was a 
 singular virtue in the readers of that day in Germany, 
 and Jean Paul could create no taste for satire. 
 
 While his fond expectations and unripe hopes were 
 fast falling to the ground, the money he had received for 
 the second volume was consuming also, and the poverty 
 of the youth was again as pressing as ever. In this 
 necessity he had no other alternative but to return to 
 Hof. Under the same roof with his mother, their united 
 housekeeping would be less burdensome to Paul than 
 their separate expenditure. He had long since given up 
 his evening meal ; and his supper of dried prunes he ate 
 walking in the Kuchen garden. 
 
 For about half a year Paul had been in debt to his 
 victualler for his midday frugal meal, and she gave him 
 not a moment's peace, but seasoned his small pittance 
 with the daily demand, " Now, Herr Richter, has not 
 your golden ship arrived ? " At last, in despair, he re- 
 solved to fly. His friend Ocrthel bore his packed trunk 
 to the spot where the post-wagon would pass ; and Paul, 
 who imagined tliat, on account of his peculiar dress, and 
 especially the manner of wearing his hair, he was known 
 to the whole city, purchased, with liis last groschen, 
 a false cue, which he attached carefully under his hat 
 behind, and withdrew liiraself from the city, where he 
 had been nearly lost, as, to use his own expression, Mun- 
 chausen drew himself from the swamp. 
 
 In the manner in which Paul left Leipzig, he created 
 
 K
 
 l6l LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 the only real adventure of his youth, and the simplicity 
 of his proceedings shows the remarkable naivete of his 
 character. He thought it necessary to disguise himself 
 in a city where scarcely ten persons knew him, and in 
 the twilight, to follow his friend, who carried his portman- 
 teau. Even to his last days Richter loved to relat^ his 
 flight, as he called it, out of Leipzig. 
 
 As soon as Paul found himself under his mother's roof, 
 he wrote to his friend Oerthel, who remained at the Uni- 
 versity : " I send thy mantle back ; and, merely on ac- 
 count of the cold wind, of which in Leipzig I had formed 
 no idea, do I owe thee more gratitude for this, and for the 
 over-hose, than I could have believed possible. Speaking 
 without hyperbole, to them I owe it that I was not 
 wholly congealed, instead of having only my right hand 
 frozen, on my arrival. I can scarcely write, and should 
 this inflexibility, like that of all frozen limbs, return 
 every winter, I shall be constrained to put off wTiting 
 satires until the summer, and be like those porcupine 
 men in London, who can only embrace their friends in 
 moulting time. I journeyed under Herman's name, and 
 first gave my own at my own door. I heard, on the 
 way, one peasant say to another, who was under the 
 strict government of his wife, ' You have found your 
 Mann in her.' I took it merely for a bon-mot. 
 
 " Notliing can embellish a beautiful lace more than a 
 narrow band, tliat indicates a small wound, drawn cross- 
 wise over the brow. I saw this on a beautiful girl on 
 the way. One should try, from time to time, to give his 
 wife a little wound on the forehead, that she might be 
 obliged to bind her brow with tliis pretty ornament." 
 
 Tliere is an amusing letter from Paul to his friend 
 Oerthel, written directly after his flight from Leipzig.
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 163 
 
 " Through negligence, not of my own, this letter and 
 thy mantle comes to thee a post-day later than they 
 should. My visit to thy dear parents could not be more 
 welcome than at this time, for I relieved the anxiety that 
 your last letter had caused, and which had been increased 
 by certain noises, falls and blows, that for some time past 
 had come from thy chamber. Would that through tliis 
 spectre appearance thy fatal unbelief could be abated ; 
 for I am persuaded that if you went so far as to believe 
 in spirits and in the Devil, a few steps further would 
 bring you to a belief in God. 
 
 " By this occurrence, the suspicion came to me whether 
 certain spirits do not foretell other tilings than bodUy 
 calamities. Why should they not inform us of the indis- 
 position of the soul ? I propose these two questions, as I 
 am in fact of opinion that the noises and blows that came 
 from thy chamber do not prophesy the sickness of thy 
 body, but the bad state of thy soul. It is certain at least 
 that they must mean something. 
 
 " I close this letter with the hope that you will not 
 treat me as usual in our correspondence, but that you will 
 as seldom as possible send me a line." 
 
 Its close proves the sportive and ironical sense of the 
 whole letter. 
 
 The darkest period of our hero's life was a.d. 1784, 
 when he fled from Leipzig and went in disguise '^'" ^^' 
 to Ilof. The lawsuit had stripped his mother of the Little 
 property she inhei'ited from the doth-weaver, and she 
 had been obliged to part with the respectable homestead 
 where the honest man had carried on his labors. She 
 was now living with one or more of Paul's brothers, in a 
 small tenement, containing but one apartment, where
 
 164 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 cooking, washing, cleaning, spinning, and all the beehive 
 labors of domestic life must go on together. 
 
 To this small and overcrowded apartment, whicli hence- 
 forth must be Paul's only study, he brought his twelve 
 volumes of extracts, a head that in itself contained a 
 library, a tender and sympathizing heart, a true, high- 
 minded, self-sustaining spirit. His exact situation was 
 this. The success of the first and second volumes of his 
 Greenland Lawsuits had encouraged him to Avrite a 
 third, — a volume of satires, under the name of Selec- 
 lections from the Papers of the Devil ; but for this we 
 have seen he had strained every nerve in vain to find a 
 publisher. This manuscript, therefore, formed part of 
 the little luggage, whicli his friend Oerthel had smuggled 
 out of Leipzig. It was winter, and from his window he 
 looked out upon the cold, empty, frozen street of the lit- 
 tle city of Hof, or he was obliged to be a prisoner, with- 
 out, as he says, " the prisoners' fare of bread and water, 
 for he had only the latter ; and if a gulden found its way 
 into the house, the jubilee was such that the windows 
 were nearly broken with joy." At the same time, he 
 was under the ban of his costume martyrdom ; this he 
 could have laughed at, and reformed ; but hunger and 
 thirst were actual evils, and when of prisoner's food he 
 had only the thinner part, he could well exclaim, as Car- 
 lyle has said, — 
 
 " Night it must be e'er Fricdland's star will beam." 
 " Without was no help, no counsel, but there lay a giant 
 force witliin ; and so from the depths of that sori-ow and 
 abasement his lietter soul rose purified and invincible, 
 like Hercules from his long labors." 
 
 " "What is poverty," he said, at this time, " that a man 
 should whine under it? It is but like the pain of piercing
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 165 
 
 the ears of a maiden, and you hang precious jewels in 
 the wound." 
 
 The very day of Paul's arrival at home, the 16th 
 of November, he made known to his friend Vogel, the 
 pastor of Rehau, liis return. He seems to have felt some 
 timidity about presenting himself at his house, as he had 
 been a negligent correspondent. But there was no rea- 
 son. Vogel answered immediately. " I am so rejoiced at 
 your arrival in Hof, that for joy I cannot contain myself, 
 much less write a letter. Hof is only two hours distant 
 from Rehau, and in the morning I shall see my best 
 friend there, unless in the morning, at riglit early day- 
 light, you step into the old apartment." 
 
 The intercourse of the two friends was immediately 
 established on the most familiar footing. Vogel was him- 
 self an author, and his manuscripts were sent to Paul for 
 his criticism and correction. In one of them Paul ac- 
 cuses his friend of stealing five comparisons from him, — 
 fifty would scarcely have been missed from Richter's, at 
 tliis time, exuberantly ornamented style. 
 
 As Vogel's library had been the place where Paul had 
 become his own instructor, he immediately resumed his 
 rights there, and there w^as a continual sending back- 
 wards and forwards of books, manuscripts, and letters, 
 and Paul's younger brother was tlie INIercury. Paul was 
 also a favorite with the Frau Anna, the wife of Vogel, 
 and as the philosophy of hunger was studied so thoroughly 
 at home, we may easily imagine that she took a womanly 
 interest in providing for Richter, when he visited them, 
 something more than the intellectual food of the library. 
 That he had more pressing wants, the note of the 25th 
 of December will show. 
 
 " You are the Pope from whom the destitute souls in
 
 l66 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 Hof receive a dispensation from fasting. You go further 
 than tlie Pope. You give yourself the food, that you per- 
 mit. This time I pray for the Heercticorum Cntalogus ; 
 Selisaire oberauch ; Lightfooti Horce Hebraicce, &c. Solo- 
 mon asked for wisdom rather than riches, and received 
 both. I imitate him in this letter, — may I also receive 
 his answer ! 
 
 " My mother is in the greatest perplexity. This fes- 
 tival's gifts, and the tax falling at the same time, have 
 •wholly exhausted her. Ah, dear friend, if I could only 
 help her ! I mean if you could do me and her so great 
 a favor ! If from your church income you could lend us 
 about twenty-five gulden, secured upon a safe mortgage ! 
 Dear friend, if you can, — Do not desert me ! " 
 
 The request must have been granted, for, soon after, 
 Paul wrote in this sportive manner : — 
 
 " I have no news, except that the destruction of Hof 
 by an earthquake has been prophesied, and appears to be 
 confidently expected. It is to be hoped, in this short room 
 for repentance, we may be all truly converted. I shall 
 be well satisfied if I do not arrive in heaven so soon, for 
 I would willingly, before, enjoy one more visit at Rehau, 
 where I live in such freedom that I am not obliged from 
 politeness to speak, if I would rather be silent. If we 
 are neither swallowed nor shaken, I will visit you next 
 week, and frizzle the heads of your spiritual children. . . . 
 
 " Locke ! if thy spirit should overlook this letter while 
 the Herr Vogel is reading it, influence him for the best, 
 and induce him to send me thy work upon the Human 
 Understanding, to improve my own ; for I know well thy 
 spirit powerfully inspires Jiis. (If I were in your place, 
 I would not turn the leaf, for, dear heaven ! what can 
 come now but something that will not please you.)
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 167 
 
 " Having done with Locke, I must turn to some one 
 else, and it is happy for me that the Saint Anna * comes 
 to my help, who, according to the Catholic faith, can en- 
 rich. Truly, Saint Anna, tell me thyself, is it suitable 
 for me to pray again to the Ilerr Pastor Vogel (who has 
 already done so much for the nourishment of the two 
 elementary parts of my existence), to promise me again, 
 in the name of my motlier, eight or ten gulden from the 
 revenue of God's house ? At least it is more suitable for 
 the Saint Anna, that she should present such a prayer in 
 the name of benevolence. Thou art far holier than I, a 
 poor satire writer, and he can hardly deny thee. It is 
 enough that thou art a woman ! 
 
 " If, now, the ill-humored Church Fathers should step 
 into the room, use all thy power, whatever may be the 
 reliques, to work a miracle. Give to my mother, in the 
 eyes of the old Fathers of the Church, the form of the 
 Herr Pastor ; this is very easy, — you will only have to 
 draw upon her a pair of hos6n and a morning gown, and 
 furnish her with a good stock of heterodoxy, reason, and 
 gayety. 
 
 "P. S. Should the Saint Anna forget to say to you, 
 that the wliole thing is on account of an extremely press- 
 ing circumstance, tliat will last only as long as the moon, 
 I do it herewith." 
 
 I have quoted these letters that the reader may see 
 in what friendly relations Richter lived with the family 
 at Rehau ; and although there was an attempt to poison 
 this mutually confidential intercourse by the slanders of 
 some evil-minded persons in Ilof, Paul's noble character 
 was too well appreciated by the pastor and his wife for 
 them to succeed. 
 
 * The sportive title of the Frau Vogel.
 
 l68 LIFE OF JP:AN PAUL. 
 
 The distance from Hof to Vogel's house was only a 
 two hours' walk, and the protecting Saint Anna would 
 not fail on a Sunday or holiday, when she expected the 
 welcome Ilofer friend, to Offer those graceful and kind 
 attentions that only a woman, let alone a saint, knows 
 how to bestow. Thus Paul continued almost without a 
 momentary interruption of his cheerfulness, to study and 
 write, never giving up the hope, the trusting confidence, 
 that what he so painfully wrought out in concealment 
 and poverty would one day appear in the full light of 
 fame. 
 
 Two books of this period, equally curious for the 
 strange circumstances under whidi they were produced, 
 remain. The mother's record of her gains from spinning 
 cotton, which she carried far into the night, and no doubt 
 often wetted with her tears ; * and Paul's " Little Book 
 of Devotion," f composed also in the solitary night, when 
 he strengthened his high-hearted resolution by self-com- 
 munion and humble resignation to the will of God. A 
 few extracts will show the spirit of this book. 
 
 OF PAIN. 
 
 Every evU is an occasion and a teacher of resolution. 
 Every disagreeable emotion is a proof that I have been 
 faithless to my resolutions. 
 
 An evil vanishes if I do not ask after it. Think of a 
 worse situation than that in which thou art. 
 
 Not to the evil, but to myself, do I owe my pain. 
 Epictetus was not unhappy ! 
 
 * Of this hard-earned money twelve sliilliiigs, nearly half, went to 
 pay for Samuel's new boots. 
 t Andaclitsbticlikin.
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 169 
 
 Vanity, insensibility, and custom, make one steadikst. 
 Wherefore hot virtue still more ? 
 
 Never say, if you had not these sorrows, that you would 
 bear others better. 
 
 What is sixty years' pain to eternity ? 
 
 Necessity, if it cannot be altered, becomes resignation. 
 
 OF GLORY. 
 
 Most men judge so miserably ; why would you be 
 praised by a child? 
 
 No one would praise you in a beggar's frock ; be not 
 proud of the esteem that is given to your coat. 
 
 Do not expect more esteem from othei-s because you 
 deserve more, but reflect that they will expect still more 
 merit in yourself. 
 
 Do not seek to justify all thy actions. \'^alue nothing 
 mci'ely because it is thy own, and look not always upon 
 thyself. 
 
 Do not wait for extraordinary opportunities for good 
 actions, but make use of common situations. A long-con- 
 tinued walk is better than a short flight. 
 
 Never act in the heat of emotion ; let resison answer 
 first. 
 
 Look upon every day as the whole of life ; not merely 
 as a section, and enjoy the present without wishing through 
 haste to spring on to another lying-before-thee section. 
 
 Seek to accjuire tliat virtue in a month to which thou 
 feelest the least inclined. 
 
 It betrays a greater soul to answer a Satire with patience 
 rather than with wit. 
 
 We never think of tlie sorrow of our dreams ; where- 
 fore should we in the dream of life ? 
 8
 
 170 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 If thou wouldst be free, joyful, and calm, take the only 
 means that cannot be affected by accident, — Virtue. 
 
 This little book, which should be called a manual 
 of practical philosophy rather than a book of devo- 
 tion, strengthened Paul's cheerful stoicism, to which he 
 added devout prayer and strenuous exertion. " Evil," 
 said he, "is like the nightmare; the instant you bestir 
 yourself it has already ended." His strength and energy, 
 and at last his trust, increased, and was established on 
 the immovable foundations of faith and truth. 
 
 In this chapter I have scarcely given an idea of the 
 hard necessities of Richter in this little over-crowded 
 house in the midst of his poor family. In Leipzig he 
 had to contend only with his own necessities ; but here 
 he had at every moment the spectacle of his pain-suffer- 
 ing mother, his sick brother, and of poverty so great, that 
 he says of prisoners' fare, they sometimes had only the 
 water. When, in later years, his love of salad was re- 
 marked, he referred it to that time in Hof when the food 
 of the family consisted of dry bread and salad ; and once 
 he entreats from his friend, as of the utmost necessity, the 
 loan of two or three gulden. 
 
 In the midst of this irksome poverty, under the dark 
 shutting out of hope, the youth of two and twenty had 
 the strength of mind to persevere in his resolution to be- 
 come an author. It was the point of time when to reach 
 the ideal that filled his soul took such entii-e possession 
 of him that he scarcely noticed his painful surroundings. 
 As Otto said of him, " In this, which to another would 
 have been the most unfortunate period of life, Paul pos- 
 sessed a self-reliance, a peace and joy of soul, tliat only 
 trust in God could have sustained in the highest and 
 h()li«'.>Jt efforts."
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 Christian Otto. — Studies. — Herman. — His Death. 
 
 MMEDIATELY after Richter's re- a.d. nss, 
 turn to Hof, as mentioned in the last -^'- 22. 
 chapter, he formed that remarkable friendship 
 with Otto, which continued without a moment's 
 interruption through the life of the poet, and, on the part 
 of Otto, it did not then cease. Grief for the loss of Richter 
 hastened his own death, and put an end to his efforts to 
 perpetuate the memory of his friend in the memoir that 
 has till this time furnished the materials for our biog- 
 raphy. 
 
 In the midst of the hard necessities that had driven 
 Richter from Leipzig, his victualler followed him to Hof, 
 and presented her demand for the frugal repasts she had 
 furnished. Paul was in the greatest perplexity. It was 
 impossible to send the woman, who had come this distance 
 on foot, empty away, and so large a demand was beyond 
 the help of his friend, the Pastor Vogel of Rehau. In 
 his distress he turned to the only men in Hof who would 
 not have repulsed him from their doors ; tliese were the 
 two brothers Otto, who from this time united themselves 
 to him with intimate sympathy. They became surety for 
 the whole demand, and sent the woman back with a con-
 
 172 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 siderable sum. This tormenting spirit, however, did not 
 inform Paul that the brothers had become surety for 
 the debt, and they had too much delicacy to mention it ; 
 so that every fine day this inexperienced debtor was 
 alarmed with the dread of the appearance of his inex- 
 orable creditor. 
 
 Christian Otto was the son of the Vesper preacher* 
 in Hof, who, from his ascetic character, and the severe 
 earnestness of liis preaching, was called the Strafprediger. 
 Christian had been sent to the University at Leipzig ; he 
 returned after the death of his father, and occupied the 
 same house with his mother and sisters in Hof. He had 
 been destined to the ministry, as " the theological books 
 were all ready for him in his father's study " ; but his 
 taste led him to devote himself to general science, and as 
 the circumstances of the family were easy, he was able to 
 follow his inclination. In all other respects the circum- 
 stances of the two friends were alike, and served to knit 
 them in the bonds of the closest friendship. 
 
 The elements of Otto's character were warm sympathy, 
 unequalled tenderness, and self-sacrificing love, together 
 witli severe integrity and steadfastness of purpose. The 
 penetration and discrimination of his mind, together with 
 his sympathy in all that was highest and noblest in litera- 
 ture and in life, singularly fitted him for the ofl:ice of a 
 critic, and in after years, when Kichter had found i)ub- 
 lishers for his works, he never printed a line that liad 
 not passed tmce through the ordeal of Otto's perusal and 
 criticism. 
 
 As these years, spent with his mother in Hof, were the 
 most uninterruptedly studious of Richter's life, it seems 
 
 * The afternoon preacher in Protestant churches is called the Ve»per 
 prediger. Strafprediger, — repentance-preacher.
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 173 
 
 tlie place to give some account of the manner in which he 
 pursued his studies. That plan must be a good one, and 
 of use to others, of which he could say, " Of one thing I 
 am certain, I have made as much out of myself as could 
 be made of the stuff, and no man should require more." 
 
 First in importance, he aimed, in the rules he formed 
 for himself, at a just division of time and power, and 
 he never permitted himself, from the first, to spend his 
 strength upon anything useless. He so managed his 
 capital, that the future should pay him an ever-increas- 
 ing interest on the present. The nourishment of his 
 mind was drawn from three great sources, — living Na- 
 ture, in connection with human life ; the world of books ; 
 a,nd the inner world of thought : these he considered the 
 raw material given him to work up. 
 
 We have already mentioned his manuscript library. 
 In his fifteenth year, before he entered the Hof gymna- 
 sium, he had made many quarto volumes, containing hun- 
 dreds of pages of closely written extracts from all the 
 celebrated works he could borrow, and from the periodi- 
 cals of the day. In this way he had formed a repertory 
 of many of the sciences. For if, in the beginning, when 
 he thought himself destined to the study of theology, liis 
 extracts were from philosophical theology, the second 
 volume contained natural history, poetry, and, in succes- 
 sion, medicine, jurisprudence, and universal science. He 
 had also anticipated one of the results of modern book- 
 making. He wrote a collection of what are now called 
 hand-books, of geography, natural history, follies, good and 
 bad names, interesting facts, comicjU occurrences, touch- 
 ing incidents, &c. 
 
 During this residence with his mother in her poor 
 cottage, he also wrote almost daily to Oerthel in Leipzig.
 
 174 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 He wrote letters as though they were books, and his 
 books are written in the style of letters. He kept also a 
 book in which he transcribed his letters, his thoughts, and 
 a play of wit for future use in writing books. One writer 
 says in German phrase, " that he was as thought-thrifty 
 and thought-storing as he was thought-wealthy." 
 
 At this time he says, Tlie trutli is more to him than 
 its ornament, the thought more than its imagery, and he 
 writes in a simple, unornamented style. At length, he 
 passed from philosophy to poetry, not immediately, but in 
 circuitous ways, through the thorny and stinging path of 
 the satirist to the more common, the romantic poetry of 
 the novelist. 
 
 He observed Nature as a great book from which he 
 was to make extracts, and carefully collected all the facts 
 that bore the stamp of a contriving mind, whose adapta- 
 tion he could see, or only anticipate, and formed a book 
 which bore the simple title " Nature." 
 
 When he meditated a new work, the first thing was to 
 stitch together a blank book, in which he sketched the 
 outlines of his characters, the principal scenes, thoughts 
 to be worked in, &c., and called it '' Qnamj for Ifesperics" 
 " Quarry for Titan," &c. One of his biographers has 
 given us such a book, containing his studies for Titan, 
 which occupies seventy closely printed duodecimo pages. 
 
 Richtcr began also in his earliest youth to form a dic- 
 tionary, and continued it through the whole of his literary 
 life. In this he wrote down synonymes, and all the 
 shades of meaning of which a word was susceptible. For 
 one word he had found more than two hundred syno- 
 nymes. Add to this mass of writing, tliat he copied all 
 his letters, and it is surprising how any time remained. 
 He made it a rule to give but one half of the day to writ-
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 175 
 
 ing, the other remained for the_ invention of his various 
 works, which he accomplished while walking in the open 
 air. 
 
 These long walks through valley and over mountain 
 steeled his body to bear all vicissitudes of weather, and 
 added to his knowledge of atmospheric changes, so that 
 he was called by his townsmen the weather-prophet. He 
 is described by one who met him on the hills, with open 
 breast and flying hair, singing as he went, while he held 
 a book in his hand. Richter at this time was slender, 
 with a thin, pale face, a high, nobly formed brow, around 
 which curled fine blond hair. His eyes were a clear soft 
 blue, but capable of an intense fire, like sudden lightning. 
 He had a well-formed nose, and, as his biographer ex- 
 presses it, " a lovely lip-kissing mouth." He wore a 
 loose green coat and straw hat, and was always accom- 
 panied by his dog. 
 
 As Richter from every walk returned to the little 
 household apartment where his mother carried on her 
 never-ceasing female labors, where half of every day he 
 sat at his desk, he became acquainted vnth all the 
 thoughts, all the conversation, the whole circle of the re- 
 lations of the humble society in Hof. He saw the value 
 and significance of the smallest things. The joys, the 
 sorrows, the loves and aversions, the whole of life, in this 
 Tenier's picture passed before him. He himself was a 
 principal figure in this limited circle. He sat with Plato 
 in his hand, while his mother scattered fresh sand on the 
 floor for Sunday, or added some small luxury to the table 
 on days of festival. His hardly earned groschen went to 
 purchase the goose for Martinmas, while he dreamed of 
 his future glory among distinguished men. Long years 
 he was one of this humble society. He did not approach
 
 176 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 it as other poets have clone from time to time, to study 
 for purposes of art the liumbler classes ; he felt himself 
 one of them, and in this school he learnt that sympathy 
 with humanity Avhich has made liim emphatically in Ger- 
 many the " poet of the poor." 
 
 Paul's solitude was suddenly enlivened by the rfeturn 
 of Herman from Leipzig. Herman is described as sin- 
 gularly interesting. To the noble qualities of his mind 
 was added a high degree of personal beauty. His trag- 
 ical contest with an ever-increasing poverty, his eminent 
 attainments, vainly opposed to an adverse destiny, seem 
 to have given him a touching interest in Richter's heart. 
 His friendship for Herman was softened by something 
 like the tenderness of love for a feminine nature, and he 
 says, in a sportive letter, that if Heraian had a sister he 
 should certainly wish to marry her, provided that her face 
 was like Herman's. 
 
 The reader will pardon it, if I anticipate events a little, 
 and place togetlier all I have been able to collect of the 
 history of this favorite friend of Richter's. 
 
 I have already mentioned, that the son of the poor 
 tool-maker was always sheltered from blame by Paul's 
 considerate kindness, when obliged by pressing work to 
 come late to the gymnasium. He followed him to Leip- 
 zig, and there his struggles with poverty must have been 
 as severe as Paul's. Prepossessing as he was in ajipcar- 
 ance and manner, he might have possessed the key to all 
 hearts;* but with a glowing love of freedom, he was 
 timid and desponding about himself Beneath a cynical 
 and rough expression, he concealed in the sanctuary of 
 
 * Herman's person was so charming, that when Panl gave him a 
 letter to the Pastor Vogel, he wrote on the margin " that he must take 
 care of his wife and daughters."
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. l'^^ 
 
 his mind a tender, even a virgin purity, and an exalted 
 sense of honor. By his talents and information he was 
 prepared to take a high place among scientific men, but 
 through the want of means and patronage the bloom and 
 fruit of his mind was doomed to wither and fall. Her- 
 man could not, like Eichter, withdraw into his hermitage, 
 and there oppose to his discouragements a waiting and 
 persevering industry ; he was obliged to wage a daily 
 contest with the saddening realities of life. Providence 
 seemed not to permit that Herman's spirit should find the 
 resting-place it sougbt : he was, therefore, not master of his 
 dejection ; and Richter, at the same time he was con- 
 tending with his own hypochondria, saw with bleeding 
 heart this fi'iend hastening to the abyss of despair. He 
 now first learnt that deepest pain of the inward soul, — the 
 tragical contest of a noble nature like that of Herman's 
 with the difficulties that social and political institutions 
 place in the way of success ; the dark riddle of the dis- 
 crepancy between the mighty impulses of the soul and 
 the trivial and low circumstances that follow its action, 
 and weary out its effijrts in its struggles after a better 
 existence. 
 
 Herman having gained the object of his ardent wishes, — 
 a doctor's degree, — came to settle as a physician in the 
 place of his birth. But the proverb was true in this, as 
 in Richter's case, " A prophet is without honor in his own 
 country," and he removed to Erlangen ; but there he 
 found little alleviation of his limitless poverty, and was 
 obliged to sell his movables and go to Gottingen, invited 
 to give instructions there to a young Duke de Broglio, 
 from Paris. This employment, although it had i^vi 
 charms for Herman, who thirsted for occupation in his 
 beloved science, yet saved him from actual want, and his 
 
 8 * L
 
 178 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 letter to Paul, informing him of his plans, is written with 
 much cheerfulness. 
 
 Paul wrote to him about this time : — 
 
 " I say to others, ' Be what you appear'; to you I say, 
 'Appear what thou art!' Suffer like a man the Alp press- 
 ure of fate. Does one call thee by name, thou wilt, open 
 thy eyes, and instead of a crushing spectre the sun will ap- 
 pear You are refreshed and charmed by the most 
 
 pitiful fables as well as by the weightiest truths ; like the 
 lark, now singing above the cloud, anon nesting in the damp 
 ground. I am the Devil if I do not, some time or other, 
 evolve your whole character in a romance. But make me 
 understand how I can persuade my readers of the proba- 
 bility of your cynical mania ; they will say I misunderstood 
 the character, and compelled the inconsistencies to meet. 
 
 " From excessive love for your doctor's hat, I send you 
 Hallei''s Physiology. The part relating to the breath I 
 read so hastily that I lost my own. Write to me not only 
 all that you experience, but also what you think and what 
 others think, either new or evil. Trust yourself upon the 
 broad shining wings of your understanding, and make 
 them bear you over the Dead Sea, so as not to fall spirit- 
 ually dead within. Do not, as a city physician, cure others, 
 and suffer yourself to die. Do not allow your necessities 
 to steal away the elasticity of your soul ; for if you are 
 Herman, you will be angry that you have ever been an 
 anti- or pseudo-Herman, although never to 
 
 " Your friend E." 
 
 Richter's letters were always full of encouragement and 
 hope, and to assist his removal, he sent him a louis d'or, 
 which we may well suppose he could ill spare. A letter 
 from Herman follows.
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 179 
 
 " Dear Richter : Saturday evening, the 6th Septem- 
 ber, I departed, like a Don Quixote, in the brown vest 
 and hose in which I took leave of the Hof gymnasium 
 and its plagues, which the fashion has hitherto forbidden 
 me to appear in, and my white coat, which I was ashamed 
 to wear in Hof, as it had already served me a year as a 
 night-frock. In the right pocket, paper, of which this 
 letter is part, the sketch of the necessary information 
 about Gottingen, a pocket-handkerchief, and a pair of 
 red gloves that Oerthel gave me when he read me the 
 most touching passages out of ' Moritz's Soul Experi- 
 ences.' In the left, a pair of slippers, a box with sealing- 
 wax, penknife, and razor. Under my left arm an um- 
 brella, carried more to conceal a handkerchief, in which 
 were tied up two shirts, a neckcloth, a pair of stockings, 
 and a nightcap, than to protect me from the rain. Omnia 
 mea mecum. 
 
 " As in the afternoon B., who had followed me to Bam- 
 berg, parted from me, I first took a concentrated view of 
 my destiny, present and past. Who would have believed 
 that on that height, where the insupportably oppressive 
 heat of the sun made every step difficult, the Catholic 
 images planted on the way could have consoled me ? 
 There I saw that exalted man, who sacrificed himself for 
 the love of truth and mankind, represented under suffer- 
 ing and bitter injuries, wounded with thorns, with stripes, 
 
 and blows, and bowed down under the cross Found 
 
 I not in this an echoing and an appeasing voice ? " 
 
 In Gottingen Herman found sympathizing friends ; but 
 the ardor with which he pursued his favorite sciences (he 
 had begun a universal encyclopaedia of science) soon un- 
 dennined his health. The letters of the friends are so 
 filled with local and personal references, that even if the
 
 l8o LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 limits of this Life would permit the insertion of tliem, 
 they would be hardly intelligible. 
 
 In January, 1796, Herman wrote to his friend : — 
 
 " This year must decide whether I remain a physician 
 or a patient. Should you receive no more letters before 
 Easter, think that I am already beyond all the mountains ! 
 In spring one flies more freely ! 0, dear, good Richter, 
 when I remember the time, those school years when I 
 wandered with thee at midnight upon the Schlossplatz at 
 Hof, what should I have suffered, if in the presage that 
 assured me we should alwa}'S be the sincerest of friends 
 I could have read and felt what I am now ; a mere human 
 form, that through hypochondria and opposing fate the 
 soul threatens, sometimes under one, sometimes under 
 another appearance, to leave. Had I foreseen this, it 
 had been no wonder if, through madness, I had antici- 
 pated by a voluntary stroke the last consequences of so 
 cruel a destiny. Only the hope of still for a few years 
 pursuing my Elements yet retains me. I must now cease, 
 but will continue the letter in a freer moment." 
 
 The freer moment that csmie to poor Herman released 
 him from the burden of life, and permits us to return to 
 the little apartment in Hof, and to our hero. 
 
 How deeply Richter, through the loss of this friend, 
 was shaken a))pears from his letters. It cut dce{)cr into 
 his soul than the death of Oerthel. Herman was far more 
 genial, and the most beloved of all his friends. The almost 
 feminine love that he felt for hira — as though Herman 
 were tlie manly party in their iilliance — was strength- 
 ened rather than diminished through their separation. 
 Richter wrote to him, a short time before his death, that 
 he coidd wish to marry his sister if her face Avere like his, 
 were he not ashamed to marry from such a motive.
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 Adam von Oerthel. — Residence at Topen. — Death of his 
 Fkiend. — Change of Views. 
 
 T this time, Richter's other school and a. d. 1786, 
 college friend, Adam von Oerthel, re- -^'- 23. 
 turned from Leipzig to his father's residence 
 ^ in Topen, and his friendship soon suggested a 
 plan to make his friend Richter's situation, as he hoped, 
 more comfortable. He had a younger brother, and he 
 proposed that Paul should remove into their family as 
 his instructor, principally in French. Paul consented, 
 as he said in his answer to Adam's letter, " to become the 
 crutch, or the wooden leg, to help the boy's halting and 
 stumbling through the language." His letter is so char- 
 acteristic that it seems wrong to withhold it from the 
 reader. 
 
 " LiEBER Oerthel : J'y ai r^fleche. Enfin, j'ai dit h 
 moi meme : ' En verit6, mon cher moi, je vois, que tu n'a 
 pas encore les ailes, qui te doivent porter de Hof. Pen- 
 dant quelles eroissent, tu te peux bein faire une beau nid 
 a Topen, ou ton ami a le sein. Tu me feras un grand 
 plaisir, si tu y ensiegnes, ecris, et lis, c'est a dire, si tu y 
 veux etre le maitre de ton eleve, du monde entier, et de 
 toi-merae. Aussi dois-tu comptu pour quelque chose que 
 tu y es assure de ne mourir pas de faim. Ne crains point
 
 182 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 de perdre ta liberie ; tu changes seulement des borncs 
 qui t'environnent deja.' " 
 
 It was on New Year's day, 1787, that our Richter, 
 with the hope of a better year than the last, entered upon 
 his office of teacher in the house of the Herr Counsellor 
 von Oerthel, in Topen, not many hours' distance froin his 
 mother's residence. In leaving his motlier's narrow apart- 
 ment, the pressure of poverty was lightened, and he was 
 reheved from the eternal din of female labors, but he did 
 not find a paradise of rest in Topen. 
 
 Herr von Oerthel was a man of limited mind, rough 
 manners, and cold heart. His manner of granting a 
 request was so ungracious, that no one, with proper self- 
 respect, could make one ; and in becoming rich, he had 
 learnt to love and to hoard his money. But Paul's pleas- 
 ure in being with his friend Adam was great; and there 
 was also presented to him the opportunity of opening in 
 the depths of the innocent and hopeful soul of a child 
 new treasures for psychological observation in the unfold- 
 ing of the spiritual and moral germs implanted there. 
 
 Although Topen lay deeper than Hof, tlie place was 
 colder, rougher, and more mountainous. Paul was also 
 farther removed from the Pastor Vogel, and his library. 
 It required all the affection of his friend Adam to make 
 his situation in Topen bearable, as he soon found himself 
 wholly disappointed in the character and disposition of his 
 pupil. He never learnt to know the worth of the instruc- 
 tor who opened his whole heart to him. Richter was un- 
 able to gain the love or confidence of the boy, who soon 
 joined himself with his inferiors to injure his instructor. 
 A man of Paul's sensibility would have suffered still more 
 in such a family, had not the Frau von Oerthel regarded 
 liim with motherly care. He had the good fortune in this,
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 183 
 
 as in every other instance, to gain the affection of the mis- 
 tress of the family. Even in his latest years, Paul never 
 forgot the goodness of this excellent woman, nor the cup 
 of coffee which she secretly conveyed to his apartment, 
 and the liberal hand that was only restrained by the 
 avarice of her husband. 
 
 The painful and dispiriting circumstances in which 
 Paul found himself in the Oerthelshen house seem at 
 last to have broken down his almost superhuman cheer- 
 fulness and elasticity of spirits, and to have attacked and 
 injured his robust health. He became subject to hypo- 
 chondria. His gayety deserted him. It became evident 
 that under such circumstances he could never become at 
 home in Topen. Herr Oerthel's law library did not fur- 
 nish him with the books that he loved, and the increas- 
 ing illness of his friend Adam deprived the house of all 
 cheerfulness. 
 
 At length, after much suffering, his friend expired in 
 his arms. Paul's situation became less tolerable. His 
 pupil possessed none of the endearing qualities of his 
 brother, and with the father his relations were not more 
 agreeable, especially as his manner of fulfilling the con- 
 tract with Richter was harsh and miserly. He was abso- 
 lutely in debt to Paul when he left his house. With this 
 bitter experience, Richter returned, with wounded and 
 sorrowing heart, to his mother and his old apartment at 
 Hof. 
 
 Paul's friendship with the spiritual and witty Pastor 
 Vogel continued firm as in his Hofer years, and brought 
 many bright Sundays into his life, and many good books 
 into his study ; and, as Vogel's early prophecy about 
 his young friend found confirmation, his esteem increased, 
 deeply augmenting his regret at the loss of his society
 
 184 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 •when Vogel, at the beginnmg of 1787, removed from Re- 
 hau to Ai'zburg. Tlie distance, indeed, was not great, 
 but the daily intercourse of the friends was interrupted. 
 
 I have passed over, with great rapidity, the two years 
 and nine months that Eichter was private instructor in 
 the family at Topen. They were perhaps the most, un- 
 happy of his life, rendered so by the stupidity and in- 
 gratitude of his pupil, his dependence on a harsh and 
 avaricious principal, flie death of one of liis most inti- 
 mate friends, and the absence and despair of another. 
 But these years of outward mortification and sorrow 
 were rich in their spiritual influences upon the ge- 
 nius of the poet. The question must have constantly 
 recurred to the readers of Hesperus and Titan, how 
 could Jean Paul for so many years have written nothing 
 but bitter satires ? How could talents, so consecrated in 
 after years to all that is true and beautiful in life, have 
 found any other expression than that of love ? Perhaps 
 one answer may be, that every healthy and eminent fac- 
 ulty is augmented in power through self-denial. He has 
 himself said : " The young poet should devoutly and in- 
 wardly love, wonder, pray, and weep, but he should pass 
 slowly from thought to expression. The emotions should 
 shut themselves in their sanctuary ten long years from 
 that corkscrew the poet's pen. Insealed, they are con- 
 densed, and do not evaporate in the air of the market 
 and tlic world." * 
 
 The fact was, that his genius had as yet found no ade- 
 quate expression ; but a succession of emotions on a mind 
 like Richter's had the serious and deep effect of great 
 epochs in life. The image of his suffering friend, contend- 
 ing with the bitterest poverty and the deepest despair, 
 
 • Preface to Satires.
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 185 
 
 turned his inward eye to the whole of suffering human- 
 ity ; and at the same time tliat he sought gi-ounds of con- 
 solation for his friend, he looked deeper into his own soul, 
 and there found, not satire for the imperfections of hu- 
 manity, but a true understanding of the end of all suffer- 
 ing, and poetical illustrations of the same. How could 
 he avoid forming the resolution, which he soon ventured 
 upon, instead of wounding with satire or enlivening with 
 caricature, to use such weapons only occasionally, against 
 the oppressor and the wicked ? How could he refrain 
 from the effort to alleviate the great sum of human sor- 
 row which, in the image of his friend, he found beating 
 at his heart, by elevating views of human destiny, and 
 the use of the rich treasures of love and hope and trust, 
 his genius had placed at his command ? 
 
 At this time he wrote to his friend Otto : — 
 "When my brother died, I believed a day could not 
 come when my heart would be more crushed. But 
 the day came ! My friend Herman died of a quickly 
 destroying hypochondria, beloved by nature, hated by 
 fortune ! Then I read lOopstock's ode to Death, and 
 changed my question : ' Of three friends wherefore hast 
 thou lost two ? ' into ' Why, in this sad waste of humanity, 
 hast thou found three fr-iends ? ' and I could make no 
 other than a grateful answer." 
 
 We have frequent indications, through all Eichter's 
 works, how deeply he was shaken by the death of these 
 friends ; and, after representing the dying scene of one 
 of them, he says, " I felt for the first time, that upon 
 the earth I was not einheimisch " (a native, or at home). 
 These were the experiences that awoke in his l)leeding 
 and softened heart a deeply sympathizing imagination; 
 his spiritual nature made giant strides, and his feelings
 
 l86 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 of despondency gave place to a self-consciousness of 
 power. His book of devotion may be considered as the 
 precursor of his serious writings. In this he fii-st poured 
 out, without reserve or shame, the earnest and love-need- 
 ing soul of the poet. Here he first expressed those 
 worthy and exalted aims to which he ever afterwards 
 aspired. He analyzed his own soul, and entered upon 
 the noble effort to acquire for himself and others the 
 exalted hopes, and the sure trust in God, and in human 
 virtue, that is not shut out from the poorest and most 
 limited relations of human life. His Uberal interpreta- 
 tion of the Christian faith, which in the Hofer school 
 drew upon him the suspicion of atheism, subjected hira 
 in Topen to still heavier charges. Pastor Morg of To- 
 pen, a zealous and severe servant of the loord, was not 
 inclined to appreciate the bold assertions of this disciple 
 of the spirit, and regarded him as a denier of God and a 
 preacher of sin. This sufficed to light again in the soul 
 of the self-conscious youth the flame that once before was 
 kindled in Hof He wrote a letter to Pastor Morg, which 
 is too long to insert any but the closing lines : — 
 
 " Suffer me to go my own way in my search for the 
 truth and in defence of it, not as an accidental thing, but 
 as it is my duty. Suffer me to believe that this world is 
 for the imitation of God and Christ, and the future for 
 the exact knowledge of the same, and that one who would 
 rather prove the Godhead of Christ than to obey his pre- 
 cepts, is like the servant who spends his whole time in 
 proving the nobility of his master, but gives him neither 
 love nor obedience." 
 
 Among all the authors of the time, Herder was the 
 one to whom Richter turned with the strongest sympa- 
 thies. Herder's great views of the world, were as if
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 187 
 
 ■written from the anticipations of his own soul, and to 
 Hei'der alone he unveiled the deeper and more earnest 
 impulses of his mind, which to others were concealed 
 beneath the light garment of wit and satire. He sent 
 through Herder to Wieland, who was at this time the 
 editor of the German Mercury, two serious essays for 
 that publication. In this instance, as all through life, his 
 success was decided by a woman. Herder was travelling 
 in Italy ; but the peculiar union, not only of heart, but 
 of literary pursuits, that existed between Herder and his 
 accomplished wife, permitted her to open and read all his 
 literary communications. She was deeply touched and 
 interested by Richter's essay, Was der Tod est, " What 
 is Death ? " and this was an introduction to a friendship 
 with that charming woman that lasted to the end of life. 
 Richter had written : " These two essays I venture not 
 to send immediately to Herr Wieland ; they might be 
 lost in the caravan of paper that closes around him. 
 Perhaps they will gain by being presented by you, as 
 disagreeable news are mitigated when brought to a king 
 by a favorite or a beloved friend. As I have absolutely 
 nothing, and hope by these productions, born in the midst 
 of hypochondria, heart-sinkuig, and vanishing health, to 
 gain something. Might you only find them worthy to be 
 read by you ! Might you through their merits find me 
 worthy to have read yours." 
 
 Madam Herder sent the essays to Wieland, with tlie 
 request, that if he did not insert them in the Mercury, to 
 return them immediately ; but, alas ! they were mislaid 
 in his " caravan of papers." They were afterwards sent 
 back, and Madam Herder wrote to Richter : " As my hus- 
 band is more in connection with the editor of the German 
 Museum, I have to-day sent your essays to him ; and as
 
 l88 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 soon as I receive an answer, or money, I will immediately 
 forward it to you. Your second piece. Was der Tod est, 
 has deeply pleased me. I had nearly placed your true 
 name at the bottom." 
 
 The editor of the Museum consented to print the 
 smallest 2:)iece, on Death, but sent him no money. Thus 
 Richter's ship, freighted with hopes, came back without 
 the expected treasure, but with one more valuable, the 
 friendship of the Herders, to whom he was never after- 
 wards a stranger. 
 
 Caroline Herder was the fu-st of the German female 
 world whose heart Jean Paul gained through a poetic 
 work ; and that, a little serious essay. This was the first 
 acknowledgment he received of warm sympathy in his 
 writings, and it was a prophetic assurance that from the 
 German women he should receive through life the richest 
 reward of Fame. It could not fail to make a deep im- 
 pression upon his mind, that through a little serious and 
 Earnest work, he had reached in a moment that for which 
 he had been striving in vain through so many years 
 volumes of witty satirical essays. 
 
 As soon as Eichter had returned from To- a. d. irsg, 
 pen to his mother's residence in Hof, he showed, -^t- 26. 
 by very decided stei)S, the change that had taken place in 
 his opinions and feelings. He made those changes in his 
 costume, which liis friends had demanded in vain for 
 seven years, covering his throat and drawing out his curls 
 beliind into a cue ; but, as lie could do nothing as other 
 people did, he demonstrated his intentions by the humor- 
 ous advertisement already mentioned. These changes 
 were necessarj^, perhaps, to ensure his reception in the 
 polite circles of Hof; but he entered with avidity also 
 into all those families who had ever been friendly to his
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 189 
 
 mother, and showed a desire to please in every way those 
 to whom for seven years he would not make the sacrifice 
 of confining the natural flow of his hair. This sudden 
 change of life proves that the plan of his literary works 
 had changed, and that he held it necessary, at any price, 
 to study men and character, and to gain a deeper knowl- 
 edge of the human heart ; especially a more intimate 
 knowledge of the thoughts, impulses, aspirations, and sor- 
 rows of that sex who occupy so important a. place in his 
 romances, and upon whose favor he depended so con- 
 stantly in after life. 
 
 This was not difficult for one with such gifts as he pos- 
 sessed, and with such hearty sympathy in the joys and 
 sorrows of others ; especially endowed as he was with 
 that which the French so beautifully call poKtesse du 
 cceur, which, we have seen by his book of Devotion, was 
 nourished and cultivated as sedulously as if it had not 
 been the natural growth, and rooted deeply in his own 
 virgin soul. It was easy, therefore, for him to gain ad- 
 mittance to a number of cheerful family circles, and the 
 inteiTourse was for him so much the more charming, as 
 he soon found in each family one or more growing-up 
 daughters, who discovered for his higher nature a sur- 
 prising sympathy, and by their more susceptible imagina- 
 tions attached themselves closely to him. 
 
 Among liis best friends was the Postmistress * Wirth. 
 And to show the friendliness of the intercourse, we ex- 
 tract a note to her. 
 
 " I am reduced to the choice to freeze or to write to 
 you ; and I do the last. We put off the purchase of wood 
 until to-day, and to-day I am compelled, for want of 
 
 * Women in Germany take the titles of their husbands, as, Sirs. 
 Postmistress, Mrs. Doctoress, Mrs. Fastorin.
 
 190 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 money, to put it oiF a week longer. But in that time, I 
 and my harpsichord-playing fingers must be frozen unless 
 you send me counsel or wood. It would be well for us 
 Hofers, if we could get some of the fire which we shall 
 have too warm hereafter, in our stoves in our lifetime." 
 
 The mention of the harpsichord-playing fingers^ re- 
 minds us of one of the accomplishments with which Paul 
 made himself a welcome guest in every society. It was 
 his first recommendation to princely circles, and has taken 
 deep hold upon the heart and memory of all who heard 
 him. He played never from written or printed notes, 
 but fantasied, as the inspiration of the moment and the 
 mood of his feelings dictated. In this manner he poured 
 out all the emotions, images, and dreams of his soul, 
 without the timidity that he had always felt at expressing 
 them in words, and excited or melted his hearers with his 
 own emotions. " Often," said one of his charmed circle, 
 " when we had collected ourselves about him in the twi- 
 light, and he had fantasied on the piano till the tears 
 ran over all our faces, and from emotion Paul could play 
 no longer, he would break off suddenly, and begin the 
 most humorous stories of his future life ; of his journeys, 
 his wife, his children (which were always three) ; then 
 he would prophesy, but always with whimsical effect, 
 what a great man he would be, — bow people would come 
 from all places to see him, and princes and princesses 
 would envy us the pleasure of his society." A prophecy, 
 how improbable, but how well fulfilled ! 
 
 Richter had not, up to this time, found a publisher for 
 his third volume of Satires. At length Beekman, of 
 Gera, consented to bring out the papers, which for three 
 years had been journeying around in vain for patron or 
 editor. The adverse fortune which had followed the book
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 191 
 
 did not cease now. Paul had long contention with the 
 editor about the form, title, and price of the manuscript. 
 Beckman wrote that he never would print a book whose 
 title did not please the public ; that he printed only to 
 sell, and, alas ! he knew from experience that the best 
 books won or lost through their titles, and proposed for 
 this one. Selections from Sir Lucifer's Papers. With 
 slight alteration Richter consented, and the book was 
 called Selections from the Papers of the Devil.
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 elchter takes a school at schwarzenbach. — method of 
 Instruction. — Female Pupils and Friends. 
 
 AD. 1790, 
 Mt. 26. 
 
 HILE Richter was thus hajipy in 
 the circle of youthful beings he had 
 drawn about him, whom he was endeavoring 
 to instruct and elevate, he was invited by- 
 many persons of liigh rank to enter their families as pri- 
 vate instructor. His experience at Topen forbade him 
 again to encounter such humiliation ; but, urged by his 
 friends Volkel, Vogel, and the magistrate * Cloter, to take 
 charge of their children, he consented to go to Scliwar- 
 zenbach, and become, as he says, a pedagogue where he 
 had first been a school-boy. He had at first a small 
 school of six boys and one girl, between the ages of four- 
 teen and seven ; and his poetical associations were excited 
 at the thought of beginning his school on the day of his 
 birth, the 21st of March. Richter wrote to Cloter, 
 " That on the following Monday, his allodial and feudal 
 estate might be transported to Schwarzeubach in a child's 
 go-cart. Inform both friends, that about the pedagogue's 
 wages tliere need be no new negotiation. Tlicy should 
 both pay less in proportion than yourself. Truly, it is 
 much easier to receive presents than wages from friends." 
 
 *^ Amtvei'walter, the magistrate of a certain district.
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. I93 
 
 C'loter answf red : " I must remind you of one of the 
 Sibylline rules, that when tiie moon is waning all fortu- 
 natt; things go backwards, and that JMonday also is Kind- 
 lein day (Innocents), when nothing new should be begun. 
 Forget not, when you enter your dwelling, to make three 
 crosses, and place the right foot first.* Besides, on Mon- 
 day I shall have no horses ; and to bring the reverenc" 
 theologian with oxen in a chaise, God forbid ! that will 
 I not." 
 
 I have given this little extract that the reader may 
 have a glimpse of the man who was to be Richter's future 
 patron. We are already acquainted with Volkel and Vo- 
 gel. Cloter was a man ojjcn and honorable in word and 
 deed. " Where he gave his hand, he gave his heart, and 
 the bond lasted as long as life." 
 
 There was need of neither horse nor oxen to transport 
 the personal property of our hero. He wrote to Otto 
 upon his removal: "On my entrance into my Schwarzen- 
 bach school office, I, as usual, made an inventor}- of boots, 
 stockings, handkerchiefs, and a couple of kreutzeis. Out 
 of this list, failed only Nos. 1, 2, 3, and 4. I have noth- 
 ing, but I hope tliis will be the very last request. I 
 have been the occasion of some accidental successes, but 
 friendship is perhaps best known to you under the form 
 of favors, and with Herman died, as little what you did 
 for him, as your goodness to me will die with either of 
 us. Besides, thou knowest me, and thyself, and I hope 
 neither the doing nor the forbearing to do, the refusing 
 or consenting to my prayer, can ever alter our relations 
 or our opinions. LebewoJd." 
 
 The reader will now follow Richter to Schwarzenbach, 
 
 * This raillery was no doubt occasioned by Jean Paul's wishing to 
 enter upon his new duties on liis birthday. 
 
 9 M
 
 194 I^II'E OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 the place wliere, in childhood, he hungered and thirsted 
 for instruction, and where first the dreams of future fame 
 hovered over the friendless bo3%* This last winter in 
 riof had blown its icy breath of cold and jioverty into the 
 poor apartment of his mother ; but now, in the spring, it 
 was cheered with the warmer breeze of approachingvgood 
 fortune. At this time his biographer says : " Whoever 
 had seen him, with his small portion of worldly posses- 
 sions in his hand, his gray-green woollen coat, and that 
 noble, tender countenance, in which fate, with all its 
 blows, had left no scars ; had looked into his beaming 
 eyes, and said. Steer on, courageous Columbus ! What 
 thou, with prophetic eye, hast looked upon, must be ! 
 Only a few more heavy years, and thou shalt hear and 
 see the land. Above the blooming hills of the New 
 World the sun shall rise for thee, and a beam will pene- 
 trate the narrow, dark chamber of thy poor mother, and 
 will be to her the light-beam of an eternal blessedness ! " 
 
 After a friendly contest with Cloter, who insisted that 
 the new teacher should be exclusively his guest, it was 
 decided that . he should live successively with each of 
 his patrons, changing his residence every quarter. It 
 is pleasant to see that this New England custom has 
 had a precedent in Germany. After a few weeks Richter 
 found his most sanguine hopes of contentment and happi- 
 ness fulfilled. 
 
 The deep and marked peculiarities of a poetic nature 
 were never brought into fuller exercise than by Richter 
 in the formation and government of his little school. 
 That which is usually to men of rich endowments a 
 vexing and wearisome employment, the daily routine 
 of instruction for little children in the elements of 
 
 • Spc First Part, par;o 71.
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. I95 
 
 knowledge, became to him a source of elevated and 
 ennobling thought. His mode of instruction was the 
 opposite of that from which he thought he had him- 
 self suffered. In his little school there was no learning 
 by heart, no committing to memory the thoughts of 
 others, but every child was expected to use its own 
 powers. His exertions seem mainly directed to awaken 
 in the children a reproducing and self-creating power ; 
 all knowledge was therefore the material out of which 
 they were to form new combinations. In a word, the 
 whole of his instruction was directed to create a desire 
 for self-study, and thus lead his pupils to self-knowledge. 
 He aimed to bring out, as much as possible, the talents 
 that God had given his pupils ; and, after exciting a love 
 of knowledge, he left them to a free choice as to what 
 they would study ; but their zeal and emulation were 
 kept alive by a (so-called) " red book" in which an exact 
 account of the work of each individual was recorded ; this 
 was shown to parents and friends at the end of the quar- 
 ter, and so great was their zeal, that they needed a rein 
 rather than a spur. While he accustomed the children 
 to the spontaneous activity of all their faculties, he gave 
 them five hours a day of direct instruction, in which he 
 led them through the various departments of human 
 knowledge, and taught them to connect ideas and facts 
 by comparison and association. From the kingdom of 
 plants and animals he ascended to the stai-red firmament, 
 made tliem accjuainted with the course of the planets, and 
 led their imaginations to these worlds and their inhab- 
 itants. Then he conducted them through the picture- 
 gallery of the past history of nations, and placed the 
 heroes and saints and martyrs of antiquity before them, 
 or he turned their attention to the mystery of their own
 
 196 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 souls and the destiny of man. Above all, and with all, 
 he directed their tender, childish hearts to a Father in 
 Heaven. He said, " There can he no such companion to 
 the heart of children, for the whole of life, as the ever- 
 present thought of God and immortality." 
 
 In Levana, his work upon education, Eichter has^>given 
 a detailed account of his method of instruction in this 
 little school. It cannot be denied that it was more 
 adapted to cultivate a poetic nature, to form authors and 
 literary men, than active and practical men of business. 
 His instructions were directed almost wholly to the un- 
 folding of the spiritual and intellectual nature, and to 
 forming a creative imagination. He seems to have been 
 in danger of forgetting that the same sun that opens the 
 tender bud may close it forever. A wise gardener will 
 take care that a too powerful heat do not draw up from 
 the root an excess of the vital fluid, and injure the deli- 
 cate 2>lant forever. 
 
 It has been said that Richter's method of instruction 
 was to make of children, so diverse in age, character, and 
 situation, mei'cly poets and literary men ; — that he sought 
 to reproduce his own life and character without the vari- 
 ous hinderances and trials that he encountered in his self- 
 education. He made of his school an academy of poetry, 
 sowing his own individuality under different forms, and 
 creating only little Kichters among Ills pupils. He called 
 his method the awaking of the spiritual nature to self- 
 knowledge and self-instruction. 
 
 These four years at Schwarzenbach were among the 
 happiest of Richter's life. The parents of the children 
 were his wannest friends, and his whole heart was en- 
 gaged in forming the characters of his pupils. He wrote 
 to Otto, " that his school-room was his Paradise, his Peru,
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 197 
 
 his Tenipe, and his Prater." Every Sunday he walked 
 to Ilof, and spent the day with his mother. There he 
 always found a party of young female friends collected to 
 meet htm, who was the soul and life of their intercourse. 
 A heart like Richter's could not remain at any time in- 
 sensible to female influence. The tenderness and rever- 
 ence with which he always speaks of the sorrows and sen- 
 sibility of women has made him dear to every woman's 
 heart. He did not regard them, as men of genius are 
 too apt to do, as mere playthings for the flattery of an 
 idle hour, or solely as idols of the imagination, for poets 
 to study in order to heighten the effect of their own 
 creations : he strove to elevate them in their own estima- 
 tion, and place them in a moral and intellectual equality 
 with man, and, added to this, was all the tenderness which 
 led him to say, " To the man who has had a mother, all 
 women are sacred for her sake." 
 
 The four young ladies with whom Richter lived in 
 confidential friendship appear under the names of Caro- 
 line, Helena, Frederica the sister, and Amone, who after- 
 wards married his friend Otto. He encouraged them to 
 write to him upon all questions of taste and literature, 
 ethics or religion, that they found difficulty in solving 
 themselves ; and he fortified the resolution or soothed 
 the uneasiness of those who met with difficulties of any 
 kind. He, indeed, seems to have held the double office 
 of instructor and confessor. His intercourse with young 
 women was also a l)enefit to liimself, for with them he 
 was obliged to soften the bitterness of his satire, or to 
 clothe it in the form of the graces. 
 
 It may seem surprising that, placed in such intimate 
 relations with women only a i^cw years younger tlian him- 
 self, and susceptible as he had always been, Richter should
 
 198 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 have felt no serious jiassion. At this time he wrote a prize 
 essay that probably defined the limits of his friendship 
 towards his young disciples : " How far friendship towards 
 the other sex may proceed witliout love, and what is tlie 
 difference between that and love." His biographer seems 
 to wish to persuade himself that the change which ''took 
 place in Jean Paul at this time was the result of an indi- 
 \-idual passion. But it is plain, I think, from his journals, 
 that his ideal of female beauty and excellence, the object 
 for which his heart beat in secret, those exquisite crea- 
 tions of profound feeling, meekness, and love which he 
 has left in his writings, existed not yet to liim. In all 
 his strong emotions, in the torrent of his deepest feelings, 
 Avhen he bathed in the delight of a summer day, or when 
 the setting sun spread over him rose-colored and golden 
 clouds, and he asked for a second lieai't in which to pour 
 the overflowing emotions of his own, it was always a 
 female heart. In his journal are many passages, in 
 which he dwells upon his hopes of one day meeting this 
 idol of his dreams. 
 
 He writes : " I ask not tlie most beautiful person, but 
 for the most beautiful heart ; in that I can overlook blem- 
 ishes, but in this, none." Even when his spirit was filled 
 with universal benevolence, and he spread out liis arms 
 to embrace all the world, a small voice from his heart 
 whispered, that among a thousand, none had yet been 
 found for him. He writes again : " There can be but one 
 beloved, that can forget all for thee, and give thee every 
 minute, every glance, every joy, eveiy beating of the 
 ])idse, and say to thee : ' We have chosen each other from 
 the whole world. Thy heart is mine, mine is tliine, thou, 
 deeply, deeply loved ! ' But, beyond the clouds of earth 
 and the grave, a time will come when we shall not seek
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 199 
 
 avariciously among the best a better for ourselves, but 
 when there will be but one, supremely loved, that is, God, 
 and millions loving all mankind. 
 
 " And yet thou ! that in this dark, cold night of life 
 remained longest with me, and pressed my arm upon thy 
 heart ; yet, if I should meet thine eye that I have so 
 loved, if I should see again all that here so drew me to 
 thee, ah, I should fall weeping upon thy heart, and say : 
 ' This is he who loved me upon earth, I must do some- 
 thing here to distinguish thee from others.' " * 
 
 There was said to be a certain Caroline, who carried 
 Richter beyond the limits between friendship and love. 
 It was not her extraordinary beauty that fascinated him, 
 but the great liveliness of all her sentiments and emo- 
 tions. However, this dream lasted but a short time ; 
 with the spring it melted away ; and, that the lady her- 
 self dissolved it, appears from an entry in his journal. 
 " /alone must repeat in solitude, with flowing eyes, Thou 
 lovest her yet, eternally, eternally ! " His letters to Caro- 
 line differed very little from his letters to his other young 
 friends. To all they were full of wise counsel, playful 
 and humorous suggestions, delicate and penetrating sym- 
 pathy with sorrows, only betrayed in hints and whispers. 
 He wrote for them fables ; imaginary journeys all over 
 the world, to teach them the customs of foreign countries ; 
 a fanciful history of the inhabitants of the moon ; dreams, 
 in which he veiled the most delicate hints and instruc- 
 tions ; and to one of his young friends, who wished for 
 some assurance of the immortality of the soul, he sent 
 an " Essay upon the Continuance of the Soul, and its Con- 
 sciousness," which contains the foundation and outline of 
 the Campaner Thai. 
 
 * Richter refers here to his friend Herman.
 
 200 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 To another he wrote, on her birthday : " The soul cele- 
 brates at every good deed a birthday. In your letter 1 
 rejoice at your joy over a quiet day. Men are made to 
 be etei*nally shaken about, but women are flowers that 
 lose their beautiful colors in the noise and tumult of life. 
 Since a year and a half it has been my principle ^or 
 your sex are judged by the suspicion of men or the 
 hatred of women) to think better of every woman than 
 
 any would think of her except her lover Let the 
 
 reward of virtue be the continuance of virtue." 
 
 It should be remembered, in reading the next extract, 
 that Richter was writing for the young women who lived 
 in the region of the Fichtelgebirge, where, we have learnt 
 from the Introduction, the females bore the burden of 
 life ; and before Paul had diffused more liberal ideas 
 upon the education of the daughters of families, they 
 received little intellectual instruction, and were scarcely 
 regarded as the equals of man. He is speaking of a 
 young bride he had met in one of his rambles, returning 
 to her husband's home, and was invited to take a seat in 
 the vis-a-vis. 
 
 " I and the sun were opposite Pauline, and looked into 
 lier face with equal warmth ; and at last I was touched 
 by the sight of her patient, quiet figure. Why was it ? 
 Not that I reflected upon the common Hernhuttish mar- 
 riage lot-drawing of women, for at a certain age tliey 
 have more feeling than knowledge, and in their empty 
 hearts there is a fire for the sacrifice, but no God, as in 
 the virgin temple of Vesta there was no image, but only 
 fire, and at the^rs^ appearance of any divinity the altar 
 was consecrated to him. My emotion did not come from 
 the thought that she, like most of her sisters, like tender 
 berries, were plucked from the stem and crushed in the
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 20I 
 
 rough hand of man ; or that her female spring had so 
 many cdoiids and so few flowery days ; or that I compared 
 her, as many other hrides, to the sleeping cliild that Gara- 
 fola has painted, with an angel holding over it a crown 
 of thorns, that marriage, like the angel, would awake by 
 pressing the thorns upon her brow. But it made my 
 soul tender, when I looked in this sweet, contented face, 
 blooming with red and white roses, and thought witliin 
 myself, O, be not so joyful, poor sacrifice ! Thou knowest 
 not that thy gentle heart needs something warmer than 
 blood, and thy head better dreams than the {)illow can 
 bring it; that the perfumed flower-leaves of thy youth 
 must soon be drawn together to form the scentless calix- 
 leaves to protect the honey-cup for thy husband, who will 
 soon demand of thee neither tenderness nor a light heart, 
 but only rough, working fingers, feet never weary, labor- 
 ing arms, and a quiet, paralytic tongue. This far, wide- 
 speaking vault of the eternal, the blue rotunda of the 
 universe, will shrink up to be thy housewifery apartment, 
 thy fuel-chamber and spinning-house, and in thy happiest 
 days only a visiting apartment. The sun will be for thee 
 only a hanging balloon-stove, a room-heater of the uni- 
 verse ; the moon but a cobbler's rushlight upon the can- 
 dlestick of a cloud. The Rhine will shrink into a pool 
 and rinsing kettle, to whiten thy household linen, and the 
 
 ocean be only a herring-pond Thou wert created 
 
 for something better, but that thou wilt not be ; and so, 
 thy leaves stripped away by years, and all thy sweet buds 
 dried up and faded, death will first transplant thee to a 
 more congenial climate. 
 
 " Wherefore should not this trouble me ? Do I not 
 see every week how souls are sacrificed as soon as they 
 inhabit a female body ? K, then, the richest and most 
 9*
 
 202 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 gifted souls, in the morning glow of life, with hearts un- 
 requited, wishes denied, are in a single position disdained 
 by society, what wonder if they sink into the sheltered 
 citizenship of marriage ? They think themselves happy, 
 if by this they escape ^ thousand signs of forgetfulness ; 
 and if the husband is a gentle jailer, who could tame \he 
 Bastile prisoner, the poor soul feels her lot supremely 
 happy. The golden mornings and enchanted castles of 
 her eai'lier years fade, and fall unremarked. Her sun 
 descends, unseen, by slow degrees, over her clouded and 
 earthly day, and amid pain and duty the twilight of even- 
 ing shrouds her humble existence ; she has never expe- 
 rienced all that she was worthy of, and in age she has 
 forgotten all that the morning glow of life promised. 
 Sometimes, when a long-buried idol of her once devout 
 heart, or melancholy music, or a book, throws upon the 
 ■winter sleep of her heart a warm sunbeam, she starts and 
 looks around, and says, ' Formerly was it diflferent with 
 me ; but it is long since, and I believe at that time I might 
 have erred,' and she sleeps again. 
 
 " Truly, parents and husbands, I draw this picture, not 
 to press from the wounded hearts who recognize their 
 own likeness another tear ; but I represent these pic- 
 tured wounds, that you may heal the real, and throw away 
 forever your instruments of torture." 
 
 A letter to Helena follows, from which I give a short 
 extract. 
 
 " I would in this foolish letter repeat our late conver- 
 sation. I will take the liberty to call you the Democrat, 
 as you would be the protecting goddess of the freedom of 
 women ; and I will take the title with which I was once 
 baptized at your house, that of Chaplain. We will make 
 believe that we were following the Democrat and the
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 203 
 
 Chaplain, and listening to their conversation as they 
 walked to Krotenhof. 
 
 " The dear good Democrat says : ' Can a maiden, who 
 has preserved this name till old age, deserve every satiri- 
 cal aiTow that is aimed at her from mouths and book- 
 shelves, because she does not wish for fetters, or suffer 
 them to be drawn on ? ' 
 
 " The Chajjlain answered : ' In fact, we all, or none, de- 
 serve satii*e, for we have all more follies than hairs. But 
 how will your good nun defend herself?' 
 
 " ' With everything,' (and the Democrat shaded herself 
 with her parasol, as the sun with an evening cloud.) 
 ' Ah, in the female heart envious eyes too often look, and 
 too rarely the indulgent ! Pitying eyes would there find 
 wounds that are every day cut deeper, and a world of 
 stifled sighs. But upon, the female soul, as well as the 
 female body, is bound an eternal corset. We go from 
 chain to chain — ' 
 
 " ' Suffer me to finish the picture, for so far it is true. 
 Yes, you are right, — prejudices, that are flowers for us, 
 are thistles for you. Your teachers, your companions, 
 and often even your parents, trample upon and crush the 
 little flowers that you have sheltered and cherished. 
 Your hands are more employed than your heads. You 
 ai^ only allowed to play with your fans, — and nothing is 
 pardoned you ; at the least — a heart ! 
 
 " ' Who, then, wouM be severe and satirical, if a being 
 so opprest, so entangled in chains, has not the courage 
 to deliver all she possesses, tliat best and tenderest treas- 
 ure, her heart, into manly hands of which she knows 
 nothing, — knows not whether he will warm or oppress ; 
 cherish or torture the gift ! What upon this earth can be 
 more dangerous than to make an election that can never
 
 204 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 be changed, and whose good or evil goes on increasing 
 continually to the last day of life ? May she not justify 
 herself in avoiding this election, if she sees stretching 
 out before her a charming, unfettered life, among female 
 friends, with light duties, and the pleasures of youth ever 
 renewed ? ' 
 
 " ' Complete your picture,' said the Chaplain ; ' and do 
 not forget, that perhaps there may have been one, upon 
 whose arm you could, nevertheless, have passed through 
 the thorns of life, but that he is eternally parted from you, 
 and perhaps buried beneath these thorns. In certain 
 years, it is difficult to forget what we have loved, and 
 more difficult to replace it. The lacerated heart retreats 
 into its solitary cell, and seeks, at most, only female 
 friends.' 
 
 " ' You are, then, of my opinion ? ' said the Democrat. 
 
 " ' God forbid ! ' 
 
 " Both now stood upon a height where they could look 
 towards Krotenhof. The Chaplain opened his arms, and 
 cried out, ' Is there in the w'ide world one w-ho would be 
 Chaplainin ? Here stands the Chaplain ! — But, seriously, 
 I have a hundred reasons to give you. In your opinion, 
 the best maidens crook the finger, when asked to put on 
 the marriage ring. But we will follow tliese best maid- 
 ens into their sixtieth year, and see how it is with them 
 then, without the marriage ring. "We find them solitary, 
 unknown, without friends, except those who would live in 
 their testaments, but not in their hearts ; without friends, 
 for those wlio were their friends in the summer years of 
 youth, liave taken back their hearts, and given them to 
 their husbands and children. She has now no one that 
 she can love ; instead of a husband, only a favorite cat to 
 torment, that is not half as faithful as a husband ; and in-
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 205 
 
 stead of children she educates canaiy-birds. Instead of 
 the inexpressibly sweet duty of a mother, who, like God, 
 educates little Adams and Ev^es ; and the sweet employ- 
 ment of a good housewife, who takes from her husband 
 all his cares and wrinkles, she has merely the duty to 
 love or hate herself; to cherish her ennui and her great 
 prayer-book, and on festivals to eat alone. In the long 
 winter evenings she has no one but her maid to whom 
 
 she can recount the joys of her youth The good 
 
 maiden thought, forsooth, she should remain her whole 
 life long only seventeen years old ; her young friends are 
 now all scattered far from her, upon diflferent heights, and 
 for tliirty years she has had nothing youthful near her, — 
 and she will die alone, perhaps not missed.' 
 
 " ' She will be regretted by the poor, to whom she gave 
 bread, and missed by the children to whom she gave edu- 
 cation.' 
 
 " ' Educating poor children is like a bright-colored 
 May-dream. It is as though I should see my children 
 confessing to another, and myself seek complete strangers 
 to absolve. If a man, that has all the world upon his 
 shoulders, books to write, journeys about the world, 
 protocols, sermons, conquests to make, and no time to 
 woo, can scarcely be excused from marrying, how can a 
 woman, who has more time to betroth herself, and first at 
 the altar receives her crown and sceptre, her power to 
 rule, and confer happiness ? — But here we are at the end 
 of our walk, and I will send you a written contradiction 
 and confutation.' " 
 
 I have dwelt thus long upon this part of Paul's life 
 because it was the season when he passed through those 
 moral conflicts that resulted in a deep spiritual faith, and 
 in love and devotion. His whole nature acquired an
 
 2o6 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 earnest direction, and his works were henceforth created 
 to elevate in happiness, to soothe and cheer in sorrow. 
 Satire remained among his lighter weapons, but he took 
 from it the bitterness of scorn, and henceforth his vinegar 
 was made of honey. 
 
 These assertions are established by a remarkable pas- 
 sage in his journal of this year (November 15, 1790). 
 He calls it " the weightiest evening of my life, for I re- 
 ceived the thought of death. I looked through thirty 
 years, and saw myself on my death-bed. That last dre<im- 
 night will come ! And because thirty years are as certain 
 to terminate as one day, I will now take leave of the earth 
 and its heaven ! My plans and wishes shall now fold 
 their wings. My heart, as it does not yet rest under the 
 feet of strangers, may beat on a friendly bosom ; my senses 
 may yet, ere six boards enclose them, seize a few flutter- 
 ing joys on their short passage to the grave, — but I value 
 them no more. And you, my brothers ! I will love you 
 more ; I will create for you more joys ! Giving up my 
 great plans, I will limit my exertions to making you 
 cheerful, and direct my comic power no longer, as hith- 
 erto, to torment you."
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 Eichter's first serious Work. — " The Little Schoolmaster 
 Wuz." — "The Invisible Lodge." — First Success. — Sab- 
 bath Weeks OF Life. — "Hesperus." 
 
 must not be supposed that by a. d. 1791 
 Richter's devotion to his young ^t. 28. 
 female friends all other friendships were ex- 
 yj eluded. His intimacy with Christian Otto, 
 as already mentioned, began soon after his return from 
 Leipzig ; but in 1790 they began a daily correspondence, 
 that lasted uninterruptedly for fourteen years, after which 
 they were both established in the same city. Beside this, 
 they met every week between Schwarzenbach and Hof, 
 when Otto accompanied his friend back. Richter said to 
 him, " I pray thee to be my public, my reading world, my 
 critic, my reviewer " ; and henceforth Otto filled these 
 offices. Richter wanted such a friend, and chose Otto to 
 fill the place. He seems to have exercised upon him 
 a magnetic power, such as in his sixtieth year he was 
 able to exercise upon young and powerful natures merely 
 through the force of his will. When Richter looked at 
 Otto with lightning eyes, but at the same time filled with 
 love, Otto's fate was decided for life ; there was nothing 
 more in the world for him, he lived in and through his 
 friend. He was the person that Paul needed to listen to
 
 2o8 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 his literary plans, to receive and answer liis letters, to be 
 the depositary of his inward and outward life. Otto was 
 the first who whispered that applause which was after- 
 wards echoed by the literary public. He was also a 
 severe and faithful critic, and Richter for some years 
 adopted his suggestions, and made, with admirable ^do- 
 cility, the changes in his works that Otto advised. 
 
 The relation between Richter and Otto was one of the 
 most remarkaljle tliat the history of literary men has made 
 known. Ouly a less gifted nature could have given him- 
 self up to another, and have submitted to the sacrifices 
 that Otto made to Richter. But he was no Boswell ; he 
 possessed the noblest qualities, and was inferior to Richter 
 only in genius. He seems to bave loved and reverenced 
 his friend with the disinterested devotion of a woman ; 
 and he had to suffer many of the mortifications that 
 attend a female nature in connection with a man of 
 genius. For if Richter was blinded for a moment by 
 the splendor of higher acquaintances. Otto felt himself 
 forgotten, and suffered all the bitterness of jealousy. 
 Even the blessedness of calling such a man his own 
 was purchased with the sacrifice of much that a woman 
 gives up to a beloved object, and with the misery that a 
 woman feels after she has learnt to know her spiritual 
 wants, and is thrust back into common life. Otto's hu- 
 mility was as remarkable as his elevation. He never 
 even drew a reflected light upon himself, but was content 
 to enjoy in secret the consciousness of influencing a man 
 like Richter; and was great enough to owe nothing ia 
 the siglit of the world to him. It was only after the 
 death of both that the publication of their correspondence 
 revealed tlieir relations to each other, and the outbreak- 
 ing pain and jealousy of Otto over what he imagined the 
 occasional coldness of Richter.
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 209 
 
 Almost tlie first production upon which Otto was called 
 to exercise his new office of critic was the " History of 
 the Contented Little Schoolmaster, Maria Wuz." Richter 
 had the modesty to call it an Idyl, the lowest species of 
 poetic creation. Wuz is remarkable as being the first 
 of his comjiositions to which he lent his own life. The 
 childhood of Wuz is but a poetical representation of his 
 own. Its exquisite humor consists in the delightful vanity 
 and self-satisfaction of a limited being in limited cii'cum- 
 stances. It is also remarkable as the transition from the 
 satirical works to those of an earnest and sentimental 
 nature, or, as Paul calls it, " The bridge over which he 
 passed from the vinegar fabric where he had worked 
 nineteen years, when he closed the door to satire, and 
 opened it to all that loved and rejoiced and wept with 
 human nature." 
 
 In 1819 Richter wrote thus of this transition. Speak- 
 ing in the third person, he says : " In liis nineteenth year 
 he made satirical sketches, and then nine years longer he 
 worked in his vinegar manufactory ; but at last, in De- 
 cember, 1790, tlirough the somewhat honey-sour 'Life 
 of the Little Schoolmaster Wuz,' he took the blessed step 
 over into the Invisible Lodge* A long oppressed, over- 
 
 * I have since learned that the Lilth Schoolmaster Wuz was not the 
 Jirst effort of Jean Paul in the form of narrative. He had written, be- 
 fore this, the diverting description of a pedantic School Rector, on a 
 journey of pleasure with his Primaners, continuing their lessons all 
 through the beautiful June days, dosing them with Latin when they 
 rested at the inns, studying the maps of other countries, instead of 
 observing the places they passed through, and turning back before 
 they had reached the object of their journey. This, together with 
 Freudds Klaglibdl iiber seinem Verflitchten Damon, were omitted in 
 the first collected edition of his works. I was ignorant of them, till I 
 learned their existence from Spazier's Biographical Commentary, a book 
 to which I have been much indebted in the latter part of this work.
 
 210 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 full heart preserves more of moderate and just equality 
 in its flood than one always left open, for the ebb of the 
 last must make a spring fountain requisite for the next 
 book fair. 
 
 " The blossoms of large trees tliat have long been 
 growing are small, and have usually only two sipple 
 colors, white and red, innocence and shame ; on the con- 
 trary, flowers on quick-growing, slender stems ai'e broader 
 and fuller, and ornamented with many glaring colors." 
 
 Otto's approbation of the Contented Schoolmaster en- 
 couraged Richter to go on to the production of a serious 
 romance. Wuz was finished March 2d, and the Invisible 
 Lodge begun March loth. Paul called it his Pedagogical 
 Romance, and it is based on his own experience in teach- 
 ing. The plan of education in the Invisible Lodge is the 
 same pursued by Richter with his own pupils. It con- 
 sists in not exciting too early the warmth of emotion, but 
 through mathematics and philosophy forming the under- 
 standing to self-activity and leading the fancy to wit ; 
 thus protecting the pupil from those moral errors, which 
 are the fruit of a too early excited imagination. 
 
 Gustavus, in consequence of his Moravian and secluded 
 youth, was brought too late into the hands of such a 
 teacher to escape a moral fall. While Richter asserts 
 that a too early excited imagination leads a man into 
 moral errors, he also asserts that it preserves the higher 
 female nature, raises it above temptation, and gives it a 
 strength to contend with difficulties, before which the 
 weaker physical nature of woman is vanquished. Thus, 
 wliilc Gustavus yields to, Beate is victorious over temp- 
 tation. Beate is but a passing shadow of those women, 
 made up of light and delicately-touched lines, that Jean 
 Paul, with all the glow of fancy, delighted, as in his
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 2II 
 
 Lia7ia, to paint with high, pure souls, frail, almost dis- 
 solving and transparent bodies ; beautiful materials for 
 poetry, but too ethereal for human nature's daily food. 
 
 Tlie other characters in this romance are made up from 
 the limited number of the author's acquaintance, and he 
 has worked tliem in with wonderful skill. Roper and his 
 wife represent the Oerthelshen marned pair ; Amatidus, 
 his sick and dying friend Adam von Oerthel ; and Dr. 
 Fenk is a modification of Herman, destitute, however, of 
 the singular personal beauty of his friend. In the princi- 
 pal characters, Richter has not only expressed his own 
 thoughts and sentiments, but his individual experiences, 
 his recollections, and the diiferent epochs of tlie history 
 of his soul are embodied in them. To Ottoman he has 
 given his dreams and aspirations ; to Fenh, his satire and 
 comic humor ; and in Gustavus, the events of his auto- 
 biography are clothed in a poetic garment. We feel that 
 these three characters, though with different forms of 
 expression, compose one and the same being. Great as 
 appears to us the result gained by the creation of the 
 Unsichtbare Loge, the history and analysis of all his 
 romances become more significant and interesting through 
 this one. It is the birth-history of all his poesy, and con- 
 tains not merely a succession of unfoldings and characters 
 for his later romances, but it is the poetic ground for all, 
 the seed-bed for all the unfoldings of his future works. 
 
 The poverty of characters in Jean Paul's novels is the 
 reason of his breaking the narrative with what he calls 
 extra leaves. The richness of his ideas, and his poetic 
 illustration, were in such disproportion to his invention of 
 fable and character, that the canvas was not broad enough 
 to take up all of which his mind was full. It was not 
 affectation, therefore, that induced the insertion of these 
 extra leaves, but a superabundance of tliought.
 
 212 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 When Richter sent his manuscript to Otto, he Avrotc 
 with fear and trembling : " The birth-pangs of my ro- 
 mance are over. Think of my disadvantageous situation 
 as a romance writer, that I can avail myself of so few 
 living characters as models, that I have never seen the 
 higher ranks of life, — and be lenient." 
 
 But how should he obtain a printer ? Providence 
 seemed to lead him to send his manuscript to the Hof- 
 rath * Moritz, who had great influence with a bookseller 
 in Berlin, whose daughter he was on the eve of marrying. 
 Happy was it indeed for Richter, that the man to whom 
 he turned was, in ripe age, for the first time loving deeply, 
 and exactly in a situation to be touched by the earnest 
 and sentimental gifts of Paul's imagination. Richter 
 wrote thus : " I would that you had already finished this 
 page, that I might not blush at your astonishment at the 
 sight of these volumes. The dai-k canvas enfolds, like 
 the life of man, joys, sorrows, and a half-executed plan ; 
 in short, a romance. If you find, after reading, that it is 
 worthy to be read by the few like you, I pray you to 
 reach it a mercantile helping hand, that it may be raised 
 from the written to the ))rinte(l world." 
 
 Moritz, who was in the liabit of receiving such presents, 
 frowned, and threw it aside witli an Ah ! but as he read 
 the first lines of Richter's letter, his brow cleared, and 
 when he reached the end, there was no longer a fold to 
 be seen on his face. As he read some pages of the man- 
 uscript, he cried out, " This is no unknow7i writer. It is 
 Goethe, Herder, or Wieland ! " but as he went on, he 
 repeatedly exclaimed, " tliat he could not understand 
 it, — it was above Goethe, — it was something wholly 
 new ! " 
 
 * Counsellor.
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 213 
 
 We can imagine Richter's delight on returning from a 
 little pedestrian journey, to find such a letter as this : 
 " Suffer me to tell you what has delighted me in your 
 work, and were you at the end of the earth I would en- 
 counter a hundred storms to fly to tell you ! Where do 
 }ou dwell ? How are you called ? Who are you ? * Your 
 work is a jewel ! " &c. 
 
 Moritz wrote again immediately after the book was 
 printed, and sent thirty of the hundred ducats t the 
 printer gave for the work. 
 
 The heart of Richter opened immediately to such a 
 friend, and went forth to meet him in all the confidence 
 of love ; but the whole fulness of his joy and success was 
 poured out for his mother, who needed indeed this balsam 
 of filial love. The moment he received the thirty ducats 
 he set out to walk from Schwarzenbach to Hof. On the 
 way, by the light of the stars, he thought of his mother's 
 astonishment, her joy, and her pious gratitude to Heaven, 
 and, entering late at night the low apartment where she 
 sat spinning by the light of the fii'e, he poured the whole 
 golden treasui-e into her lap. 
 
 Whoever has read the numerous passages in Richter's 
 works, where he describes the joy of soothing the dark 
 years of aged sorrow, and lightening the debt which every 
 child contracts at birth to its mother, will follow him in 
 sympathizing joy on this evening, never to be forgotten, 
 when he transferred the first reward of jiersevering in- 
 dustry to the hands of his mother. 
 
 The unexpected success of his romance, lifting him as 
 it were at once into fame, made no difference in the 
 simple and unostentatious life of Richter. He imme- 
 
 * Ricliter did not publish yet under his own name, 
 t About two hundred and twenty-six dollars.
 
 214 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 diately began his second romance, The Hesperus, working 
 unweariedly at it before and after school. 
 
 In the sprhig of 1794, his two eldest pnpils entered the 
 Gymnasium at Bayreuth, and he returned to his mother 
 in Hof. His first care had been, as soon as a better 
 prospect 0])ened before him, to take his mother from^the 
 miserable little apartment she had occupied behind the 
 parish church in Hof, and place her in a more cheerful, 
 but still humble and modest dwelling, near his friend, 
 Chi'istian Otto. His next care was to fulfil a duty of 
 gratitude, by repaying to his old instructor, Werner, a 
 sum he had lent to his mother. I insert the answer of 
 the aged man. 
 
 " "Wholly unexpected was your letter to me ; and yet, 
 if possible, the enclosure was more so. Be assured I was 
 touched by it, even to shedding tears, and that it will re- 
 main forever unforgotten ! It is to me a new proof of a 
 Divine Providence, a new expression of your noble way 
 of thinking and acting. 
 
 " I sat in the window, deeply sunk, in consequence of 
 the sad times, in anxiety for the support of my family, 
 when your letter, heavy with money, of which I was 
 wholly destitute, was brought in. Certainly it was won- 
 derful ! and that, in the midst of so much employment 
 you should remember me, a poor old schoolmaster ; 
 should be my friend, and wish me so much good; and 
 that the little I once afforded your poor motlier, that I 
 had long since forgotten, should be again restored to me 
 by the heavy sweat of your brow ! Truly, it was some- 
 thing strange! touching! 
 
 " Tlumks, above all, to the good Providence that, just 
 at the right time, and wholly unexpectedly, led you to do 
 this for the support of my family (for I have never found
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL". 215 
 
 it so difficult to help tliem as now, when my old body will 
 not acquiesce in it). Thanks also to you, through whom 
 Providence has chosen the means to help me. Be as- 
 sured, till my apparently near dissolution, I shall be 
 yours. ., ^y „ 
 
 The weeks that followed the successful reception of the 
 Unsichtbare Loge were the " Sabbath weeks " of Paul's life. 
 He had had the courage to speak out in the fulness of 
 his nature, and had found a response in many hearts. In 
 the paradise that opened before him he determined to 
 give full course to the flood of his genius ; but he well 
 knew that the richest fulness of poetic thought could 
 only exist in connection with peace of soul, cheerfulness 
 of disposition, and firmness of purpose ; and that the 
 truth of his representations must arise from correspond- 
 ing inward truth and integrity ; in short, if he would be 
 a poet in his works he must be a poet in his life. 
 
 He carefully continued his book of devotion, his rules 
 and purposes of life. He never awoke without review- 
 ing the past day, and where he had been assaulted by the 
 force of any passion, there he placed a double bulwark, 
 and with quiet satisfaction celebrated the victory gained. 
 His quick and warm fancy led hira often to outbreaking 
 anger, and his ready wit to satire tliat was sometimes 
 wounding, especially when his good nature was misused ; 
 but the gentlest call led him back to tenderness, — the 
 accidental sight of a boy's face with tears in his eyes was 
 sufficient to disarm liim ; he thought of his future life, of 
 the sorrows that would draw from him still bitterer tears, 
 and he said, " / will not pour into the cup of humanity 
 a single drop of gall," and he kept his woi-d. Where he 
 was obliged to assert his riglits, he did it so calmly and
 
 2l6 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 gently, that the holy treasures of liis life, love and truth, 
 l-emaiiied forever undisturbed. 
 
 Everything living touched his heart, from the humblest 
 flower that opened its leaves in the grass, up to the shin- 
 ing worlds on high ; children and old men, the beggar 
 and the rich, he would have embraced them all iu the 
 sacred glow of his emotions, or given all he possessed to 
 make them happy. No one went from him unconsoled ; 
 and when he could give nothing but good counsel, he 
 gave that. Were it only a poor mountaineer, or a trav- 
 elling apprentice to whom he could impart the smallest 
 present, he would dwell the whole day with delight 
 on the circumstance. Often he would say to himself: 
 "Now he wiU draw the dollar from his pocket, and 
 reckon which of his long-cherished wishes he can first 
 satisfy. How often will he think of this day, and of the 
 unexpected gift, and perhaps once more than usual upon 
 the Giver of all good." Love was the ever-living prin- 
 ciple of his character and of his writings, and before the 
 tliought of the Infinite, all differences in rank vanished 
 away ; all were equally great or equally little. He 
 gained nourishment for this principle from every circum- 
 stance in life. Where others would have been untouched 
 and cold, there he heard whispered to his spirit the voice 
 of humanity. Let him speak for himself. He says in 
 his journal : — 
 
 " I picked up in the choir a faded rose-leaf, that lay 
 under the feet of the boys. Great God ! what had I in 
 my hand but a small leaf, with a little dust upon it, and 
 upon this small fugitive thing my fancy built a whole 
 l)aradise of joy, — a whole summer dwelt upon this leaf. 
 I tliought of the beautiful day when the boy held this 
 flower in his hand, and when through the church window
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 217 
 
 he saw the blue heaven and the clouds wandering over 
 it ; when every place in the cool vault was full of sun- 
 light, and reminded him of the shadows on the grass from 
 the over-flying clouds. Good God ! thou scatterest satis- 
 faction everywhere, and givest to every one joys to im- 
 part again. Not merely dost thou invite us to great and 
 exciting pleasures, but thou givest to the smallest a lin- 
 gering perfume." 
 
 Above all things his e}^e hung upon Nature. He lived 
 and wrote whole days in the open air, on the mountain or 
 in the woods ; and in the midst of winter he sought from 
 the window the evening rose color, his beloved stars, and 
 that magic enchanter, the moon. Every walk in the open 
 air was to him the entrance into a church. He said in 
 his journal : " Dost thou enter pure into this vast, guilt- 
 less temple ? Dost thou bring no poisonous passion into 
 this place, where flowers bloom and birds sing ? Dost 
 thou bear no hatred where Nature loves ? Art thou 
 calm as the stream where Nature reflects herself as in a 
 mirror ? Ah, would that my heart were as true and as 
 unruffled as Nature, when she came from the hands of 
 her great Creator ! " Every new excursion in this great 
 temple gave him new strength, and he returned laden 
 with spiritual treasures. He loved to make short jour- 
 neys on foot, where the motion of the body kept the mind 
 in a state of activity ; and the insignificant gained value 
 by its unexpectedness. A sunny day made him happy, 
 and the perfumes of a spring morning, or dewy evening, 
 seemed almost to intoxicate him with their incense ; but 
 the hours of night were those of his highest elevation, 
 when he would lie long hours on the dewy grass, looking 
 into the opening clouds. He says in his journal : " I take 
 my ink-flask in the morning, and write as I walk in the 
 10
 
 2l8 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 fragrant air. Then comes my joy, that I have conquered 
 two of my faults, — my disposition to be angry iu conver- 
 sation, and to lose my cheerfulness through a long day of 
 dust and mosquitoes. Nothing makes one so indifferent 
 to the pin and mosquito thrusts of life, as the conscious- 
 ness of growing better." '-■ 
 
 Immediately after the publication of The Invisible 
 Lodge, the friend who had exerted himself so much in 
 its favoi", and whose admiration had been so warmly ex- 
 pressed, Moritz, of Berlin, died. The book did not attain 
 the universal fame he had predicted for it ; Paul himself 
 was sensible of its faults, and proposed a few years after- 
 wards wholly to re-write, and give it a more satisfactory 
 conclusion. It remains however unfinished, and appears 
 to me the least interesting of all Richter's serious ro- 
 mances, and he, before his death, called it a Born Ruin. 
 Whatever the cause, for his Hesperus, which was finished 
 and sent to Otto to read on the longest day of the year 
 1794, Richter could obtain only two hundred Prussian 
 dollars. This is the work by which the author lias been 
 best known, out of Germany. In Germany, Titan is the 
 work, the great wokk of Jean Paul ; but the first vol- 
 ume is so peculiai'ly Jeaii Paulish, that I presume many 
 persons have been deterred from going beyond that. 
 
 It is, perhaps, desirable to the English reader to leam 
 something of the work by which the author is best known. 
 
 HESPERUS. 
 
 It was a singularly happy illustration to compare Hes- 
 perus to Strasburg Cathedral ; although it is full of beauty, 
 of lovely pictures, and of exquisite passages, it is deficient 
 in symmetry and unfinished in its details. The story is
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 219 
 
 SO confused, that probably many persons have read and 
 admired the book without even getting a clear idea of 
 its story. 
 
 The Prince January, in his various travels, has left five 
 sons in the different countries where lie has rested. Lord 
 Horion, an Englishman, after the death of a beloved wife, 
 ardently desires some employment that will lessen the 
 void in his heart ; meeting this Prince January, he be- 
 comes his friend, and, returning with him to Germany, 
 makes himself necessary to him as a wise and powerful 
 minister. Of the five sons, one only enters into the 
 scenes of the romance, Flamin the youngest, whose 
 mother was a niece of Lord Horion. After the deser- 
 tion of the prince, this niece mari-ies Le Baut, his cham- 
 berlain. Lord Horion, fearing that his own influence 
 will be overruled by that of his niece and her son, if 
 permitted to return with the prince to Germany, per- 
 suades her to separate herself from Le Baut (whose bad 
 character is indeed a sufficient reason), and remain with 
 her son in England. Eyman, the chaplain of the prince, 
 had also followed him to England, having before married 
 a young lady of the court, who gave birth to a son just 
 at the time Flamin was born. Lord Horion, the master- 
 spirit and juggler of the history, and who wishes to try 
 the experiment of educating a prince as if he were only a 
 citizen, effects the exchange of the infants ; gives Flamin, 
 the son of the prince, to Eyman the chaplain ; and Victor, 
 the chaplain's son (as his own son Julius, by his beloved 
 wife, is bom blind), he determines to educate as his own, 
 and gives liim his own name. 
 
 The three children, Flamin, Victor, and Julius, to- 
 gether with Julia, the daughter also of Lord Horion, 
 arc educated by Emanuel, or Dahore, a Moravian, or
 
 220 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 Brahmin, or mystical philosopher, and remain in Eng- 
 land until their tenth or twelfth year, under the maternal 
 care of the divorced wife of Le Baut, the niece of Lord 
 Horion. To the surprise of every one, Flamin, the re- 
 puted son of the chaplain, but the real son of the prince, 
 is educated for an advocate ; Victor, the reputed sdn of 
 the lord, but the real son of the chaplain, for a physician ; 
 and the story opens w^hen they have all returned to Ger- 
 many and are just entering upon their respective employ- 
 ments, Flamin as a counsellor, Victor as court physician. 
 Clotilda, a daughter of Lord Horion's niece, born w^hile 
 she was the w ife of Le Baut, has also returned to her 
 father, who has been disgraced at the court of the prince, 
 and withdrawn to his country-seat, St. Lune, where Ey- 
 man is also pastor, after having been coui't chaplain. 
 Lord Horion is himself absent, for the purpose of seek- 
 ing the fifth son of the prince, and thinks to hold in his 
 hand the wires that shall direct all their motions in his 
 absence. 
 
 The scene opens under the following circumstances : 
 Flamin and Victor, intimate friends, and brothers in affec- 
 tion, come to St. Lune to pass the holidays, previous to 
 entering upon their duties at court ; Lord Horion having 
 become bluid through grief for the loss of his wife, Victor 
 operates upon his eyes and gives him back the light. 
 Flamin, thinking himself the son of Eyraan, had become 
 passionately attached to his half sister, Clotilda. She 
 had herself become acquainted with their consanguinity, 
 by having been the reader to Lord Horion during his 
 blindness, but she was bound by him to keep the secret. 
 Victor, at tiie first siglit of Clotilda, falls passionately in 
 love with hei', but stifles his passion from principles of 
 honor, and from affection to his friend Flamin, w^hose
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 221 
 
 relationship to Clotilda lie does not yet know. Through 
 the eccentricities and iniprobabiUties of this plan Jean 
 Paul contrives to involve the fate of his lovers, and to 
 excite the deepest interest for their destiny. 
 
 There is another charactei", the evil spirit of the his- 
 tory, Matthieu, the son of the minister Schleunes, an 
 eccentric and wicked youth, whose rich powers of intel- 
 lect are impaired through his bad heart. He possesses 
 the art of the ventriloquist, and the power of imitating 
 all voices and sounds. Assuming the voice of Clotilda, 
 he is permitted by the blind Lord Horion to read his 
 letters, and thus discovering the secret relationship of 
 Flamin to Clotilda, and his real parentage, is able to 
 infuse suspicion and jealousy into all hearts. 
 
 The limited experience of the Poet permitted hira only 
 a limited range of characters ; but he represents the moral 
 and intellectual errors in these characters, not only in 
 their influence upon others, but as they secretly return 
 upon themselves. Thus, mystical enthusiasm is carried 
 to such madness in Emanuel, that he imagines he has the 
 power, by the force of the spiritual nature, to cease to 
 live at a certain time, and to leave the body. He is 
 cured and punished by the accidental discharge of a 
 powder-reservoir, that occasions his death. 
 
 Lord Horion imagined that he held in his hand the 
 secret springs, and could direct the motions of sentient 
 beings as if they were puppets, obedient only to mechani- 
 cal impulses. He left out of his calculations the will and 
 the passions of each individual, and, failing in his objects, 
 the world, to his cold injideUty, seems empty of everything 
 worth striving for. He retires to a solitary island, and 
 there, by his own hand, falls into the grave of his wife. 
 
 But the great idea of Hesperus, as it was of the Invisi'
 
 222 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 ble Lodge, is to unite in a powerful character all outward 
 and inward greatness. Victor, the hero of the novel, 
 fails to represent this idea to the reader. He rather 
 unites the characteristics of Jean Paul himself; the 
 serious poetic nature with that of the humorist. To 
 evolve his higher nature, he is educated as the son of a 
 nobleman ; but to make him a humorist, as according to 
 the Poet's definition of humor, strong contrasts are neces- 
 sary ; he was therefore the son of a country pastor, and 
 destined to be a physician, " to whom the hut and the 
 palace are equally open." Richter himself was conscious 
 of an irretrievable failure in the character of Victor. Al- 
 though full of all lovely and engaging qualities, he fails 
 to interest the sympathies of the reader. He is the rep- 
 resentative of a certain period of life rather than a com- 
 plete human being. It is the period of preparation for 
 action, but the action which succeeds the period of high 
 ideal love in truly great minds is Avanting. For what does 
 he strive ? For tender and generous emotions, and for an 
 opportunity to jest. He never acts. He waits, while all 
 around him, impelled by different passions, involve him 
 in the consequences. Even his virtues appear like weak- 
 nesses. He is saved from seduction by a being infinitely 
 interesting to his fancy merely through an accident, and 
 the reader feels that in a life of action or of trial he must 
 inevitably fail. 
 
 The heroine, Clotilda, is the first in the gallery of 
 female portraits in which Jean Paul sought to embody 
 his ideal of female excellence and loveliness. She also 
 disappoints the reader, as she hovers, an undefined being, 
 half angel, half woman, over the pages of the romance, 
 and we seem never to catch a full view of tlie Madonna 
 loveliness of her features, but they are immediately
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 223 
 
 shrouded in clouds. Richter had not yet seen all the 
 elements he wished to unite in woman in any of his 
 female friends. His own ideal, like the rainbow in his 
 fancy, hovered constantly before, and led him on, till 
 it became a luminous point, the highest aim of his 
 poetic exertion. 
 
 The public, and even the friends of Richter, mistook 
 his design in the character of Dahore, or Emanuel. As 
 he described him with all the glow of fancy, and his death 
 with true and deep emotion, they imagined he was in- 
 tended for a model rather than a warning. Ricliter was 
 wounded by the imputation, and justly complained that 
 liis critics would not take the trouble to investigate the 
 character of Dahore, and place the public in a right un- 
 derstanding of his design. Goethe painted, in poetically 
 beautiful and seducing colors, the weakness and the con- 
 fusion of moral good and evil in the character of Werter, 
 and others took the trouble to vindicate the moral design 
 of the autlior, or to present a suthcient antidote. 
 
 Jean Paul intended to paint, in his Emanuel, that 
 enervating excess of feeling, that longing after a world of 
 love and beauty, where the perfume of flowers and the 
 luxury of tears unfit one for common every-day duties ; a 
 malady that is apt to infect the most elevated and spir- 
 itual natures ; and, as he had healed himself, he wished 
 to heal others of that mystical disease, carried to luxu- 
 riant excess in Emanuel, but of which the seeds are in 
 every human breast. 
 
 Hesperus, although failing as a w^ork of art of the aim 
 which tlie author intended, is yet a temple where hu- 
 manity, love, and nature are reverenced. It is full of 
 passages and whole scenes of exquisite beauty, and rich 
 to excess in the peculiarities of our author. The pages
 
 224 I^IfE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 dazzle us with wit and condensed sentences of wisdom, 
 and the reader is fatigued by a prolonged perusal, as he is 
 by a book of aphorisms. 
 
 The whole is enclosed in a comic or humorous frame. 
 The author mixes his own personal history with the 
 romance, by imagining it brought to him on a solitary 
 island by a dog, who swims across with the chapters 
 suspended from his neck in a basket. The chapters 
 are therefore called Hundpostagen (Dog-post-days). The 
 days that the dog-post fails the author fills with essays 
 and satires of his own. These interlocutory days are full 
 of wit and wisdom, although, as interrupting the narra- 
 tive, the reader is inclined to skip them. 
 
 The description in Hesperus, of the transfer of the 
 Princess Agnola, is that of a real occurrence, — the trans- 
 fer of the Princess of Tuscany, as the bride of the Saxon 
 Prince Maximilian, which took place in Hof in 1793. 
 And the portrait of the bridegi'oom carried in a sedan- 
 chair, and stopping whenever the princess stopped, was 
 an actual part of the ceremony. Richter here shows 
 what tributes he could draw from real life, and what 
 treasures a youth, richer in incidents and experience, 
 would have accumidated for his after years.* 
 
 * These sketches of the characters in " Hesperus," as well as in the 
 books that follow, are wholly insufficient to give the reader an idea of 
 their excellence. The limits of the book oblige me to be brief.
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 RicnTER VISITS Baybeuth. — The Jew Emanuel. — The Origi- 
 nal OF Clotilda. — " Siebenkas." — Letter from Septimus 
 
 FiXLEIN. 
 
 A. D. 1794, 
 Mt. 31. 
 
 LTHOUGH, as already mentioned, 
 the hopes that Moritz had excited, 
 of an immediate splendid fortune for our poet, 
 Avere already disappointed, and he obtained 
 only two hundred dollars for the four volumes of Hes- 
 perus, he had given up his school and returned to his 
 mother's still humble dwelling ; but he found himself 
 obliged to resort again to teaching, and received the 
 young sisters of his friends, as daily pupils, in his own 
 house. 
 
 He says, " Very little remained after dividing the two 
 hundred dollars with my mother and brother ; and I am 
 yet compelled, like the bird, to learn to sing in a dark- 
 ened cage." 
 
 His next woi'k seems to have grown out of the circum- 
 stances of his present life, in which he sought to solve the 
 Xerxes riddle, not to create new joys, but from the en- 
 chantment of fancy to bring out the infinite riches of the 
 old. Quintus Fixlein is only an enlarged and more 
 elaborate Wuz, in which the poet represents the small 
 and contented joys of the schoolmaster, increased beyond 
 10* o
 
 226 LIFE OF JE-AN PAUL. 
 
 measure by rising a step higher in the scale of social life, 
 and becoming a pastor. The poet knew no situation 
 more depressed tlian that of school-teachers, in so far as 
 a higher education made them more sensitive to the pov- 
 erty and limitations of their actual life. In no situation 
 in Germany are the discouragements of life more^'^p- 
 parent. At the same time he could attain the other 
 aim of all his writings, to contend for tlie oppressed 
 against the original causes of oppression, the institutions 
 of the state and the privileges of birth, and so, in a double 
 sense, be the advocate of the poor.* 
 
 The -pecuniary reward that Paul received for the Hes- 
 perus was far from being the best of his compensations. 
 After the publication of that work, letters poured in upon 
 him from every side. Vogel, who had been estranged 
 from him, renewed his friendship and his correspondence. 
 Even those who had known him long wei-e inspired with 
 new admiration. Otto, who had judged his former works 
 with calm severity, which was indeed the fomidation of 
 his own character, was excited by this to the most glow- 
 ing expression of deep and inward joy. The joyful sense 
 of the approbation of his friends, and the consciousness 
 that, in striving to embody his own high ideal, he had 
 reached a higher point, though far below his aim, made 
 the summer of the year 1794 the most precious he had 
 yet enjoyed. 
 
 The happiness of Richter was increased during the 
 summer by a visit to Bayreuth. He was drawn there by 
 his acquaintance with Emanuel, a Jewish merchant, 
 
 * As Quintus FixUin is known to the American public through 
 Carlyle's admirable translation, which has been reprinted in Boston, 
 it is unnecessary to enter into any analysis of one of the most simple 
 of Jean Paul's works.
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 227 
 
 whose genial and benevolent character attracted Rich- 
 ter's esteem. Emanuel had been, like Wordsworth's 
 Mattheiv, in early life a travelling merchant to the differ- 
 ent villages in the Fichtelgebirge, until, through his ac- 
 tivity and extreme honesty, he had gained the confidence 
 of every one, and became a Avealthy banker, or what we 
 call an estate broker. The knowledge of the world 
 gained by such a life, the union of integrity and feeling, 
 originality and truth, acquired for him unlimited confi- 
 dence, which was increased by a singularly noble and 
 interesting exterior. His peculiar business opened to 
 him an extensive correspondence, especially Avith accom- 
 plished women, in which all the bloom of his mind and 
 heart was expressed. A sight of this correspondence 
 had attracted Jean Paul to the writer. 
 
 Emanuel met him with the reserve and self-respect 
 that higher natures among that oppressed people, the 
 Jews, assume, from the notion that benevolence alone ex- 
 cited his interest. Tliis for some time kept up a resei-ve 
 between them, that ceased after the publication of Hes- 
 perus. Emanuel was delighted with the Oriental glow 
 and richness of illustration in that work, and Richter 
 found in his new friend treasures of observation and ex- 
 perience which he seized to enrich his future works.* 
 
 For the first time in his life Paul found himself in a 
 study, furnished with articles of luxury and taste, in an 
 elegant street in the little city of Bayreuth, where ducal 
 residences alternated with two-story houses of red sand- 
 stone, and the ornamental fountains of princely castles 
 
 * Emanuel's mind was richly furnished with the knowledge and 
 images deri"ed from Oriental poetry and philosophy; and to Richter, 
 A^ho from childhood had been fascinated with these subjects, he af- 
 forded a treasure of observation and experience.
 
 228 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 were intenuixed with the green blinds of village houses. 
 What was his joyful astonishment to find, twelve whole 
 hours* from Hof, his own writings known and read. 
 
 The friendly reception he met among the accomplished 
 men of this city, contrasted as it was with the small value 
 that was expressed for his poor family in Hof, gave Itim 
 no doubt a predisposition for this city, and led to tlie reso- 
 lution he afterwards adopted, after many changes, to make 
 this the place of his future home. In Bayreuth, he had 
 the double joy of finding himself appreciated ; and, for 
 the first time, becoming acquainted with an accomplished 
 woman of high rank, the original from which he drew his 
 Clotilda in Hesperus. She had been described to him by 
 the pen of a friend, that might have been " cut by the 
 god of love himself," and she had also written to him, 
 asking for his friendship and correspondence in return ; 
 and at the same time had warned him, that he must not 
 rely on the description that had been given of her ; for 
 her portrait, personal and moral, had been heightened by 
 the coloring of love. Now, when he had seen the origi- 
 nal, he wrote thus to Otto : " Touching the beautiful Clo- 
 tilda. Saturday evening, as soon as I arrived, I seized a 
 pen to invite myself to visit her at five o'clock. She sent 
 a billet by the return of the servant, in which she turned 
 the hands of my watch two hours back. ' We will both,' 
 she said, ' go about three o'clock through the Hermitage,' 
 (this was a princely garden in Bayreuth.) I crept then 
 into the lower story of the Rutzensteen house, and 
 through beautiful rooms into a third, where she sat, half 
 concealed by a curtained and flowery window, listening to 
 
 * Stunde is used in Germany for distances, thus: Es isl eine SluiiJe 
 bis da/iin, "It is an hour's walk," means about two English miles. 
 Bayreuth was twenty-fom* miles from Hof.
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 229 
 
 two niglitingales. Could I describe her, you would have 
 a wholly new female character in your head, or rather in 
 your heart. She is of a majestic height, is twenty-seven 
 years old, and has a very slightly arched, but well-formed 
 profile. A half shadowy reflection of rose color was drawn 
 over her face, which departs a little from the female oval ; 
 with the most beautifully ennobled Berlin expression. 
 In the beginning merely, she made with the head eight 
 or nine and a half (I may err in the number) motions 
 too many, but her conversation with me was full of be- 
 nevolence, decision, and generosity. Wlien she sings, 
 her two nightingales strike in, and altogether is as if 
 one's heart must escape by the enchantment from the 
 breast." 
 
 Paul had also the satisfaction in Bayreuth of having 
 his Hesperus read by the bedside of the old lady Plotho, 
 the patroness of his father, who was now on her death- 
 bed, and who recalled the time when he used to stand at 
 her breakfast-table, and read the newspapers to her. 
 
 After Paul's return from Bayreuth, he wrote to 
 Emanuel. 
 
 "July, 1795. 
 
 " The day that I left Bayreuth, the longest day of the 
 year, was my shortest and happiest. Since then, I hear 
 nothing of my friends. Are you then nightingales, that 
 after St. John's day are silent ? In Bayreuth, my mo- 
 ments were roses, and my hours polished brilliants ; so 
 much the more readily do these images arise, like buried 
 pictures, and the intoxication of memory renews my thirst 
 for the present joy cup, and joy begets heimweh. 
 
 " It is wonderful that men in seasons of happiness, in 
 youth, in beautiful places, in the fairest season of the year 
 incline more surely to the enthusiasm of longing ; they
 
 230 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 think oftener of a future world, and more readily form 
 pictures of death ; while the opposite takes place in want, 
 in age, in Greenland and in winter. Thus the best men 
 are humble through happiness, pious, tender, thireting for 
 a liigher liappiness : misfortune makes them proud, severe, 
 and full of earthly plans. With bad men it is often exactly 
 the reverse. After praise a man is modest and humble ; 
 when blamed, he asserts an opposing pride. Thus the 
 tear of joy is a pearl of the first water, the mourning 
 tear only of the second. I begin a ball with gayety, 
 and conclude it with melancholy. Pi'olonged sounds 
 of music, long-continued dancing, the midnight starry 
 heavens, soften, as it were, the heart, as melon-seeds 
 are made to swell in sweet wine, and the first shoot 
 from this seed is a weeping willow." 
 
 In the mean time, Richter's industry was unremitting. 
 Before the close of this year, 1796, the Blumen-Frucht- 
 und-Dornenstukke appeared.* This is a collection of 
 pieces, one of which is the singular dream of the dead 
 Christ, translated by Madame de Stael, that made Richter 
 first known out of Germany. The longest of the fruit- 
 pieces is the history of the Poor's Advocate, SiehenJcas, one 
 of the most remarkable, and at this time the most personal 
 of all Jean Paul's works. Under the veil of fictitious char- 
 acters, he describes his own transition from tlie every-day 
 life of reality to the higlier ideal life of poetry and im- 
 agination. This romance is remarkable also for a de- 
 scription of a Poppenshaw, or bird-shooting, so like that 
 of Scott's, in Old Mortality, that if the German novel 
 had been known at that time, we might almost imagine 
 vScott had taken a hint from it. The actors in Richter's 
 are a poor's advocate, a shoemaker, and a hair-dresser ; 
 
 * Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces.
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL, 231 
 
 ■with these ho has contrived to keep up an unflagging 
 interest through more than a hundred pages. 
 
 The cliaracter of Lenette in this work is said to have 
 been drawn from Paul's mother. It represents a noble^ 
 but Hmited and uninstructed nature, in contention with 
 all the little down-pressing circumstances of real life, and 
 menaced with the grim spectre of actual want. Nothing 
 can be more true, and of more universal application, than 
 Paul's \-iew in this novel of the sufferings of an ill-as- 
 sorted union, when there is neither vice nor crime, only 
 an unequal standard of mind, and a deficiency of culture 
 in one of the parties. The unhappy Lenette is incapable 
 of understanding her gifted husband; Siebenkas, full of 
 tenderness and all noble qualities, who has married her 
 for her innocence and simplicity, is at length worn out by 
 her narrowness, obtuseness, and want of sympathy, and 
 their mutual sufferings are rich in instruction for all 
 married pei-sons. 
 
 It is impossible to present an analysis, or even an ab- 
 stract, of this remarkable work. The Germans give it a 
 philosophical and poetical interpretation. They say that 
 Jean Paul intended to repi-csent Siebenkas as dying to 
 the actual, to the every-day life of man ; and in the re- 
 luctant and bleeding heart with which he tears himself 
 from Lenette is meant to be represented the great strug- 
 gle of the soul to rise to a higher, an ideal life. 
 
 As the half visible author of Hesperus,* Paul had 
 drawn upon himself the attention of all Germany ; but 
 now, in Siebenkas, he represents his own and his mother's 
 struggles with poverty in the poor apartment in Ilof, and 
 first appears with his whole and real name. The truth 
 
 * In Hesperus he first signed his literary name Jean Paul, without 
 the Richter.
 
 232 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 of his representations having their foundation in the act- 
 ual experience of the Avriter, led irresistibly, in a new 
 and surprising manner, to faith in himself; only he who 
 had felt the want of outward blessings could describe 
 them so faithfully, and only one who was possessed of the 
 temperament of joy could rise so easily above the press- 
 ure of calamity. The breathing form of love that he 
 gave to everything that came from his hands was felt in 
 every heart, and gratitude as well as admiration induced 
 many readers to crave a personal acquaintance with him. 
 From every side he received expressions of gratitude, 
 which were as touching from their simplicity, in some in- 
 stances, as they were flattering from the distinction they 
 conferred, in others. 
 
 He received letters from poor country schoolmasters 
 and pastors, the class of persons that he has described 
 with such simplicity and naivete, begging him to lend or 
 give a copy of some one of his works ; and perhaps more 
 welcome yet, one morning in May of this year the post- 
 boy brought him a packet, containing fifty Prussian dol- 
 lars and the following letter : — 
 
 " You should be pooi-, dear Herr Eichter, you ! the 
 millionnaire in understanding, as such are usually poor; 
 and this is right, for the otliers write no books ; and as 
 your books give me satisfaction, very gi-eat satisfaction, 
 and notliing but satisfaction, I hold myself indebted to 
 Herr Richter, and would give him a little proof that his 
 readers are grateful. Many readers cannot show their 
 gratitude, and that also is well, or Herr Richter would 
 become rich, and write no more books 
 
 " Your grateful and devoted. 
 
 " SEPTIMUS FIXLEIN."
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 233 
 
 The Avriter remained unknown until many years after, 
 when a happy accident revealed him to Riehter.* 
 
 The next is a letter from Sophia la Roche, the gi-and- 
 niother that Bettine has so beautifully made known to us 
 in her correspondence with Gunderode. 
 
 " It is impossible that the man whose susceptible soul 
 and richly thoughtful mind hovers over all the leaves of 
 Hesperus can take it ill if a good Frau thanks him for 
 the agreeable hours she has enjoyed through that won- 
 derful book ; if she bless him, that with so wonderful a 
 genius he is so good a son, so good a brother. Let a 
 mother, who has educated three sons, and has lost, in his 
 three-and-twentieth year, the noblest, the most beautifully 
 blooming, congratulate his mother that Jean Paul is her 
 son — and lives ! 
 
 " He will not take it ill, and my heart would yet say 
 something more that Hesperus, and the little that I have 
 heard of its author, makes me think. I tell you frankly 
 that I wish to know more of you, for to me your appear- 
 ance is full of truth and reverence. Heaven make you 
 as happy as it has made you precious to others, and when 
 you read or hear my name, remember to say, ' That lady 
 
 is my friend.' 
 
 " SOPHIA LA ROCHE." 
 
 * Appeudix I.
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 
 Letters from Weimar. — Letter from Madam von Kalb. — 
 
 RiCHTER PREPARES TO GO TO WeIMAR. 
 
 E come now to that period in the life ^ d. 179o 
 of Richter when the silk and golden ^t- 33. 
 threads of love began to be woven thickly in 
 his web of life ; when, borne in triumph by 
 eccentric and distinguished women, although with chains 
 of flowers, he often felt the concealed thorns pierce his 
 heart. The publication of his last works, Hesperus, Quin- 
 tus Fixlein, and the Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces, drew 
 upon him the attention of women in the higher ranks of 
 life, who were not only penetrated with his peculiarities 
 as a writer, but began to manifest for him a deep personal, 
 and more than friendly interest. The reader must rec- 
 ollect Paul's easily kindled imagination, the sentiment 
 amounting almost to reverence with which he regarded 
 women, his separation from the more elevated circles of 
 social life, and the disapjwintment of his former hopes, to 
 undci'staud the excitement, the fulness of joy with which 
 he met this new manifestation of tlie interest his writings 
 had produced. 
 
 Upon tlie first of March of this year he received from 
 Weimar the following letter, which bore the signature of 
 a noble lady : —
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 235 
 
 " During the last months your works have been made 
 known to us in Weimar. They excited attention, and to 
 many have they been most welcome. To me they gave 
 the most agreeable entertainment, and I have to thank 
 you for some of the sweetest hours of the past, which I 
 willingly wooed to linger, while the images of your fancy, 
 like lovely phantoms from tlie realms of spirits, wandered 
 before my mind. Often was I so deeply moved by the 
 charm and riches of your thoughts, that, overpowered by 
 gratitude, I would seize the pen to express it to you. But 
 how insignificant would be such a token from one unknown 
 to you ! In a happy hour I heard your praises from men 
 that you have long known and revered, and the wish to 
 write was again excited. Now it is not the solitary tlower 
 of my own admiration that I send you, but an unfading 
 wreath, which the applause of Wieland and Herder have 
 woven for you. Wieland has extracted much from Hes- 
 perus and Fixlein for his Museum. He calls you ' our 
 Yorick, our Rabelais, — the purest spirit ! ' He discovers 
 in you the highest flights of fancy, the richest humor, 
 that often displays itself in the most surprising, the most 
 agreeable turns. 
 
 " All this he recognizes with joy in your writings 
 
 You vnW find here yet many more friends, whose names I 
 must mention to you. Herr von Knebel, the translator 
 of Propertius, Herr von Einsiedel, Herr von Kalb ; your 
 writings belong to then* most agreeable reading, and long 
 have ornamented their desks. Yes, we hope, through 
 your susceptibility for knowledge of the world and of 
 men, and this rare talent lor delicate individuality, to 
 receive many works from your pen. Farewell ! Be 
 happy through the enjoyment of nature, and inspired 
 through the creations of art, and continue to make us
 
 236 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 acquainted with ideals, that honor the poet and eyinohU 
 the reader." 
 
 Richter is represented like one struck by an electrical 
 shock upon the reception of this letter. To be known and 
 read where Goethe, Schiller, Wieland, — where Herder's 
 elevated spirit shed an immediate influence upon all^sur- 
 rounding minds ! This spot, that had lain in distant 
 shadow, like an enchanted world before his longing 
 fancy ! 
 
 He immediately hastened to Bayreuth, where a sister 
 of the noble letter-writer, a young, amiable, and spiritual 
 woman, lived with her husband. 
 
 I have hesitated whether to give to the English reader 
 the correspondence of Jean Paul with this lady, Charlotte 
 von Kalb, who entered so deeply and powerfully into his 
 life and poetry, and is said to be the original from which 
 he drew his Linda in the Titan. 
 
 Sentiment, either in love or friendship, is like those 
 delicate perfumes, so delicious when breathed from the 
 plant as it grows in the sun and air of its native home ; 
 translated, it resembles the same perfume distilled and 
 mixed with foreign substances, which, transported from 
 its native sun and air, becomes faint or nauseous. 
 
 We must remember also that the German language 
 is full of expressions of tenderness that are wholly un- 
 translatable ; their domestic terms of endearment are like 
 caresses, and their du and their Ja-wort, to use an expres- 
 sion of Paul's, " are as if they laid a rose in your hand." 
 
 Although much relating to this lady is, to us, involved 
 in mystery, no one among his correspondents excites a 
 deeper interest. She appears to have belonged to the 
 court of the Duchess Amelia, as she went with the court 
 to the country. She says in one of her letters that she
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 237 
 
 is oldei" than Richtcr, and that she had wept the loss of 
 two children. Her letters disclose the most zealous and 
 disinterested friendship, and their beauty and tenderness 
 must have kindled the warmest attachment in a heart like 
 Richter's, had there not been to him a fatal objection, — 
 she was married, and unhappily married. 
 
 Otto looked from the first upon this correspondence 
 with coldness and alarm, and would have prevented his 
 fi'iend from going to Weimar. But at the same time Paul 
 received other flattering letters ; one from Frederic voa 
 Oerthel,* expressing a glowing reverence for him, which 
 his youth and inexperience would not allow him to 
 conceal. The demand that Herder had made for a new 
 poet, to be heard first and before all, as a word from the 
 heart to the heart of man ; a sound of the universal voice 
 of humanity, an echo of the mighty spirit of the age, 
 seemed to be answered in Richter. Still he was held 
 back by his own timidity, or by Otto's anxiety, and an- 
 swered the letter of his noble correspondent, of which I 
 give an extract : — 
 
 " ^Vhen Jean Paul with three hundred pages can give 
 as much satisfaction as you with your two small and brief 
 ones, he would wish you to praise many authors, thereby 
 making many happy lie shall take the place of a bet- 
 ter author than himself, and say to you now that I know 
 women so well, and that their masks are only veils that 
 hcigliten their intellectual beauty as much as they guard 
 it, — now that I see better than a hundred others, that 
 the female heart is as poetic and ideal as the head, and 
 that it has little more to give to tlie earth than sighs and 
 wishes ; that their May of life, instead of being like ours, 
 
 * Oertliel was a literary character in AVeimar, bearing tlie same 
 name, but not related to the friend of his j-outh.
 
 238 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 as beautiful as that of France, is like a German May, 
 cold and frosty ; that, like the nightingale, they must col- 
 lect the wool from thorns, from which, in a thorny hedge 
 they must prepare their nest, — what should a poet do 
 more with the pen than offer them, not pitiful German 
 flattery, but morning dreams and gentler sighs thaiV they 
 can extract from life. K I spread for one only, a rainbow 
 over the cloudy morning of life, — if for one heart only I 
 have drawn the angel of love from his cloudy Parnassus 
 to bear away the angel of death ! I have lived and written 
 enough." 
 
 Another pressing letter came from his correspondent. 
 " Two thirds of the spring is gone, as I see by the alma- 
 nac. The trees are yet unleaved in the beautiful park, 
 the nightingales have not yet sung, — you are not yet 
 here ! All signs of spring are absent, — which waits for 
 the other ? They may come, with all their charms ; the 
 beautiful foliage, the perfume of the flowers, the love- 
 songs of the birds, the gentle fanning of the spring 
 breezes, but for your iriends tliey will be nothing, if you 
 do not appear also. You are the soul and spirit of our 
 union ; we are rich only in tlie esteem, admiration, and 
 hope that your writings excite ; we know who are our 
 fi'iends by their admiration of you, and it is the first word 
 of our greeting when we meet. Has not Richter yet 
 come ? " 
 
 He hesitated no longer. Like a travelling apprentice, 
 he took his pack and staff, and turned liis face towards 
 the Mecca of his hopes, not as a merely modest, but as a 
 humble pilgrim. For twelve years he had looked, long- 
 ingly, from his solitary Fichtelgebii'ge, to this Paradise 
 of exalted men, tender and accomplished women, love and 
 gloiy, and all that in a poet's golden dream awaited him.
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 PiRST Visit in Weimar. — Letters from Weimar. ■ 
 Herder. — Schiller. — Wieland. 
 
 Goethe. — 
 
 T is well known, that at the time Jean a. d. 1795, 
 Paul entered the literary circles of ■^'- ^^■ 
 Weimar and its filial dependent Jena, the ut- 
 most harmony did not prevail among the great 
 spirits of the age. Goethe and Schiller were at the head 
 of what might be called the Conservative party in litera- 
 ture, at least, until after the publication of William Tell. 
 Herder, although he was fettered by holding an office at 
 court,* was opposed to them, both as a pati-iot and a 
 pliilosopher. When Richter and his works appeared, he 
 was received with joy and outstretched arms, both by 
 Herder and Wieland ; but from different points of view. 
 By Wieland as a poet, by Herder as a man. The first 
 was charmed by his glowing descriptions of nature, and 
 his Sterne-like humor ; the last by his purity of heart, 
 and the deep religious feelings of the poet's soul ; and 
 both, thi'ough the manly independence and love of free- 
 dom that breathed through every line from his pen. The 
 absence in his works of all established rules of art, which 
 had so offended Goethe, was forgiven by men, one of 
 whom had retid Tristram Shandy eighty times, and the 
 * Herder was court chaplain to the Duchess Ameha.
 
 240 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 other carried his indifference to forms of art so far as to 
 condemn all rhyme. 
 
 In rehition to Jean Paul, Goethe and Schiller stood 
 opposed to both Herder and Wieland. Goethe, who was 
 present iii Weimar, could not be ignorant of the influence 
 which both these authors exerted upon the cultivated'-men 
 and accomplished women there. He knew, also, for he 
 had experienced it in his own case, how important a help 
 the enthusiasm of women is in reaching the higher and 
 more dazzling elevations of fame, but his whole corre- 
 spondence with Schiller, who was at this time living at 
 Jena, betrays his contempt for Richter and his writings. 
 
 But with what feelings of reverence was Richter now 
 approaching these men, who, from his earliest age, he had 
 looked to as shining worlds in the heaven of literature. 
 He would see Herder face to face, perhaps receive from 
 him a word of sympathy ! He would approach still 
 nearer to the unknown writer of those flattering letters, 
 to whom his imagination had lent every enchantment ; 
 but his unaffected and genuine humility prevented him 
 from forming even a faint idea of the enthusiasm with 
 which he was I'eceived in Weimar. 
 
 Immediately upon his arrival, he visited his unknown 
 correspondent. Madam von Kalb, and through her was 
 his presence made known to the distinguished literary 
 characters of the day. All wanted to see the wonderful 
 man. The men received him Avith outstretched hands, 
 the women with beating hearts. They vied with each 
 other in attentions to liim ; even the Duchess Amelia, 
 who had given orders that they should immediately in- 
 form her of his arrival, flattered him by many expressions 
 ol" sympathy and admiration. Ilerr von Oertlud, bi'other 
 of his friend and correspondent in Leipzig, took him as a
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 241 
 
 guest to his house, and supplied all those little domestic 
 attentions so grateful to a stranger. Whoever had read 
 his books wished to be introduced to him, and whoever 
 saw and heard him was compelled to love him. Con- 
 trary to the fashion of the time, he had persevered in the 
 custom of wearing his throat open ; and his hair pre- 
 served its natural curl around his head, and fell in thin 
 locks upon his neck ; in short, he dressed, when powder 
 and periwigs were worn, as gentlemen dress at the 
 present day. Although strongly and well built, he was 
 thin, and his pale complexion had a tinge of yellow ; his 
 eye only revealed all the enchantment of a higher nature, 
 and kindled at every thought. His conversation, like 
 his writings, was fresh and original, his voice musical 
 and well toned, but tender, and its Boightlandish accent 
 had peculiar charms for the cultivated inhabitants of 
 Weimar. Added to this, the simplicity of his natui-e, the 
 truth and warmth of his emotions, his deep-grounded 
 faith in humanity, which was to him a sacred religious 
 belief, in a place where so many complaints were uttered 
 over a concealed egotism, and an unconcealed infidelity, 
 and his appearance must have been like a day of sunshine 
 in a dark and rainy season. 
 
 Madam von Kalb did not disappoint the expectations 
 of Ivichter. Her imposing exterior, the glance from her 
 large, dark eyes, the strength and elegance of her lan- 
 guage, the exalted sentiments by which she made herself 
 known as the pupil of Herder, the fire of her emotions, 
 that might consume as well as warm, marked the first 
 impression as very powerful, and gave her the name by 
 which he was accustomed afterwards to distinguish her, 
 the Titanade, as the original of his Linda, in the Titan. 
 
 To her Richter was more, even, than with all her 
 U p
 
 242 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 enthusiasm she had dared to imagine him ; and from her 
 .previously kindled mind resulted the purest warmth of 
 friendship and good will. He was ftirnished with every 
 gift that the most excited imagination could desire, and 
 filled the ideal that had hovered before her enclianted 
 fancy. Generally, fancy is employed to heighten the 
 real impression on the heart ; but in this case, on the 
 contrary, the heart followed the fancy, and loved where 
 that had idoHzed. She was daily with him, sent him 
 books and newspapers, and procured for him the smallest 
 conveniences with the same solicitude that she provided 
 the highest enjoyments of life. The day of his arrival 
 she introduced him to Knebel. On their way, they met 
 Einsiedel, and they were no sooner seated in Knebel's 
 apartment, than Herder, his wife, and their two boys en- 
 .tered. The reader will recollect the correspondence 
 Jean Paul had already had with Caroline Herder ; as 
 her husband and Richter met, they could neither of them 
 speak for joy, and Knebel's eyes were also moist. They 
 passed the evening together, and were quickly the most 
 confidential friends. Herder soon after, in writing to 
 Jacobi, said : " Heaven has sent me a treasure in Richter, 
 that I neither deserved nor expected. Every time that 
 we are together he opens anew the treasures that the 
 three wise men brought, and the star goes always before 
 him. I can only say, that he is all heart, all soul ; an 
 harmonious tone in the great golden harp of humanity, 
 in which there are so many cracked, so many discordant 
 strings." 
 
 This little circle passed every evening together, and 
 the confidential supper-table, at which Caroline Herder, 
 rich in heart and intellect, presided, was the central point 
 of their union. To Jean Paul every intellectual and
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. Z43 
 
 accomplished woman was tlic sun that ripened the fruit 
 of his intellect, and imparted the beautiful colors to the 
 flowers of his fancy ; and tlic presence of Madam von 
 Kalb, who had comjiletely captivated him by the power- 
 ful enchantment of her character, heightened the charm 
 of these reunions. 
 
 "Wieland was not in Weimar at this first visit ; but from 
 his distant Alp home, where he now was, he sent him the 
 most cordial greeting. Jean Paul looked forward with 
 much delight to his introduction to Goethe and Schiller. 
 Goethe now dwelt in his own house in Weimar, and 
 Schiller in Jena. They had expressed different, but 
 depreciating opinions about Richter's Avorks.* Richter's 
 unbounded reverence for Goethe had already been ex- 
 pressed by sending him his Quintus Fixlein and Hespe- 
 rus, and there was not a single work of Goethe's that he 
 had not read and copied w^ith infinite zeal. With this 
 disposition he came to Weimar. The peculiar reserve 
 of Goethe, which perhaps arose from his disposition to 
 hold all subjects at an impai'tial distance, and to observe 
 them from an artistical point of view, drew upon him 
 among his acquaintance the reproach of coldness, and 
 this judgment had some influence upon the disposition 
 with which Richter approached him. Illness and domes- 
 tic trouble prevented Schiller from welcoming Jean Paul 
 with much cordiality, when he visited him at Jena. Far 
 different was it with Herder. Striving in different paths 
 for the highest point to which humanity can reach, there 
 is, in minds like his and Richter's, a predestined friend- 
 
 * I cannot pretend to understand the literary or political dissensions 
 of the time. But no one can read the correspondence of Goethe and 
 Schiller without observing the disparaging remarks of Goethe upon 
 Jean Paul and his works.
 
 244 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 ship, " a clasping of souls before the hand is reached or 
 met, and it endures from the first moment to the last." 
 
 The reception that the Duchess Amelia gave to Rich- 
 ter was of peculiar value to him. When she -withdrew 
 to the country retirement of Tieffurth, where she col- 
 lected around her a circle of distinguished men and ac- 
 complished women, among whom was his friend Madam 
 von Kalb, and the Herders, Richter was invited in the 
 most cordial manner to join them ; and here they formed 
 a mutual high esteem for each other, to which the Prin- 
 cess herself gave the name of friendship. This sentiment 
 she extended afterwards to his family, when she became 
 godmother to his first child.* 
 
 It has been said that Jean Paul had no knowledge of 
 courts, and that his Princesses were drawn from imagina- 
 tion ; but here, and afterwards, he was collecting mate- 
 rials for his great work, the Titan, and the court of the 
 Duchess Amelia imparted a deeper and richer coloring to 
 the beings of his imagination. 
 
 But Richter must speak for himself; the reader must 
 not be deprived of that mixture of gratified self-compla- 
 cency, childlike simplicity, and warm-hearted confidence, 
 with which he pours into the ear and heart of Otto 
 
 * This was the Dowager Duchess Anne-Amelia, daughter and sister 
 of the Dukes of Brunswick. This remarkable woman was the presiding 
 spirit of the court of Weimar for half a century. MaiTied in her seven- 
 teenth year, she was left a widow in her nineteenth. She appointed 
 Wieland governor to her son, and drew around her a circle of learned 
 and accomplished men. Her palace at Weimar, her country-houses 
 at Tieffurth and Ettersburg never ceased to be the rendezvous of liter- 
 ary men and travellers of merit. A tour in Italy, which she made in 
 company with Goethe, heightened her taste for the arts. From her 
 glowing descriptions of Italj' Jean Paul derived the knowledge of that 
 country so exquisitelj' employed in Titan. The invasion of her country 
 by Bonaparte broke her heart. She died in 1806, a few months after.
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 245 
 
 the delightful incidents of his three happy weeks in 
 Weimar. 
 
 " Weimar, June 12, 1796. 
 
 " God saw yesterday upon his earth a happy mortal, 
 and that was I. Ah, I was so happy, that I thought of 
 Nemesis, and Herder consoled me with the Deus aver- 
 runcus. I cannot put off writing till I can send a letter. 
 I must say something. Yesterday I went at ahout eleven 
 o'clock, as I had missed two of her billets, to Charlotte 
 (she is sister to the Bayreuther, and, I believe also, mine). 
 I had in my note asked for a solitary minute, a tete-a-tete. 
 She has two great things, great eyes, such as I never saw 
 before, and a great soul. She speaks exactly as Herder 
 writes, in his letters upon humanity. She is strong, full, 
 and her face — I would I could describe it. Three quar- 
 ters of the time she smiles, but half only from nervous 
 irritability, and one quarter she is serious, when she 
 raises her heavenly eyelids, as clouds when they alter- 
 nately conceal and reveal the moon (I do not trouble my- 
 self about the accuracy of my expressions). 'You are a 
 wonderful man,' she said to me thirty times. Ah, here 
 are women ! and I have them all for my friends ; the 
 whole court, even to the Duke, reads me ! I dine, for 
 reasons, not with Madam von Kalb. She informed Kne- 
 bel of my arrival (he is chamberlain to the Duchess) ; at 
 three o'clock I went again, and Knebel was there.* He 
 is a courtier as to the exterior, but so much warmth and 
 
 * Knebel was tutor to the second prince, Constantine. After the 
 early death of his pupil he received a pension for life. He remained 
 in Weimar, an ornament of the circle which ninile that little court the 
 resort of the intellect and genius of Europe ; a friend of Wieland and 
 Herder and Jean Paul ; living in philosophical serenity in his little 
 garden, a stranger to artificial wants, a contented sage of the school 
 of Aristippus. He died in 1834, at the age of ninety. — Mks. Austek.
 
 246 LIFE OP JEAN PAUL. 
 
 knowledge, and so simple ! All my male acquaintance 
 here (I would it were not these alone) meet with a cor- 
 dial embrace. There is none of the pitiful affectation 
 of Hof ; none of the fear of being out of fashion. I 
 wish I had brought my green gOAvn, or even th^ blue 
 short coat would be allowed. Towards five o'clock, we 
 all three went to Knebel's garden ; on the way Einsie- 
 del * met us, who took me immediately by the hand, but 
 he could only say thi-ee words, as he must follow the 
 Duchess to the comedy. After some moments, Knebel 
 said, ' How gloriously it all happens ; here comes Her- 
 der, his wife, and the two children.' We went to meet 
 him, and under the free heaven I threw myself into his 
 arms. I could scarcely speak for joy, and he could not 
 embrace me enough. As I looked around, Knebel's eyes 
 were also moist. With Herder I am now as familiar 
 as with you. He will write to me when I return, and 
 when he journeys through Hof with his wife, who loves 
 me heartily (she is a modification of Von Kalb), they 
 will visit me. I wish it were possible to tell you all 
 witliout blushing. He praises all my works, even the 
 Greenland Lawsuits. He looks as noble, but yet not 
 exactly as I thought, but speaks as he writes. He says, 
 ' Whenever he reads the Hesperus, he is for two days 
 unfit for business.' 
 
 " As we all sat together, I said, * If only my Otto were 
 here, and heard us ! ' Herder loves satire infinitely, and 
 has twice as much irony as seriousness in his conversa- 
 tion. He asked me the occasion of many places in my 
 
 * Herr von Einsiedel united the most amiable and agreeable char- 
 acter with engaginfT exterior and manners ; qualities that were sur- 
 passed by the integrity and kindness of his heart. He was chamber- 
 lain to the Duchess Dowager Amelia. He wrote several pretty tales. 
 — Mas. Austen.
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL, 247 
 
 books, and gave me oppressive praise. Your Paul ven- 
 tured sometimes to speak, although at intervals, in the 
 five houre the evening lasted. 
 
 " They all said that I received scandalous payment ; 
 that for the Meister and Horen the booksellers gave five 
 louis d'ors a sheet ; that I was read everywhere in Ger- 
 many, and that in Leipzig all the booksellers received 
 commissions for me. Wieland had read me three times, 
 and Herder said Gleim continued to read all day and all 
 night. He spoke of Kant's system with the highest de- 
 gree of displeasure. Of his own works Herder spoke so 
 slightingly, that it cut me to the heart to hear him, so 
 that I had scarcely the courage to praise him. ' What I 
 erase,' said he, ' is the best, as I dare not write with 
 freedom.' 
 
 " In the evening we supped with the Kalb. They 
 have the most liberal manner of thinking. I made as 
 many satires as at Hof, in short, I was as unrestrained 
 and as lively as I am with you. By Heaven ! I have 
 become courageous, and could trust myself to talk with 
 twenty gentlemen, and yet more, with the Burgomaster 
 and all his kindred. I have not told you one third part, 
 but the bitterest drop. Otto, swims in my Heidelberg cup 
 of joy. What Jean Paul wins, humanity loses in his 
 eyes. Ah ! my ideal of great men ! All my acquaint- 
 ance with them only increases the value of my beloved 
 brother Otto." 
 
 " June 17. 
 " The late date will inform you of my joy-intoxicated 
 life. I have lived twenty years in Weimar in a few 
 days. I have wholly incomprehensible, unheard-of, but 
 not disagreeable things to tell you, — but to you alone. I 
 see no possibility of sending you more than a duodecimo
 
 248 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 of my universal liistoiy. I shall need as many days as I 
 now should employ pages, to tell you only this division 
 of my life. I am happy, Otto, wholly happy ! not merely 
 beyond all expectation, but beyond all description, and I 
 want nothing in the whole world but you ! only you ! 
 
 " I went yesterday with Charlotte to visit the Duchess 
 mother at TiefFurth, and I shall dine with her next time. 
 The Duchess is worthy of her Wieland and her beautiful 
 Tieffurth. Of our conversation I will tell you verbally. 
 Madam von Kalb is in correspondence with all the mag- 
 nates in Gennany, and in connection with all in Weimar, 
 and I could see everybody that I wished at her house, 
 but we both remain every evening alone together. She 
 is a woman like none ; with an all-powerful heart, incom- 
 parable firmness, in short, a Waldemarin.* 
 
 " On the second day I threw away my foolish preju- 
 dices in favor of great authors. They are like other 
 people. Here, every one knows that they are like tlie 
 earth, that looks from a distance, from Heaven, like a 
 shining moon, but when the foot is upon it, it is found to 
 be made of houe de Paris (Paris mud). An opinion con- 
 cerning Herder, Wieland, or Goethe is as much contested 
 as any other. Who would believe that the three watch- 
 towers of our literature avoid and dislike each other. I 
 will never again bend myself anxiously before any great 
 man, only before the virtuous. Under this impression, I 
 went timidly to meet Goethe. Every one had described 
 him as cold to everything upon the earth. Madam von 
 Kalb said, he no longer admires anytliing, not even him- 
 self. Every word is ice ! Curiosities merely warm tlio 
 fibres of his heart. Therefore I asked Knebel to petrify 
 or encrust me by some mineral spring, that I might pre- 
 
 * See the novel of Waldemar, by Jacobi.
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 249 
 
 sent myself to him like a statue or a fossil. Madam von 
 Kalb advised me above all things to be cold and self- 
 possessed, and I went without warmth, merely from curi- 
 osity. His house, palace rather, pleased me ; it is the 
 only one in "VVeLmar in the Italian style, — with such 
 steps ! A Pantheon full of pictures and statues. Fresh 
 anxiety oppressed my breast ! At last, the god entered, 
 cold, one-syllabled, without accent. ' The French are 
 drawing towards Paris,' said Knebel. ' Hm ! ' said the 
 god. His face is massive and animated, his eye a ball of 
 light. But, at last, the conversation led from the cam- 
 paign to art, pubhcations, etc., and Goethe was himself. 
 His conversation is not so rich and flowing as Herder's, 
 but sharp-toned, penetrating, and calm. At last he read, 
 that is, played for us, an unpublished poem, in which his 
 heart impelled the flame through the outer crust of ice, so 
 that he pressed the hand of the enthusiastic Jean Paul. 
 (It was my face, not my voice, for I said not a word.) 
 He did it again when we took leave, and pressed me to 
 call again. By Heaven ! we will love each other ! He 
 considers his poetic course as closed. His reading is like 
 deep-toned thunder, blended with soft, whispering rain- 
 drops. There is nothing like it. 
 
 " They contend here, whether Flachsenjingen,* on 
 account of its location, is a sketch of Vienna or Manheim. 
 Wieland, who takes it all for sport, said, ' Flachsenjingen 
 lies very much scattered about Germany.' I send you, 
 without shame, these signs of canonization that they 
 draw around my bald pate, that you may relate what }ou 
 please to our friends in Hof. I tell you all, for you have 
 esteemed me too much, but do not disgust with the long 
 story in Hof, where they have so often done me iiijus- 
 
 * The location of Hesperus. 
 11*
 
 250 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 tice, that if you were not there, brother, I would remain 
 here. 
 
 " My good Caroline has taken care for all my needs. 
 Ah, you do not yet know that I lodge with Oerthel in a 
 more elegant apartment than I ever had in my life. On 
 Wednesday I came to his house, near the trees of'the 
 heavenly park. I have two chambers, better furnished 
 than any in the fashionable journal ; ready prepared let- 
 ter-covei-s ; the newspaper, of which I enclose one as a 
 proof; lights in both chambers. In short, every, even 
 the smallest, thing is cared for, and I and he live like 
 brothers. We laugh ourselves dead at each other's pe- 
 culiarities. I sat yesterday with his mother and sister, 
 who created two heavens for my two eai-s, with their 
 singing and playing ; in the afternoon I was introduced 
 for the first time to a circle of beautiful girls. There is 
 not in Paris so much freedom from gene as here. You 
 introduce no one ; there is no kissing of hands ; you 
 merely make a silent bow ; you say nothing before or 
 after dinner. This is the fashion of the world, that coun- 
 try people tliink as stiff and starched as their neck-bands. 
 Wliat one might comi)lain of here, is painted egotism and 
 unpainted sceplicism ; for this reason, a soul that has 
 neither is like a summer's day. 
 
 " Unite the Fantasie and Hermitage * in one park, 
 and it will give you no idea of the simple majesty of this. 
 It is an HandeVs Alexander's Feast, and Tieffurth is an 
 adagio. The Devil is in me, but I cannot get away. I 
 count the days no longer. Ah, I am so happy, so happy ! 
 as you alone deserve to be ! . . . . 
 
 " I went yesterday to see the stony Schiller, from 
 
 * The Fantasie and Hermitage were public walks and gardens 
 in Hof.
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 251 
 
 whom, as from a precipice, all strangers spring back. 
 ffis form is worn, severely powerful, but angular. He is 
 full of shaq>, cutting power, but without love. His con- 
 versation is nearly as excellent as his writings. As I 
 brought a letter from Goethe, he was unusually pleasant ; 
 he would make me a fellow-contributor to the Horen (a 
 periodical), and would give me a naturalization act in 
 Jena." 
 
 Notwithstanding this courtesy, Richter did not repeat 
 his visit to Schiller, and his intimate union with Herder 
 excluded all hope of his bemg drawn to the party of 
 Goethe. The latter wrote to Schiller : " I am glad you 
 have seen Richter. His love of truth and his wish for 
 self-improvement have prepossessed me in his favor ; but 
 the social man is a sort of theoretical man, and I doubt if 
 Richter will ever approach us in a practical way, although 
 in theory he seems to have some pretensions to belong to 
 us." They were never friends. Richter could not con- 
 ceal his disappointment at the character of Goethe's latter 
 poetical works, and soon after his retui'n to Hof he 
 wrote to Knebel in relation to one of them, " that in 
 such stormy times we needed a Tyrtajus rather than a 
 Propertius." The remark reached Goethe's ears ; and 
 Goethe, usually so indifferent to censure or criticism, 
 showed himself deeply susceptible and offended at this 
 so-called " manifestation of arrogance in Herr Richter."
 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 
 Madam von Kalb. — Letters. — Close of Richter's Intimact 
 WITH Madam von Kalb. 
 
 T would perhaps have been excusable, if tlie 
 humble author, who left his home with his 
 pack, on foot, and found himself in less than 
 a week a courted guest at the table of princes, 
 invited and caressed by the most accomplished men, and 
 the most beautiful women, had been seized with a little 
 giddiness. But his principal danger arose from his in- 
 timacy with Madam von Kalb. She was somewhat 
 older than himself, and at that age when an accom- 
 plished woman can exercise the utmost power over the 
 mind of an imaginative man. She was living in an un- 
 happy union — or rather disunion, for they were rarely 
 together — witli a husband much her infenor, and at a 
 time when revolutionary ideas in domestic mannei'S had 
 infected Germany almost as much as Paris itself. 
 
 A daily exchange of notes took place between Madam 
 von Kalb and Richter. The morning after his arrival in 
 Weimar she wrote : " Have you slept well ? Friendship 
 has prepared a home for you, and I am indeed glad that 
 you are no longer in a gasthof (inn). Ah ! are we not 
 always in inns and pay-houses, where everything is done 
 for us from interested motives, that kill all heart ? You
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 253 
 
 have told me that you could not live where they did not 
 sympathize with you as a human being. I understand 
 you, among the good we are good, among the loving — 
 happy. Write me the very moment that you will come 
 to me, that I may not wait. All waiting destroys me ; I 
 would rather suffer pain of body than of soul, — that of 
 waiting. I have much to tell you of the Duchess ; 2d, 
 that I must read your last letter to Otto ; 3d, that I am 
 jealous, &c. ; 4th, that Herr von Oerthel shall be my 
 guest to-day, if it is agreeable to him ; and pray him to 
 say to Ids sister that she must come in the afternoon. I 
 believe they will not allow you to leave them to-day ; but 
 / will let you, and all is with me like the laws of na- 
 ture, — life and death. 
 
 Life, and your 
 
 " CHARLOTTE." 
 
 Paul answered, •ndth his longing desire to meet again. 
 The next morning Madam von Kalb sent the following 
 note : — 
 
 " I awoke this morning ; I awoke about dawn ; as soon 
 as I could distinguish the colors around, I longed for your 
 answer. But I could write before it came. — Ah ! my 
 God, there was your billet ! But for God's sake do not 
 show yourself to others as you do to me, or all who un- 
 derstand you will die for you You are as if in an 
 
 apartment of glass, from which you can overlook all with 
 the power of your intellect ; but we, — we are no glass, 
 so smooth and cold. None ! none ! The soul loves an 
 ideal representation, the heart an ideal man, and would 
 appropriate him 
 
 " To-morrow you will go with Bottiger to the theatre, 
 to Herder, to Einsiedel. All the world will have him, — 
 all the world ? No ! all shall not have him, — or I shall
 
 254 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 die ! I shall be destroyed. Then can they have him ! 
 How often I have been wounded ! how often ! Ah ! only 
 the most refined refreshment for the soul, the purest, the 
 warmest enjoyment, can again renew and freshen my 
 existence ! " * 
 
 Richter and his devoted friend continued to write to 
 each other every day durmg the three weeks he remained 
 in Weimar. The notes that are preserved are upon the 
 passing events of the time, and could only be interesting 
 to one intimately acquainted with the spirit of the age, 
 and the eminent characters in Weimar. 
 
 The influence of Madam von Kalb upon Richter was 
 happier for his works than for himself. He was indebted 
 to her for that knowledge of more powerful female char- 
 acters which he has displayed in liis Titan ; and he seems 
 to have been impatient to hasten back to his solitude, that 
 he might treasure his impressions in his book. 
 
 The first letter after he left Weimar was from Madam 
 von Kalb. 
 
 " To-day are four weeks since you came to Weimar, 
 and what I so long expected is finished. Finished ? Ah, 
 no ! If I never see you again, yet I shall know where 
 to find the being to whom I can impart my most secret 
 thoughts and sentiments ; that which, like the ephemera, 
 existed only with the sun, and in the evening was gone, 
 holds now a second and longer life, and I can say to those 
 who misunderstand and correct me, to me also the treas- 
 ure of his mind is confidentially imparted. 
 
 " On Monday evening we were, as I have already writ- 
 ten to you, at Herr von Knebel's. I spoke little, and yet 
 too much. There are very few men that, when I talk 
 with them, elevate and improve my spiritual nature ; and 
 
 * I give only extracts from these billets.
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 255 
 
 •witli these it is better that I should not speak ; and by 
 others I cannot make myself understood. Knebel talked 
 much of annihilation. 
 
 " I came to Jena in the middle of the week, to visit 
 Schiller, who gave me his poem for you. I believe it has 
 wounded him that you did not visit him again. I have 
 yet received no letter from you, and to-day is Monday, 
 the 11th. Say many beautiful things from me to Otto. 
 Fai'ewell ! How often have I thought of you, — how 
 often ! for to you I can say all that I think, and even my 
 anticipations will be like certainty. Farewell ! how will 
 be the first letter I shall receive from you ? " 
 
 Paul had waited eight days. How was his answer to 
 this letter : " Time has crept over the last eight days with 
 cold, wet wings, without one swift feather. I cannot for- 
 get my friend, I cannot do without her; I cannot bear 
 that a heart I would hold as my own should be melted 
 without individual form into the whole transparent mass 
 of the public heart 
 
 " Nothing makes me so indulgent and mild as a fault. 
 I am not accustomed to have my inmost soul wounded, 
 therefore its bleeding imparts a new and more tender life. 
 Distance consecrates the soul and warms the heart anew. 
 If my eye should again sink into thine, if I should again 
 dare to shed tears in your presence, yet our hearts and 
 souls shall remain unveiled to each othei'. 
 
 " Upon your bii-thday I will ascend a high mountain, 
 and, looking upon the sun that sinks down in the direction 
 of your plain, I will think of your life. Look you at the 
 same moment upon this glowing, sinking orb, and be cer- 
 tain that I am thinking of you, that I count the clouds of 
 your shadowed life, and weep anew for all your deep sor- 
 rows. I will pray, when I think of your heart so crushed
 
 25.6 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 as if it had been tlirowai from rock to rock in tlie past. — - 
 O, good Destiny ! Avill I pray, give this weary soul a ten- 
 der, green repose ; rend not asunder again the hardly yet 
 united parts of her wounded heart. Give her calmness 
 of soul and a gentle life's course, accompanied by conge- 
 nial beings, and rest, — rest ! Oh, I shall be eloqueiat on 
 your birthday, and my tongue shall stream as my eyes, 
 and overflow with wishes ; and when I am silent, and 
 suik down with panting heart upon your beloved hand, 
 my heart will be fuller, not lio;hter. 
 
 It appears from this letter, that Richter felt for this 
 lady the most profound pity, as well as the more enthu- 
 siastic sentiment of admiration ; but he had the strength 
 of mind to leave her, and to resist what has been so often 
 fatal to genius of the highest order, — the seducing fas- 
 cinations of rank and wealth, in the midst of intellectual 
 refinement and luxury. He returned to his poor home, 
 and to his narrow-minded mother, but rich in new ideas 
 and materials for his great work. 
 
 He was followed by so many letters of admiration and 
 interest, that the wish, expressed earlier, that all the 
 world Avould correspond with him, seemed to be almost 
 literally fulfilling. The individuality of character is so 
 strong in the works of Jean Paul, that eveiy reader feels 
 as if they were written expressly for him, and wishes to 
 thank the author as if for a personal favor. 
 
 Among the letters that touched him most deeply was 
 one from a Madam Fisher, who told him she had sent 
 her copy of Hesperus to the state prisoners in the fortress 
 of Spandaw ; and described, in lively colors, the consola- 
 tion they had derived from it. The same lady, with her 
 husband, visited his mother's house with the hope of see-
 
 LIFE.OF JEAN PAUL. 257 
 
 ing him, while he was absent at Bayreuth ; and we need 
 no longer blush for the American habit of pilfering relics, 
 when we leam that this enthusiastic pair secreted and 
 carried away from Paul's writing-table his worn-out pens. 
 
 Another letter is from the pastor of Anhalt-Zerbst, en- 
 closing a letter and a purse beautifully net with gold 
 thread, from a lady who wished to remain unknown. The 
 unknown was afterwards discovered to be the Princess 
 Anhalt-Zerbst. Paul's answer is too characteristic to be 
 omitted. 
 
 " . . . . May some good genius open the cloud through 
 which your haiid only, although full of gifts, has been 
 reached to me, and show me the concealed angel. Your 
 sex and your worth predict to me the common fate of a 
 tender exotic belonging to a warmer climate, whose root 
 and stem are planted in the winter of reality, and whose 
 beautiful flower only the forcing-house of Poetiy can 
 bring to blossom. Is it so ? Then only the wish remains, 
 that all your blossoms may find their spring, all your fruit 
 
 its sun The inward nature finds all that it longs for 
 
 in hope and virtue, and if it seeks more in the present 
 and in reality, it finds only wounds." 
 
 Richter was aware that a strenuous industry was neces- 
 sary to banish that longing for "Weimar that was beating 
 at the bottom of his heart, and that was kept intensely 
 alive by his letters from Madam von Kalb. But there 
 was a voice of warning as well as of wooing in these 
 letters. She wrote to him in November of this year, 
 1796: — 
 
 " It is well that you not only come in a short time, but 
 that we should decide upon your residence here. The 
 Herders' life is turned within themselves, and become 
 altogether recluse ; but with what joy will they admit
 
 258 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 you. Your residence will bring them new refreshment. 
 "Wieland will rejoice, and there are many others. I think 
 of the spring like a bird that is then to be released from 
 prison. Herder, Wieland, Knebel, Einsiedel, and my 
 Littleness will form your society. What need you more ? 
 A dwelling ? That your friends will furnish you ;' they 
 can do it without trouble. Yes, you can have a house 
 already furnished, either Knebel's dwelling in the mar- 
 ket, or his garden house. For your coffee, the waiter 
 will furnish it ; and if you wUl dine at home, as the food 
 from a restorator's, if long continued, would injure your 
 health, you will permit me the pleasure of sending you 
 your dinner. I have thought it all out ; and even if you 
 pay for your house, I can promise you that three months 
 will not cost you more than ten rix-doUars. If at present 
 you are without money, your friends here can lend you 
 some hundreds of dollars. And what if it were forever ! 
 Of what use is our trumpery, if our friends cannot enjoy 
 it with us ? I despise those that are wooed by princes 
 and pensions, but I despise those much more who have 
 not the heart to take anything from a friend. 
 
 " I pray you go to no court, or the like. Hold your- 
 self high, and avoid all situations of the kind. Man is 
 oppressed there, and learns that all is empty, and at last 
 repents. Princes esteem only those who can do without 
 them. But / do not, therefore, esteem those who make 
 satires upon courts for it is not possible that it can be 
 
 otherwise What have I yet to say ? Ah, not 
 
 much. Be wise as Minerva and happy as Apollo ! Do 
 not smile, — you smile too beautifully ! The tones that 
 your spirit yields are sweeter without words than the 
 sounds of the harmonica." 
 
 To this truly feminine letter, Richter answered : —
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 259 
 
 " Your letter brought your sofa and our evening hours 
 into my apartment, — May into December ! It is right, 
 perhaps, that a •poor friend should be as rich as his richer, 
 while both have but one heart and one purse ; but the 
 friend should divide his bread only, but not the ornaments 
 of his table, with his poorer friend. I might indeed bor- 
 row money for my fast days, but not for my festival 
 
 joys." 
 
 At the conclusion of the Prefiice to the new edition 
 of Quintus Fixlein Eichter inserted a species of myth, 
 called the Ifondsjinsterness, which his biogi'apher asserts 
 had direct reference to Madam von Kalb. He expresses 
 very fully his opinions and feelings upon female purity, 
 and his abhorrence of all but the most legitimate unions ; 
 and considers every marriage in which the purest love 
 fails on either side as no better than a work of seduction. 
 
 Richter sent the Preface in manuscript to Charlotte, 
 and after waiting some weeks she answered in a way to 
 displease him. 
 
 After tliree years of correspondence a perceptible cold- 
 ness had chilled her enthusiasm for the Poet. She began 
 to learn that his love for women was principally for the 
 sake of his poetry. He kindled into flame and enthu- 
 siasm before every unusual female appearance, and as 
 soon as the unwonted excitement had heightened the in- 
 terest of the work in hand, it faded and went out. Thus 
 Madam von Kalb had served for the original of Linda in 
 the "Titan." 
 
 Madam von Kalb appears to have been deeply tinged 
 with the modern "French, and perhaps German {Esthetic 
 doctrine, that as all purity is from within, the external 
 relations of life are of little consequence in a moral point 
 of view. This is so much the more dangerous, as it is an
 
 26o LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 effort to conceal from one's self that want of elevation in 
 which nature conspires to deceive one. She avowed the 
 opinion, so humiliating to a woman, that nature should 
 suffer no restraint. She says in her answer, " That relig- 
 ion upon the earth is nothing but the unfolding and eleva- 
 tion of all our powers, and the disposition that our ndture 
 has received. That the creature should suffer no re- 
 straint, and that love needs no laws." Henceforth an 
 estrangement took place between him and his friend.* 
 
 At the same time with the above letter, Madam von 
 Kalb sent Richter the first number of the Musen Alma- 
 nac, a periodical conducted by Schiller, which had served 
 to increase the discord between the ruling spirits of the 
 age ; Herder had wholly withdrawn into himself. This 
 strengthened Richter's decision to remain at home with 
 his mother, working with unexampled activity upon the 
 new editions of his Hesperus and Qulntus Fixlein, and 
 the days that the great wash took place visiting his old 
 friends at Arzburg, Schwarzenbach, &c., and returning 
 only late at night, when he always found his poor, watchful 
 mother sitting, after her hard day's work, at the wheel, by 
 the glimmering light of a poor fire. 
 
 * See Appendix L
 
 PART III, 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 Prince Hohenlohe. — Madam von Krudenek. — Letters. — 
 
 " JUBELSENIOK." — " CaMPANER ThAL." 
 
 HAVE omitted, for the purpose of a. d. 1796, 
 concluding the account of Richter's •^'- ^■ 
 intimate friendship with Madam von Kalb, 
 two events that took place in the autumn, 
 immediately after his return from Weimar. His wide- 
 spread reputation brought him many proposals to become 
 the instructor of young persons ; among others the Prin- 
 cess of Hohenlohe came to Hof, and entreated him to take 
 charge of her two sons. The eldest of these princes was 
 afterwards the celebrated Jesuit priest, and worker of 
 miracles. The delusion lasted a long time, but ceased 
 before the death of the prince. His fine exterior, gentle 
 manners, and insinuating voice no doubt made part of the 
 miracle. This was an alluring offer, as it promised Rich- 
 ter independence, and a beautiful residence on the Rhine. 
 He answered, "That he was henceforth determined to 
 educate no children but his own (his books), and that he 
 had so much to say, that if death should surprise him at 
 his writing-table, in his eightieth year, it would be yet too 
 early."
 
 262 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 The other event, that made a deeper impression upon the 
 imaginative mind of Richter, was a visit from the cele- 
 brated enthusiast Julia von Krudener, the wife of the 
 Russian ambassador in Denmark. This singular woman 
 had been to Leipzig, to visit her son, and came, in the full 
 bloom of her remarkable beauty, to his solitary resictence, 
 as she said, to seek a comet on its path. Upon Richter, 
 whose soul was always thirsting for the spiritual and ideal 
 in woman, she made an indelible impression, and excited 
 an interest that led to a correspondence of many years' 
 duration. They were only an hour together, but the in- 
 terest was mutual. There must have been something in 
 Richter's person and manners extfemely fascinating to 
 women ; for the impression his works had made on the 
 imagination was always deepened by an interview ; and 
 there was some reason why Madam von Kalb should tell 
 him " not to smile, and that the tone that his mind gave 
 without words was sweeter than the sounds of the har- 
 monica." 
 
 Paul said, in a letter to Otto, " That, unlike as Madam 
 Krudener was to all other women, so was the impression 
 she had made upon him different from that of all other 
 women." 
 
 He wrote to her : " The hour in which I saw you floats 
 like the evening glow still lower beneath the horizon. 
 Your letter must again color my atmosphere. You came 
 like a dream, and fled like a dream, and I still live in a 
 dream 
 
 " A legend says, that the angels had created men like 
 gods, but that they could not stand upright until God, by 
 a spark, gave them souls, and raised them to the upright 
 posture. Most of us are still such prostrate men ; but 
 in your soul glows this sun-spark, and you stand among
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 263 
 
 the cold, reclining forms, with your glance still turned to 
 heaven." 
 
 Madam von Krudener answered : " Ineffaceable is the 
 hour when your eye, the sound of your voice, the inde- 
 scribable whole of your emotion in expression and accent, 
 established the sweetest harmony of knowledge and feel- 
 ing. I know not whether I make myself intelligible, as 
 you know how imperfectly I possess your language. You 
 will imagine what I think, for I feel with indescribable joy 
 that you wholly understand me, and the little that you 
 said to me was penetrating like your glance, and led 
 directly to my inmost heart. Oh, how few men can un- 
 derstand me, and how sweet is the jiope to see you here, 
 and to open this heart to you, to show you, without pride 
 and mthout fear, the virtues as well as the faults of my 
 nature. This need of learning the truth, this living ne- 
 cessity in me to grow better, this thirst after knowledge, 
 and this warm desire to promote the happiness of men ; 
 this expanding love that glows in my heart and breathes 
 in your works, are what makes them so dear to me, and 
 convince me that, through your friendship, I shall be 
 better and happier ; and that to you also, the observa- 
 tion of a noble soul, that would fain impart blessings 
 to mankind, will not be indifferent. 
 
 "I say to you that I am never deceived in men in 
 whom I can kindle a spark of emotion ; by men of low 
 dispositions I am often offended ; yet who remembers the 
 sting when a gnat fells upon him. Such stings take away 
 the injurious blood, that inflames so easily at the smallest 
 wound, and from wliich ill-humor and misanthropy are 
 formed. I have climbed that mountain tliat little minds 
 have not the power to ascend, and the echo of their voices 
 brings no disharmony to my ears.
 
 264 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 " Without pride, I may say this to you. Ah ! I cannot 
 be proud, — too much remains yet to be improved before 
 I can be satisfied. Gratefully I acknowledge the happi- 
 ness, that God has given me a heart in which only the 
 memory of the good and beautiful can live ; and that has 
 so lived in the higher regions of virtue and frien^hip, 
 that the possibility of breathing in a lower world cannot 
 exist. The hand of genius seized my thoughts even in 
 their cradle, and thus I know you can understand me 
 even in my imperfect language.* .... 
 
 " I thank Providence that I have learnt to know you. 
 He gives me, in you, a new and powerful assurance of 
 my future happiness, and in your tears is a world for me. 
 May you be as happy as I wish you, and may the pre- 
 cious emotions you have given me conduce to your own 
 happiness. Remember, meanwhile, I can never forget 
 
 you. 
 
 "JULIA VON KRUDENER." 
 
 Richter entreated the lady to visit him again in Hof, 
 "that the little blessed island she had tlirown into the 
 humble stream of his life might not float away " ; but she 
 did not return, and he met her not again until after his 
 mari-iage, many years afterwards, in Berlin. 
 
 INIadam von Krudener did not make a favorable im- 
 pression upon Richter's friends. They accused her of 
 vanity and ostentation. From the course of her life it 
 could scarcely be otherwise ; Jean Paul was not blind to 
 the faults of any one, but his true sympathy with all the 
 weaknesses of humanity led him always to place the good 
 and bad qualities in opposite scales ; and lie said of her, 
 what might be said of many ostentatious women, " That it 
 
 * French was the native tongue of Madam von Krudenor.
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 265 
 
 was not vanity that made her an artist, but the enjoyment 
 of the representation." 
 
 From the subsequent life of Madam von Krudener, it 
 will appear that Richter w^as not so penetrating as his 
 friends in the estimation of her character.* 
 
 Richter's spirits, after denying himself a return to the 
 "Weimar Eden, and furtlier intimacy with Madam von 
 Kalb, were too much depressed to allow him to pro- 
 ceed with his Titan. He occu})ied himself this winter 
 with two of his minor works, Jubelsenior and the Cam- 
 paner Thai. During the progress of his great work, 
 upon which he rested liis hopes of immortality, he kept 
 himself constantly before the public, and procured the 
 means of subsistence by a series of smaUer works. Like 
 a celebrated painter, he worked up the superabundance 
 of colors upon his palette into smaller pictures, wliile 
 his immortal work was yet on the easel. 
 
 These works differ from his earlier in tliis, that they 
 never contain a complete picture of character, neither is 
 any elevated philosophical nor poetical idea in life or 
 character completely carried out. They are mer.ely seg- 
 ments of life, and make no pretension to a full delineation 
 of passion or event. In his earlier romances almost all 
 the characters had been left incomplete ; the reader is 
 therefore rejoiced to find the author taking them up 
 again, and introducing them anew to his acquaintance 
 in these segments. Balzac, who in everything else dif- 
 fers more widely than the antipodes from Jean Paul, has 
 in this respect the same peculiarity. 
 
 The Jubelsenior is the beautiful and swnple representa- 
 tion of an aged minister, and his equally aged wife, cele- 
 brating the anniversary of tlieir marriage festival at the 
 
 * See note at the end of the chapter. 
 12
 
 266 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 same time with the consecration of the church,* and the 
 introduction of a new young pastor, who is in love with 
 the adopted child of the old people. " The aged pair, 
 bowing under the gate of death that leads them to another 
 world, will not withdraw their hands from each other, but 
 keep them constantly clasped over the cold gravestone. 
 .... They celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of their 
 marriage festival, with the re-warmed fragments of their 
 own young bride-cake." 
 
 Jean Paul partook deeply of the religious nature of the 
 Germans ; he delighted in all these humble, simple relig- 
 ious ceremonies ; and he awoke the gratitude of many an 
 old man and many an aged matron with his intimate sym- 
 pathy with their well-remembered feelings, and the high 
 esteem he ever paid to the silent men that the loud young 
 century had forgotten. The love of the young people is 
 also mingled in the liistory, and makes a low, under, but 
 sweet tone in the piece. 
 
 The Campaner Thai, or proofs of the immortality of the 
 soul, is one of the most purely serious and poetically beau- 
 tiful of all the author's minor works. It was suggested by 
 his friend Charlotte von Kalb's saying that she sometimes 
 felt doubts overshadowing her mind when she thought of 
 annihilation ; and as he had written the former letter 
 on immortality for Helena's, he wrote this for her con- 
 solation. 
 
 In his intercourse with educated women, Richter had 
 found that in proportion as they were refined and thought- 
 ful they were pained with doubt upon this great consola- 
 tion of humanity, — a future existence of tlie soul. He 
 somewhere says, " That he never heard a cultivated woman 
 
 * A church consecration is one of the principal country celebrations 
 in Oormany.
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 267 
 
 speuk of meeting again with her lost friends without de- 
 tecting at the same time an almost imperceptible sigh 
 of doubt." * 
 
 lie did not write to convert the infidel, but to establish 
 the wavering faith of the doubtful : " As the plants that 
 grow upon the margin of a stream are as much refreshed 
 by a summer shower as those whose roots are planted in 
 the dusty highway of life." 
 
 I feel that no justice could be done to this beautiful 
 work by such an analysis as I could give, and that even 
 my highest praise would be inadequate to express its 
 merits.f 
 
 This chapter cannot be more appropriately closed than 
 with a letter from Caroline Herder, in which she has 
 singularly anticipated the definition of the Romantic, 
 which was afterwards given in the Foreign Quarterly 
 Revieic. It is written after receiving the Campaner 
 Thai from the author. 
 
 " I require, indeed, the pen of an angel to relate the 
 thousand-fold obstacles that have prevented me, dear, un- 
 forgotten friend, from writing to you. I dare not give 
 you circumstantially the Litany of my own little miseries, 
 that united make the great cause of my silence. My eyes 
 suffer, and since some years my health also, so that I have 
 to prescribe for myself a severe diet in writing. I rely so 
 securely upon our union in the world of spirits, I am so 
 certain that you think of us, and speak to us, as we to 
 you, without visible signs ; yet visible signs of the sacra- 
 ment of love are beautiful, as I felt deeply when I re- 
 ceived your dear letter with the Campaner Thai. 
 
 " Ah, we owe you thanks for Hesperus also. If my 
 
 * I quote from memory, not Laving the book at hand, 
 t Appendix IV.
 
 268 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 husband were not so slavishly chained, you had heard 
 from him before this, upon Hesperus. The whole building 
 is, as it were, filled with choice sacred pictures, and we 
 linger to strengthen, elevate, and delight the spirit. We 
 might seize the whole at once, but we are unwilling under 
 a thousand emotions not to dwell upon each, and the'rich- 
 ness of ornament distracts our attention. 
 
 " If you have ever seen the Minster at Strasburg,* you 
 will understand me, and not misinterpret this comparison. 
 Perhaps the soul of that great architect has returned, with 
 you, to earth ; and, as at this time pictures in stone are 
 not so essential to us as spiritual representations, he builds 
 with other naaterials than stone and marble, but in the 
 taste of that time. 
 
 " We look for Titan with the utmost impatience." 
 
 * 
 Note. — The Baroness Krudener was educated in Paris, where her 
 father's house was the resort of men of talents, and lier beauty and wit 
 were much admired. In her fourteenth year she was married to Barou 
 Krudener, who was more than double her age, and accompanied him 
 to Russia, where he was sent as ambassador. Madam Krudener, placed 
 in the first circles, and remarkable for wit and beauty, was surrounded 
 by admirers ; but she was not happy. Her liveliness of temperament 
 led her into levities, which caused a divorce from her husband, and 
 she returned to her father's house in Riga. Riga did not satisfy her. 
 She removed to Paris, and lived alternately at Paris and Petersburg. 
 She was afterwards attached to the court of the beautiful Queen of 
 Prussia ; and, sharing her misfortunes, her mind turned from the 
 pleasures of the world to the subject of religion. She was now at- 
 tracted by the principles of the Moravians, and again went to Paris, 
 where she found many disciples, — a fact easily explained. The 
 higher circles in Paris contain many persons accustomed, from early 
 youth, to live on excitement; who, when age, or any other cause, 
 
 * " He who casts one eye in thought on the Strasburg Minster, 
 and another on the Teynplcs at Pcestum, will understand the difference 
 between the romautic and classical." — Foreign Quarterly Review, 
 July, 1837.
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 269 
 
 sickens them of those of fashionable life, Qy to devotion, and kindle 
 again for God the burnt-out coal of other passions. She was after- 
 wards connected with the mystical Jung Stilling. In 1814 she was in 
 Paris, much connected with the allied sovereigns, and is said to have 
 had great influence upon the Emperor Alexander. At this time she 
 had prayer-meetings, attended by all the distinguished persons in 
 Paris; where she was seen in the backgroiind, in the dress of a 
 priestess, kneeling in prayer. She afterwards went to Geneva and 
 Bale, everywhere followed by women, poor people, and vagabonds ; 
 sometimes preaching in the open air to three thousand persons. She 
 distributed libenilly to the poor, but excited so much sedition, that 
 she was placed under the surveillance of the police, and at length sent 
 to Russia, with orders not to pass the frontier. She was forbidden 
 also to go to Moscow or Petersburg. She retired to the Crimea, and 
 died there in 1824'. — Conversations Lexicon.
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 ElCHTER VISITS THE FkAUZENBATH TN EgER. — DeATH OF HIS 
 
 Mother. — Emilie von Berlespsh. — Removal from Hof to 
 Leipzig. 
 
 N the month of June, 1797, Richter a. d. 1797, 
 found his health, from uninterrupted -^t. 34. 
 labor, so much impaired, that, to avoid a fit of 
 hypocliondria, he fled to the baths of Eger, in 
 Saxony, where were collected some of the most distin- 
 guished and brilliant persons of the country. Here he 
 was destined to meet another of those enchantresses, who 
 drew him more powerfully than either of the others from 
 the quiet and regular flow of his studious hours. This 
 was Emilie von Berlespsh, a young, beautiful, and rich 
 widow, of Switzerland. Paul's fancy was immeiliately 
 kindled, and he was soon so much the more captivated, 
 as the beautiful and spiritual woman professed to love 
 him more with the fancy than the heart, and thus seemed 
 to avoid the rock upon which poor Madam von Kalb had 
 struck. 
 
 The health of Richter's mother had been gradually 
 declining, but he felt no immediate alarm, although her 
 blessing, when he parted, was more fervent and tender 
 than usual ; but the fascination he was under detained 
 him at the Baths until he was shocked with the sudden
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 27I 
 
 intelligence that she was no more. "With bleeding heart, 
 in which remorse for his absence was mingled, he re- 
 turned to Hof. 
 
 It was to Paul a painfully sweet recollection that he 
 had not gone from her without her blessing, and that 
 when he saw her again she was resting peacefully. The 
 hand of Death, unlike that of Providence, had effaced 
 from her pale countenance all the lines of sorrow and 
 of years, and in death she looked again young, and calm, 
 and happy. His mother had been so bowed down by her 
 life-long sorrows, that even after Paul had become the 
 child of fame, and she heard his praises on every side, 
 she wore the same subdued and humble expression, and 
 denied herself all demonstration of joy at the success of 
 her darling child. She fulfilled literally the injunction 
 of the apostle, " to rejoice with trembling." * 
 
 To add to his sorrow, Paul now first discovered the 
 book, already mentioned, in which his poor mother had 
 kept a record of her little gains in her midnight spinning. 
 He wrote to Otto, as he placed the faded paper next his 
 heart, " If all other manuscripts are destroyed, yet will I 
 keep this, good mother ! where the misery of thy nights 
 is recorded, and where in weakness and pain thy thread 
 of life is drawn out." f 
 
 For many weeks Paul was not able to write to his 
 friend Otto, or to mention his loss to any one ; but at 
 length he fled back to Eger, to find, in the sympathy of 
 
 * The character of Lenette, in Siebenkds, has some of the traits 
 of Paul's mother, and she is said to have furnished him with the 
 original. 
 
 t In a letter from the Duke of Mechlenburg this circumstance is 
 mentioned as a touching feature in the character of Richter. It shows 
 the strong aflfections of his heart, that he should have been so tenderly- 
 attached to a character like that of Lenette.
 
 272 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 his new female friend, consolation for this his deepest 
 sorrow. Notwithstanding the fascinating beauty and 
 charming qualities of the young widow, Richter would 
 not have been so completely enthralled had she not also 
 excited his sympathy. She had lost her young husband 
 after a very short period of happy married life, and was 
 left childless. He wrote to Otto : " I have found the first 
 female soul that I can completely unite with, without 
 weariness, without contrariety ; that can improve me 
 while I improve her. She is too noble and too perfect 
 to be eulogized with a drop of ink. She belongs to that 
 class of women who with firm steps go straight forward 
 on their path, and do not turn, or observe the gazers on 
 the right or left. She has more love in her heart than 
 in her eyes, and therefore she is not understood, nor 
 happy ; and her clear reason and brilliant fancy sui-pass 
 the glow of her imagination." 
 
 But although the lady began with the most Platonic 
 affection for Richter, it soon appeared that she demanded 
 a more exclusive devotion, a warmer expression than 
 Paul, with all the claims of his imaginary heroines, could 
 give to one, and those violent passions and stormy scenes 
 began that tormented the next twelve months of his life. 
 After Paul had left the Fraiizenhath and returned to 
 Hof she wrote to him. 
 
 " . . . . Follow your heart when it speaks for me, for, 
 notwithstanding all your goodness, all your sympathy with 
 me, there is something in me that will always doubt. Do 
 not look upon little hinderances and outward relations. 
 What we lose at the present no eternity can give us back. 
 There is for me only one real, pure joy, and in no future 
 life can there be a higher than the intimate sympathy 
 of soul with you. Ah, we have as yet said nothing to 
 each other.
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 273 
 
 " To-morrow I shall go to Weimar, and tliei'e I shall 
 find a letter from you ! Tliis tells me why I have such 
 an inexpressible longing to be there, where no joy except 
 this and meeting with Herder awaits me. Ah, I pray 
 you not to love me ; that were silly ; but I pray you to 
 view justly the heaven that you create in me ! and if you 
 can estimate it, then you will never destroy it. Would 
 that I could write to you something more of thought than 
 feeling ! I know not how it happens that I, who am 
 always nine parts understanding, and one miserable tenth 
 part heart, forget, pen in hand with you, all logic and 
 penetration, and, like the most susceptible girl, could dis- 
 course of my feelings through whole pages, if the thought 
 of your severe understanding did not stand in warning 
 opposition before me." 
 
 A week later : " I have received your letter. The 
 manner in which I received it is a circumstance in the 
 history of the letter. But of that another time. Breath- 
 less with joy I, seized the letter fi'om the hand of the 
 bearer. My nerves trembled ; for some moments I could 
 not read it. At last it was read. But now — I would I 
 could use any other image — but now the high-swelling 
 waves of feeling were instantly checked, as if by a sudden 
 frost. But wherefore ? That never ask me ! The heaven 
 from which I wrote the first part of this letter is de- 
 stroyed. 
 
 " I have been some hours with Plerder. We talked 
 of the works of art in Dresden, and of you. Herder said, 
 with the most generous expression, that there was not in 
 Germany (that is, in the world), your equal in affluence 
 of mind, and with all, so rich, so pure a heart Could one 
 say more ? And yet, when I talked of you, they called 
 me an enthusiast ! Further, social life in Weimar is as 
 
 12* R
 
 274 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 if a wicked enchantment had dissolved everything. Love, 
 friendship, veneration, the enjoyment of art, even society 
 is here only a sound, a shadow. A leaden night settles 
 on all heads, all hearts, in apparently equal uniformity. 
 
 " Farewell ! When you are a little good to me, if you 
 would not make it utterly impossible for me to wHte to 
 you with unreserve, write, but never again in such a man- 
 ner to your 
 
 " EMILIE." 
 
 Richter answered : " How could I take from your view 
 even the smallest blue spot in the cloud-heaven of life ? 
 Nothing is so painful as an epistolary misunderstanding, 
 when it must be effaced through the slow post rather than 
 with a glance of the eye. 
 
 " I stand already at the door of my literary cabin, and 
 look at the opening in the distant prospect. How few 
 men have a life plan, — although many a week, year, 
 youth, or business plan. Men in their movements are 
 without aim ; accident, necessity, desire, press one upon 
 them that they take for their own. Gold-pieces and 
 medals of honor draw them down in life, and the outward 
 dies without the inward being thought of. The folly of 
 human wishes, indifference to the integrity of the soul, 
 the half-fragmentary, half-accidentally fomied inward, 
 ideal man, where one half is a giant, the other a dwarf 
 makes one not only melancholy, but desponding. Upon 
 the churchyard of the whole earth should this universal 
 epitaph be placed : ' Here lie the beings who in life 
 knew not what they would have.' 
 
 " My leave-taking with all dear associates here gives 
 me many w^ounds to take with me to Leipzig. May I 
 there in your [)recious heart find none. 
 
 " R."
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 275 
 
 Ricbter had at length decided upon the removal from 
 Hof that is indicated at the conclusion of this letter. By 
 the death of his mother the last thread was broken that 
 held him there, and beside the whole care of the educa- 
 tion and maintenance of his youngest brother Samuel 
 devolved also upon him. He was a youth full of talent. 
 Paul resolved that he should not suffer as he had hhnself 
 for the want of a helping hand, and tliis determined him 
 to remove to Leipzig, where his brother could at the same 
 time enjoy the advantages of the University and of his 
 own guardian care. 
 
 Richter's residence in Hof had never been favorable to 
 his genius. He felt that he needed a wider and more 
 brilliant bu'thplace for liis Titan, to which, if it had not 
 been for the demands of Emilie Berlespsh, he would now 
 have been exclusively devoted. His wide-spread celeb- 
 rity, and the homage he had received from all ranks, 
 widened the distance between Paul and his Hofer friends, 
 and even Otto's jealousy could not be concealed at the 
 marks of distinction which he did not share with his 
 friend. Only a heart like Paul's could have resisted the 
 flattery on one side and the reproaches on the other, and 
 nothing places him in a more amiable light than his ten- 
 derness and forbearance under Otto's jealousy. He says, 
 in answer to a letter filled with fond reproaches : " I have 
 within me a humility that no one has ever guessed ; it is 
 not a victory over pride, but a necessity of my nature. 
 The judgments of others deceive me more through immod- 
 erate censure than through immoderate praise." 
 
 As soon as it was known that Richter was going to 
 leave Hof, a voice of regret and lamentation broke out 
 on all sides. The young women to whom he had been an 
 instructor and friend, now almost all of them married,
 
 276 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 would fain have kept him among them, to be the monitor 
 to their children that he had been to them. Vogel and 
 the Saint Anna, Volkel, and his old instructor Werner, 
 (now infirm and aged,) all poured in then* lettei-s express- 
 ing their warm love, their reverence for his noble quali- 
 ties, and their deep grief at losing one wTio seems to have 
 been regarded by those who enjoyed his intimacy with 
 sentiments bordering upon idolatry. 
 
 Richter visited all his near friends, and took leave 
 of others by letter. To Vogel (when he returned his 
 books) he wrote : " Dearest friend, I go as an inhabitant, 
 my brother as a student, to Leipzig, and leave forever the 
 place of my youth. Exactly as at the first time, when I 
 went a student myself to Leipzig, I write to you this 
 second time ; and with the same anxiety with which we 
 see the successive pieces of the machinery of life's stage 
 shoved and pressed through each other. To your printed 
 treasui-es, dearest friend, I am indebted for the greater 
 part of my Library of Extracts, and my gratitude for 
 your love can never be lessened. May Heaven lead in 
 enchanting dreams the innocent world of your life before 
 your eyes, and shelter you from the night air and the 
 night frosts. May you and yours be happy, happy, 
 happy ! " 
 
 Vogel answered : " Infinitely, inexpressibly, beloved 
 friend, you give me my books again, and take from us 
 that personal image in which you have come to us from 
 heaven. I weep at it like a child. But why should I 
 suifer you to see my emotions reflected, as it were, in a 
 glass, when you can read in the human heart as in a 
 book ; and yet the less need I color them, for you are 
 holy Nature's first and dearest painter. Let your spirit 
 still hover about us, and let now and then a drop of the
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 277 
 
 old friendship fall into our cup. Thanks, thanks ! noth- 
 ing but thanks for every enjoyment that from the sea of 
 your love you have created for me. Eternal devotion, 
 eternal reverence, eternal tenderness will be consecrated 
 by my heart to yours. Fare you well, well, well ! thus 
 calls with me my wife, thus call all my children after 
 their friend. 
 
 " P. S. If I should see the Gampaner Thai, the ninth 
 or tenth commandment will not stand in my way. You 
 have spoilt my whole reading for me, especially the so- 
 called beautiful ! I would that you had not spoiled it, or 
 that I had more money and fewer books. Send me often 
 from Leipzig only the written words, Jean Paul Frederic 
 RicJiter, and I will practise magic with them. Denuo 
 vale carissime ! Carissime vale ! " 
 
 We hear of the phlegmatic Germans ! This letter 
 was from a country pastor, advanced in years. Let us 
 recall the words of the former letter, written just sixteen 
 years before, when Paul, as a poor student, was setting 
 out on foot for Leipzig : " Excellent young German ! 
 from whom in the future I promise thje world so much. 
 Fulfil this prophecy ! " If they both remembered the 
 letter, how well seemed the prophecy fulfilled ! 
 
 Richter and Otto, although living in the same city, had 
 written to each other every day. They would not trust 
 themselves with a parting intervicAv, and Richter's last 
 letter to his friend is most touchingly tender. It closes 
 thus : " My last word to you is, be courageous ! Strive 
 with manly power against sickly fantasies, and enter, as I 
 do, always more courageously into active life, that your 
 talents may be more useful to others, and thus to your- 
 self. With this wish, with these hopes, my infinitely dear 
 friend, I close my youth's time, and we part silently from
 
 278 
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 each other. If man can bear an eternity in his heart, 
 you will remain eternally in mine. Say this also to your 
 dear brother and sister. I will not seek such a trio in 
 the world, for I shall not find you." 
 
 After many other farewell messages, Paul closes by 
 recommending to Otto's peculiar kindness a poor'girl, 
 who had sometimes, in her illness, served his mother.* 
 
 * Appendix V.
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 Residence in Leipzig. — Letters. — Emilie von Beklespsh. — 
 
 Visits Deesden. 
 
 HE residence in Leipzig was a great ^ p ^.^gg 
 and decided change in the life of our -^t- 35- 
 Richter. In the tumult and whirlpool of the 
 collected literature of the great book-fau- of Ger- 
 
 many, so distinguished and so original a writer must have 
 become one of the central points. How different from 
 his humble apartment in Hof, where the only sounds that 
 broke upon the quiet of still life were the drowsy whir- 
 ring of his mother's spinning-wheel, and the unweaiied 
 scratching of his own pen. 
 
 On his arrival in Leipzig, the bookseller Beygang re- 
 ceived him into his house. Richter found there treasures 
 of new books, periodicals, and conveniences, that held him 
 fast with the enchantment of novelty. But he soon went 
 to his old lodgings in the Peterstrass, where he found 
 higher chambers, wider windows, a more ornamented 
 stove, in short, elegant forniture, where the " commode 
 was better than anything he could put in it." 
 
 Instead as formerly with timid and concealed steps he 
 sought a cross hostess, booksellers ran to find the best 
 victualler who would send the best dish to his table. 
 Where he had before paused longingly, unable to afford
 
 28o LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 the grosclien to enter the concert-hall, he now passed 
 freely where for the first time in his life he heard music. 
 He found that what we desire in youth, age sometimes 
 gives us in excess. But, alas ! these joys come when 
 for us they have lost their value. 
 
 Many families admitted him to their most intimate do- 
 mestic circles, and the young attached themselves to him 
 with irresistible impulse. Weisse, now an old man, who 
 had closed his literary career by writing hymns and A 
 B C books for children, and to whom every German 
 child is indebted for his delightful " Child's Friend," took 
 Richter into his family; and his table, his library, and 
 country house were as open to him as if he had been Ms 
 first-born son. Paul said of him : " In his seventy -second 
 year his face is a thanksgiving for his former life, and a 
 love-letter to all mankind. A Leipziger supper is always 
 a guest repast. Weisse's daughter, a beautiful and accom- 
 plished young lady, presides at his ; but for some years I 
 have been dead to external beauty, and only alive to wliat 
 is living beneath it." 
 
 But, as in Weimar, Richter must sp(?ak for himself 
 Leipzig was tlie residence of his friend Christian Oertel, 
 who had lately been married, and Richter had not yet 
 seen his young wife. He says : " Oertel had already de- 
 posited a letter inviting me to a private interview. After 
 half an hour he opened the door of the next room, and 
 his wife, as tall and slender as Renata, neither beautiful 
 nor unpleasing, but with love-gushing* mild eyes, that 
 steal the heart away as by enchantment, fell, although 
 her mother and two sisters were present, upon my neck. 
 I was not less confused than pleased. Her voice is like 
 her eyes. When she sang the forget me not, and some 
 
 * It is impossible to translate liebequelknden otlierwise.
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 281 
 
 Italian pieces, you may easily tliink where my ears led 
 my heart, and that the tones, floating between the present 
 and the past, aflfected me too deeply. Wednesday I Avas 
 at the concert-hall ; there were over a hundi-ed perform- 
 ers. Beating the kettle-drum to a parchment thunder, 
 organ, female singers ; in short, I heard music for the 
 first time in my life. As the animals to Adam, were the 
 people presented to me, of whom I could name only Em- 
 hardt and Dr. Michaelis and their sons. About eight 
 o'clock, a man came to me without a hat, with tan- 
 gled hair, and aphoristical voice, and conversation free 
 and bold. It was Thieriot, a violinist and philologist, 
 and apparently an oddity, as he took me for one. He 
 begged me to leave my lodgings, and come and live with 
 him. 
 
 " Kotzebue has visited, and invited me to dine with 
 his wife. She appears to be a good mother. Contrary 
 to my expectation, his conversation is sleepy, spiritless, 
 and, like his eye, without brilliancy. On the other hand, 
 he appears to be less wicked than timidly weak. Con- 
 science finds in his panada * heart no ground firm enough 
 in which to fix her hook. 
 
 " I have been with Platner in his family, where I found 
 a completely accomplished wife, and two extremely beau- 
 tiful daughters, and many distinguished young people. It 
 exceeds the power of my pen to give you a reasonable 
 sketch of my acquaintances. Rather would I describe 
 for you the refined, not too ftiU, but costly and delicious 
 supper-parties. Yet I save nothing by them, for I must 
 give the sei-vants drink-money, and the maid who lights 
 you down, or up, even in clear daylight, demands the 
 offering penny. 
 
 * Boiled bread and water, sweetened.
 
 282 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 " What I promised to tell you of Goethe is insignifi- 
 cant. It was merely that he judged favorably of the 
 Hesperus. Further, he sees now, that it is good earnest 
 with me ; but it gives him cramps of the brain when I 
 throw myself from one science into another. ' I show 
 my knowledge too much.' He knows a little also*! but 
 he delivers only the result. ' When I am elevated 
 above the earthly, even to heaven, then comes suddenly 
 a poor jest,' &c. In short, he rues this side of my 
 works. 
 
 " I met a noble Scot, Macdonald (celebrated in history 
 and in Ossian), at a stranger's table, and at his own, and 
 found in him the twin mind of Blair, whose sermons so 
 delighted me, and whose personal friend he is. No, 
 there is not in the three kingdoms a nobler or more 
 manly breast, under which beats a tenderer, purer, more 
 piously poetic and melancholy spirit. Thus thought a 
 youth long since of the English, from books, and thus 
 he finds it now. He reads and speaks as many languages 
 
 as the freed American cantons, thirteen 'I must 
 
 tell you of your faults ! ' I have already once, but com- 
 pletely wrong, namely, hinted a little vanity. That can- 
 not exist in a mind that so readily performs anonymous 
 work, and withdraws itself from praise. Every son of 
 earth may dare to be somewhat vain, it is only unper- 
 mitted wlicn he conceals it, or displays it too much. Ah, 
 dear Otto, I remark from your letter that you are going 
 back into your old errors, and that, merely because I 
 write to you chronologically. Written complaints and 
 explanations are, on account of their longer and stronger 
 false impressions, more dilficult to efface than verbal. Ah, 
 if we could be only one day together in Hof, not merely 
 a full amnesty, but a deep Lethe would hide the little
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 283 
 
 precipices where we have fallen." * .... Fate is spin- 
 ning for me, for I hear the whizzing of her wheel, a net- 
 work that will overspread my whole life. The Berlespsh 
 is here. I find in her a soul that has not once fallen 
 beneath my ideal, and I should be wholly happy in her 
 friendship, if she would not be too happy with me." 
 
 The last extract bids us return to Emilie von Ber- 
 lespsh. A remark has been made by one of his biog- 
 raphers, " that whoever writes the life of Jean Paul must 
 not forget how much influence women exercised upon his 
 destiny." The reader must have already remarked, that, 
 although this lady began with the purest Platonism, she 
 soon complained of the coldness of Richter's letters ; and 
 that he never appears to have felt other sentiments for 
 her than those of admiration and esteem. 
 
 Immediately after Richter's removal to Leipzig she 
 purchased a country house at Gholis, a short distance 
 from that city. When Paul visited her he found a quiet, 
 retired apartment in the lower story, fitted up expressly 
 for him as a study, where he could retire if he wished to 
 be alone, or seek society with her and her friends in her 
 apartments. Upon all occasions he met a glowing heart, 
 and a warm, disinterested friendship. 
 
 As a female author Richter placed this lady above 
 most of her sex ; but female authorship was more rare 
 in Germany at this time than even in England, and this 
 lady was distinguished for a lucidity of arrangement and 
 strength of expression at all times rare among female 
 authors. About this time she had publislied remarks 
 upon the revolution in Switzerland, together with Mallet 
 du Pans's history of the same. Richter himself must un- 
 
 * Otto had again expressed his distrust of Richter's affection. See 
 Appendix IIL
 
 284 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 fold her history in connection with liimself. He writes 
 to Otto: — 
 
 " Harpocrates, lay thy finger upon thy lips, for the 
 theme is of her, the i:)urest, most sj^iritual female soul 
 that I have ever known, but the firmest and most ideal, 
 and possessed with an egotistical coldness of philanthropy 
 that demands and loves nothing but perfection. She ful- 
 fils all the duties of benevolence, but without warmth of 
 feeling. At the baths of Eger I treated her with extreme 
 reserve, and took rarely her hand, and only a sympathiz- 
 ing part in her hard fate. She'introduced to me a beauti- 
 ful, rich, high-principled young lady, her friend from Zu- 
 rich, for whom no wooer had hithei'to been pure and good 
 enough, and wished that I should marry her. Her pro- 
 230sal, when she came now from Weimar, was that my 
 little winnings and the young lady's property should be 
 thrown together, to purchase a country house, and that 
 she should live constantly with us. She yielded, when I 
 represented the folly and impossibility of such an arrange- 
 ment, but her soul hung on mine with more wai'mth than 
 mine on hers ; and I have lived through fearful scenes, 
 blood-spitting, and swoonings, such as no pen can describe. 
 At length, as I sat one evening reflecting upon her severe 
 destiny, my heart melted within me, and I went in the 
 morning and told her I consented to the marriage with 
 herself. She will do whatever I wish ; will purchase a 
 country-house wherever I like best ; on the Necker, the 
 Rhine, in Switzerland, or Voigtland. None perhaps will 
 ever love or esteem me more, and yet I am not satisfied ; 
 my fate was not decided by myself. In so for as great- 
 ness and purity of soul and worldly rit-hes can make me 
 happy I shall be so, perhaps. 
 
 "Ah, Otto, I weary to write, when thou art so long
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 285 
 
 silent. What have I done to thee ? What mist has 
 again drawn around thee ? Farewell, my brother ! I 
 long more bitterly every day for you. Ah, you have no 
 excuse, if, in an unaltered situation, you alter; while I, 
 in an altered, remain the same to you." 
 
 Although Otto was at a distance from the fascinations 
 of the lady, liis mind was so completely the echo of his 
 friend's, that he had not the power to represent to him 
 that by such a mai-riage, even if he gained all the for- 
 tunes of Germany, it would be no atonement to a heart 
 like Richter's for the want of mutual confidence and love. 
 He saw on Richter's side more sacrifice than love, and 
 that he would sufller from exclusive demands upon his 
 tenderness, for every woman that, self-forgetting, gives 
 herself wholly, demands at times answering sacrifices, 
 although in the moment of her highest elevation she 
 may imagine that the certainty of possession is enough 
 for her happiness. Otto also avowed that miserable, 
 self-deceiving opinion, that a marriage without love was 
 best for Richter's literary and poetic life. He would 
 also be preserved, he said, from great vicissitudes by 
 receiving at once a competence, which would only come 
 by degrees if he married a woman without fortune. 
 " The real" he adds, " in marriage, as well as in friend- 
 ship, takes something from the ideal. But with thee, 
 if it must be that thy ideal life proceed alone upon its 
 heavenly way, yet wilt thou steal treasures from the real, 
 for if disappointed love makes poets of prosaic men, how 
 much more will it preserve in thee a poetic youtlifulness 
 and a pure, unsatisfied love." Paul had therefore to 
 achieve his freedom alone, and it is another proof of his 
 extraordinary power, and the elevating influence of his 
 moral nature, that lie not only reconciled the lady to the
 
 286 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 refusal of her passionate demands, but continued with her 
 upon the most friendly and coniidential terms, without 
 further question of love or marriage. 
 
 Eichter's next letter informs his friend that even before 
 he had received his last his fate was decided. " I told 
 Emilie that I felt no passion for her, and that it would be 
 impossible for us to live happily together. I passed two 
 inconceivably wretched days ; but now her wounded heart 
 closes again gently, and bleeds less. I am free, free, free 
 and blest ! In Hof you will hear of it most extensively, 
 but my justification will precede the censure. It depended 
 on myself, after my confessiO)is, to form with her a social 
 and friendly bond. At the end of May we shall go to- 
 gether to Dresden, Seifersdorf, and on the Elbe I 
 
 should be much happier in marriage than you imagine. 
 If there were only the spring of love, I would ask little 
 from the summer of marriage. But do not believe that 
 mine is like your sacrificing heart. Ah, in your situation 
 I should be, through youth and beauty, and through great 
 tenderness of soul, completely ]iapj)y.* 
 
 " Let me say no more of you, but only soon, to you — 
 I believe I should for joy and love, among you, die ! Ah, 
 the good Paulina, tell Renata she must ask me what I 
 think of her silence." 
 
 We have room but for one more extract from the Leip- 
 zig letters ; one that shows the childlike simplicity and 
 o])enness with which the two friends wrote to each other. 
 
 " I celebrated my birthday on the 2Uth, on account of 
 the birth of the spring ; and on the 21st, on account of my 
 own birth. From an unknown hand I received brown 
 cloth, that I already doubly wear, as a coat, and as an 
 
 * Otto h:ul long been attached to Amone Herold, but through family 
 opposition tlieir iniii'riiige was delayed.
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 287 
 
 overcoat for tlie Avinter. Madam Feind gave me a cup, 
 with hers and my initial letters interlaced ; Madam Bru- 
 ningt a neckcloth ; and the Berlespsh made a little festi- 
 val, with rose-trees, crowns, etc. ; to which Weisse and 
 some other friends were invited." 
 
 Richter was now pre2iaring the second volume of the 
 Titan for the press, and was also employed upon the 
 Palingenesien. But, in the midst of the business and 
 pleasures of that whirlpool, the Leipzig Fair, he was 
 seized with inexpressible longing for his late home. He 
 fancied that this heimweh would be cured by the sight 
 of the green spot near the Lorenzo Church, where his 
 mother reposed, and his melancholy dissipated by a few 
 days' residence with Otto, and quiet and confidential inter- 
 course with his friend and his friend's betrothed, Amone. 
 After fourteen days with Otto and his family, who re- 
 sembled 1dm in tenderness, and in attachment to Richter, 
 he returned, strengthened as much by their love as by the 
 repose and freedom from excitement he had found in the 
 little city of Hof. 
 
 Shortly after his return, he journeyed with Emilie to 
 Dresden, partly to escape from the tumult of the fair, and 
 partly to feel the full enjoyment of Nature, under the 
 double charm of the opening spring and the society of a 
 female friend. It was Richter's first visit in Dresden, 
 and he was disappointed in the social tone of the accom- 
 plished Dresdeners. But in Dresden a new and hitherto 
 unimagined world was opened to him. He became ac- 
 quainted with the Grecian plastic art. A new sun arose 
 over his own, and threw its living beams upon, his mind. 
 He wrote to Otto : — 
 
 *' As yet I can impart nothing to you but the hall of 
 Sculpture, that yesterday like a new, huge world pressed
 
 288 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 iuto my mind, and nearly crowded the other out. "We 
 entered a long, light, vaulted hall, through -which ex- 
 tended two rows of pillars. Between these pillars repose 
 the old gods, who have thrown off the world of the grave, 
 or the clouds of heaven, and reveal to us a holy, calm, and 
 blessed world in their forms and in our own breasts, v^ere 
 we find the difference between the beauty of a man and 
 that of a god. That excites, though gently, wishes and 
 timidity, but this exists firm and simple, like the blue of 
 ether before the world and time were created. The re- 
 pose of perfection, not of weariness, looks from their eyes 
 and rests upon their lips. Whenever in future I write 
 of great or beautiful objects, these gods will appear before 
 me, and reveal to me the laws of beauty. Noav I know 
 the Grecians, and can never forget them." 
 
 He did not forget them ; but the feeling they awoke in 
 him was a reverend timidity towards them, and despond- 
 ing reflections upon himself; as the sight of a large 
 library always made him melancholy, he felt the impossi- 
 bility of taking in its treasures. He did not enter the 
 ball again. Richter was now thirty-five years old, and 
 the feeling may be easily understood of all that he had 
 lost, while his mind was forming, which he was now too 
 old to repair. The sight of perfection in any form ex- 
 cites in susceptible minds the longing after perfection. 
 After his visit to the hall of Sculpture, Richter wrote in 
 a secret pocket-book : " Unknown, unseen ! here in the 
 stillness of my empty chamber comes thy image ! Ah, 
 once, only once, thou All-loving, send to my thirsting 
 heart that being that, as an eternal pole-star rises above 
 me, and that, alas ! I never reach." 
 
 This visit to the gallery of Sculpture in Dresden in- 
 spired him with a desire to renew his acquamtance with
 
 LIFE OF JEAX PAUL. 289 
 
 the ancients. He says, in a letter to Thieriot afterwards : 
 " During this northern winter, my spirit was refreshed in 
 Attica and Ionia. I read with a joy of which Herder can 
 tell you the Odyssey and Iliad, Sophocles, part of Eu- 
 ripides and ^schylus. After the last hymns of the Iliad, 
 and tlie CEdipus in Colortna, one can read nothing but 
 Shakespeare or Goethe. They already affect my Titan, 
 but as the teacher rather than the father." 
 
 Richter had abeady found reason to rejoice that he had 
 not formed a more permanent union with Emelie. He 
 says to Otto : " In future I shall journey alone, and on 
 foot. With Emilie I found upon our journey too much 
 egotism, and too much aristocracy towards those beneath 
 her in rank. I have again made peace with her, although 
 she, not I, has often opened the old wounds. In the spring 
 of 1799 {siib rosa) she will go to England." 
 
 The lady went to England and resided in the High- 
 lands of Scotland, but soon returned with heimweh to her 
 native land. Her troubled life at length reposed happily 
 in another union.* 
 
 Upon Richter's return to Leipzig, from his Dresden 
 journey, a deep sorrow awaited him. His brother Sam- 
 tiel, upon whose account and to promote whose education 
 lie had come to Leipzig, a youth of good talents and 
 originally of a noble disposition, had fallen into dissipated 
 company and become involved in a deep passion for gam- 
 
 * Emilie von Berlespsh was a distinguished female German author. 
 I learn from Schindel's biography that at the time of her acquaintance 
 vrith Jean Paul she was divorced from her first husband, although in 
 Richter's life she is called a widow. She visited Scotland in company 
 with Sir James McDonald, and on her return published a work called 
 " Summer Hours in Caledonia." In 1801 she married a second time 
 the Rath Harms, and went with him to Berne, in Switzerland, where 
 she owned estates. 
 
 13 s
 
 :90 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 ing. He had taken advantage of Ricliter's absence to* 
 break open his desk, and abstract from it one hundred 
 and fifty rix-dollars. With this sum he departed from 
 his brotlier's lodgings, without leaving any clew by which 
 he could be discovered. 
 
 Paul suffered inexpressibly when he entered Kfs de- 
 serted room, and discovered the rosebush that had been 
 his brother's care faded and dried as if it had been long 
 neglected ; but he suffered infinitely more, when he found 
 that guilt also was connected with his flight. He wrote 
 to Otto : " That lost and deserted one, who knows me so 
 little, and who will never guess that I should be more 
 softened by his return than he would be himself, comes 
 before me every night in my dreams. Ah, if he knew 
 how easily his hard fate might be mitigated ! " He did 
 not return, and his subsequent fortunes occupy a large 
 part of Paul's future con-espondence with Otto. Richter 
 was more lenient towards his poor, unhappy brother, be- 
 cause he reproached himself with too mucli indulgence, 
 and too little scrutiny of his conduct while at the Univer- 
 sity. He never saw him again, but he settled on him a 
 yearly sum to be paid through Otto, who was the medium 
 of communication between them. The boy led a wan- 
 dering life, probably filled with suffering, and died at a 
 military hospital in Silesia. A strong character should 
 never have the complete control of a weak one. The 
 weak cannot sympathize with the strong, and to conceal 
 his weakness enters into a series of deceptions that often 
 end fatally for the weak. 
 
 In the course of his journey to discover his brother, 
 Richter visited Halberstadt, the residence of Gleim,* now 
 
 * The reader may recollect that it was Gleim who sent Jean Paul 
 the fifty dollars, under the name of Septimus Fixlein.
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 291 
 
 an old man ; but the snow that had gathered upon his 
 long locks had not extinguished the youthful fire of his 
 eye or shadowed the lines of his noble brow. Gleim 
 stood at the door to receive him, and he was equally en- 
 chanted by tlie old man, and by the neighborhood of the 
 Hartz mountains. Paul wrote to Otto : "• Gleim has the 
 fire 'and the blindness of a youth. To spare the old man 
 I made only some slight remark, when he compared the 
 sori'ows of Louis XVI. to those of Chi-ist ! " 
 
 He returned to Leipzig at the end of July, regretting 
 " that he had found no man for his heart ; that he had 
 indeed found men whose pupil he could be, but none that 
 he could take to his heart." 
 
 The friendship between Otto and Jean Paul was one 
 of the most beautiful that literary history has made known 
 to us. But the frequent outbreaking jealousy of Otto, at 
 what he imagined approaching coldness in Paul, was the 
 occasion of many letters that disclose the generous and 
 forbearing spirit of his friend. As these letters would 
 have taken too much room for the body of the work, I 
 have placed some extracts in the Appendix.
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 ElCHTER RETURNS TO WeIMAR. — WiELAND. — GOETIIE. — HeRDER. 
 
 — His Attachment to Jean Paul. — Philosophy. — Madam 
 VON Kalb. 
 
 TTER the loss of his brother, Leipzig a.d. 1798, 
 with all its noise and tumult ap- -^^^ ^^• 
 peared to Richter an empty and deserted city. 
 Leipzig had indeed never fulfilled the expec- 
 tations of his youth. All that he had so long dwelt upon in 
 solitude, and that would have made him so infinitely happy 
 as a youth in Leipzig, came too late. The theatre, con- 
 certs, the society of people of rank, to one who had been 
 the intimate friend of Herder, appeared empty and idle 
 pleasures, and his longing for the conversation of his 
 fiiend returned, when there was no longer a reason for 
 his remaining in Leipzig. An invisible hand drew him 
 again to AVeimar ; an inward voice whispered to him that 
 it was only by the side of Herder that the sun would rise 
 that was to ripen his Titan. On a visit that he made 
 there about this time, wlien all his former friends received 
 him with the same delight as at first ; Goethe, with more 
 flattering demonstrations of friendship than before ; the 
 cirdelhat gathered about him was so choice and so de- 
 lightful that he determined no longer to resist his secret 
 wishes.
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 293 
 
 Accordingly, at the end of October, just a year from 
 the time he entered it, he left Leipzig, and on the 26th, 
 at evening, entered the gate of AVeimar, to him that of a 
 New Jerusalem. The same evening he wrote the follow- 
 ing note to Herder : " At length I have passed the Arabian 
 Desert of two years, and have arrived with the same pil- 
 grim's garment, like an Israelite to the promised land, 
 where I wish to conquer nothing but — yourself." 
 
 Madam von Kalb was at her country house, where she 
 suffered with cheerful resignation the long night that the 
 almost total loss of her sight had drawn around her. 
 
 In as far as the comfort of a poet depends on outward 
 circumstances, a humble personage claims a page in his 
 biogx-aphy. This is the Frau Kuhnholdter, the wife of a 
 saddler, at whose house Jean Paul hired his apartments. 
 He writes as usual to his friend Otto : " My gi*eatest re- 
 freshment here, except Herder, is my house Frau. Never 
 was I so happily lodged. No step-genius provides for my 
 comfort and waits upon me, but the lady of the house her- 
 self, who takes care of me as a mother would take care 
 of her child. In my absence she had a second door cut 
 in my apartment, and cares for all, and places all in order. 
 At six o'clock she comes in, warms and lights my room, 
 and then brings the hot coffee. I give her a crown, with 
 which she pays all, and keeps an exact account till she 
 needs a new one, and I often have a glass of wine over. 
 She provides my wood, my comforts, — takes care of the 
 washing, and when I go a little foot journey, like my 
 mother, she puts up everything, even the ink-glass. And 
 when I return all is ready, as in an expecting family. 
 The duchess mother told me that my house Frau was a 
 great reader. I inquired, and found that she had once 
 taken the (Economical Lexicon from the library. They
 
 294 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 wondered at it, and it was purchased for her by the 
 duchess." 
 
 These outward cares, for which the good house Frau 
 so well provided, bore upon the whole tenor of Richter's 
 life in Weimar, which was indeed most happj. His re- 
 ception was even more flattering tlian at first, as personal 
 knowledge had confirmed the former admiration. All 
 doors and all hearts, even the ducal, weie opened to him. 
 The noble and intellectual Duchess Amelia received him 
 as a friend of the house, and he was indebted to her de- 
 scriptions for his knowledge of hola Bella, Naples, Ischia, 
 and the other parts of Italy that he has painted with 
 such living colors in his Titan. Richter's genius also 
 was never more creative and sportful, and the little work 
 that he produced at this time, Bevorstehenden Lebenslanf* 
 in fulness of thought, charm of expression, and a gentle 
 play of wit and humor, between the serious and sportive, 
 is not surpassed by any of his longer works. 
 
 But the reader must not be defrauded of Paul's own 
 naive and simple account. He writes to Otto : — 
 
 " Yesterday I visited Scliiller. He was indisposed, and 
 I went, foolishly, to walk with his wife. She belongs to 
 those agreeable coquettes in conversation, wdio Ao not 
 throw the ball straight back, but keep it up through 
 playful persiflage. She led the author of Hesperus, at 
 twilight, to one beautiful eminence, to see another ; but he 
 could only look at her beautiful face, and her still more 
 charming Cleopatra eyes. I always tell her I cannot be- 
 lieve a word she says unless she looks in my face 
 
 At a learned supper I met Hufeland and Fichte, and 
 others that I did not know. Fichte is small (I thought 
 he had been tall), modest, and precise, but not particu- 
 
 * Approaching life's course.
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 295 
 
 larly genial. I was lovingly treated by all, especially by 
 Schiller. Ah, I speak too openly with people, and shield 
 myself too little. My table-talk at Dresden to Schlegel 
 obliged his brother, when it was repeated to him, to the 
 expression of his judgment about me.* .... 
 
 " I write to you, wrapped in Wieland's wide mantle, 
 that, on account of the cold, his wife lent me. I travelled 
 here on foot, with only my summer coat, and a pocketful 
 of shoes and clean shirts.f Wieland is slender, erect, with 
 a red scarf, and a red handkerchief bound round his head, 
 — talking much of himself, but not with pride, — a little 
 aristippish, and indulgent towards himself, as towards 
 others, — full of parental and conjugal love, but so in- 
 toxicated by the muses, that his wife once concealed from 
 him for ten whole days the death of one of his children. 
 He does not penetrate the relations of things so deeply 
 as Herder, and his judgment is better upon external 
 social affairs than upon intimate human relations. He 
 gave me the palm many inches higher than his own, 
 particularly about my dreams and pages upon nature, 
 and increased my outward pride (my inwai'd, never) 
 about many tilings. He depreciates himself too much, 
 and was too anxious about my praise of his works." 
 
 " On my second visit to Wieland, with my wide flut- 
 tering summer ornaments, the good patriarch, on account 
 of the hateful cold weather, brought me his coat himself. 
 To-day I carried it back. God send every poet such an 
 active, firm, prudent, candid, tender, and kind wife. She 
 had read in the newspapers of the danger of resting after 
 being cold, and she brought and insisted upon my draw- 
 
 * In a severe review of Jean Paul's works. 
 
 t This was on Paul's first visit from Leipzig, before he had perma- 
 nently established himself in Weimar.
 
 296 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 ing on warm stockings. Wieland could not survive her 
 if she were to die, neither she him. He has told me her 
 heart's history, and also his own.* Ah ! how much I 
 
 have to relate to your ear and heart In his single 
 
 and widowed daughters, beneath plain persons, are good 
 and beautiful hearts ; but with such faces they Avill' not 
 be di'awn out. And yet — otherwise — his wife proposed, 
 and he mentioned it to me the next morning, that I should 
 take the opposite house, and eat always with tliem. He 
 said I gave him new life, and that they all loved me ! 
 Naturally, as I always make them laugh, and as /cannot 
 help loving so good a family. But that would never do. 
 Two poets can never live together. And I wiU wear no 
 chain, even were it formed of perfume, and welded by 
 moonbeams, — and I should be certain that in the soli- 
 tude of only their society I should end by marrying one 
 of their daughters, — which is not my plan." 
 
 " I have just come from Herder. We sat many hours 
 alone in his arbor. O, dear Otto, how shall I show you 
 this noble spirit at its right elevation, before which my 
 little soul bends with Spanish, even Turkish veneration, 
 — this man, penetrated with the Divinity, whose foot is 
 upon this world, his head and breast in the other. How 
 shall I paint his inspired eye, when poetry or music softens 
 him ? How shall I represent him embracing all the 
 branches of the tree of knowledge, although he seizes 
 masses, not parts, and instead of the tree, shakes the 
 ground upon which it stands. I have often, after spend- 
 ing the evening with him, taken leave with tears. 
 
 " Apropos, I have also been with Goethe, who received 
 me with more obliging friendship than the first time. I 
 was, in consequence, freer, bolder, less susceptible, and 
 
 * See Appendix IIL
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 297 
 
 therefore more independent. He inquired after my man- 
 ner of working, as it completely surpasses his method, and 
 asked how I liked Fichte. Upon the last Goethe said : 
 ' He is the great new scholastic. Men are born poets, but 
 they can make themselves philosophers, if they can any- 
 where fix a transcendental idea. The new (philosophers) 
 make light an object, when it should only show objects.' 
 He will complete the Faust at the end of six months. 
 He said he could always promise himself his work six 
 months beforehand, and he prepares himself by prudent 
 diet. Schiller drinks coifee immoderately, and Malaga 
 also. No one is as moderate in coffee as I am, 
 
 " Goethe told us he had not read a syllable of his 
 Werter until ten years after it was written. 'Who would 
 willingly suiTender themselves to a past sensation, and 
 recall anger or love,' etc. So also said Herder of his 
 works. Wliat can be said of the self-idolatry of the 
 small literary men of the day, when such men are so 
 humble? I was ashamed not to he so before them, but 
 I said, 'that my things, immediately after they were 
 printed, pleased me extremely, and that I knew no bet- 
 ter reading, — but when I had forgotten my own ideal, I 
 knew none worse.' 
 
 " Dear Otto, wdiy do you write me so little of yourself? 
 "With what right or justice should I give you all my per- 
 sonalities, if I did not expect yours in return ? Write me 
 soon, what makes you so calm, — namely, — ' your newly- 
 discovered unsealed fountain ' ? Has no one guessed that 
 it is a ^t for distant, thirsting friends, when they are 
 told how often you sneeze, gape, smile, or w^eep? You 
 imagine me more altered in my views of human life and 
 benevolence than I am. I am the same man as formerly, 
 and have lost nothing but certain hopes and dreams." 
 13*
 
 298 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 Otto, in his next letter, discovers the source of his 
 newly acquired contentment, and as it condenses the phi- 
 losophy of many tedious volumes, I give an extract from it. 
 
 " The conviction lies deep and indelible in every hu- 
 man breast, that only those have a right to be happy, — 
 more, only those can reproach Destiny, who possess'»the 
 purest virtue ; that every one should be satisfied with his 
 fate, if he has ever, in the course of his life, acted un- 
 justly or unwisely. I reflected upon my whole life. I 
 have found nowhere what is in the world called happi- 
 ness, but everywhere gifts that I had not deserved. The 
 more narrowly I looked at these, they shivered, and, like 
 ignoble metals, evaporated in the melting. How small 
 then Avas the result? But I did not spare nor deceive 
 myself, and hypocritically say, that my desert appeared 
 much smaller, and the more this diminished the more the 
 gifts increased. I felt with deep mortification, that there 
 I should have been better, here wiser, or at least more 
 reasonable. Then I was silent within myself, and said, 
 ' Thou hast received more than thou hast deserved, and 
 if Destiny had given thee nothing but this living faith, 
 and the still, cool air, and the solitude that thou lovest, 
 still it is more, a thousand times more than thou hast de- 
 served.' .... 
 
 " I celebrated Amone's birthday, this year, with emo- 
 tions wholly different from former ones. In future years, 
 I thought, she will live by me, care for me, and as I have 
 always known her sacrificing love, so I am certain that in 
 every relation with me, be it ever so limited, she will be 
 contented. I have lived, in my long connection with her, 
 days of sweet and intimate enjoyment for the mind and 
 heart. How often do I admire in her her sacrificing and 
 forbearing spirit, — her tenderness of heart, together with
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 299 
 
 the manly ambition of a philosophical spirit ; her silence 
 and patience under the severity of her father, and the 
 narrowness of her family ; — all this makes the prospect 
 of life with her, and only Avith her, when we have passed 
 the hard circumstances that now divide us, dear to my 
 heart. To whom could I say all this, with the prospect 
 of sympathy, but to you my Richter ? " 
 
 To this letter Richter answered : " Your excellent 
 judgment, ujion happiness and desert, was always mine. 
 I have always myself laid the egg out of which the basi- 
 lisks have crept. On account of my poor brother, I have 
 also some guilt, but less of the heart than of the head. I 
 contended with Goethe upon your assertion ' concerning 
 the Progress of the World.' ' Revolving, we must say,' 
 he answered ; ' a priori progress follows from the belief 
 of a Providence, but not a -posteriori is the progress 
 always apparent, at least not in the French revolution. 
 The hardly found truth we must also earn for ourselves. 
 The chambers of the brain are full of seed, for which the 
 feelings and passions are the flower-soil and the forcing- 
 glasses.' 
 
 " A young Haydn is music-director here ; and a female 
 singer, that I visit sometimes, though without beauty, is a 
 perfect gymnastic for wit. She laughs and sings, and, 
 with justice, more than she speaks. She told me, that 
 she asked Goethe how she should receive me, whether 
 she should come trilling to meet me ? ' Child,' said he, 
 ' do as with me, and be natural.' 
 
 " Herder has one Alphabet of his Metakritic ready. He 
 asked me to look through it, and make corrections. I 
 told him I would, but only to read and restore what he 
 had scratched out. 
 
 ". . . . In the great world I despise the men and
 
 300 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 their joyless joys ; but I esteem the women ; in them 
 alone can one investigate the spirit of the times. Besides, 
 I am freer and better known than in a small place. But, 
 as I said to Herder yesterday, ' Once married, I shall 
 creep into the smallest nest in the world, and stick noth- 
 ing but my writing fingers out.' " '» 
 
 Caroline Herder, in her reminiscences of his life, gives 
 a beautiful account of Richter's relations at this time 
 with her gifted husband. 
 
 " In the last month of the year 1798, Jean Paul Rich- 
 ter came to Weimar, and with warm, full heart to Herder. 
 Herder immediately won his love, and his esteem for 
 Richter's great and rich genius increased from day to 
 day. The high moral power breathing in his works, fit- 
 ting him to be a physician of the times, united both men 
 in a friendship of the closest sympathy. He came, {is 
 though sent by a good Providence, exactly at the time 
 when Herder, on account of his political and philosoplii- 
 cal principles, was deserted, and nearly forgotten. The 
 happy evening hours that Richter passed with us, his 
 perpetually cheerful, youthful soul, his fire, his humor, 
 the animation with which he talked over with Herder 
 everything that happened, always gave him new life. 
 Much as tliey differed in their views upon one subject, 
 yet were their principles and their emotions always thn 
 same. (Herder differed from Richter in his judgment of 
 women ; he thought Paul made them too melancholy, too 
 desponding, and perhaps too inactive.) Moreover, he 
 valued Richter's genius, his rich, overflowing, poetic 
 sj)irit, far above the soulless productions • of the time, 
 that contended for the poetic form only. Hei-der named 
 them brooks without water, and often said, " that Richter 
 stood, as opposed to them, upon a high elevation, and that
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 301 
 
 he would exchange all artisifcal fc^rms f'cr Kii=" living vfr- 
 tue, his feeling heart, his perennial creative genius ; he 
 brings new, fresh life, truth, virtue, reality, into the de- 
 clining and misunderstood vocation of the poet." 
 
 " Most intimately united the two friends lived together. 
 Our Uttle evening table, with him, our cMldren, and some- 
 times Frederic Mayer, was a true sanctuary. Oh, how 
 often has the good Richter there, or walking, or in his little 
 journeys to the Ettersburg, by his genial humor, robbed 
 Herder of the bitterness of his emotions. He often said 
 to me, in the last year of his life, ' Before I close the 
 Adrastea, I will place there a memento of our Richter, I 
 will show to the whole of Germany how we prize him.' " 
 
 It was thus that our Richter was valued by those who 
 best knew him. and perhaps he now stood upon a higher 
 elevation in the estimation of society and in his own than 
 he had before attained. He had added independence and 
 strength of soul to the consciousness of the value, and to 
 the infinite reverence he felt for the holy aim of his life. 
 His views were more extensive and richer ; while his 
 heart beat with a more glowing philanthropy. He felt 
 that the calling of an author at this time, when a spiritual 
 revolution was beating in the hearts of men, more impor- 
 tant even than the political that was raging without, de- 
 manded all the highest quahties of the soul, as well as the 
 devotion of the time and heart of him, 
 
 " Who comprehends his trust, and to the same 
 Keeps faithful, with a singleness of aim." 
 
 The friendship which about this time he formed with 
 Jacobi threw him again on the path of pliilosophy, which 
 in his nineteenth year he had abandoned for poetry. From 
 the idealism of Fichte, which made egotism ti-anscen- 
 dental, he turned to what he thought the interests of hu-
 
 302 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 "^i&nity tleflyifid'ed. - God,?tWf mnker, preserver, and gov- 
 ernor of the universe ; the immortality of man, as a self- 
 conscious and accountable being, — and to love, as the 
 spring, incitement, and impelling principle of the uni- 
 verse. In these opinions he found in Jacobi an immova- 
 ble rock, and for these Herder incessantly contended. 
 They had united to publish a periodical under the title 
 of " Aurora" but the advanced age of Herder (he was 
 in lais sixty-sixth year) and Jacobi's failing health pre- 
 vented the accomplishment of their project. 
 
 I cannot be guilty of the temerity of undertaking to 
 define the different systems of the philosophical writers 
 of the time, so as to be able to determine to which of 
 them Richter adhered ; but I may venture to assert that 
 he dreaded the influence of the Kantish philosophy upon 
 religion and morals, and that he made the idealism of 
 Fichte (who asserts that all external things are the pro- 
 duction of the imagination) the subject of severe ridicule 
 in his Clavis Fichtiana, and has shown the practical con- 
 sequences of his system in Schoppe, or Leihgeber, a char- 
 acter introduced into more than one of his books, who is 
 crazed by the Ideal philosoi)hy, and maddened by the 
 fixed idea that he has lost his individuality. Ricliter's 
 biographer asserts, that, after the publication of Fichtc's 
 book upon the destiny of man, he seized every opportunity 
 to express his reverence for the autlior, and that in his 
 Levana he inserted a eulogy of Fichte. 
 
 Jean Paul adhered closely to Herder, and was a fellow- 
 believer with Jacobi, the '■'faith philosopher." Those 
 who are acquainted witli the elevated and religious senti- 
 ments " that echoed to the mighty heart of Herder," wiU 
 understand the position he took in German philosophy. 
 Richter possessed in an eminent degree what have been
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 303 
 
 called the highest capacities of man, — reverence for the 
 holy and love for the beautiful. Superstition, bigotry, 
 and fanaticism seein to have been equalhj abhorred by 
 him in early life, although he said, after the French Revo- 
 lution : " I bless the Concordat. The deepest superstition 
 is better than Atheism and Theism." 
 
 In this happy manner the autumn passed in "Weimar. 
 In January, Madam von Kalb returned from her country 
 residence, and immediately a storm arose in Richter's 
 Indian summer. She had brought her husband and her 
 own family to consent to her divorce, and, as a conse- 
 quence, insisted upon marrying our hero. But he must 
 give his own account of the affair, in a letter to Otto : — 
 
 " After a supper at Herder's, with Madam von Kalb, 
 Herder was sitting by her, for he esteems her highly, 
 and immediately, in the presence of his wife, kissed her 
 heartily ; and as the reflection of this ancient flame fell 
 upon me, she said, ' In the spring, in the spring.' I said 
 afterwards to her, decidedly, no ! and after a glow of elo- 
 quence from her, it stands thus, — that she shall take no 
 step for, and I no step against the divorce. I have at 
 last acquired firmness of heart. In this affair I am 
 wholly guiltless. I can feel that holy, genial love, that I 
 cannot, indeed, paint with this dark water, — but it passes 
 not beyond my dreams." 
 
 These stormy passages in the life of Richter were of 
 singular advantage in enabling him to complete liis Titan, 
 but they were unfavorable to his own happiness ; and, jis 
 he said, " the Berlespsh relation bound his hands and 
 shut his eyes, while some gentler heart that might have 
 been his was lost to him ? Sliall I always thus play and 
 hope ; fail and end thus ? Such women as both these 
 blind one to every quiet female Luna. Ah, what seeds
 
 304 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 for a paradise I bore iu my heart, of which birds of prey 
 have robbed me." 
 
 Richter remained firm through the winter against the 
 seductions of Madam von Kalb. He happily knew that 
 such stormy heroines as Madam Berlespsh and Von Kalb 
 were never formed for wives for him. He needed a'mild 
 and gentle spirit, not to dazzle and to be admired, but in 
 whose unselfish love he could find a sanctuary for his 
 heart. Xoble and excellent as Richter was, he was yet a 
 poet, and therefore a spiritual egotist, and his wife must 
 minister to the domestic altar the sweet and pure incense 
 of reverence and love. With a Berlespsh he could have 
 found no repose, with Madam von Kalb there could have 
 been no security. 
 
 Xo genius of either sex should marry a genius. The 
 result of the poetic nature seems to be an intense person- 
 ality. I do not mean selfishness or even egotism, — but 
 the poet lives in his owa creations ; they are his domain, 
 his kingdom, and he cannot go out of them to enter into 
 the heart or interests of an individual, although he under- 
 stands better than another the great heart of humanity, 
 and lives in the soul of the universe. His wife should be 
 willing to be only a ray, to be absorbed, and have no indi- 
 vidual existence except in him. How could this be were 
 both poets, both demanding supremacy and the acknowl- 
 edgment of individual superiority ? Far happier, far 
 more graceful is it for the woman to remain in the atti- 
 tude of a priestess at the domestic altar of man, not be- 
 cause he is a man, but because he is a poet, and to keep 
 the flame pure by no slavish offering, but by the holy 
 incense of admiration and reverence. 
 
 The work that appeared this year from the pen of 
 Richter, " Selections from the Papers of the Devil," re-
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 305 
 
 cast and rewritten, was entitled " Palingenesien," horn 
 again. Ten years before, Ilichter had met with great 
 difficulty in finding an editor for these satires. Disputes 
 were held upon the title, — the printer wishing them to 
 appear as " Philosophical and Cosmopolitan Remains of 
 Fuust," or ^^ Selections from the Writings of Sir Lucifer." 
 Jean Paul adhered to his own title, but the book attracted 
 little attention at the time. It was now wholly rewritten, 
 and only about ten of the original satires retained ; these 
 being the only pages that could have a direct reference 
 to the present time, and be combined with a dramatic 
 action. A critic, speaking of this book, says, " It is one 
 of the works of the author that gives the most lucid ex- 
 planation of the being and nature of the poet, and places 
 poetical influences in the clearest light." 
 
 In the course of tliis spring the splendor with which 
 Weimar was invested at his second visit was somewhat 
 diminished, and the shado\\'y side became more apparent 
 when it was known that he had placed himself on the 
 side of the literary men to which Herder belonged. It 
 was too beautiful to Richter to sacrifice himself for this 
 beloved friend. The relations between him, Goethe, and 
 Schiller, the last having now come to live in Weimar, 
 were every day attenuated, and the warm hopes with 
 which he had approached these great men chilled. It 
 became still worse when Herder's criticism of the Kantish 
 school appeared, as it was well known that Jean Paul 
 had gone through the manuscript with him, and had 
 written notes upon it. At a dinner where all were 
 present, at a remark of our hero, Goethe, apparently dis- 
 pleased, remained silent, turning his plate around for a 
 quarter of an hour. All this made an invitation to the 
 court of Hildburghausen doubly welcome.
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 RiCHTER VISITS THE CoURT OF HiLDBURGHAUSEN. — JIaDEMOI- 
 
 SELLE VON F. — The Four Sister Princesses. — Dedication 
 OF Titan. — Visits Berlin. 
 
 ]N the spring of 1799 Madam von ^ p j-gg 
 Kail), liaving invited Amone, the iEt. 36. 
 betrothed of Otto, to accompany her, retired 
 to one of her country houses, and all questioa 
 of the divorce was thenceforth dropped. 
 
 Richter could not pass the genial season of spring 
 without a longing desire to wander ; he therefoi'e ac- 
 cepted the invitation to visit the court of Ilildburghausen, 
 from whose Duke he had received the diploma of Lega- 
 tionsrath. He was also drawn thither by the powerful 
 attraction of a young lady, Caroline von F., whom he 
 had met in Weimar the previous winter, and who was 
 an attendant on the Duchess of Ilildburghauficn. This 
 new attacliinent was so far happier for Kit-hter, that the 
 lady did not belong to the class of eccentric beings who 
 had before entangled him, but the storm tliat nipped and 
 destroyed its fiuit in the bud came from the opposition 
 of her noble relations. 
 
 His letters describe the delightful residence of a few 
 weeks at this court, and the flattering kindness of the 
 Duchess. She wa.s one of the four beautiful sisters,
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 307 
 
 daughters of the Duke of Mecklenburg, to whom he 
 afterwards dedicated his Titan. He must first describe 
 his situation at the court, and then the lady of his love. 
 His letter is to Otto. 
 
 " Paint to yourself the heavenly Duchess, with her 
 childlike eyes, her Avhole face full of love and the cliarm 
 of youth, her voice like the nightingale's, and her mother's 
 heart, — then the not less beautiful sister, the Princess 
 von Solms, and the third, the Princess of Thun and 
 Taxis, and their lovely, healthy children, who all ar- 
 rived on the same day that I did. We will pass the 
 men, but with the Princess von Solms I could be happy 
 in a mountain coal-mine. All these women read me, and 
 love me truly, and urge me to stay yet eight days longer, 
 when the fourth, the yet more charming sister, the Queen 
 of Prussia, is expected. I am invited to dinner every 
 evening. The Duke is extremely good-natured, but could 
 not at first be much au fait with me. He remarked that 
 I took too little asparagus, and helped me not only to this, 
 but to the first young venison, which is not indeed won- 
 derfully good. Yesterday 1 fantasied upon the flute be- 
 fore the court. You are shocked and friglitened. But 
 for more than half a year I have done it passably before 
 Gleim, Weisse, Herder, and the Duchess mother. I have 
 also here an established brother and sisterhood, and could 
 be a Zinzendorf. No, it would be ungrateful if I did not 
 receive the love of the Germans as the richest reward of 
 my authorship. 
 
 " ^ly Caroline lives with licr mother, sisters, and brother, 
 and the time I am not at court is passed with her. I know 
 her now more intimately^ and in no female soul have I 
 found such serene, sedulous, religious morality ; immova- 
 ble and incorruptible in its smallest branches. One feels,
 
 3o8 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 alas ! by her moral tenderness, that he has been long In 
 Weimar. If I were united with her, my whole being, 
 even the smallest stain, would be purified. She does not 
 read, as young ladies usually do, merely to dissolve a sen- 
 timental manna upon her tongue, but to leara ; tl^at is, 
 she reads history and natural history. She lias formed a 
 complete herbarium, and a succession of ingenious flower 
 paintings. She makes verses, as you will learn by the 
 accompanying enclosure, and therefore she cannot forget 
 the satire upon female poetry in J. P.'s letters.* It was 
 true, she said, but too bitter. She di-inks no wine at 
 dinner, and passes great part of her time in the open 
 air in the garden. ' Now that I am healtliy,' she says, 
 ' I will make myself hardy.' .... Her delicate mother 
 certainly guesses all, and by her silence gives consent. 
 I dare tell you all. With three kind words you can give 
 
 this dear being three heavens Her complexion is 
 
 fair, and pale red, her brow poetical and feminine, her 
 eyebrows strong, indeed, too much so, and her eyes dark. 
 The nose is tlic reverse of little and short ; the lips natu- 
 rally cut, and the chin a little too prominent. Of the 
 beauty of her hair I enclose a proof. Pray return it im- 
 mediately. I derive from her, God knows why, unless it 
 is my fi\ e-and-thirty yeai-s, a sense of firmness and secu- 
 rity that enables me to enjoy the present hour witliout 
 anxiety for future years ; and thus my life completes its 
 circle, its enchanted circle." 
 
 Eichter was now more genuinely attached tliaii he had 
 ever been, and the lady ajjpeared to have reciprocated his 
 emotions ; but the course of their love was turbid and 
 ruffled. Paul was tortured all through the summer by 
 the caprices of Caroline's noble relatives. At one time 
 
 * See Jeau Paul's " Conjectural Biography."
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 309 
 
 she gained their consent to the betrothment, and Richter 
 wrote, full of joy, to Otto, to postpone his marriage with 
 Amone, that they might have the happiness of solemniz- 
 ing both on the same day, and both retiring to the little 
 city of Bayreuth, there to realize the plans of their youth. 
 All these changes are related most faithfully to his friend, 
 and he closes one of his letters with these words : " How 
 can I tell you, Otto, how entirely I esteem her, — not 
 merely love, for that is always so easy ! " 
 
 The winter passed in frequent correspondence, and in 
 May his friends, the Herders, went with him to Ilmaneau, 
 where Caroline then was, to celebrate the festival of be- 
 trothment.* Certainly Richter had never loved appar- 
 ently so naturally and prudently, and the encouragement 
 of the Herders was to him a guaranty of his future hap- 
 piness. They found that his Caroline surpassed even the 
 description of her lover. There was something about her 
 fascinating to people not exactly of the world, and that 
 
 * The " Verlobung " is often, but not always, a solemn ceremony in 
 German society. It means that the lover is fonnally accepted by the 
 lady and her family. If there be no reason for keeping the affair secret, 
 the relations and friends, on both sides, are assembled, a little festival 
 takes place, and the young people are presented as " Verlobt," affi- 
 anced, or, as we say in this country, " engaged." The marriage cere- 
 mony, which takes place afterwards, is more private, and attended by 
 fewer witnesses. In this country we have the custom of " Verlobung," 
 without the ceremony; and here, as Mrs. Jameson, in her pleasant 
 notes to the Princess Amelia's dramas, observes, " the engaged youth 
 is expected to devote eyery leisure minute to the society of his be- 
 trothed ; he attends her to all public places, and to every private party, 
 (as it is not considered good manners to invite them separately,)" and 
 less restraint is placed on the intercourse of the lovers here than even 
 in Germany. In England, it may be presumed, from Mrs. Jameson, 
 the lovers do not appear much together before marriage; and in France 
 it is offending against lien-seance ever to leave them alone together. la 
 this, as in other habits of social life, we have been pemnitted, in this 
 country, to select what is good and agreeable from all others.
 
 310 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 took the Herders by surprise. What took place at thia 
 time is not exactly known ; the opposition of the relatives 
 does not appear to have prevented the betrotliment, but 
 some little moral differences, that would have destroyed 
 the whole happiness of the marriage. Richter returned 
 to Weimar with a crushed heart, — he had no words to 
 describe the agitation his disappointment occasioned ; for 
 a moment the health of this strong and firm being sank 
 under the blow, and the thought of returning again to tiie 
 desert world. He thus closed a letter to Otto : " The 
 blow is given that has cut me to the inmost heart. I also 
 am superstitious, — misfortunes and happiness come twice, 
 not three times. I long infinitely for the little corner of 
 my birth, and the innocent and touching scenes about 
 you.* You know not how my heart, even to sadness, 
 dwells upon your day of ceremony.f We can never lose 
 each other, therefore everything, even the weather, Avill 
 be important to me, as it concerns you and our Amone." 
 
 Otto, who appears to have felt a singularly warm in- 
 terest in the Fraulein von F., insisted upon knowing 
 more distinctly the causes of the rupture. Richter says, 
 in re^jly : " Merely little moral differences, but such as 
 would have destroyed the whole liappiness of marriage." 
 But there was also the opposition of the lady's noble 
 family, who i)robal)ly looked with the eyes of worldly 
 prudence, not merely u])on their sister's violation of all 
 German conventionalism in uniting herself witli an author, 
 but trembled for the straitened circumstances into which 
 her disinterested inexperience would lead her. 
 
 In a letter, written to her at the breaking off the be- 
 
 * Otto and his sister Frederica were both married at this time; aud 
 Otto immediately removed to Baj'reuth. 
 t Otto's Verlobung day. ■
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 31I 
 
 trothment, Paul says : " Only one fault have I, and only 
 I, committed throughout, that aftex* so many earlier les- 
 sons from experience, I did not immediately, as soon as 
 we had once conversed with each other, write this letter 
 to you, and impress it upon my own heart." 
 
 Otto, to whom the correspondence was transmitted, 
 draws, as he was accustomed to do, these wise, hut, 
 alas ! too tardy reflections, for the use of his friend : — 
 
 " It is a weak perverseness of our nature, and yet an 
 antidote against egotism, that when we see a being worthy 
 of our esteem, we turn from what we discover in them 
 that is disagreeable, and believe that if we shut our eyes 
 so as not to see them, the little spots are not there ; as 
 if we could avert the divine and human sentence which 
 decrees that inequalities and blemishes shall, in the course 
 of time, become more instead of less apparent, and that 
 because we blind ourselves they should vanish and be 
 obliterated. That your separation is right, that it is the 
 work of destiny, and that you have completed the decree 
 of a higher Power, tliat you should not be happy together, 
 is true, and that the good and unfortunate Caroline will 
 be the most unhappy is also true ; because she will never 
 be in a situation to understand the disparity and inequal- 
 ity between you. Because the advantages of the separa- 
 tion are more apparent to you than the advantages of the 
 union, you can justify the separation to yourself; but it is 
 the reverse with Caroline ; she can never understand the 
 rfzsadvantages of the union, because her dismterested gen- 
 erosity and affection would obliterate them all ; while she 
 feels the unhappiness of the separation." 
 
 We see from these extracts that Eiehter was not alto- 
 gether blameless with regard to the Fraulein von F., be- 
 cause his deeper penetration and experience of life had
 
 312 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 enabled him from the beginning to understand the dispari- 
 ties, whether of a moral or conventional nature, which 
 would have rendered their union unhappy ; and yet he 
 permitted himself to win the love of the lady. She seems 
 to have been greatly attached to him, and for his sake 
 would have saci'iliced the privileges of rank and accdpted 
 the inconveniences of poverty ; and it was no balm to a 
 wounded heart, or to wounded pride, that he had had the 
 sagacity to foresee the issue. 
 
 As women, we may be peiTnitted to protest against 
 Richter in connection with our sex. It is true that he 
 has written beautifully and eloquently of women ; and 
 has perhaps done much to elevate and spiritualize their 
 views and affections ; but in actual life he was not wholly 
 sincere with the beings he professed to reverence. After 
 the fancy for the little blue-eyed peasant girl, till his mar- 
 riage, he does not appear to have felt the truth and ten- 
 derness of an equal love. He was dreaming of an ideal, 
 spiritual love, like a far-off luminous star, while he per- 
 mitted himself to write letters to his four or five Ilofer 
 friends, that from any but a poet would have been thought 
 genuine declarations of love. 
 
 In his connection with INIadam von Kalb and Emilie 
 Berlespsh he was more sinned against than sinning ; in 
 the one case he retreated before dishonor, in the other 
 before a marriage in which thei-e could be no genuine 
 and mutual affection ; but even hei-e he appropriated 
 their unselfish affections, their disinterested devotion, to 
 purposes of artistic creation ; he made them the models 
 for the female cliaracters in his works, and they lived to 
 see the warm pulses of their hearts registered, and made 
 a standard by which to count the feverish or healthful 
 pulsation of other hearts.
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 313 
 
 In the usual acceptation of the word, Richter was not 
 an enemy to women, but his devotion to them was not 
 a genuine devotion to them as women ; he did not love 
 them for themselves ; he loved them artistically ; and as 
 the artist drapes his model in every graceful form to pro- 
 duce effect, Jean Paul made use of the power his genius 
 gave him over the minds of women to di-aw out the sweet 
 affections, the hidden depths of the heart, revealed only 
 to love, to mcrease his psychological knowledge for the 
 public. 
 
 In spite of all the various causes of interruption, Richter 
 was never more completely absorbed in work than through 
 this winter. The first volume, and the comic appendix to 
 Titan, was ready for the press, and he had printed his 
 history of Charlotte Gorday and Glavis Fichtiana. Nei- 
 ther of these were works of the fii'st importance, but they 
 served to keep him before the public while his great work 
 was in preparation. 
 
 The Glavis Flddiana was, at the time, one of his most 
 celebrated works, and upon its publication attracted much 
 attention. Fichte's popularity was so great, or the interest 
 in metaphysical speculations so intense, that the booksel- 
 lers paid him six louis d'ors a sheet for his lectures, while 
 Goethe received only five, at the same time, for his most 
 admired works. It would not, perhaps, be interesting to 
 inquire at this distance of time, and in another country, 
 why Jean Paul threw himself so entirely into the pliilo- 
 sophical and metaphysical contests of the day. From all 
 that can be gathered from his letters, it would seem to be 
 his friendship for Herder and Jacobi ; but he gained noth- 
 ing, even from them, and he widened the distance between 
 himself and Goethe and Schiller. 
 
 His letters at tliis time to his friend Otto, to whom he 
 
 14
 
 314 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 confided every intimate and every passing emotion, betray 
 discontent and restlessness ; a deep longing for quiet and 
 retirement, yet an unwillingness to retire until he had 
 formed a union that would satisfy his heart, if not his 
 ideal, — although, at present, he certainly did not place 
 his demands too high. He says : " I would fain 'find a 
 gentle girl who could cooh something for me ; and who 
 would sometimes smile, and sometimes weep with me." 
 
 During the whole of this winter Richter was flattered 
 and courted by the four beautiful Princesses already men- 
 tioned, and he obtained permission to dedicate his Titan 
 to them. 
 
 The dedication of Titan to the four distinguished sis- 
 ters, the daughters of the Duke of Mecklenburg, is not to 
 the sistei-s upon the throne, for he mentions only their bap- 
 tismal names, and commends his Titan to their favor as 
 exalted human, wot princely beings ; and when his fi-iends 
 represented that his Titan contained bitter satires against 
 princes, he answered, " That his dedication was to theiu 
 as women, not princesses, and that his satire touched 
 princes only, not their wives." 
 
 This pretty piece of flattery is thus presented : — 
 
 " The queen of Love and her three attendant graces 
 look from their cold Olympus, through the atmosphere, 
 and long to descend to our earth, where the soul loves 
 more because it suffers more ; and although it is darker, 
 it is warmer than on Olympus. They hear the sacred 
 hyms of Polyhymnia, as she wanders invisible through 
 the earth, to elevate and console man, and they mourn 
 that they are so distant from the sighs of the helpless. 
 Then they resolved to clothe themselves in the veil of 
 humanity, and descend to earth. As they touched the 
 flowers of earth, and threw no shadow, the queen of
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 315 
 
 heaven raised her sceptre and decreed, that these im- 
 mortals should be mortal, and take the form of the four 
 sisters, Louisa, Charlotte, Theresa, and Frederica, and 
 the loves were changed into their children, and fiew into 
 the arms of the mothers. Then their hearts beat with 
 new love, and Polyhymnia, as she hovered invisibly near, 
 gave them tlie voice and the heart to charm, and to con- 
 sole humanity." 
 
 The rupture of liis ties with the Fraulein von F. made 
 Richter very desirous to remove for a short time from 
 Weimar, where he was constantly meeting her family ; 
 fortunately, a singular circumstance drew him at this time 
 to Berhn. 
 
 The previous March he had received an anonymous 
 letter from Belgard, Upper Pomerania, together with his 
 Hesperus, translated into French. The writer promised 
 to make herself known as soon as an answer to her letter 
 gave her courage. 
 
 Richter answered immediately, which was not his cus- 
 tom to anonymous letters ; and the lady made herself 
 known as the lady Josephine von Sydon ; French by 
 birth, but who had so far become mistress of the Ger- 
 man language as to read it with ease, and to translate it 
 into her mother tongue. Her love of Eichter's works 
 had excited the highest admiration for their author, and 
 an ardent desii-e to become personally acquainted with 
 him. Richter now went to Berlin to meet her, with 
 whom he had formed a friendship by means of a cor- 
 respondence in different languages, and with the parti- 
 tion wall of mountains also between them. 
 
 It rarely happens, that a friendsliip formed without a 
 personal interview, through the charm of correspondence, 
 will not disappoint one of the parties when they meet.
 
 3l6 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 We have none of the letters of Josephine, but Richter's 
 expectations were more than satisfied. He wrote to Otto : 
 " My Josephine has increased my esteem and admiration. 
 What southern naivete, simpHcity, and openness, carried 
 to almost childish excess ; southern animation, firmness, 
 and tenderness, with a true German eye and heaK." 
 
 This year also, in the midst of his intimacy with the 
 four princesses, he wrote his Eulogy of Charlotte Corday, 
 the female Brutus of the French revolution, in every line 
 of which breathes the holiest love of freedom. Paul 
 represents Corday as sacrificing, not the opposer of legiti- 
 macy, but the tyrant of a republic ; and has the boldness 
 to make a governing German count a fellow-admirer of 
 the heroine. He defended the deed, not from feeling, but 
 from principle. She destroyed Marat, not as a citizen, 
 but as an enemy of the state, in a civil war ; conse- 
 quently he regarded her act, not as the offence of an 
 individual against an individual, but as the act of a 
 party against a corrupt and apostate member.
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 richter removes to berlin. — introduction to caroline 
 Meyer. — The Meyer Family. — The " Verlobung." 
 
 ER-LIN was at tliis time to our a.d. isoo, 
 Richter a newly discovered part ^t- 37. 
 of the world. The society was distinguished 
 by a higher culture, a more refined tone, 
 through the accomplishments of the women, to wliich 
 the beautiful Queen Louisa, one of the four sisters, lent 
 a splendor and a charm at that time unequalled else- 
 where. But Richter must speak for himself. 
 
 " I have been here two thirds of a week, and must 
 remain the following, as Offland, on my account, will per- 
 form the Wallenstein. I have never been received in any 
 city with such idolatry. After such an elevation, I can 
 henceforth only sit upon the steps of the throne, never 
 again upon its summit. I avoid the merely learned, and 
 therefore I meet with no envy ; but only a too warm en- 
 thusiasm, that does not make me proud of myself, but of 
 humanity. How it refreshes the heart to find tlie same 
 sighs for the spiritual in a thousand hearts that arise 
 in mine, and prove that we have within us a common 
 heaven. 
 
 " The splendid queen invited me immediately to Sans 
 Souci. Heavens ! what simplicity, frankness, accomplish-
 
 3l8 LTFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 ment, and beauty ! I dined \vitli ber, and sbe sbowed me 
 the kindest attention. Tbe learned ZoUner invited eighty 
 persons to meet me at the York Lodge ; gentlemen, their 
 wives and daugliters, of the learned circles. I have a 
 watch-chain of the hair of three sisters, and so much 
 hair has been begged of me, that if I were to make it 
 a traffic, I could live as well from the outside of my cra- 
 nium as from what is under it. 
 
 " I have been often with the highly accomplislied min- 
 ister. Von Alvensleben. The tone at the court table was 
 easy and good ; with Alvensleben one may speak as freely 
 as upon this sheet. Only in Berlin is freedom and law ! " 
 
 The reader will recollect, that when Jean Paul was 
 nameless, and struggling Avith the waves of poverty, that 
 nearly made shipwreck of his hopes, from Berlin was the 
 first plank thrown that brought him to land.* Now he 
 says, " they threw a couple of worlds upon his head." 
 
 The impression that he made upon the Berlinians we 
 learn from the journal of a lady at this time published. 
 She says : " Among the wonderful peculiarities of our 
 time, and from which our country will receive a distin- 
 guished radiance, is the appearance of Jean Paul. As 
 yet, few among us know him, but those who have seen 
 him, look upon him as an apparition i'rom another world, 
 as a proi)hct who has come thence to perform miracles 
 incomprehensible to the senses. No one had scented his 
 approach ; of so rare a man, no one had received an idea. 
 Like a Vjeam of light he flashed among us, but cheering 
 as tlie star of day is his lingoi-iiig here, lie cannot be 
 more than forty, though he lias a l)ald head. All the 
 riches of language appear to have been cieated lor him. 
 
 * Moritz, in Berlin, from whom he received a hundred ducats for the 
 manuscript of the Invisible Lodge.
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 319 
 
 Nature is his dwelling, customs his playthings, and men 
 his machines. Like the sun he shines through the cur- 
 tains of art, and the labyrinth of the heart," etc. 
 
 It was not only in the journals of ladies that Richter 
 was favored ; the beautiful queen, whose fate has thrown 
 a touching interest over everything relating to her, con- 
 tinued firm and steady in her friendship. She never 
 spoke of him but with a deep feeling of his worth as a 
 man and an author ; and with the brother of the queen, 
 Prince George of Mecklenburg, he formed a friendship 
 that was uninterrupted till his death. In Schleiermacher 
 he found a congenial spirit, and formed many friendships 
 with distinguished women. 
 
 Taking into view all these circumstances, it is not sur- 
 prising that Richter should form the resolution to remove 
 to Berlin, and fix there his permanent residence. A 
 secret and unacknowledged inclination, as well as an un- 
 seen and Providential hand guided him to the happiness 
 he had so long been seeking. The separation from his 
 fiiends the Herders cost him some painful and lingering 
 hours, but a more powerful wish drew liim onward, and 
 before the end . of the year he had accomplished his 
 removal. 
 
 It was in October, 1800, that Richter finally made in 
 Berlin his permanent residence. On his jirst visit at the 
 festival that Zollner made for him at the York Lodge, 
 he met the upper tribunal counsellor, Meyer, and his two 
 unmamed daughters. A little accident, his being too late 
 to take the place assigned him at the right hand of the 
 president, brought him to an unoccu^^ied seat at the side 
 of Caroline, the second daughter of the counsellor. It 
 was the only vacant place at the table, and the young 
 lady's heart began to beat when she saw the wonderful
 
 320 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 man, the observed of all observers, approach it, and with 
 timid humility she shrank from supporting a conversa- 
 tion -with liim ; but as Richter had come from dining at 
 Sails Sonet, the conversation about the queen and the 
 court immediately became interesting. The mildness and 
 friendliness of Paul's manner wrought a sudden change 
 from timidity to the most ingenuous confidence in the soul 
 of Caroline Meyer. Richter, in his personal appearance 
 and manners, exerted a magical influence over all minds, 
 and nothing interested him so deeply as the imveiling of 
 an innocent female heart. He was touched ; and at rising 
 from the table gave Caroline the flower from his breast, 
 and asked her to present him to her fatlier. It happened 
 that her sister Ernestine, who sat opposite at the table, 
 and, like a true woman, had observed the impression that 
 had been made on Caroline, now met them with her 
 father. They had seen in his eyes an expression of high 
 esteem for Jean Paul, and, secretly happy, about midnight 
 they left the party. Richter led the sisters through tiie 
 long avenues of the garden to their carriage, wifliout 
 either expressing the wish to meet again, and bade them 
 silently good night. One day only was permitted to pass 
 before he called at the house of the Rath, with the ex- 
 cuse that he could not leave Berlin without expressing 
 liis gratitude for the agreeable evening he had passed at 
 the York Lodge. 
 
 But before we proceed with the w^ooing, we must learn 
 something of the family of the Gelieimer-Rath Meyer. 
 He was himself one of the most accomj)lislied and distin- 
 guished oflicers of the Prussian government, and had mar- 
 ried early in life a daughter of the family of Germers- 
 hause, who had been educated in country simplicity, but 
 in all the severity of the orthodox faith ; and even after
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 32I 
 
 her marriage, she remained, out of childlike love, in blind 
 subjection to the will of her mother. 
 
 Herr JNIeyer was a man who cherished a high ideal of 
 life and its duties ; and, uniting the most agreeable accom- 
 plishments with the most enlightened views, he moved 
 in the distinguished circles of Berlin, one of the most in- 
 teresting men of the period. By the intolerance of his 
 mother-in-law, and the blind subjection in which she held 
 the will of her daughter, he was either deprived of the 
 enjoyment of his refined tastes, or obliged to live in con- 
 tinual discord with his relations. The numerous sacri- 
 fices that he made to his mother-in-law only increased 
 her asperity, and his wife always taking the side of her 
 mother, at last a coldness and estrangement arose, that 
 after seven years of married life resulted in a mutual 
 agreement of separation. 
 
 But as Providence had denied him a son, and Herr 
 Meyer desired for his daughters the most liberal culture, 
 and the modern accomplishments, which he could not de- 
 pend on the mother to sanction, they formed the singular 
 agreement, that the weeks should be passed alternately 
 with either parent ; and actually, every eight days the 
 children were sent backwards and forwards between 
 father and mothei-. This strange arrangement, which re- 
 mained a mystery to their young hearts, was a perpetual 
 occasion of self-denial and self-government. They dared 
 not speak of either parent in the presence of the other ; 
 and the constant exchange, now from severe religious 
 simplicity to all that was refined and intellectual in social 
 life, and now from the latter to an almost Moravian soli- 
 tude, must have promoted in the minds of the daughters 
 an early development, and given them a strong and entire 
 dependence on each other, as well as on themselves. 
 14* n
 
 322 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 In their earliest years the children hung fondly on tlie 
 mother, whose tears they vainly tried to wipe away when 
 they left her, and whose sacrificing mother's love knew no 
 limits ; but as they grew older they found opening to 
 them under the father's roof, a rich school for the cultiva- 
 tion of their liigher faculties, to the value of wliich tJiey 
 soon became sensible. The most zealous desire for a 
 refined culture, especially in philosophy, poetry, and the 
 arts, filled the soul of their father. Every moment that 
 he could Avin from his duties as a servant of the state he 
 devoted to the cultivation of his own and his daughters' 
 taste, in the beautiful arts of poetry, music, and painting. 
 Above all in importance was the cultivation of the moral 
 purity of his children, whom he anxiously protected from 
 the influence of everything low and trivial. He provided 
 them with the best teachers, and filled his house with 
 paintings and other of the choicest works of art. Thus 
 was linked in their opening minds, in company with art- 
 ists, learned men, and poets, a susceptibility to everything 
 great and good, which in this family was innate and true, 
 but which an unsym])atliizing world calls transcendental- 
 ism, when affected ibr purposes of vanity or display. 
 
 Upon minds so prepared by education, the acquaintance 
 of Jean Paul must have made a deep impression ; it had 
 already, in that evening at the York Lodge, woven a 
 sweet enchantment about the heart of Cai'oline, and when, 
 after the interval of a day, in which her imagination had 
 dwelt exclusively upon him, he made the unhoped-for 
 visit, he stood near her as a being that she must regard 
 with almost religious veneration. 
 
 A report had been spread in Berlin, that Caroline was 
 about being betrothed to her cousin ; and Jean Paul, to 
 leave her entirely free, returned to Weimar without any 
 express manifestation of his wishes.
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 323 
 
 His image, however, was interwoven in all the social 
 enjoyments of the family ; but Caroline's father, with a 
 quick and nice sense of the honor of his daughter, had 
 coldl}' and severely commanded that there should be no 
 reference to him. The gossips of Berlin spread a report, 
 that Caroline had kissed the hand of Jean Paul in public, 
 and the father, jealous of the slightest shade on the deli- 
 cacy of his daughter, forbade her to speak of him, until he 
 should himself make some more decided demonstration of 
 his wishes. This command was the occasion of the fol- 
 lowing letter from Caroline to her father : — 
 
 " It is a great pity that we caimot receive the noblest 
 and best among men with interest and warmth. I feel 
 indeed, dear father, that I have thereby lost your esteem. 
 It pains me much, but the consciousness alone that I am 
 free from all enthusiasm and all extravagance in esteem- 
 ing and admiring such excellence raises me in a certain 
 degree above all mortification. Your dissatisfaction with 
 me aiises from the suspicion that something different from 
 reverence has taken possession of my heart. Did you 
 know how pm*e, how inexpressibly pure, my interest in 
 Jean Paul is, a man like you could not on that account 
 esteem me less. "With Leonora in Tasso, I can say, ' I 
 love in him only what is most excellent and most exalted.' 
 Ask yom' own judgment whether tliis is extravagance. 
 Truly, a more exalted man we can never meet. 
 
 " Perhaps you still misunderstand me. I must bear it, 
 and I should be too proud to justify what I think and 
 feel to any other than my father. Of his writings permit 
 me to say, that the influence they exert upon me is 
 exactly that which you demand from a good book, namely, 
 to be made wiser and better. Is what he gives me un- 
 sound ? Its efifect then must be as wonderful as if poison
 
 324 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 in a medicine were changed into a healing blessing. I 
 have indeed become better, and feel within myself the 
 power to improve. Tliis meeting has been the most 
 momentous circumstance of my life, and I know nothing 
 except this emotion in my heart that can ever make me 
 happy or unhappy. Nothing outward, nothing thaf 'men 
 reckon fortune or happiness, can charm or interest me 
 again ; and if Providence should prepare trials for me, I 
 shall not be unhappy. 
 
 " One, a sore trial, I feel it deeply, dear father, is the 
 doubt of your love. It may be that I have deserved to 
 lose it ; and on this point my tears of regret, but not of 
 repentance, must flow ! 
 
 " Never was I less excited or extravagant than now. 
 Yes, I will cherish this sentiment. It does not injure 
 me ; I will conceal, but not part with it. I see indeed 
 that it will be my first struggle to suffer silently if the 
 sanctuary of my emotions is violated. The warmth with 
 which I have written Avill be with you, dear father, my 
 apology for writing." 
 
 In reading this letter, in which Caroline avows such 
 faith in Richter, and such confidence in the truth of her 
 own feelings, we must recollect that they had never 
 spoken of love, their eyes had met, and her destiny was 
 decided ; and if Providence had so decreed that they had 
 never met again, Caroline would have mourned him in 
 widowhood of heart. In the same happy confidence she 
 wrote to her married sister : — 
 
 " I believed I should have been unhappy when we were 
 separated ; that the painful reality of parting would drive 
 me from the ideal height to which his presence had ele- 
 vated me. But I feel a courage and power to bear life 
 such as I never felt before. I could be hapj)y without ever 
 again seeing him in this life."
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 325 
 
 The elevation of a pure and ideal love is here ti-uly 
 expressed. Caroline felt lierself raised above the acci- 
 dents of life, and happy in the ideal presence of the being 
 she reverenced above all others. 
 
 But Richter had not left her without some slight inti- 
 mation of his wishes. When he returned to Berlin, in 
 October, Caroline was the first person informed, by a few 
 lines, in which he asked permission to visit her family 
 that evening. Their hearts had spoken too truly for 
 them to be longer silent ; and that very evening, as he 
 conducted Caroline to visit her mother, his tongue was 
 loosed, and their destiny forever united. 
 
 Early the next morning, kneeling at the bedside of her 
 father, and whispering in his ear that Richter had spoken, 
 Caroline asked his blessing on their love, and received 
 this consoling assurance : " My child, if the satisfaction of 
 your father can add anything to your happiness, believe 
 me no union could give me so much joy. I feel it a re- 
 ward for all my care of your education." Truly, the 
 father must have been as unworldly and as unselfish as 
 the daughter, for Richter had not the prospect of a dollar, 
 except those he could coin, as Sir Walter Scott said in 
 another case, " from the rich mine of his intellect, and 
 stamp with the mark of his genius." It must be acknowl- 
 edged, in a worldly point of view, this connection appears 
 romantic, if not imprudent. Caroline had been educated 
 in all the luxury of refinement, at least in her father's 
 house, and his fortune depending on his office, he could 
 give his daughters no dowry.* 
 
 * Caroline, although educated in the luxury of refinement, was prob- 
 ably accustomed to great frugality of expense, as the salary of a Berlin 
 Gehelmer-Rath is, in some instances, only two thousand florins. Richter 
 says, in one of his letters: " She is cold towards all ornament in dress,
 
 326 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 Although Jean Paul had dedicated his Titan to prin- 
 cesses, they had given him nothing but empty praise in 
 return. In the correspondence with the Rath INIeyer, not 
 a word is said of property. Richter says, when he asks 
 the father for his daughter :".... In this moment of my 
 great request all other things appear too little to be touched 
 upon by either of us. I approach tlie man for whom my 
 esteem and love, even without the relation I desire, would 
 be almost filial ; as his feminine tenderness and manly 
 philosophy have together nourished the root of this beau- 
 tiful flower of the sun, and made it so firm, yet so tender. 
 To this good father of this good daughter I present my 
 short but weigh^sj prayer. Let her be mine ! she will be 
 happy, as I shall be ! " 
 
 Herr Meyer answered : " That it had been tlie aim of 
 all his plans, in the education of his daughters, to prepare 
 them to unite themselves to sucli men as himself, and 
 that he gave his unconditional consent." The mother, 
 also, in German phrase, sent hcT ja-wort, and the betroth- 
 ing of two noble hearts took place immediately. 
 
 Paul had, at last, in his thirty-eighth year, found the 
 ideal of female perfection and loveliness that had always 
 haunted his imagination. He says : " Caroline has exactly 
 that inexpressible love for all beings tliat I have till now 
 failed to find even in those who in everything else possess 
 the splendor and purity of the diamond. She preserves 
 in the full liarmony of" her love to me the middle and 
 
 but not to the necessity of maiden neatness, and on my account she 
 puts on her splendid new blue dress, to which I have added a white 
 satin, at four louis d'ors, together with a hat for one louis d'or. I wish 
 I could iian^ my heart, as a golden ornament, over hers. I would draw 
 it out of my breast." Richter seems to have had a passionate admira- 
 tion for a wiiite hat and a black veil, for a lady. Clotilda's hat occu- 
 pies a large space in Hesperus.
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL, 327 
 
 lower tones of sympathy for every joy and sorrow of 
 others." 
 
 In describing her to Otto, he says : " She has the 
 beauty, rare among Germans, of a dark, soft eye and 
 Madonna brow, .... self-sacrificing love, without equal ; 
 modesty, openness ; and in the midst of the purest love 
 for me, her heart trembles at every sound of sorrow. She 
 has the warmest friends among women and young girls, 
 and the innumerable visits of congratulation that she re- 
 ceived at the news of our Verlohung shows how much she 
 is beloved by the Berliners." 
 
 "We have no means of forming a judgment of Caroline 
 Meyer, except from her letters to Richter; which have all 
 the simplicity and tenderness of lOopstock's Meta. But 
 they are only the beautiful expression of a submissiA^e 
 tendeniess and boundless reverence. The letter to her 
 son, which will appear hereafter, discloses independent 
 thouglit, and is altogether of a higher order. Mrs. Austen 
 says, " It is the habit of Paul's countrymen to require 
 from women the virtues of attached and industrious ser- 
 vants, rather than of equal, intelligent, and sympathizing 
 friends " ; and although Jean Paul in so many places in 
 his works protests against this tendency of his country- 
 men, and pleads most eloquently for the emancipation of 
 women from their state of servitude, his minute dii-ections 
 to Caroline about household affairs, whenever he leaves 
 home, look as if he had readily assumed the manly supe- 
 riority of his countrymen. 
 
 Paul, wliile he describes in Siehenkas, with exquisite 
 penetration, the miseries of an ill-assorted union, asserts 
 that he shall be " happy if one falls to his lot, upon whose 
 opened eyes and heart the flowery eartli and beaming 
 heavens strike, not in infinitesimals, but in large and
 
 328 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 towering masses ; for wliom the great whole is some- 
 thing raoi-e than a nursery or a ball-room ; one who 
 with a feeling at once tender and discriminating, with 
 a heart at once pious and large, forever improves the 
 man whom she has wedded." 
 
 The coldest of Richter's biographers speaks thys of 
 Caroline : " Purity of mind, unlimited love to her parents 
 and sisters, and benevolence to all mankind, were native 
 to her. She added inexpressible reverence for Richter, 
 and unconditional submission to his wishes. With a love 
 for all that was beautiful in art, she had very moderate 
 views of the value of the outward in life ; great enthu- 
 siasm of feeling, and througli trial and experience a pene- 
 trating knowledge of the world ; but with an accomplished 
 education, and almost unlimited resources within herself, 
 her outward life and appearance was modest, and w'ithout 
 pretension. AVith their peculiar education, Caroline and 
 her sisters possessed qualities singularly adapted to form 
 the hap])iness of domestic life, but to Caroline only 
 Providence granted this satisfaction." * 
 
 She was marked out indeed for distinguished happiness, 
 and the biographer goes on to say, " that no female nature 
 
 * The eldest sister of Caroline liad been jilreadj- three j-ears married 
 to Carl Spazier, who was at this time the editor of a belles-lettres news- 
 paper (Eleganten Zeiiung) in Leipzig. After a marriage of many out- 
 ward dLfTiculties, he left her a destitute widow, with four young chil- 
 dren. She entered upon the thorny path of female authorship, and 
 continued their literary journal. Jean Paul contributed man}' of his 
 ephemeral pieces to its pages, and Caroline also assisted her with her 
 elegiint and graceful pen. The author, to whom I have been indebted 
 in this biography, F. Otto Spazier, is her son. 
 
 The youngest sister, Ernestine, married about the same time with 
 Caroline, to August Mahlman, died, after a few years of married life, 
 of a broken heart; occasioned, as her nephew says, by an unfaithful 
 husband and a childless marriage.
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 329 
 
 could have resisted Paul. Tlie enchantment of his smile, 
 and the power, the magnetic influence of his eye, — the 
 inspiration and elevation that was enthroned upon his 
 brow ; the musical, but toucliingly tender intonations of 
 his voice, together with the mystery that involved the 
 author of Hesperus, who was thought to have lived upon 
 a solitary island ; all this would liave given every woman, 
 without exception, to his hand, and Caroline had the feli- 
 city to be chosen from all." 
 
 She had beside the happiness of being chosen by him, 
 the guaranty of that happiness, from the fact that, in 
 sjjite of the seductions that had surrounded him at a 
 time when the bonds of domestic society were every- 
 where falling loose, he had passed through all, with a 
 singular purity of life ; among all the women, who, as 
 his biographer says, " would have left at his call lover 
 or husband," not one had suffered in reputation on his 
 account.
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 Richter's Petition to the King of Prussia. — Marriage. — 
 Caroline's Letters from Weimar. 
 
 UR Richter had never been so liappy a.d. isoi, 
 as the few montlis after his betroth- ■^'- ^s. 
 ment to Caroline. The learned and social 
 circles of Berlin had many charms for him. 
 They were composed, as he says, of Jews, ministers, offi- 
 cei-s, learned men and women. Tieck, Fichte, and the 
 Schlegels showed themselves so friendly that he believed, 
 in his simplicity, he should win that school to himself. 
 The merely learned only displeased him. To use his 
 own figurative language : " The roots of their dry deism 
 were planted in sand, and bore only withered leaves and 
 no flowers ; and no breath of perfume came from them." 
 But he conceived the warmest esteem for Scldeiermaclier, 
 wliose Reden iiber Religion he calls " an inspired and in- 
 spiring work, a simple and beautiful temple, whose con- 
 tents are a true God's service." 
 
 At t]iis time, spite of their philoso])hioal differences, the 
 exalted cliaracter of Fichte attached Jean Paul intimately 
 to him. He also renewed his acquaintance with Madam 
 von Krudener. 
 
 From the exciting tumult of the society of the gi'eat, 
 where he wfis courted and admired, he turned with a
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 331 
 
 sense of domestic tranquillity to the quiet circle in which 
 his betrothed moved. Tliis, from the circumstance of 
 the separation of her parents, was necessarily limited, 
 although they were not excluded from any. 
 
 The queen had presented them, through the medium 
 of her bi-other George, upon hearing of the betrothment 
 of Richter and Caroline Meyer, a costly service of silver, 
 — but nothing more useful or enduring appeared in pros- 
 peel. 
 
 In the mean time tlft spring returned ; but without 
 some pecuniary provision Richter could not afford to re- 
 main in Berlin. 
 
 " Is there none," said old Gleim, " is there none who 
 can say to the king, we must keep J. P. F. R. in Berlin. 
 He does you honor, and will bring money into the city. 
 Is there none who will be a Colbert? no Scholenburg? 
 no Hardenburg ? no Voss ? not even the queen ? " 
 
 Richter at last, though reluctantly, addressed the fol- 
 lowing letter to the king : — 
 
 " May your royal majesty be graciously moved to listen 
 to the prayer of a man, that not only from dwelling under 
 your government, but from birth and disposition, rejoices 
 in the happiness of your reign. The loss of my father 
 was never to me, but through me, supplied to my family. 
 I was already a writer at the .age when men l^egin to 
 read. Through years of poverty and labor, I at last won 
 a hearing from the public, and lately a more extensive 
 audience. My aim has been to elevate the sinking faith 
 in God, virtue, and immortality, and in an age of egotism 
 and revolutions, to warm again the cold humanity of 
 men's hearts. As this object has been dearer to me than 
 any other reward, I have sacrificed every other ; time, 
 health, and the richer winnings of other pursuits.
 
 332 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 " But now, when I am entering upon the cares of mar- 
 riage, where my own sacrifices should not extend to 
 another, I feel excused by my conscience if I petition the 
 throne (that has so many to listen to and to make liappy), 
 that I also may be excused, if respectfully I submit my 
 prayer. My gratitude and joyful sympathy in the happi- 
 ness of my country will be the same, however justice and 
 goodness may decide." 
 
 The king in answer, gave Richter to understand, 
 through one of his courtiers,. " hBw much it had rejoiced 
 him to observe, that by his talent and industry alone, 
 exercised in the face of such unfavorable outward circum- 
 stances, he had placed himself at the head of the litera- 
 ture of his country. He was not indifferent to literary 
 merit, and would be glad to have Richter remain his sub- 
 ject ; and if any vacant prebend should offer, he would 
 remember him." 
 
 It seems to us almost a degradation of genius like 
 Richter's, that he should have petitioned in vain for a 
 small ecclesiastical benefice, for (although some humorous 
 letters passed between him and Otto on the subject, — 
 Richter saying, " that he should place watchmen on the 
 church-towers to strike the last hours of the old preb- 
 ends," and Otto answering, " that they were always long- 
 lived, few dying under a hundred years,") he received no 
 prebend. He would have been fettered also under the 
 obligation to remain in Prussia. Accordingly, on tlie 
 27th of May, after a solemnization of their marriage un- 
 der the eyes of their father and of the dearest friends of 
 their house, Richter and his young bride left the dust and 
 noise of the city to enjoy, in quiet and without witnesses, 
 their long-dreamed-of happiness. 
 
 They travelled in the month of bloom and flowers over
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 333 
 
 the beautiful parts of Dessau, visited the Herders in 
 "Weimar, and then went to Meiningen, where Jean Paul 
 anticipated for a time to establish his " Portative Par- 
 nassus." 
 
 Here is the letter of Caroliiae to her father, a week 
 after her marriage. 
 
 " Weimar, June 3, 1801. 
 
 " I write to you, my beloved father, for the first time, 
 from the most charming resting-place. We arrived last 
 evening, about 8 o'clock, after the most delightful journey 
 that was ever taken, except the pain of the separation 
 from you, that often made me insensible to many lovely 
 spots. But the care that my good Richter took of me, 
 and of everything that could touch my heart, softened my 
 emotions, gently and happily ! Indeed, there are few such 
 men, — so sympathizing and attentive to the smallest 
 little tilings, and to all the actual of life 
 
 " As we approached Weimar, my heart began to beat. 
 The place, beautifully surrounded with hills, lies low, and 
 we look from above all over the city. It is larger and 
 gayer than I expected, and there is much life and joy 
 everywhere. In the morning the market was held before 
 our door, where there was more tumult than in the Berlin 
 market, and twice a week the music at the Stadthause 
 imparts a cheerful gayety that is read on all faces. 
 
 " But now, the most delightful thing that could have 
 happened. As soon as we arrived on Wednesday even- 
 ing, we went to Herder's. It was already dark. With a 
 beating heart I stepped into the sacred house. The aged 
 mother sat in the parlor alone, knitting. Richter opened 
 the door quietly, and we stood before her. Her surprise 
 is not to be described. She looked at me with astonish- 
 ment, — ran to call all the house together, — turned
 
 334 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 back, — and knew not what to do for joy. Now while 
 we debated whether Richter alone, or whether we should 
 both go up to the Herders at once, tlie venerable man 
 stood in the door. I discovered him first. ' There he is,' 
 I said with emotion. He stepped calmly near, and turned 
 me with penetrating eyes towards the light, and» as he 
 looked fixedly at me, ' God be praised,' he said, ' I am 
 now satisfied.' He was surprised ; he had formed no 
 image of me, and he doubted whether llichter would be 
 happy. He loves me now equally with hina, and he was 
 as much moved as a father who has found his lost chil- 
 dren. He went in great emotion up and down the apart- 
 ment, — then he came again to me, and said with touching 
 tenderness, ' Yes, you are what he must have, — you need 
 not speak, we see already all ! ' I was so much aflfei'ted, 
 that I could say nothing, and the evemng passed like a 
 quiet festival. 
 
 " I tell you all, my dear father, for Richter wishes it, 
 just as it happened, ibr it will make you happy to know 
 your daughter so beloved ; and principally, that we both 
 know from this sympathy how much Richter deserves to 
 be loved. 
 
 " This is . infinite, — here is his home. Father and 
 mother dwell with the deepest warmth upon what he 
 mutually feels for them, and he appears more splendid 
 to me than ever. Indeed, I might from this moment date 
 a new era in my love. 
 
 '■ I cannot describe Herder to you ; through Richter 
 you know enough of liim. He goes quietly in and out, 
 so reflective, so serious, so harmonious, so gentle and 
 musical his voice, his dress so patriarchal. He does not 
 affect me as other poetical men, as notwithstanding he 
 has an iioii firmness and decision that makes weakness
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 335 
 
 blush before him, he manifests the refined politeness of a 
 man of the world, Avithout being insincere. He has so 
 much dignity as not to pardon the slightest insult, because 
 he esteems the dignity of human nature, not on account 
 of his individual worth, for he is so modest that he veils 
 his eyes like a young girl who is praised for the fu'st time, 
 if his own merit is spoken of. 
 
 " His wife has far exceeded my expectations. She has 
 not the masculine form, but only the manly soul that I 
 anticipated. She has risen with her husband, but she 
 stands firm by herself. She is equally acquainted with 
 ancient and modern literature, speaks decidedly upon all 
 the sciences, but inclines herself in a loving, motherly 
 manner to me. In her house she is very active and 
 busy, but without littleness. A certain well-to-do-ness 
 rules, without luxury. The apartments are simply, but 
 cheerfully furnished. At the table everything goes on 
 quietly, without anxiety in the hostess ; the old servants 
 are well trained, moving reverently about, observing 
 attentively the master's wishes. 
 
 " They will hardly let me part from them, but we are 
 so mexpressibly happy in the little quiet apartment with 
 Richter's old hostess, that we would always rather remain 
 alone. So happy as I am, dearest father, I never believed 
 I should be. Every minute binds our souls closer to each 
 other. It will sound extravagant to you if I say the high 
 enthusiasm which Richter excited in me has continually 
 risen as we have entered into real life together. Never 
 can a misunderstanding arise between us. My mind, 
 through love and the highest goodness, is so tenderly 
 tuned, and my sense of obligation so elevated, that I 
 never as formerly despond. How could I place my 
 will in opposition to this splendid humanity that works
 
 336 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 only through love and humility ? Thank God, I have a 
 husband with whom love in married life can only take 
 the path of honor and morality ; one that I must obey, as 
 we obey vii-tue itself And this man so loves me ! that I 
 have nothing to wish but that we may die together. I 
 press myself to your heart." 
 
 It is but just, although at the risk of satiety, that the 
 reader should also learn, from Richter himself, the perfect 
 happiness that he imparts to Otto thus unreservedly. 
 
 " That the brightest and purest fountain of love to 
 mankind takes nothing from love to the individual, I 
 learn from my Caroline. Every day it becomes more 
 expansive. Rare as beautiful is her adoration of the 
 spiritual, of poetry and nature ; wonderful her disinter- 
 estedness and complete abnegation of self There is 
 nothing that she would not do for me, or others. World- 
 long cares are to her nothing, as her industry and love 
 of duty are infinite. As she loves me, she loves all my 
 clothes, and would make them all herself 
 
 " As yet we have had nothing, or only very little, to 
 irritate. I cannot say that I am satisfied, but I am cer- 
 tainly blest. Ah, see her ! What are words ! Marriage 
 has made me love her more romantically, deeper, infinitely 
 more than before !" 
 
 CAROLINE TO HER FATHER. 
 
 " Weimar, June 11, 1801. 
 " .... I have lived a very happy time here, and have 
 been everywhere received with more hearty warmth than 
 I expected. Herder's sympathy with us has every day 
 increased ; indeed, we dwell almost wholly with them. 
 Like yourself, he loves a simple drive in the country with
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 337 
 
 his wife and children, and tliere he is often a child, and 
 sings and jokes like any youth. 
 
 " I have also been presented to the Duchess mother. 
 Afterwards we were invited to dine, with no company 
 except Wieland. I sat between liim and the Duchess ; 
 he was very kind to me, and bade me make Richter truly 
 happy. He is very old, and wears, even in the presence 
 of the Duchess, a little black velvet cap, as a being who 
 stands on the boundary of life pays no regard to conven- 
 tional observances. 
 
 " The Princess is very simple in her apartment, and in 
 all her surroundings. 
 
 " We have now made our rounds of visits, and I am 
 rejoiced that our last day can be undisturbed. On the 
 17th, we journey to Gotha and Eisenach. In Gotha my 
 splendid husband will visit his friend Schlichtgeroll ; this 
 will give me the acquaintance of his amiable wife. I 
 seek in every house some instruction for my own. Fare- 
 well, dearest father. 
 
 " C." 
 
 15
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 Residence in Meiningen. — Letters. — Birth of Eichter's 
 FIRST Child. — Dog's Petition. 
 
 S soon as our Ricliter and his bride 
 
 A. D. 1802, 
 JJt. 39. 
 
 Ui%/l\>A)'! had accomplished what, in modern 
 
 *^V| I phrase, is called the bridal tour, they hastened 
 to the enjoyment of what had always been 
 his ideal dream, — complete social independence, in im- 
 mediate union with nature. His inclinations drew him to 
 Bayreutli to be near his friend Otto ; but he felt almost 
 a maiden dilHdence to expose the intoxication of his love, 
 in the first year of his married life, to his old female 
 friends. He wished also, until the Titan was completed, 
 to be near the accessories of princely life, which the little 
 court of Meiningen, retired as it was, could furnish. 
 
 They established themselves in Meiningen, therefore, 
 and here Jean Paul began that domestic still life, that 
 remained uniiiterruj)t(Hl till the day of his death. 
 
 A letter from Caroline to Otto, a few days after their 
 entrance into their new abode, shows the delicacy and 
 tact of the woman, who felt that she had almost taken 
 the j)lace of her husband's friend in his heart. 
 
 " ' When you have taken your seat at Meiningen, I 
 shall step from mine and go to you.' So you write to us. 
 Ilichter has already established himself, and waits for the
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 339 
 
 beloved Otto to make the promise true, and come and fall 
 upon his heart. My husband leaves the invitation to me, 
 and the information that we are ready, and that you can 
 now, without any hinderance, accept it. 
 
 " Our young furnisliing, now five days old, has a thou- 
 sand wants ; yet you will find Richter's chamber ordered 
 iafter the old fashion, as he has altered nothing, and you 
 will feel at home. IMine is also domestic and friendly, — 
 yours alone is wholly poor, that you may not remain there 
 long, but be always ready to run up to us. I am a docile 
 being, and will exactly obey your wishes. You shall 
 arrange all after your own domestic order. "We will be 
 melancholy or gay, and we will celebrate our second mar- 
 riage-day, when our union through the presence of our 
 friend, is first truly consecrated. 
 
 " Rest is inexpi'essibly welcome to my husband after 
 ■ a tliree weeks' journey. We suffered ourselves to be 
 detained fourteen days in Weimai-, for the sake of the 
 charming little dwelling of the good hostess, and through 
 the love of the Herders. In Gotha we received Schlicht- 
 geroU's hearty greeting, and the following evening we 
 selected a little dwelling in Meiningen, where we could 
 unpack. Now we only wait for the rising of the sun, 
 and the appearance — dare I say it ? — of our friend." 
 
 A letter from Paul, of a later date, to the same friend, 
 completes the picture of domestic life. " My Caroline, 
 who wins the love of all, — of the men by her beauty, 
 and of the women through her enchanting truth and 
 goodness, — constrains me by happiness to be contented 
 here. We have the whole place for friends. Her in- 
 deed too great indifference to outward life, her absorp- 
 tion in quiet employment, her heavenly, faithful, virgin 
 love, her unconditional compliance with my lightest wish,
 
 340 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 makes our love yet younger and fresher than in the be- 
 ginning, Avhen it was merely young. That you will fall 
 in love with her, is only too certain. I feel that marriage 
 is something holy and heavenly 
 
 " As yet I find no trouble. If I have a guest, I seem 
 to sit here as a guest myself, so elegantly and completely 
 my Caroline knows how to order everything. Tou can- 
 not know the whole value of a married union, as you 
 have always lived with sisters, and never, like myself, 
 alone. 
 
 " The whole of the next month will be beautiful. God 
 send me you or Emanuel, or I shall go to you in the 
 autumn with Caroline." 
 
 A letter from Caroline to her father follows. " O my 
 best father, how do I thank you that you have at length 
 written ! I was on the point of writing again. My hus- 
 band, as we sat together, was speaking of the incompre- 
 hensibility of your silence, — ' Could there be a letter 
 mislaid ? ' when the maid brought in yours, and that of 
 Gretchen's. With how many tears have I read the dear 
 words. I live so simply calm, that I hold fast everything 
 that was ever dear to me, — and your image! how it 
 takes hold of me. How often in spirit do I lean upon 
 your shoulder ! But that it renders me too melancholy 
 for the happiness of my beloved husband, nature often 
 makes me so tender, that in very longing after you and 
 my mother, I should sometimes weep. 
 
 " I came here with uncertain, timid expectations. The 
 Duchess of IMeiningen received us with extreme joy, and 
 showed us many houses ; but this made me really melan- 
 choly, and the first niglit I slept not at all, for all my fine 
 dreams of domestic economy were destroyed. This little 
 city is not so ideal as I had imagined ; few of the houses
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 341 
 
 have gardens, and only very small courts. The rooms 
 are large, with many windows, and very high. 
 
 " In the morning we went in pursuit of cheaper and 
 more simjjie dwellings, and were so happy as to find one, 
 isolated, but with very respectable domestic conveniences. 
 As quickly as possible we were in it. My helpful, never- 
 faihng, good-humored husband arranged his own cham- 
 ber, I mine, and thus we were at the end of the first day 
 apparently in order. The rest I could complete with all 
 leisure, and now the clock-work of our little domestic life 
 goes on without stopping. Our maid is active, and I 
 hope good. 
 
 " My husband is perpetually satisfied with all as it is, 
 and I form myself so willingly after his wishes, that in 
 my heart I feel the intimate and sweet conviction that I 
 can be to him all that he needs. Let me repeat, that I 
 am every day happier, — there is nothing without or 
 within to disturb us. Now when the moments of enthu- 
 siasm are over, you will believe that my judgment is 
 sound. Richter is the purest, the holiest, the most god- 
 like man that lives. Could others be admitted, as I am, 
 to his inmost emotions, how much more would they es- 
 teem him. There are moments when my soul lies kneel- 
 ing before him, and I fear only death. Every one finds 
 him stronger and fresher. He is also calmer than he was 
 in Bei'lin, and his life is more regular. We rise about 
 six, and dine at twelve o'clock. At the latest, Richter 
 goes to bed at ten. From principle and economy he has 
 left off wine, and drinks only beer. He is in everything 
 at the same time so kind and so firm " 
 
 The reader will, perhaps, think there is too much of 
 these domestic letters, — but how beautifully are they the 
 unstudied expression of that meek and enduring love that
 
 342 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 belongs almost exclusively to domestic life, in which Car- 
 oline's heart was nourished, as the flowers are fed from 
 the light and the dew of heaven. 
 
 Only one more letter of this period shall find a place 
 here. It is a little note that Caroline wrote to her hus- 
 band when he had taken a short journey to Leibenstein. 
 It was their first separation, and in answer to a line from 
 him. " Ah ! could I fall on thy heart, and thank thee 
 that thou hast thought of me ! I stood exactly in the 
 same place on the floor, covering the little Spinde with 
 gauze, when your letter came. As you left me yesterday 
 in the carriage, it seemed to my childish fancy that the 
 stranger Jean Paul, that did not belong to me, sat there, 
 and how deserted I felt, all was so empty and void. I 
 stifled my regret, and went into your chamber and put 
 everything in order. Your handkerchief, just left, had 
 yet some warmth in it, and I took it with me. Then I 
 had nothing more to care for, and I felt a great loneli- 
 ness. I took up the unbound part of Titan, and ha\e, 
 indeed, read it wholly through. How often did I sink at 
 your feet as I read, and I looked opposite to your sofa as 
 if my voice would reach you. Ah, I do not deserve you, 
 and am in myself nothing. 
 
 " To-day I wrote letters. It is wondei'fully still in our 
 quiet dwelling. No one has been here, and only the 
 newspaper-carrier yesterday. In the cellar all stands in 
 military order. It gives me joy to obey you when you 
 are distant; How heavenly will our meeting be. 
 
 " God take thee into his holy protection. May the 
 
 sunbeams kiss thee, and I be worthy to deserve thy heart 
 
 Farewell ! my soul, my heaven. Thine. 
 
 " C." 
 
 The eighteen months Richter passed at Meiningen,
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 343 
 
 flowed with that quiet uniformity that Caroline loved no 
 less than her husband. Jean Paul was so much sought 
 after by the Duke, that Caroline mourns over his too fre- 
 quent absences from her ; and Paul writes to Otto : " I 
 never believed that a prince would be my friend, — but 
 the Duke is nearly that, although I refuse his frequent 
 evening invitations, sometimes as many as six in a week. 
 He comes to us often, and lately he dUied with us. He 
 would build me a house here, which God forbid, as I seek 
 no eternity in Meiiiingen." 
 
 In the winter of this year Paul went with the Duke to 
 Oberland in a sleigh. In Newhouse, he says they gave 
 us, in an amateur theatre, a comedy by four peasants. 
 " It was performed tlu'ee times in the day, as the place 
 was too small to admit many, and the old company went 
 out as fresh came in. From time to time, as the Duke 
 and the Prince of Hesse Philipsthal sat among the peas- 
 ants, a jug of good beer was passed backwards and for- 
 wards, from which all drank in turn." 
 
 One letter more from Meiningen, of September, 1802, 
 and we close this chapter. 
 
 " Dear old Friend : Your expressions over my wife 
 touched me deeply. You should have had, as of a prin- 
 cess, tlie diarium of her double life, — but indeed it lasts 
 no longer. This very night she had, with her still con- 
 tinued blooming health, pains that prevented sleep 
 
 About eleven o'clock they were followed by a godlike little 
 daughter. Heavens ! you will be as transported as I 
 was, when the nurse brought me, as out of a cloud, my 
 second love, with the blue eyes wide ojien, a beautiful 
 high l)row, kiss-lipped, heart-touching, and with the little 
 nose of my Caroline.
 
 344 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 " God is near at the birth of every child. Who does 
 not find him in tliis incomprehensible mechanism of pain, 
 in this sublimity of his exquisite machinery, in this pros- 
 tration of our owii independence, will ne^•er find him. I 
 concealed, to spare my wife, as well as I could, my weep- 
 ing admiration, but she perceived and returned much of 
 it. In my solitary ajjartraent I had (ah, how I wished 
 for you or Emanuel !) only my own rapture, and God, and 
 my hound. 
 
 " It is a large child, splendidly formed, wholly like my- 
 self, which rejoices my Caroline, but I hold modestly 
 back from the little nose. Only on her account did 1 
 wish for a boy, — but I tell her a girl will be dearer to 
 me, as our parental education would not wholly answer 
 for a boy, but for a girl it will be everything ; and with 
 this pure, firm, and enlightened mother, she can be noth- 
 ing less than a second diamond. 
 
 " Now is all again well with me, — and the world and 
 heaven are open, and I have my wife again. In the 
 midst of her pain she yet brought me my breakfast this 
 morning. Ah, how do I again learn to esteem and pity 
 the poor women. I have the best people about me, — 
 the pastor's daughtei-, wthout equal, — the honest waiting- 
 woman, &c. Let me prattle, good old friend, to you and 
 Amone, — you are the first listeners. 
 
 " To-day I went to the Duke, and asked him to give 
 a title to the fairest work I should ever give to the pub- 
 lic, lie answered, ' Georgine.' * Truly, he sympathizes 
 kindly with human feelings." 
 
 Caroline added to tliis letter, with the child on her left 
 
 arm, " Beloved Otto ! who is so blest as I ? with two so 
 
 dear to love ! 
 
 " C." 
 
 * George was the prince's own name.
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 345 
 
 One other little incident belongs to tlie Meiningen 
 residence. On account of the hunting season, all the dogs 
 of citizens were put under arrest. Richtei", in liis attach- 
 ment to these faithful friends of man, if not in some other 
 characteristics, resembled Scott, and was always accom- 
 panied in his rambles by one or more dogs. Upon the 
 decree of arrest being published, he sent his hound to the 
 Duke with the following petition : — 
 
 " That I may accompany my master, when he goes to 
 Welkershausen or to Gi'immathal. 
 
 " I can bring attestation from my master that I under- 
 stand as little of hunting as he does, and that I keep close 
 beliind his stick in all his rambles. And the only game 
 that I permit myself, is what the government advertiser 
 recommends, sometimes a poor field mouse. 
 
 " That I shall lose my bread if my master dare not 
 place me outside his door, where is indeed my only sta- 
 tion. I constitute his animal establishment ; liis poultry, 
 his pheasantry, and his body-guard. You love him half 
 as much as he does you, and often, when you have been 
 with him, you have had the grace to stroke me, poor 
 hound, and to say, ' Come, Spitz ! ' Thus will I confide 
 in my fortunate dogstar, that it will permit, before I am 
 cut into shoes, and worn on the feet of others, that I may 
 appear before your gracious presence upon my own." 
 
 The petition was granted, and Paul was permitted to 
 keep his dog. 
 
 At the same time with the poet's first child the last 
 volume of Titan was given to the world. It had been 
 ten years in progress, and during that time the author 
 had printed several minor works. 
 
 15*
 
 CHAPTER IX, 
 
 Titan. 
 
 APPROACH this great work with diffidence, 
 with real humility, and feel that I am entirely 
 incompetent to give to the English reader a 
 just idea of a work so tliorougldy German, so 
 difficult for him to appi'cciate, and yet by wliich Jean 
 Paul, if he is read at all, is usually appreciated in this 
 countr}^ In speaking of it, I shall be somewhat indebted 
 to the author from whom I have already quoted. 
 
 In the ten years during which T'itan had been xa. pro- 
 gress Jean Paul had published several works, all of which 
 had been in subordination to this. His commentator 
 says, " that of this the Invisible Lodge was the cradle, 
 and the others, as they followed, only the educators." 
 And as I have said before, it was like the great picture 
 to which all the serious and sacred hours of the painter 
 are devoted, while others of less note take up his casual 
 moments, and are tlie nui^ses of the inspiration that is 
 lavished upon this. 
 
 The great idea of Titan is that which so many poets 
 and romance-writers have endeavored to represent, and 
 which Goethe has so nobly evolved in Faust, — the lim- 
 itations and compensations of life, — that all power as 
 soon as it aims to exceed its just bounds, breaks down ;
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 347 
 
 that all who would violate the laws of eternal justice, 
 necessarily fail. Hence the title of the book, taken 
 from the contest of the ancient Titans against the gods. 
 " Every heaven-stormer finds his hell, as surely as every 
 mountain its valley." In Albano, the hero of the novel, 
 Richter has accomplished the object twice attempted be- 
 fore without success (in the Invisible Lodge and in Hes- 
 perus), through birth, education, trial, and experience to 
 form a perfectly harmonious character. " He is not, like 
 Victor, a man seeming and feehng only, but a man of 
 deeds, and unites with the highest love the highest sphere 
 of action. He is not merely an cesthetic example, but a 
 real chai'acter, in which life and action are identified with 
 poetic representation." And yet he does not, I think, 
 enlist so mucli the sympathies of the reader as Victor 
 in Hesperus ; his treatment of Linda is perhaps too harsh 
 and stern. 
 
 The great dissonance in Titan has probably prevented 
 many from going beyond, the first volume. During the 
 composition of the first half of the first volume the au- 
 thor intended to give it the tragicomic cliaracter of some 
 of liis other works, and that the comic should enter largely 
 into its composition. But his visit to Weimar, and in 
 consequence his enlarged range of characters, especially 
 his connection with Madam von Kalb, induced him to 
 change his plan ; to make it a senous romance, and re- 
 serve the satirical and comic elements for an appendix. 
 Through the last half of the first volume he is apparently 
 contending with the witty and satirical manner of his 
 early works. 
 
 The outline of the story is this. Two German prin- 
 cipalities, Ilohenflies and Haarhaar, are in contention for 
 the succession, — each has a supporter, Haarhaar, the
 
 348 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 German gentleman, Von Bouverot, as he is called, a 
 gambler, a voluptuary, but connoisseur in art, who fol- 
 lows Luigi, the pretended only son of the Hohenflies 
 prince to Italy, and there by every kind of excess sub- 
 jects him to a lingering dissolution. The supporter of 
 the Hohenflies dynasty is the knight Don Gaspaiti de 
 Cesara, who, in addition to his devotion to the old prince, 
 the father of Luigi, is influenced by personal revenge for 
 having been refused the hand of a Haarhaar princess. 
 To preserve Albano, the second son of the old prince of 
 Hohenflies, from the arts that had administered a slow 
 and consuming poison to the life of Luigi, his birth is 
 concealed, and he is educated as the son of Don Gas- 
 pard ; his pai'cnts having entered into a bond that at the 
 death of Luigi, the claims of his birth shall be established, 
 and that he shall marry Linda, the daughter of Don Gas- 
 pard. To keep up the deception, that Albano is his son, 
 Gaspard gives himself out as the guardian of his daughter 
 Linda. She is called the Countess de Romero, and is left 
 in Spain with her mother, where everything conspires to 
 nurse and increase the eccentricity and romantic enthu- 
 siasm of her character. Her mother soon dies : Linda 
 is left without female influence, and at liberty to travel 
 wherever her love of independence leads her. She ac- 
 cordingly goes to Switzerland, and there, in the solitude 
 of the mountains, endeavors to establish a school of in- 
 dustry and innocence. Not succeeding, she removes to 
 Italy, and nourishes her passion for the beautiful by liv- 
 ing in the midst of the monuments of art in that exqui- 
 site climate. 
 
 Albano, whose parents were travelling at tlie time, was 
 bom, together with a twin sister, at Isola Bella, where he 
 remains until the death of his mother, in his third year.
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 349 
 
 He is then taken to Germany as the son of Don Gaspard, 
 and placed in the family of TVehrfritz, the provincial di- 
 rector, as their foster son. He remains secluded in the 
 country until his eighteenth year, and, on account of his 
 resemblance to his father, the old prince, is not permitted 
 to visit Pestitz, the capital of Hohenflies. He grows up 
 a powerful, pure, innocent, well-instracted youth, endowed 
 with the most brilliant and attractive qualities, and with 
 a beauty of person that charms every beholder. While a 
 country recluse, he has that longing for love and friend- 
 ship?, the intense thirst for intercourse with great spirits, 
 that Richter makes a characteristic of all his heroes ; 
 and forms in imagination an attachment both of love and 
 friendship with the son and daughter of the court minister 
 Frovlay, through the medium of their instructors, who 
 give lessons at the same time to all the young people. 
 
 Don Gaspard, with his knowledge of the romantic 
 character of Linda, and by the help of his brother, an 
 alchemist, ventriloquist, juggler, and liar, makes use of 
 magical means, deceptive glasses, and voices issuing ap- 
 parently from the clouds, to accomplish liis object, the 
 union of Albano with his daughter ; and although, from 
 consciousness and pride (for the same means are prac- 
 tised on Albano), they avoid each other, yet, when they 
 accidentally meet, a mysterious influence di-aws them irre- 
 sistibly together. 
 
 Before this takes place, however, the death of the old 
 prince and the elevation of Luigi, although dying slowly, 
 allows Albano to go to Pestitz. With his fresh, beauti- 
 ful, ingenuous character, he cements his secretly-formed 
 friendship with Roquairol, the son of the minister, and 
 his love for Liana is confirmed by her beautiful feminine 
 nature. The first love of these young people is one of
 
 350 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 the most touching episodes in all Richter's works. It is 
 a Romeo and Juliet, \\Titten and performed in heaven. 
 Liana is one of those spiritual beings, with angelic souls, 
 and almost transparent bodies, that Richter loved to di'aw : 
 disinterested, religious, humble, sacrificing all to duty, and 
 suffering without a murmur. She lives one fleeting spring 
 of happiness, in which her love, hidden like the perfume 
 of the violet in the heart of the flower, is breathed only in 
 whispers ; and when opposed by her fiend-hearted father 
 and her icy mother, though sensitive as the wind-flower, 
 she remains true to Albano, and will only renounce her 
 love when informed of his royal birth. But with her 
 love she renounces life ; and the death of the young, 
 usually so sad, is here beguiled of melancholy by the 
 beautiful mysticism that surrounds it with spiritual ex- 
 istences, and clothes Liana with the robes of angels before 
 she leaves her mortal investment. 
 
 Albano is taken from the death-bed of Liana to Italy, 
 where he meets Linda. Through various influences she 
 has grown up a dazzling and enchanting being. Albano, 
 rich in fancy and full of love for all that is beautiful, is 
 instantly captivated. The character of Linda is said to 
 have been modelled from that of Madam von Kalb. She 
 is bold, proud, free, with an infinite generosity and nobility 
 of soul. Her glowing Spanish heart and Italian imagina- 
 tion have never been restrained by the conventionahsms 
 of courtly society. Like Madam von Kalb, she gives way 
 to fits of passionate jealousy ; like her, she avows the pe- 
 culiar aesthetic philosophy upon love, — " that love needs 
 not the bond of marriage, that, like an iron ring upon a 
 delicate flower, checks and destroys its tender bloom." 
 She has also Madam von Kalb's doubts upon the immor- 
 tality of the soul, and even her occasional blindness, which 
 in poor Linda led to such fatal consequences.
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 351 
 
 Albano's powerful character subdued Linda's pride; 
 with the most childlike love she yielded her indepen- 
 dence, and her haughty nature seemed to melt away 
 under the sun of love. In their various journeys in 
 Italy, to Ischia, Isola Bella, and the palace and gardens 
 of Borromeo, Richter has almost surpassed Madam de 
 Stael. These glowing descriptions are more unique from 
 the circumstance of his never having visited the places ; 
 he was wholly indebted to the Duchess Amelia for the 
 perfumed Italian breath of the whole, which cold reality 
 would have chilled. 
 
 We come now reluctantly to the evil genius of the 
 romance, Roquairol, the son of Froulay and brother of 
 Liana. He is a child of the times, a victim of the vicious 
 institutions of society, and of an unsuitable education. 
 Richter in this character has furnished us with almost 
 a prophetic example of those artistic paintings, of which 
 we have seen so many since his death, and in France even 
 in the times in which we live. An example, where the 
 culture of the mind, without the attendant culture of the 
 heart, is carried so far as to excite and mislead the judg- 
 ment of the wisest. An association of intelligence and 
 crime, of artistic power of the imagination, united with 
 perversity of heart to mar and destroy all the beauty of 
 the painting. But Jean Paul has not, as other authors 
 of such characters, painted his hero half angel, half devil ; 
 he has made him wholly hateful : he has not, like Love- 
 lace, the charm of gi-aceful manners ; nor, like Byron's 
 heroes, the attraction of personal beauty ; he excites no 
 sentiment but that of aversion, and when he falls, pity 
 even cannot regret his fate. At the age of twelve he 
 conceived a violent passion for Linda, and attempted 
 even then to shoot himself because the httle girl turned
 
 352 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 her back upon liim and expressed her aversion. Upon 
 her return from Italy, and when Albano's claims to her 
 hand were acknowledged, he determined to add revenge 
 upon Albano to the fatal resentment of his murderous 
 love. A slight contest arose between the lovers, occa- 
 sioned by Linda's quickness of resentment, and Albano 
 absented himself for a few days. According to a psycho- 
 logical law of love, Linda is now more tender than ever, 
 and her cold independence melts under the thought of 
 estrangement. Roquairol forges Albano's handwriting, 
 and asks for an interview. Deceived by his counter- 
 feiting the voice and di-ess of Albano, and by her even- 
 ing blindness ; seduced also by her OAvn views of love, 
 that it should yield all without the bond of marriage, the 
 superb and proud Linda surrenders all to the madness 
 of Roquairol ! 
 
 With the boldness of despair, he has the whole history 
 of his love, and its catastrophe, performed in a tragedy 
 he had already written, and at the end of tlie fourth act 
 shoots himself. Linda, crushed in body and soul, retires 
 forever to her living tomb ! and Don Gaspard, who had 
 thought to make use of men as the instruments to accom- 
 plish his aml)itious purposes, disappears from the scene. 
 
 But the romance docs not end thus tragically and iiope- 
 lessly. Albano, failing twice in love and twice subdued, 
 — by the physical death of Liana and the moral death 
 of the noble Linda, — rises again above his fate. The 
 death of his brother, Luigi, takes place at this moment. 
 Educated as one of the people, and prepared to regenerate 
 the corrupt dynasty to which he belongs, and to pour heal- 
 ing streams into the impure society of the time, he ascends 
 the throne, and becomes a benefactor and reformer. 
 
 Idoine, a princess of Ilaarhaar, who had made a volun-
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 353 
 
 tary vow never to marry beneath her rank ; and in a little 
 province of her own had created a paradise, where pure 
 morals, religion, industry, and happiness prevailed ; with 
 a strong, rational, yet tender and beautiful nature, bears 
 also a striking personal resemblance to Liana, — and the 
 romance ends with her union with Albano. 
 
 This is a rough outline of the plan and action of Titan. 
 "Within it revolves much that is great and beautiful and 
 touching in life ; almost all the errors and sorrows and 
 pains of humanity ; love, in all its forms, from its delicate 
 fragrance, like that of the lily of the valley, to the volcanic 
 flame that burns and destroys ; nature, in the idylUc sim- 
 plicity of German village life, in ornamented parks and 
 gardens, in Alpine mountains, and in the intoxication of 
 spring in the Italian climate ; art, from the breathing 
 tones of the flute to the noble beauty of Grecian sculpture ; 
 poetry, delicate irony, hidden satire, and broad humor. 
 
 Throughout the whole work an elevated poetic justice 
 is preserved ; not the common conventional justice that 
 demands vice to be punished and virtue rewarded in this 
 world, but a deeper philosophy, in which the mind itself, 
 and the affections, though crushed and disappointed, are 
 their own reward. Thus Albano, twice broken-hearted, 
 stands at last, great in himself and in his own integrity, 
 ■with the bride he had chosen from her resemblance to his 
 first love, upon the elevation his experience and trials 
 and his own great qualities fitted him to adorn. 
 
 Liana, the humble, pure, gentle being, the victim of an 
 unsuitable education ; too tender for the winter of this 
 rough life, is happy in death, because she feels that Al- 
 bano will be thus i-estored to his birthright, and by a 
 beautiful spiritual mysticism she wiU stiU be tlie pro- 
 tecting guardian of her earthly love.
 
 354 I^IFK OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 It is only against the fate of the romantic, and proud 
 Linda that every reader rebels. Richter received many 
 letters entreating him to alter or avert it. Jacobi even 
 threatened him with the loss of his friendship if he left 
 her under the sentence of this moral death. But Richter 
 adhered to his purpose, which was to give a lesson 'of hu- 
 mility to those who, strong in self-reliance, throw aside 
 tlie guards of custom, the sanction of laws, as unnecessary 
 to their more refined and spiritual natures. But Linda, 
 even in the moment of her humiliating grief, is consoled 
 by the momentary belief that Albano may be her brother, 
 and that she may have been saved from a deeper and 
 more ten'ible fate. 
 
 Many other characters revolve around these, the prin- 
 cipals in tlie drama. Schoppe, the former Leibgeber, 
 appears again, crazed by the philosophy of Fichte, ever 
 accompanied, and trying in vain to escape from his Ich 
 (me) ; Dian, a Greek artist, and his simple and affec- 
 tionate Greek wife, existing in an atmosphere of beauty ; 
 the minister's lady, cold and ascetic ; the princess bride 
 of Luigi, a malicious and heartless coquette ; Spener, the 
 court chaplain, proud of his sanctity, and of his spiritual 
 power, etc., etc. 
 
 The four volumes of the Titmi were printed in three 
 successive years. Great, indeed, was the disappointment 
 of the reading public, when, after ten years of expecta- 
 tion, the first volume made its appearance. The discrep- 
 ancy between its first and last portions displeased both 
 parties of Richter's admirers. Those who loved Jean 
 Paul's earlier maimer were disapi)ointed to lose it, and 
 tlie admirers of his serious romances were displeased at 
 the intrusion of the comic into this. The second volume, 
 containing the cjiisode of Liana, appeared at the end of a
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 355 
 
 year, and was violently condemned as sentimental, mys- 
 tical, too much in the style of the fashionable weeping 
 school of fiction. When at length the last two volumes 
 came out, disclosing the moral annihilation of a being so 
 charming to the imagination of every reader as Linda, 
 indignation was added to disappointment. Just then the 
 battle of Jena occurred, and more important concerns took 
 its place with the reading public. Like all really great 
 works. Titan has survived the popular disapprobation ; and 
 the more it is read the more it will be acknowledged a work 
 of exalted genius, pure morality, and perennial beauty. 
 
 Spazier, whom I have so often quoted, tells us that, in 
 the last weeks of the poet's life, when he was engaged 
 with him in a revision of his whole works for a new edi- 
 tion, Richter had determined by an earlier development, 
 and more psychological analysis of the character of Linda, 
 to show, that, with her previously-formed ojjinions and 
 education, the catastrophe was unavoidable. And to illus- 
 trate more fully the axiom, " that character and destiny 
 are the same thing." 
 
 How much it is to be regretted he did not live to fulfil 
 his intention ; that an author who touches the sick heart 
 so tenderly, that if for purposes of art he must lay bare 
 the inmost recesses of weakness and frailty, covers them 
 again from the cutting air of scorn with the downy, 
 warm breast of pity and lo\'e, should have left a passage 
 that cannot be read without deep mortification and pain. 
 
 Note. — The above very imperfect account of the Titan has been 
 rendered superfluous by the admirable translation of that work by the 
 Eev. Charles T. Brooks. 
 
 Every English reader can now reaffirm that which has been so elo- 
 quently said, " That the name of Jean Paul will be held in affectionate 
 esteem as long as the sorrows of humanity elicit pity, the joys of 
 friendship yield satisfaction, the moral virtues command reverence, or 
 the love of God and the hope of Heaven have disciples."
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 RiCHTER LEAVES MeININGEN. — REMOVES TO COBURG. — BiRTH OF 
 
 HIS Son. — Death of Herder. — " Flegeljahre." — Bay- 
 
 EEUTH. 
 
 HE work that succeeded the Titan, a. d. 1803, 
 the Flegeljahre, is perhaps the -^'- *°- 
 most personal of all the works of the poet. 
 While writing it his desire to return to the 
 place of his birth, the land of his youthful hopes and 
 dreams, became irre[)ressible. 
 
 He would not let the Duke of Meiningen become ac- 
 quainted with his wish from any other lips than his own ; 
 he wrote to him, therefore, " That, like wandering rats in 
 the spring, he felt an irresistible instinct to move, and that, 
 \vith wife and child and dog, lie should depart in May, 
 and draw nearer to the Fichtelgebirge." 
 
 The Duke answered, " That he was not enough of a 
 naturalist to understand the species of wandering rats 
 called geniuses, though he believed he knew one genius 
 sufficiently to call liim his friend." He gave his consent 
 with extreme reluctance, and Paul found it difficult to 
 resist his earnest entreaties, and his princely offer to build 
 him a convenient dwelling, to let him import his favorite 
 Bayrcuth beer, free from impost, and to add every new 
 book to his library. The solitude of Meiningen op-
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 357 
 
 pressed him ; but liis fii-st removal was only to Coburg, 
 a short distance from tlie Prince, and a stage nearer to the 
 attraction of the mountain magnet and the friend Otto. 
 
 The year that Kichter dwelt in Coburg has been passed 
 over in silence by his biographers. No reason has been 
 given why he selected this small city, and tliere appears 
 to have been no person there who could lend attraction to 
 such a residence. But it was marked by two events that 
 aftected him deeply, — the birth of his son and the death 
 of his friend Herder. 
 
 This last, the death of Herder, cast a deep shadow that 
 reached him and his domestic joys. He had loved and 
 reverenced none like Herder, and no author had had so 
 much influence over him. Not that they resembled each 
 other as authors, but the same deeply religious spii'it in- 
 spired them both, and the aim of both was to buUd up 
 the wavering faith of the age in God, virtue, and immor- 
 tality. 
 
 " I would willingly," he wrote to the son of his dead 
 friend, — "I would willingly journey to his holy sepulchre 
 to renew my joyful and my sad recollections of him. But 
 with what could I still my grief when I found him no 
 longer there ? Weimar, or rather Ids deserted house, has 
 made me a Jew, who can remain no longer in the city, 
 but must, as soon as he inscribed in the church-record 
 the birth of a child, depart and journey onward." * 
 
 " What shall I say to you," he wrote to Caroline Her- 
 der, " wliile you suffer so much from the soitow of others, 
 and, like the widow of a prince, must at the same time 
 mourn for the country and for yourself. I would that I 
 could go to you and sit with you unconsoled for half an 
 hour, and then silently withdraw. 
 
 * See Appendix IFI.
 
 358 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 " We are indeed only mourning for ourselves, for his 
 pure spirit deserves the purer world. He was so God- 
 like that 1 can think of him unaltered in his own place in 
 that holy, distant world, with that exalted spiritual wliich 
 is, if God is ! If his illumined countenance is now turned 
 towards this earth, nothing will appear there but the 
 thought, — ' You have loved me and blessed me, and the 
 Eternal will give you through your children your joy 
 and your reward ! ' 
 
 " For me is Weimar now also bui'ied. 
 
 "J. P. F. R." 
 
 The residence in Coburg was also marked by the pub- 
 lication of the Flegeljahre. Carlyle says the word may 
 be translated " wild oats" but it seems to mean the same 
 as Wanderjahre, or apprenticeship, as Goethe uses it in 
 Meister. 
 
 Like most of the romances of Jean Paul, especially to 
 the English reader, the beginning of this work will be 
 strange, puzzling, and apparently absurd, and he will be 
 tempted a hundred times to throw down the book in 
 despair or contempt ; but he will be well rewarded for 
 persevering till he finds his way througli the intricate 
 labyrinth of the introduction. Paul wrote to Otto while 
 he was writing it, " I work now witli inexpressible pleas- 
 ure and care upon the history of my brothers, — of J. P. 
 In this I can make the highest satirical leaps, and its 
 objectivity gains by them," 
 
 It is said to be the most personal of all the autlior's 
 works. In it he has represented his'own already so often 
 mentioned double nature, in the personal i-elations of Walt 
 and Vult, twin brothers, nourished by the same mother's 
 bosom, and " united -in such a manner that they cannot 
 live apart, and yet cannot look into each other's eyes, or
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 359 
 
 embrace eacli other. They are opposite magnets that are 
 continually drawn to each other, but meeting, are thrust 
 asunder as by positive and negative electricity." "Walt, 
 tlie earnest, sentimental, ideal enthusiast, is represented 
 as anticipating a paradise in every-day life, surrounding 
 the simplest scenes in nature, and the most common 
 people, with a halo of poetic glory ; from his simple and 
 absent nature knowing nothing, and believing nothing, of 
 craft or cunning or vice ; extracting dehght from every 
 flower, even from every weed in his path, — is twin- 
 brother to Vult, an eccentric humorist, a musician, ven- 
 triloquist, an exquisite mimic, who can take all forms, 
 and in the inequalities of life looks with penetrating eyes 
 only on the meanest side ; knowing too well, and despis- 
 ing the vices of hypocrisy, he dissects and tears to shreds 
 every tender emotion, delighting only in the wildest sport, 
 and allaying the thirsting emptiness of the heart with 
 satire, wit, and humor. Each seeks to gain an ascendency 
 over the other, — Walt, by the seducing and vanquishing 
 power of pure, disinterested love ; Vult, by the imposing 
 ascendency of knowledge of society and extensive worldly 
 experience. 
 
 The interest of the book consists, first, in the psycho- 
 logical relation of the twins to each other ; second, in the 
 severe experience of life to which the angelic and poetic 
 nature of Walt is subjected ; and, third, the resemblance 
 of the two united brotiiers to the double nature of the 
 author. Both born in humble life, the good-for-nothing 
 Vult is soon enlisted as a soldier, — Walt, whose disposi- 
 tion leads him to the clerical life, is deterred from enter- 
 ing the Church by the tears of his mother, wlio dreads 
 for her son the poverty in which her own life has been 
 passed. His father, who answers to our justice of the 
 peace, educates him for a notary.
 
 360 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 A rich and childless man, the Croesus of the village, 
 has become interested in Walt, by reading a poem of his, 
 in which he describes the liappiiie^s of a Swedish Pastor's 
 life, and determmes to put it in his power to follow his 
 inclinations by making him his heir. Yet he hedges 
 around his legacy with such conditions, and places the 
 heir in such intricate relations with avaricious and cun- 
 ning executors, that the reader foresees that the noble- 
 minded and unsuspicious Walt, through the dreaming and 
 unworldly nature of the poet, will surrender the whole 
 gift into their hands. By the conditions of the will he is 
 placed in various relations with the persons into whose 
 hands, for every fault he commits, he forfeits a part of 
 the inheritance. His experienced and worldly-wise twin 
 brother Vult follows him as his sha<low, and endeavors to 
 protect him, by his better knowledge and cold experience 
 of the world, from the blunders of his unsus])icious nature; 
 but, by a kind of poetic optimism, Walt converts every 
 loss into a lesson of wisdom, or into an occasion for dis- 
 closing his own unselfish and beautiful nature. 
 
 Unknown to each other, and without disclosing it, they 
 bntb love the same excellence in the beautifully feminine, 
 but higli-boi-n Wina. Although the helpless Walt, tbrough 
 his earnest nature and poetical character, touches her 
 beart, yet, without the knowledge of life and sagacity of 
 bis brother, he could never have breatbcd his reverential 
 love into her ear. Wina is for Walt a distant star, which 
 he may love and worship, but never reach. It would 
 have been as improbable as that Jean Paul should him- 
 self marry a pi'incess. And the reason that the book 
 breaks off so abrui)tly is, no doubt, that it would have 
 violated all probability and all German conventionalism 
 to have brought Walt's love for Wina to a happy termi-
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 36 1 
 
 nation ; and yet a poet could be permitted to love noth- 
 ing inferior. 
 
 This was the first work that Jean Paul began and 
 finished immediately after his marriage, when he had 
 obtained the object of his lifelong desires ; and over the 
 whole work is thrown the charm of a serene and heavenly 
 twilight, a soothing repose, like the disposition in which 
 it was written. The FlegeJjahre is the truest expression 
 of the inmost nature of the poet, — the picture of his 
 hopes, his longings, his griefs, his disappointments ; and it 
 contains his views upon the value of his own attainments, 
 and shows their' discrepancy with the actual world in 
 which he moved and hved. 
 
 By a German critic it is said, "It leaves upon the 
 mind of the reader the impression that it is the most ar- 
 tistically faultless, the gentlest, and most beautiful of the 
 peculiar romances of Jean Paul." For many long years 
 Paul cherished the illusion that he should continue and 
 complete this the most faultless of his works. 
 
 This seems to be the proper place to introduce a little 
 sketch of the social group in the midst of which Richter 
 passed his life after his removal to the little city of Bay- 
 reuth, — "little city of my habitation, which I belong to on 
 this side the grave ! " — at the foot of the Fichtelgebirge 
 on the south, which took place this year. The reader 
 will recollect, perhaps, the introductory sketch of the sim- 
 plicity of mannei'S in this secluded region. Modern im- 
 provement and refinement must have been increased by 
 Emanuel the Jew, who was cultivated and beneficent, a 
 patron of the arts, and who lived there in a style of the 
 most generous hospitality. 
 
 In the Otto family, originally from Hof, marriage had 
 made many changes. Frederica, Richter's pupil and 
 
 16
 
 362 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 friend, bad married "Wernlien, the pastor of Wunsiedel. 
 Frederica seems to have been one of those women with- 
 out fascinating quabties, but to whom every one turns and 
 rebes upon in times of difficulty and sorrow. After her 
 marriage, Otto wrote to Richter thus : " Frederica writes 
 that she is very much satisfied, and bves very happily 
 with Wernlien. She has taken the reins of housekeeping 
 completely into her own bands. All is furnished and 
 ordered after her views, and she does not let the remarks 
 of others make her waver. I rejoice that she has begun 
 in this way, because the disagreeables of her situation will 
 be softened thus, if not destroyed, and this firmness of 
 hers is the only way." 
 
 Of Otto's own maiTiage he gives Richter the following 
 simple and naive account. He had long been betrothed, 
 which in Germany is tiie more public marriage, to Amone 
 Herold, whose home is often mentioned as uncomfortable 
 and uncongenial, and to whom Richter, in a delicate man- 
 ner, had frequently conveyed advice and consolation. 
 
 " The last day of June was my marriage-day ; no one 
 had been informed that it was to take place. At five 
 o'clock in the morning we went alone, as we wished, into 
 the church. We were, believe me, through our own re- 
 flections, more elevated than we were by the mechanical 
 exhortations of old R. I took in imagination thee with 
 us, even into the sacristy, where I and my Amone were 
 wed, and thou, my Richter, stood by, and gave us thy 
 blessing. Then I led Amone back to her father for the 
 last time, and the next morning took her away forever. 
 We departed from Hof I left my brother sleeping. 
 We came to Bayrcuth, where I intended to hire a dwell- 
 ing. But Emanuel had cared for all that, and had fur- 
 nished it with a completeness that extended from the
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 363 
 
 greatest to the smallest things. In addition to what 
 Amone had sent here, he had provided everything ne- 
 cessary or agreeable. 
 
 " Represent to yourself our surprise, when we stept 
 into the apartment, and found all, even to the ink-glass 
 and strewing sand ; candles lighted upon my desk, and a 
 barometer near them. All, — from the window-curtains 
 to the electrical machine for lighting the fire, — from the 
 smallest milk-pitcher to the largest kettle, — all arranged, 
 everything in its place, or hanging on its nail." 
 
 Albrecht, Otto's brother, a noble and generous charac- 
 ter, who is called the old bachelor, and whom they regret 
 leaving alone when Otto marries, saves them all anxiety 
 on his account by becoming suddenly attached to a young 
 lady, and marrying in a hurry, as old bachelors are too 
 apt to do. 
 
 It was to this little circle of attached friends, living in 
 great outward simplicity, that Richter brought his Caro- 
 line, rich in every inward and outward quality that could 
 add to it grace or happiness. 
 
 To show the beautiful simplicity of their life, I give 
 an extract from Otto, describing his own birthday. He 
 says: — 
 
 '' It is the first in domestic life with my Amone, and 
 therefoi-e doubly dear. Truly, it is something beautiful 
 to observe the anxious care and contrivance of a Haus- 
 frau to create some new pleasure, to see how in secret 
 all is directed to one object, to create a happy surprise 
 for her husband. 
 
 " As I arose on the 9 th, and went into my ow^n room, 
 Amone came to meet me, with the most tender love, 
 embraced me, and led me into the common apartment to 
 see what she had prepared for me. There, under wreatlis
 
 364 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 of flowers and kindled lights, were a large cake that she 
 had herself made the day before ; pastry and wine that 
 her sister had sent me from Hof. All were symmetri- 
 cally placed and beautiful ; and on each side there lay 
 shirts of fine holland, that she had been months before 
 secretly employed in making, to surprise me. The love 
 of this good, devoted being touched me even to tears. 
 
 " The pleasure and emotion of the day were much 
 heightened by the good Emanuel, who always gives me 
 proofs of his esteem and love. In the afternoon, we took 
 a long walk, and then we all assembled around his cheer- 
 ful tea-table. I thought of you the whole day, my Rich- 
 ter, and painted to myself your future birthdays that you 
 would, perhaps, pass with us, when we should all live 
 together in domestic intimacy.* 
 
 A letter follows from Richter to his wife, on her first 
 birthday after their maiTiage. 
 
 " Even now, as I would begin, tones from the ^olian 
 harp come to my ear, as though they would say what I 
 should write to thee, my beloved ! New born, for that 
 veiled year, which no winter, but spring clouds only con- 
 ceal, thy birthday is also mine, and with wishes for thee, 
 my own will be fulfilled. Led by quiet joys among 
 flowers and sunbeams and pure loving hearts, shall thou 
 pass, dear one, into thy new year. O nothing shall fail 
 
 * Amone Herold was one of Paul's earliest pupils and most constant 
 correspondents. As her marriage was childless, she gave much of her 
 time to literary pursuits. Her first publication was a translation of 
 Ossian. She afterwards published some novels, that her friend Paul 
 revised. Otto often speaks of her philosophical mind; and her writ- 
 ings could not have been without value, as Cotta gave her two louis 
 d'ors (nearly ten dollars) a sheet for her stories. Schindel says, " She 
 excels in descriptions of scenes of domestic tenderness, and is distin- 
 guished for penetration and power of acute observation." Amone was 
 yet living at the time of the publication of Jean Paul's life.
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. ^6^ 
 
 thee therein ! But should all else fail, I will remain to 
 thee fast and true ; and when thy future years are past, 
 thou shalt say to me : ' You have foithfully kept the vows 
 of love ! You have warmly loved me ! We have been 
 happy ! ' 
 
 " I will be to thee father and mother ! Thou shalt be 
 the happiest of human beings, that I also may be happy ! 
 And thus may it be forever ; and may the Infinite Hand 
 behind the clouds, that led us together, lay its blessing 
 upon our union, and give us only the sorrows that we 
 can bear ! " 
 
 A letter or two written from Coburg may close this 
 part of our biogi-aphy. 
 
 " January 28, 1803. 
 
 " K thy watch-key left upon thy table did not remind 
 me, I would not write to thee, beloved ! Our separation 
 is yet too short, — only three half-hours from me, what 
 then can have happened? I sat too long in thy chair 
 with Emma before me on the gray cushion, so that she 
 made me, through- her smiles, happily unhappy. She is 
 so like thee, with her open-mouthed smiles, that if thou 
 shouldst ever leave me her resemblance to thee will be 
 the Heaven and the Hell of my life, if indeed I could 
 survive thee ! Yet why do I torment thee and myself? 
 
 " Beloved, farewell ! Write to me, not alone from Wei- 
 mar, and write often. God keep thee, Angel ! 
 
 " Tliine, 
 
 " C." 
 
 Three days after Richter wrote to his wife from Wei- 
 mar : — 
 
 " Dearest ! again I write to thee, here in the good 
 Kuhnhold apartment with her and her husband exactly
 
 366 
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 as we were, in the former year. The Herders were in- 
 finitely glad to see me starting like a snow-ball out of the 
 snow. Here ai"e feast after feast, yet their beer does not 
 compensate me for my own. Then I long so much for 
 thee that it may well be that I shall not go to Rudol^tadt, 
 but Sunday or Monday meet thee again. Good-night, 
 dearest !
 
 PART IV. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 RiCHTER KEMOVES TO BaYREUTH. — SOCIAL POSITION. — PERSONAL 
 
 Appearance and Habits. — Family. — Letter from his 
 Eldest Daughter. 
 
 O return : the poet's life in Coburg, a. d. 1804 
 
 as we have ah'eady said, is a com- ^'- *i- 
 
 [k^^|| pie to blank leaf in his biography. It was 
 
 -^^1 easy, therefore, — although he says to Otto, 
 
 says 
 
 " It is stupid to wander about with wife and children 
 and cook," — yet it was natural to turn his eyes to the 
 place that had always been the Mecca of his wishes. On 
 the 1st of August, 1805, the day, Paul said, ''on Avhich, 
 according to the old Saga, the Devil fell from heaven, he 
 should return to his upon earth." 
 
 He soon found a quiet little place in Bayreuth, where 
 the green meadows, and the sheltered valleys, and the 
 misty mountains of his fancy, became fixed and perma- 
 nent objects in his view. 
 
 In close neighborhood with Otto and Amone, and his 
 old friend Emanuel, he hired a convenient and pretty 
 house, consisting of four rooms and three cabinets, on the 
 beautiful margin of the Main, and commanding an ex-
 
 368 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL, 
 
 tensive prospect of the region he loved so well. Here 
 he lived in the most endearing social intercourse with 
 these friends, which was uninterrupted until the day of 
 his death. 
 
 But to Jean Paul a place under the free and, open 
 heaven to study and muse was almost as necessary as a 
 shelter for his wife and children ; and he was often seen, 
 in a fine morning, with a sack of books upon his back, a 
 knotted staff in his hand, followed by his faithful Spitz, 
 passing through the Linden avenue that led to a hermit- 
 age, far out of the city ; where there was an extensive 
 view over the valley to the Fichtelgebirge. Here was a 
 small peasant's house, in whose upper chamber Richter 
 had furnished a study for inclement weather. And the 
 good Frau still shows the room whei'e Richter came till 
 the last year of his life, and endeared himself to her by 
 good humor and kindness. 
 
 On fine days the poet might be seen sitting not far 
 from the house, under the overhanging linden, sunk in 
 his own, or regarding the outward world, until the dark- 
 ening twilight, or his children, sent l)y the watchful Caro- 
 line, reminded him that it was time to call his friend 
 Otto, who was within the sound of his voice, and return 
 home. 
 
 With his settlement in Bayreuth, the completion of 
 Titan, and the publication of the FlegeJjahre, began a 
 new existence in the literary, the ideal, and the actual 
 life of Richter. He now stood, in the full npeness of his 
 age, with an entire knowledge, and complete conscious- 
 ness of his relations to society ; and with a rich treasure 
 of experience, both in life and in literature. But, on the 
 other hand, all his upward strivings, both in poetry and 
 life, lay behind him. He had obtained, both in domestic
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 369 
 
 life and in fame, all that he had aspired to. The ideal 
 in these paths no longer beckoned him onwards. He had 
 found in his Caroline, if not all a poet could imagine, 
 enough to make a poet's fireside happj ; and as a father 
 and a member of society he had acquired an easy and 
 honorable position, that would ever bind him in silken 
 fetters to his home, and to the beloved soil of his native 
 district. The calm satisfaction and contentment, the har- 
 monious quiet, the repose and order of his life, also a[)pear 
 in all the works composed after the Titan. 
 
 Those who have followed us thus far will dwell with 
 satisfaction on this period of Richter's life, " when, with a 
 heart at once of the most sportful and the most earnest 
 feelings ; affectionate, and encompassed with the objects 
 of his affections, diligent in the highest of all earthly 
 tasks, the acquisition and diffusion of truth ; and witness- 
 ing from his sequestered home the workings of his own 
 mind on thousands of fellow-minds, he was happy and 
 at peace." 
 
 In his own immediate circle also the influence of so 
 original a mind, and a heart the truest and tenderest that 
 ever beat, upon his children and neighborhood, must have 
 been deep and permanent. He was an enthusiast, but 
 no visionary ; neither were his singularities the result of 
 affectation, as writers in this country and in England 
 have asserted ; for affectation is founded in falsehood, and 
 Richter was the truest of human beings. The poetry of 
 his genius had always been reflected in his life ; peace 
 and happiness from within now showed itself in his ex- 
 ternal appearance. One of his biographers says : "■ He 
 had hitherto been pale and lean ; he now became stout 
 and robust ; and, had it not been that the delicately 
 formed nose, the lovely mouth, the intellectual brow, 
 
 16* X
 
 370 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 and lightning eye remained unchanged, he would have 
 been taken for a farmer rather that a poet." 
 
 But I must not give the reader the impression that 
 Richter was absolutely without faults. He had perse- 
 vered from the earliest time in the habit of writing down 
 rules for conduct, and strictly regulating his whole'»man- 
 ner of life; from this we. learn his inclinations, his seci'et 
 disgusts, and the faults he was most conscious of Every 
 line shows him full of love and generosity in all the rela- 
 tions of life ; but with his glowing fancy and temperament 
 of fire, he was sometimes harsh and violent, especially 
 after long-continued writing, that brought him into an 
 excited state of mind, differing from intoxication only in 
 its cause. Against this he contended strongly ; and his 
 most troubled and penitent hours appear to have been 
 caused by the transgression of his resolutions on those 
 occasions when he forgot the habitual mildness of his 
 character. He mourned also over his violence in argu- 
 ment ; and there are many little billets apologizing to his 
 friends the next day for the warmth of his opinions the 
 previous evening. Paul loved argument, and was noted 
 for maintaining his opinions with great warmth ; he was 
 also extremely unguarded and imprudent. The breach 
 between him and the Schlegel school Avas often widened 
 by unguarded speeches, that were cauglit up and repeated 
 by curious or malicious listeners. In reference to this 
 Paul says in his via recta : " Jf 07ie effort at reconcilia- 
 tion does not succeed, the second or the third will be 
 certain to." 
 
 His biographer, a nephew, who lived much in his 
 family, writes thus of it. After saying that he had 
 been educated with the utmost reverence and even fear 
 of Richter ; that reports had reached him of his oddity
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 371 
 
 and severity, so that he remained a whole day in Bay- 
 reutli, and passed his house several times before he could 
 get couraj^e to knock at the door : — 
 
 " As soon as I entered, all my timidity vanished. Rich- 
 ter, indeed, appeared but for a moment, to welcome me, 
 and returned to his study. But the mild splendor of his 
 whole godlike, spiritual, and moral being appeared as 
 shown in his wife and children, and everything about 
 them, and threw suddenly a warm, rose-colored glow 
 upon my spirits. 
 
 " I found in them all the most benevolent and heartiest 
 love united with the simplicity and openness of the truest 
 innocence ; extraordinary culture, with indeed a too hum- 
 ble unpretendingness ; the most earnest interest for all 
 that was elevated, with the most cheerful good-humor 
 and love of pleasantry and wit ; a simple manner of liv- 
 ing, and ignorance of fashionable luxuries, but the hap- 
 piest contentment, with the truest hospitality. A deep 
 penetration and knowledge of life, united with the most 
 childlike purity of heart, that had no eye for the low or 
 tlie impure ; but unsuspicious, they confided in the best, 
 and received as they gave, without distrust. All this 
 intellect and love was clothed in the unstudied exterior 
 of a graceful form." To add to this charming picture of 
 his family, there was the deepest reverence for the hus- 
 band and father, with the freest and most independent 
 intercourse with him. In proof of this, there is a letter 
 from the eldest daughter, Emelia. 
 
 " .... I love to represent the dear friendly man, with 
 brown study-coat and socks hanging down, as he entered 
 our mother's chamber the first thing in the morning to 
 greet her. The hound springs on before him, and the 
 children hang about him, and seek, when he leaves the
 
 372 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 room, to thrust their little feet into the slippers behind, 
 when he raises his feet a little, so as to hang on him more 
 securely. One springs before (at that time my departed 
 brother lived), the other two hang on his coat-skirts until 
 he reaches his own chamber-door ; where all leave him, 
 for only the dog must enter there. 
 
 " When ^e were very small, we lived in a two-story 
 house ; my father worked above, in tlie attic. We crept 
 on our hands and feet over the stairs, and hammered on 
 the door till the father himself arose and opened it, and, 
 after our noisy ingress, closed it again, — then he took 
 from an old chest a trumpet and a fife, with which we 
 made noisy music wliile he continued writing. We ven- 
 tured in again many times in the day to play with a 
 squirrel that he had at that time, and that in the even- 
 ing he took out with him in his pocket to the Harmony, 
 and it always made one of the family circle. 
 
 " He had, usually, animals that he tamed about him. 
 Sometimes a mouse : then a great garden-spider, that he 
 kept in a paper box with a glass top. There was a little 
 door beneath, by which he could feed his prisoner with 
 dead flies. In the autumn he collected the winter food 
 for his little tree-frog and his tame spider. 
 
 " The father was good to everything : he could not bear 
 to witness the least pain, not even in the lowest animal. 
 Thus, he never went out mthout opening the cage of his 
 canary-birds, to indemnify the poor animals, who would 
 be melancholy in his absence. He took at one time the 
 most sedulous care of a dog, who came in one evening 
 after tlie loss of the poor dead Alert, as he knew that in 
 the morning he should exchange him for another, and he 
 would have no opportunity to feed him again. You will 
 smile at the connection, but he did the same for a depart-
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 373 
 
 ing servant-maid : providing everything for her conven- 
 ience the day before, and delighting the poor good-for- 
 nothing girl in the most unusual degree. 
 
 " The children were permitted all sorts of practical 
 jokes towards him. ' Father, dance once,' then he would 
 make some leaps ; or he must speak French, in which he 
 placed wonderful value on the nasal sound, which no one 
 made as well as he. It sounded indeed curiously, and 
 made my mother laugh. 
 
 " In the twilight he told us stories ; or spake of God, 
 and other worlds ; or he would tell us of our grandfather, 
 and other splendid things. We ran to gain the wager, 
 "which of us should get nearest to him on the sofa. The 
 old money-box, hooped with iron, with a hole in the cover, 
 that two mice might conveniently pass through, was the 
 stepping-stone by which we jumped over the back of the 
 sofa ; for in front it was difficult to press between the 
 table and the repertory for papers. We all three crowd- 
 ed between the back of the sofa and the father's out- 
 stretched legs ; above, at his head, lay the sleeping dog. 
 At last, when we had pressed our limbs into the most 
 inconvenient postures, the story began. 
 
 " The father knew how to create for himself many 
 little pleasures. Thus, he made all the boxes for his 
 tame animals, after his half-hour's nap in the afternoon. 
 It was a special satisfaction to him to prepare ink, which 
 he did much oftener than was necessary, for Otto wrote 
 long years after with the rejected part. He could never 
 wait to perfect it ; but tried it an hour after it was made. 
 If it was already black, he would come joyfully to us and 
 say, ' Now if it is black already, what will it be to-mor- 
 row or after fourteen days ?'.... 
 
 " The mere thought of destruction was painful to him,
 
 374 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 especially the loss of the woi-k of man's mind. He never 
 burnt a letter ; yes, he treasured even the most insignifi- 
 cant. ' All loss of life,' he said, ' may be restored again, 
 but the creations of these heads, these hearts, never ! 
 The name should be erased, but the soul tliat speaks 
 its most intimate sentiments in letters, should live?' He 
 had also thick books written full of the remarks and the 
 habits and peculiarities of his children. He rose often 
 from his work and looked round to see how it was with 
 us, but any inteiTuption from without was very displeas- 
 ing. He was very unwilling to receive visits in the 
 moi'ning houi's. 
 
 " At meals he was very cheerful, and listened to every- 
 thing we told him with the greatest sympathy, and always 
 made something out of the smallest relation ; so that the 
 narrator was always wiser for what he liad said. 
 
 " In eating and drinking he was extremely moderate. 
 He never gave us direct instruction, and yet he taught 
 us always. Our evening table he called a French table 
 d'hote, that he furnished with twelve dishes taken from 
 the arts and sciences. We tasted of all without being 
 satiated with any, and we all ventured to utter any joke 
 to the father about himself or his entertainment. 
 
 " His punishments for us girls were rather passive than 
 active ; they consisted in refusing some request, or in a 
 severe word ; but my brother sometimes received corporal 
 punishment. My father would say, * Max, this afternoon, 
 at three o'clock, come to me to receive your whipping.' 
 He went punctually, and suffered it without a sound. 
 
 " Our principal festival was Christmas, and our fatlier 
 l)egan early to look after the sacred appearance of the 
 present-giving Ghristkindlein. Fourteen days before he 
 would suffer some little light to creep through. If we
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 375 
 
 had been very good in the day, when he came home in 
 the evening from the Harmony, he would bring us some 
 little present, and say, ' To-day, good children, I went 
 into the garden of the Harmony, and as I looked toward 
 heaven there came a rose-red cloud before me, and there 
 sat the Christhindlein ; and as you have been good to-day, 
 he sent you this.' * Christmas week he went himself to 
 the fair, and when we saw him coming back, and the 
 angles and protuberances of his cloak betraying what he 
 wished to conceal in its folds, we ran down the steps and 
 would try to hang on him. Then he would cry out, art- 
 fully feigning anger, ' Touch me at your peril ! ' 
 
 " When the evening came, as soon as it was twilight, 
 we must all withdraw, my mother and all. He arranged 
 everything himself; and when the tree was lighted we 
 were recalled, and then we could not be gay enough to 
 satisfy him. He wished to educate us with the frugality 
 with which fate reconciled him in his childhood. Thus 
 he never gave us pocket-money ; but on the three domes- 
 tic fair-days in Bayreuth he gave each of us three kreut- 
 zers ; f later it rose to six, and a short time before my 
 fii-st communion I received a four-and-twenty kreutzer- 
 piece. 
 
 " Last year I and my sister received a dollar ; but it 
 might as well have been thrown away. I learnt with 
 great difficulty the use of money ; and if, as I know not 
 who asserts, a thousand angels can sit on the point of a 
 needle, so we founded a thousand plans upon our dollar. 
 But they, with it, vanished in the air. 
 
 '■'■ I will relate only two little things more. First, how 
 
 * The reader will recollect how dear this illusion of German chil- 
 dren was to Jean Paul, in his own childhood. — Tr. 
 t A kreutzer is about a penny, or one cent and a half.
 
 376 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 my father assisted the poor gardeners, who belonged to 
 the garden of the Harmony, where he wrote. He always 
 gave them five guilders * at once, from which the Frau 
 must bring one back at the end of the month to show 
 him ; to this he would add a sechzer (six kreutzers) in- 
 terest, as he called it. 
 
 " Once more, — will it weary you if I relate, that he 
 kept an empty toilet-box, in Avhich there were little holes 
 for penny and twopenny pieces, and that, like Swift, when 
 he went to walk, he carried these small pieces in the left 
 waistcoat pocket, to give to the poor people ? " 
 
 * A gilder, or florin, is about forty cents. The value of these coins 
 is nominah They vary greatly in the different states of Germany.
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 ' Introduction to Esthetics." — " Freedom Pamphlet." — " Le- 
 VAN.\." — Richter's View of Napoleon. — Comic Works. — 
 Letter to General Bernadotte. 
 
 HE Introduction to Esthetics was ^ p jgo5 
 the first book published after the ^t. 42. 
 Flegeljahre. This is apparently a scientifi- 
 cally critical work, but is not free from the 
 personality that characterizes all the productions of Jean 
 Paul. It is only fragmentary. It makes no pretension 
 to a complete theory of the beautiful in art, and can 
 therefore lead to no serious errors ; but it resembles all 
 the other works of this author, which receive their worth 
 and significance from one another, and can be thoroughly 
 understood only through each other and through a knowl- 
 edge of their author ; thus this work can only be fully 
 understood through the peculiarities of the others, and 
 they through this. It is remarkable as closing with an 
 eloquent eulogy of Herder, who died while it was in 
 preparation. 
 
 As it would exceed the limits of this work to attempt 
 an analysis of it, I mention it only as the cause of the 
 loss of the Canonicqte, formerly promised to Paul by the 
 king of Prussia. It was dedicated by permission to the 
 Duke Aemel von Gotha, a prince who had always shown
 
 378 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 a singular friendsliip for Richter, and delighted in liis 
 society. This prince had raised himself much above the 
 conventionalisms of his own rank, and in his letters to 
 Paul laughed at the pedantry of court ceremonies.* 
 
 In his dedication, Paul mentioned and praise^d the 
 hitherto unknown poetical productions of the Duke, and 
 the dedication is accidentally so worded as if the Duke 
 had, although he had not, pre^aously seen it. All this 
 appeared to the dean of the philosophical faculty at Jena 
 indiscreet, and he refused his imprimatur to tiie publica- 
 tion. 
 
 Richter was deeply olFended at this pretended guar- 
 dianship of himself and his princely friend. He expe- 
 rienced, for the first time, the despotism of the censure of 
 the press ; he was frightened at the desolation it threat- 
 ened to carry into the kingdom of the mind, and he de- 
 termined to make a bold appeal against this instrument 
 of tyranny. He obtained permission of the Duke to print 
 the whole history of the affair, together with all their 
 previous correspondence ; the Prince refusing to soften or 
 repress any of the cynical or satirical remarks in the 
 letters relative to his own cast. 
 
 At the end of three weeks this protest against the cen- 
 sure of the press, together with the Duke of Gotha's let- 
 ters, was published under the protection of the noble 
 prince Dalberg, and under tlie name of the Freylieitshnch- 
 Jein, — " Freedom's Pamplilet." A step like this, that no 
 other literary character would have ventured upon, oould 
 not fail to excite the utmost attention in Germany. But 
 the increasing political storms of the period, and the dark- 
 
 * He was one of the most genial and wittiest princes of the time, 
 who raised himself with wonderful boldness above the prejudices of 
 his rank.
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 379 
 
 ening atmosphere, turned all minds to the critical situation 
 of affairs, and Richter lost all the gratitude and reward 
 of his courageous patriotism, except that which he always 
 carried in his own breast, — an ardent love and devotion 
 to freedom. 
 
 Soon after, tliere w^as a festival in Wunsiedel, to cele- 
 brate a visit from the king and queen of Prussia, and 
 Richter, at the request of Hardenburg, prepared a mu- 
 sical entertainment, for which he wi'ote his first verses. 
 There were also present at this festival one or two of the 
 sister Graces to whom he had dedicated his Titan, and 
 Richter took this opportunity to remind their majesties 
 of the promised prebend, and learnt with astonishment 
 that, since the publication of the Freyheitshuchlein, the 
 king did not intend to recollect his promise. 
 
 The admirers of Jean Paul must rejoice that he was 
 not bound to the suppression of any opinion by holding 
 office under any prince. He was completely independent 
 of everything but his conscience. It is impossible for us 
 in this country to understand the conventionalisms of so- 
 ciety in the old, aristocratic countries, or the wide differ- 
 ences of rank that place a gulf between a literary man 
 and a prince : to us, the republican or democratic pride 
 of wealth, that enables a vulgar soul to assume the atti- 
 tude of patronage to a man of genius, would be f;ir more 
 intolerable than the generous pride of ancestry in a man 
 or of nobilit}^ in a woman ; a woman who might also re- 
 ceive the homage of a man of genius for her accomplished 
 manners or her refined and feminine dignity. 
 
 We learn from the literature of the old countries, that 
 nobility has always stooped to cherish genius ; and has 
 sometimes, as Leonora, Tasso, betrayed it ; and that in 
 the middle ranks of life there is an indifference to talent
 
 380 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 without wealth, that does not admit it to such distinction 
 as it receives with us. 
 
 The poet seems to be " the aristocrat of the world," 
 looking always to the shining summits of life ; but, to use 
 Paul's comparison, " needing to be cherished, like the 
 canary-bird, with soft, warm hands before he can be made 
 to sing." 
 
 Paul's nephew, speaking of this subject, says : " There 
 was no German poet so favored by the highest nobility, 
 and so coldly treated by the citizens as Jean Paul ; while 
 the latter, for his contests for tliera in literature and 
 politics, not only gave him not the smallest thanks, but 
 considered themselves injured by his independence and 
 outward contempt of forms ; and slandered him as an 
 original or laughed at him as an oddity ; the nobility, 
 especially princes, treated him with tenderness and atten- 
 tion. They were pleased that he never bowed low to 
 them,* and permitted him all sorts of freedom in dress, 
 and peculiar openness and unreserve in his conversation 
 with them. As he was infinitely surprised at this par- 
 tiality for so democratic a poet, and sometimes imagined 
 tliat Ihrougli his representations he had converted legiti- 
 viacy to liberal opinions, he therefore talked openly, not 
 from social vanity, but to do tlicm honor, of his intimate 
 relations with exalted men and women. This often 
 brought him into a false position with people of his own 
 rank, and impaired the influence of his generous and 
 lil)eral opinions." 
 
 * " Paul never bent liis back, but had a wholly peculiar way of 
 bowing. He nodded only the head; and this to the his;hest as to the 
 lowest, in a manner so noble and amiable, while he at the same time 
 made a greeting gesture with the right hand, that expressed as much 
 respect as good-humor and friendliness."
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 381 
 
 Many anecdotes are told in his biography of Jean 
 Paul's independence in his intercourse with the nobility, 
 — such as his presenting himself at a particular door of 
 the Weimar theatre, where none were entitled to enter 
 who were not also entitled to wear a sword. Paul an- 
 swered, " that he should feel himself as much degraded 
 by putting on a sword as others were by having it taken 
 off" ; and he was permitted to pass, etc. 
 
 To return from this digi'ession. Richter, through his 
 literary labors, had hitherto been completely independent. 
 He had obtained for the FlegeJjahre that generous pub- 
 lisher Cotta, who had paid him seven louis d'ors a sheet ; * 
 and the popularity w^iich he had lost by the Titan was 
 completely regained by this work. But at this time, 
 when he possessed more than ever the favor of the pub- 
 lic, the whole commerce of Germany, through the wars 
 of Napoleon, and especially the book-trade, was thrown 
 into trouble and confusion ; this, added to the diminished 
 resources of all classes, which disinclined them to the 
 purchase of large works, diminished also the resources of 
 our Richter, at the same moment that his family was 
 increased by the birth of another daughter. His limited 
 income was to be regretted, because he was obliged, for 
 the sake of providing immediate small sums for the sup- 
 port of his family, to divide and weaken his powers, in 
 the production of short essays, tales, and other contribu- 
 tions to the ephemeral literature, the fashionable annuals, 
 and ladies' almanacs of the period. 
 
 * Reckoning a louis d'or at four dollars, which is the nominal value, 
 amounts to twenty-eight dollars a sheet. It was extremely important 
 for Richter to fall into the hands of an honest publisher; for, through 
 simplicity or ignorance, he never specified the number of copies of any 
 of his works. The printers, therefore, printed an unlimited number; 
 and this is the reason his works reached so few editions during his life.
 
 382 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 To the widowed sister of his wife, Minna Spazier, who 
 supported her young family by editing an ahnanac for 
 ladies, and to whom he sent many contributions, he 
 wrote, " that it was easier for him to write a volume 
 than a sheet, and that he could bear any limitation 
 better than an intellectual one." In this same 'letter, 
 he says, in answer to the request of the sister that 
 Caroline would v/rite something for her Almanac, " Cai'- 
 oline is a jDoet in her life, and by that very life rather 
 than upon paper and for the public." 
 
 Paul's third child, a daughter, was named for his dear- 
 est friend, softening Otto into the pretty feminine name 
 of Odilia. 
 
 The unfolding and culture of all that was good and 
 beautiful in his children was one of the most delightful 
 employments of Richter. He knew that a better future 
 was only to be acquired by a better youth, and he em- 
 ployed himself in writing Levana, his work upon edu- 
 cation, 
 
 A critic says, that " in no other of his works is the 
 whole man, in his inward and outward being, and in his 
 relations with, and reciprocal dependencies on, the out- 
 ward world, so unfolded as In this. As is the case with 
 all his other works, they reflect light upon this, and they 
 also are better understood if read by the light derived 
 fi'om this." 
 
 Perhaps it will be an objection to this work, especially 
 in so practical an age and country as this, that tlie ten- 
 dency of Richter's system of education is, to make all 
 men and women, if not actually writers and poets, yet 
 supremely thinking and spiritual beings. The tendency 
 is to withdraw too much talent from actual and practical 
 life, and direct it to speculative and intellectual pursuits.
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 385 
 
 One of the marked peculiarities of Richter was, that in 
 actual life he was the most practical of men, suffering 
 none of the minutiaj that could influence the convenience 
 of others to escape him, but in his instructions all was 
 spiritual and transcendental. . 
 
 No writer upon education has thrown so much light 
 upon the holy and hidden impulses of the child's soul; 
 no one has written with such reverence of the childish 
 nature, and the necessity in a teacher of respecting the 
 indwiduaUty of the child ; and not, as has been too much 
 the practice, measuring all upon the same Procrustes' 
 bed. It is in fact a commentary upon those words of the 
 Saviour, " Suffer little children to come unto me, for of 
 such is the kingdom of heaven," and no less of the other 
 verse, " in my father's house are many mansions," some 
 prepared for angelic minds, and others for those of an 
 humbler order, but all are filled. 
 
 That which had distinguished all his works was even 
 more apparent in this, a singulai- knowledge of the female 
 heart in its deepest and most delicate folds. This he had 
 gained in his Hofer solitude, where he lived almost ex- 
 clusively with women, and in his subsequent correspond- 
 ence with his female friends. Perhaps there never was 
 a writer to whom women so completely surrendered their 
 confidence. He understood the false position in which 
 women are placed in some parts of the civilized world, 
 and he had on tiiat account more leniency for their vices 
 and weaknesses than for the other sex. 
 
 Richter strove in this work to return to a simplicity 
 of expression, and plain, lucid style of writing, which he 
 had long since abandoned, but which he tliought better 
 adapted to the persons he wished now to benefit; and 
 also in order to explain all scientific and too learned illus-
 
 384 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 trations, he published at the same time a Lexicon fur 
 Frauen, — '' Lexicon for Ladies." 
 
 Although the passages are innumerable in Jean Paul's 
 works where he speaks of women Avith tenderness and 
 respect, and, for the above-mentioned reason, treats them 
 with leniency, yet it is impossible to surpass the^'bitter 
 contempt, the concentrated scorn, with which he speaks 
 of those women who have thrown off the restraints of 
 their sex, or of those cold and selfish coquettes, " whose 
 hearts have become as hard within their breasts as the 
 stones that glitter on the outside." 
 
 This book, the Levana, was more favorably received 
 than any book he had ever published. The sympathy 
 was so universal that the whole of the edition was sold 
 during the disastrous year of 1807. Even Goethe forgot 
 his hostility to the author ; and seeing an extract from the 
 work, wrote to a friend, " I know not how to say good 
 enough of this extract from Levana, and desire with im- 
 patience the whole work." 
 
 About two weeks after the publication of Letmna oc- 
 curred the battle of Jena, and the last hopes for Ger- 
 many (of those who placed their hopes upon the resist- 
 ance of Prussia) failed; and that remarkable time began 
 when the greater part of the nation suffered a complete 
 prostration before the preponderance of the genius of 
 Napoleon. 
 
 It is difficult to gather from Richter's biographers the 
 precise view he took, at this time, of the aims of Napo- 
 leon. We find this passage in his journal. " Did I cer- 
 tainly know," he wrote in 1805, " that Napoleon was in 
 the wrong, and as certainly all just means of resistance 
 against him, ah ! it were easy to venture even life against 
 him with the pen. But this uncertainty fearfully cripples
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 385 
 
 the courage of the cosmopolitan, who must discern his 
 aims through their consequences. This it is that per- 
 plexes and obstructs, and is the reason that, among so 
 many thousand intricacies and involvements of human 
 affairs, no sacrificing soul finds it easy to give his life to 
 discover the right. The moral principle, that the inten- 
 tion, the will, is everything, helps not here, for we need 
 the discernment to discover the will." That Richter be- 
 lieved ?d first in the sincerity of Napoleon appears from 
 his writing to Otto upon being informed of his assuming 
 tlie diadem. " Who has not gnashed his teeth upon hear- 
 ing of his Imperial Majesty in France? Yet I do not 
 hate Bonaparte as much as I despise the French; and 
 Goethe was more far-sighted than half the world ; for in 
 the beginning of the revolution he despised them as much 
 as at the end." 
 
 But even at the confederation of the Rhine, Richter 
 did not share the complete prostration that involved the 
 rest of the nation. " His prophetic feeling told him at 
 that time, what better experience has taught the nations 
 of Europe, that all must unite in the common cause of 
 freedom ; and that one without the rest could not ad- 
 vance in the road to civilization and better government." 
 He perhaps thought that Napoleon, by destroying some 
 of the old and rotting institutions, and clearing away the 
 rubbish, was preparing the way for tliQ advancement of 
 light and freedom, and that Austria, who would imprison 
 her subjects forever in spiritual darkness, deserved no 
 support from his pen. He held the depression of the 
 hopes and spirits of the people as one of the greatest 
 evils of the time ; and he sought to enliven and keep 
 up their courage by writings purely comic, that had no 
 other aim than to contribute to their cheei-fulness. These 
 17 T
 
 386 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 were the Circular Letter of Attila Sckmelzle, and Ihe 
 Sathjourney of Dr. Katzenhurger, both" infinitely rich 
 in purely comic scenes. They were received with inex- 
 pressible delight by the whole nation, and contributed to 
 raise the spirits of the people. Richter also contributed 
 his share to the revival, at this time, of the old German 
 or Volks literature. It is well known that apprehensions 
 were felt of the too great preponderance of the French 
 in the literature of the time. The exertions of Bren- 
 tano, Arnim, and Von der Hogen, with whom Tieck 
 and the Sclilegels joined, arose from this cause. They 
 published anew the Niehelungenlied, the Knabens Wun- 
 derhorn, and went even to the bringing out of Fouque's 
 extravagances, and to complete caricature in his later 
 works. 
 
 The war had yet no other immediately disastrous 
 consequences for Richter than that of withdrawing his 
 friend Otto from his family and neighborhood. He had 
 been appointed quartermaster to Prince William of Prus- 
 sia, and accompanied the army so that the correspondence 
 of the friends was renewed, altliough with the difficulty 
 of transmitting letters through a country occupied with 
 troops. But in the autumn of 1806 the French troops 
 were stationed in Bayreuth, and Richter must have suf- 
 fered a very inconvenient interruption of his peaceful 
 labors, had two or three officers, as was usual in such 
 circumstances, been quartered in his quiet and orderly 
 dwelling. He picked up, therefore, his former knowledge 
 of French, and wrote the following letter to General 
 Bernadotte.
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 387 
 
 JEAN PAUL AU GENERAL BERNADOTTE. 
 
 Quatre Verites, deux Esperances et une Demande. 
 Ve'ritc's. 
 
 Premiere. Vous, Monseigneur, n'aves du triste dieu 
 Mars, que la valeur ; et vous aimes les homines et les 
 lettres autant, que la gloire. 
 
 Seconde. Moi, je suis auteur — je vis pour ecrire et 
 j'^cris pour vivre — ma plume nourrit ma femme, trois 
 enfans, un chien, un oiseau, et moi-meme. C'est pourquoi 
 que ce seroit appauvrir le pauvre que d'y ajouter un etre 
 vivant et mangeant de plus. 
 
 Troisieme. La Muse veut de la solitude, et la guerre 
 ou la victoire veut (votre Altesse le sait) tout I'Europe. 
 
 Quatrieme. La nation Frangoise a toujoiu'S honore 
 les lettres, qui Tout honore h. leur tour — sa gloire s'ache- 
 vant par la valeur s'est commencee par les lettres — 
 I'Erapereur Napoleon a laisse Gottingen et Heidelberg 
 aux Muses. 
 
 Esp&ances. 
 
 L J'espere que la piece ci-jointe, quoiqu'elle flatte plus 
 qu'elle ne peint, prouvera h. votre Altesse, que j'ai obtenu 
 quelques suffrages de ma nation pour mes oeuvres roman- 
 tiques, philosophiques et morales. 
 
 11. J'espere, qu'en cas de gueiTe ma maison, ou plustOt 
 mon etude sera exemte de la charge d'avoir des troupes 
 en quartier et qu'elle demeurera I'asyle de ma Muse. 
 
 Demande. 
 J'implore Thumanit^ de votre Altesse h. rdaliser ces 
 esperances, apres les avoir pardonn^es. Qu'une ligne de 
 votre main veuille m'assurer la paix, que meritent la
 
 388 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 po^sie et la philosophie, parce qu'elles la propagent. La 
 main vaillante verse le sang ; la main bienfaisante tarit 
 les larmes ; mais vous aves les deux mains. 
 
 Je suis, Monseigneur, avec le respect le plus profond 
 Votre Altesse 
 
 tres-humble serviteur, 
 
 JEAN PAUL FR. RICHTER. 
 
 Richter thus disarmed his enemies : he was permitted 
 to pursue his labors without interruption, and soon pro- 
 duced the comic works already mentioned. By his wit 
 he escaped, also, another unjust imposition. He had been 
 taxed, together with the capitalists of Bayreuth, to sup- 
 port the war. He wrote to the minister, and asked " if 
 one who had only money enough for his daily wants, and 
 who was indebted to Bayreuth for nothing but beer and 
 ennui, could be reckoned a capitalist, — that he would 
 pay a just, although he would deny an unjust demand, if 
 it were only four groschen, for all was indifferent to him 
 except justice." The minister answered, " That, as the 
 exact tariff could not be fixed, thought was free from con- 
 tribution," and invited Richter to dine with him. 
 
 We have seen that Richter did not, in the darkest 
 times, share the universal depression of his country ; a 
 prophetic insight into the future enabled him to penetrate 
 the cloud, and to see that an eclipse was not the end of all 
 things. In all his political writings, an unwavering hope, 
 like the voice and guaranty of Providence, leads him 
 through that dark time. But when roused, as by the 
 voice of a trumpet, all Germany arose against the power 
 of Napoleon, no one entered with word and deed more 
 warmly into the holy cause than Jean Paul. In his 
 Dawiv'ng for Germany, he did not limit himself to
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 389 
 
 prophesying from the whole course of history a better 
 future for Germany, or to reminding the nation of its 
 power and advantages ; he strove to destroy that op- 
 pressive feeling of the preponderance of the French, 
 which had extended to all ranks ; that eye and spirit- 
 blinding belief in the star of Napoleon, that weighed 
 with almost Turkish fatality upon the people. With a 
 courage that bordered on rashness, he endeavored to con- 
 fine the admiration of Napoleon within its just limits. 
 He often asked the question, " What, then, does a great 
 conqueror deserve ? " He placed his merit beneath the 
 science of a Newton, the courage of a Socrates or a Cato, 
 and the admirable wisdom of the true republicans of all 
 time, etc. 
 
 And this he ventured to write and publish, while he 
 owed his freedom in his own house to the French marshal 
 Davoust. 
 
 How gloriously is he contrasted with another great 
 poet of the time, who was living joyously in retirement, 
 drinking Cape wine, busy with his optics, and studying 
 osteology, for which " there could not be a better oppor- 
 tunity, for every battle-field of his country was sown with 
 preparations." * 
 
 * Knebel wrote to Richter, after the battle of Jena: " Goethe sent 
 me, in my necessity, a couple of flasks of Cape wine, that came at the 
 exact time to a man that the French had wholly drank dry. Ee was 
 the whole time busy with his optics. We study here, under his in- 
 sti-uction, osteology, for which it is an excellent time, as every field is 
 sown with preparations."
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 Pecuniary Embarrassments. — Prince Dalberg. — Paul re- 
 ceives A SMALL Pension. — Extract from Varnhagen von 
 Ensk's Memoirs. 
 
 IICHTER at this time suffered some a. d. 1808, 
 anxiety on account of his diminished 
 pecuniary resources. The book concerns of 
 tlie time were becoming every day more unfa- 
 voral)le, and pressed heavily upon authors. A great 
 work required from him concentrated attention, leisure, 
 and quiet thought ; neither of which could he command, 
 feeling, as he did, decj^ sympathy with the troubles of his 
 country ; neither would the booksellers venture upon any 
 large work ; he was obliged, therefore, to break down and 
 divide his powers in the production of many of the 
 ephemeral essays of the day. At this time and talent 
 consuming employment he worked so incessantly that at 
 last his firm health was shaken,* and immediate rest or 
 recreation became absolutely requisite. 
 
 * Jean Paul's contributions to the periodical literature of the day 
 fill several volumes of his collected works. The titles of sonic of these 
 contributions sire, — " Upon the Advantages of being Deaf in one Ear " ; 
 ".June Night Thoughts"; "The Dream of a Madman ";" Marriage 
 Looking-Glasses "; " The Pleasure we fuel in the Joj-s of Children "; 
 " Fragments from my Art of always being Cheerful " ; " Upon the 
 Evergreen of our Feelings," and many reviews of modern works.
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 391 
 
 He was attacked with a tertian fever, that obliged him 
 to give up writing every third day. " On that day," he 
 says, " he read philosophy, and was able to forget the 
 ague fit when the shaking would permit him to hold 
 the book." 
 
 Richter had dedicated his Peace Sermons to Carl von 
 Dalberg,* Prince Primate of the Confederation of the 
 Rhine. In this dedication he hinted so delicately at his 
 poverty that the Prince, in an extremely gracious answer, 
 was obliged to ask liim to declare his wishes. 
 
 Richter answered : " An author of more than forty 
 volumes, an orphan, who has lived more for than hy the 
 sciences, ventures now, after three years' war, the birth 
 of three children, and the failure of three of his book- 
 sellers, to wish for a winter pension to enable him to 
 recover his health through more reading and less 
 writing." 
 
 It was not in the Prince's power to do more at the mo- 
 ment than to send Jean Paul a considerable present, with 
 a most kind and courteous letter. But early in the fol- 
 lowing year he surprised him with a pension of a thou- 
 sand guilders (four hundred dollars), which he paid out 
 of his private purse until 1811, when the payment of the 
 same sura was placed on the common pension fund of 
 Bavaria. 
 
 * This prince is mentioned so often, that it should be known that 
 he was one of the most generous noblemen of the time, and a munifi- 
 cent patron of literature. He was Archbishop of Ratisbon and Bishop 
 of Worms, and is the same Prince Bishop tliat Bcitine Brentano men- 
 tions so playfully and so pleasantly in Goethe's Correspondence with a 
 Child. " In 1813 he voluntarily resigned all his possessions as a sover- 
 eign prince, retaining only his ecclesiastical dignity, and retired to 
 private life. He afterwards devoted himself to letters, and published 
 many moral and legal treatises." It was a brother of this prince who 
 was Schiller's first patron. — Conversations Lex.
 
 392 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 A letter from Caroline Herder, written about this time, 
 precedes for only a few months her own death. * 
 
 " May, 1809. 
 
 " Beloved, unforgotten friend, our hearts fly to meet you 
 and God, and the Prince Primas. Thus are our warmest 
 wishes at last fulfilled. Dalberg is your and our bene- 
 factor. God bless him ! O friend ! how is my heart 
 moved. I am happy with you, with your Caroline, and 
 
 your children In your last, the Flegeljahre, you 
 
 have overpowered me with new spiritual treasures, with 
 a thousand joys, new joys, a newer and happier humor. 
 Sketcher of man's and God's world ! Florist ! who 
 from the old seed, in a happy moment, makes a thou- 
 sand-fold new flowei-3 to blossom. O, what an inex- 
 pressible good for me is this brilliant exchange of 
 smiles and tears ! . . . . Do you remain in BajTCuth, or 
 go to Frankfort? We might create a Paradisaic place 
 for you ; yet wherever you are, your home is your Par- 
 adise." 
 
 Richter was now in comparatively happy circumstances. 
 With their simple habits, and his Caroline's good economy 
 and watchfulness, four hundred dollars, in addition to his 
 daily earnings, made them rich. 
 
 A letter to Otto, who was separated from him by the 
 war, is characteristic of this period. 
 
 " . . . . How often this winter have I wished that you 
 could have met me in the street, or in the Harmony, then 
 you would have seen my little stjiiirrel upon my slioulder, 
 who bites no longer. I ventured to carry him in my 
 pocket when I held Dobineck's son before the baptism 
 font ; but I was obliged to grasp him several times, and 
 wind him in my handkerchief; for if, while I held the
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 393 
 
 blessed little godson in my arras, the rogne had crept 
 «pon my shoulder, there would have been a universal 
 disturbance of the baptism, and everything serious. At 
 this moment the little fellow sleeps upon my sofa. 
 
 " Had it not been for the war, my Levana would have 
 come to a second edition, — wonderful ! For none of my 
 books have I so much feared the judgment of the public, 
 and of fate ; as much as I hoped, by the Titan, — but the 
 public always surprises one so, at least unpleasantly. My 
 inmost being remains strong, dry, cold ! The spring, with 
 all its starry heaven, has not melted me. I would remain 
 strong and cold, even till the great world's game of Europe 
 is won. Opposition only spurs me on, to work, to work 
 with the best, and with the utmost of my powers for the 
 improvement of all What time destroys these exer- 
 tions will restore. If the devils are a majority, yet the 
 angels are a larger, — yes, I say a larger, for in human 
 nature ten angels are worth a hundred devils : were it not 
 so, the excess of weak, foolish, and bad would long since 
 have sunk humanity instead of saving it 
 
 " .... I rejoice even now at your future joy over my 
 three unlike, but unspoilt rose-buds of children, — and it 
 is difficult to say which will be your favorite. Ah, were 
 you here ! and yet I cannot desire it, as you are now 
 building your future fortune. You have, on account of 
 your knowledge and desert, the greater claims. This war 
 should give you full confidence in the friendly genius that 
 goes with you through life. Your rare fortune has re- 
 joiced, but not surprised me, and had you anything of my 
 bold grasp into life, you would have had it before. I am 
 curious whether you will appear to me like a man of the 
 world when I see you again. I should think all these 
 grand persons would make you a little bold. My wife 
 17*
 
 394 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 greets you heartily, and we both wish you the balsam and 
 nourishment of joy." 
 
 At this period, 1808, Richter received a visit from HeiT 
 Varnhagen von Ense. He has left in his memoirs such a 
 pleasant account of him and his family, that the^reader 
 will pardon me for introducing it here. 
 
 "This forenoon (it was the 23d October), I went to 
 Jean Paul's. A pleasant, kindly, inquisitive woman, who 
 had opened the door to me, I at once recognized for Jean 
 Paul's wife by her likeness to her sister. A child was 
 sent off to call its father. He came directly ; he had 
 been forewarned of my visit by letters from Berlin and 
 Leipzig, and received me with great kindness. 
 
 " First of all I had to tell him what I was charged with 
 in the shape of messages, then whatsoever I could tell in 
 any way about his Berlin friends. He willingly remem- 
 bered the time he had lived in Berlin, as JNIarcus Herz's 
 neighbor, in Leder's house, where I, seven years before, 
 had first seen him in the garden by the Spi'ce, with papers 
 in his hand, which it was privately whispered were leaves 
 of Hesperus. This talk about persons, and then still more 
 about literature growing out of that, set him fairly under 
 way, and soon he had more to impart than to inquire. 
 His conversation was throughout amiable and good-na- 
 tured, always full of meaning, but in quite simple tone 
 and expression. Though I knew beforehand that his wit 
 and humor belonged wholly to his pen, — that he could 
 hardly write the shortest note without these introducing 
 themselves, while on the contrary his oral utterance sel- 
 dom showed the like, — yet it struck me much, that, in 
 this continual movement and vivacity of mood to which 
 he yielded himself, I observed no trace of these qualities. 
 His demeanor otherwise was like his speaking ; nothing
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 395 
 
 forced, nothing studied, nothing that went beyond the 
 burgher tone. His courtesy was the free expression of 
 a kind heart ; his way and bearing were patriarchal, con- 
 siderate of the stranger, yet for himself too altogether 
 unconstrained. Neither in the animation to which some 
 word or topic would excite him was this fundamental 
 temper ever altered; nowhere did severity appear, no- 
 where any exhibiting of himself, any watching or spying 
 of his hearer ; everywhere kind-heartedness, free move- 
 ment of his somewhat loose-flowing nature's open course 
 for him, with a hundred transitions from one course to 
 the other, howsoever or whithersoever it seemed good to 
 him to go. At first he praised everything that was named 
 of our new appearances in literature ; and then, when we 
 came a little closer to the matter, there was blame enough 
 and to spare. So of Adam Miiller's Lectures, of Fried- 
 rich Schlegel, of Tieck, and others. He said German 
 writei'S ought to hold by the people, not by the upper 
 classes, among whom all was already dead and gone ; and 
 yet he had just been praising Adam Miiller, that he had 
 the gift of speaking a deep word to cultivated people of 
 the world. He is convinced that from the opening of the 
 old Indian world nothing is to be got for us, except the 
 adding of one other mode of poetry to the many modes 
 we have already, but no increase of ideas : and yet he 
 had just been celebrating Friedrich Schlegel's labors with 
 the Sanscrit, as if a new salvation were to issue out of 
 that. He was free to confess that a right Chi-istian in 
 these days, if not a Protestant one, was inconceivable to 
 him ; that changing from Protestantism to Catholicism 
 seemed a monstrous perversion ; and with this opinion 
 great hope had been expressed, a few minutes before, 
 that the Catholic spirit in Friedrich Schlegel, combined
 
 396 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 with the Indian, would produce muck good ! Of Schleier- 
 macher he spoke with respect ; signified, however, that he 
 did not relish his ' Plato ' greatly ; that in Jacobi's, in 
 Herder's, soaring flight of soul he traced far more of those 
 divine old sages than in the learned acumen of Schleier- 
 macher ; a deliverance which I could not let pass without 
 protest. Fichte, of whose 'Adch-esses to the German 
 Nation,' held in Berlin under the sound of French drums, 
 I had much to say, was not a favorite of his ; the decisive- 
 ness of that energy gave him uneasiness ; he said he could 
 only read Fichte as an exercise, ' gymnastically,' and that 
 with the purport of his philosophy he had now nothing 
 more to do. 
 
 " Jean Paul was called out, and I stayed awhile alone 
 with his wife. I had now to answer many new questions 
 about Berlin ; her interest in persons and things of her 
 native town was by no means sated with wliat she had 
 already heard. The lady pleased me exceedingly ; soft, 
 refined, acute, she united with the loveliest expression of 
 household goodness an air of higher breeding and deeper 
 insight than Jean Paul seemed to manifest. Yet in this 
 respect too she willingly held herself inferior, and looked 
 up to her gifted husband. It was apparent every way 
 that tlieir life together was a right happy one. Their 
 three children, a boy and two girls, are beautiful, healthy, 
 well-conditioned creatures. A boy, Max, of five years 
 old, is evidently the favorite of the father, who sees in him 
 a future hero. Indeed, he is perfectly strong and vigor- 
 ous, and also of distinguished beauty. Two girls, Emma 
 and Odilie, older and younger than the boy, looked very 
 amiable, and show by remarkable diversity of talent the 
 undoubted goodness of the parents. All three are com- 
 pletely unconstrained, free, and childUke. I had a hearty
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 397 
 
 pleasure in them ; they recalled other dear children to 
 my thoughts, whom I had lately been beside ! . . . . 
 
 " With continual copiousness, and in the best humor, 
 Jean Paul (we were now at table) expatiated on all 
 manner of objects. Among the rest, I had been charged 
 with a salutation from Rahel Levin to him, and the modest 
 question, ' Whether he remembered her still ? ' His face 
 beamed with joyful satisfaction : ' How could one forget 
 such a person ? ' cried he, impressively. ' That is a woman 
 alone of her kind : I liked her heartily well, and 'more 
 now than ever, as I gain in sense an apprehension to do 
 it ; she is the only woman in whom I have found genuine 
 humor, the one woman of th' world who had humor ! ' 
 He called me a lucky fellow to have such a friend ; and 
 asked, as if proving me and measuring my value, ' How I 
 had deserved that ? ' * 
 
 " Monday, October 24. 
 
 " Being invited, I went a second time to dine. Jean 
 Paul had just returned from a walk ; his wife, with one 
 of the children, was still out. We came upon his writ- 
 ings ; that questionable string with most authors, which 
 the one will not have you touch, which another will have 
 you keep jingling continually. He was here what I ex- 
 pected him to be ; free, unconstrained, good-natured, and 
 sincere with his whole heart. His ' Dream of a Madman,' 
 just published by Cotta, was what had led us upon this. 
 He said he could write such things at any time ; the mood 
 for it, when he was in health, lay in his own power ; he 
 did but seat himself at the harpischord, and fantasying for 
 a while on it in the wildest way, deliver himself over to 
 
 * Jean Paul did not think of M'de S^vign^, or did not give her pe- 
 culiarities the right name ; for what the French praise in her as natu- 
 ralness is exactly that which we call humor.
 
 398 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 the feeling of tlie moment, and then write his imaginings, 
 ■ — according to a certain predetermined course, indeed, 
 which, however, he woidd often aher as he went on. In 
 this kind he had once undertaken to write a ' Hell,' such 
 as mortal never heard of ; and a great deal of it is actually 
 done, hut not fit for print. Speaking of descriptive Com- 
 position, he also started as in fright when I ventured to 
 say that Goethe was less complete in this province ; he 
 reminded me of two passages in ' Werter,' which are 
 indeed among the finest descriptions. He said that to 
 describe any scene well the poet must make the bosom 
 of a man his camera obscura, and look at it through this, 
 
 then would he see it poetically 
 
 " The conversation turned on public occurrences, on 
 the condition of Germany, and the oppressive rule of 
 the French. To me discussions of that sort are usually 
 disagreeable ; but it was delightful to hear Jean Paul 
 express, on such occasion, his noble patriotic sentiments ; 
 and for the sake of this rock-island I willingly swam 
 through the empty tide of uncertain news and wavering 
 suppositions which environed it. "Wliat he said was deep, 
 , considerate, hearty, valiant, German to the marrow of the 
 bone. I had to tell him much ; of Napoleon, whom he 
 knew only by portraits ; of Joliannes von Miillcr ; of 
 Fichte, whom he now as a patriot admired cordially ; 
 of the Marquez de la Romana and his Spaniards, whom 
 I had seen in Hamburg. Jean Paul said he at no moment 
 doubted but the Germans, like the Spaniards, would one 
 day rise, and Prussia would avenge its disgrace, and free 
 the country ; he hoped his son would live to see it, and did 
 
 not deny that he was bringing him up for a soldier 
 
 " The two youngest children were asleep. I wished to 
 leave the dear creatures a remembrance of me, and placed
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 399 
 
 myself at the table and began to cut out some pictures 
 for them. When Jean Paul saw this little child's world 
 forming under his eyes, he was seized with the feeling 
 of childhood, called his wife with lively animation, and 
 waked the other children, and I was obliged to explain 
 minutely my work. In such conversation and business a 
 great part of the evening passed, and I felt myself com-" 
 pletely happy in the midst of this beautiful, pure family, 
 that already looked upon me as a friend. 
 
 " October 25. 
 
 " I stayed to supper, contrary to my purpose, having to 
 set out next morning early. The lady was so kind, and 
 Jean Paul himself so trustful and blithe, I could not with- 
 stand their entreaties. At the neat and well-furnished 
 table (reminding you that South Germany was now near) 
 the best humor reigned. Among other things we had a 
 good laugh at this, that Jean Paul offered me an intro- 
 duction to one of what he called his dearest friends in 
 Stuttgart, and then was obliged to give it up, having 
 irrevocably forgotten his name ! Of a more serious soi't 
 again was our conversation about Tieck, Friedrich and 
 Wilhelm Schlegel, and others of the romantic school. 
 He seemed in ill-humor with Tieck at the moment. Of 
 Goethe he said, ' Goethe is a consecrated head ; he has 
 a place of his own, high above us all.' We spoke of 
 Goethe afterwards for some time : Jean Paul with more 
 and more admiration, nay, with a sort of fear and awe- 
 struck reverence. 
 
 " Some beautiful fruit was brought in for dessert. On 
 a sudden Jean Paul started up, gave me his hand, and 
 said : ' Forgive me, I must go to bed ! Stay you here in 
 God's name, for it is still early, and chat with my wife ; 
 there is much to say between you, which my talking has
 
 400 
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 kept back. I am a Spiesshurger ' (of the club of Odd 
 Fellows), 'and my hour is come for sleep.' He took a 
 candle, and said good night. We parted with great cor- 
 diality, and the wish expressed on both sides that I might 
 stay at Bayreuth another time."
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 Domestic Letters. — Journey to Erlangen. — Journey to 
 
 NURNBERG. — JaCOBI. 
 
 A. D. 1811, 
 
 ^t. 48. 
 
 E pass over three quiet years, in 
 which no event of* importance oc- 
 curred. Through his pension, Paul's circum- 
 stances were easier, and a little journey to 
 Erlangen affords an opportunity for inserting a letter to 
 Caroline, which proves that, after eleven years of married 
 life, no flower had faded from their wreath of love and 
 happiness. 
 
 " Erlangen, June 6, 1811. 
 
 "My dear good Caroline: Like this beautiful 
 morning has your long-wished-for letter come to me. 
 Every word of it was welcome. Fortunately, I did not 
 receive it till the evening, when I long heart-breakingly 
 for you and the children. 
 
 " Max was on the way so tender, pleasant, and appar- 
 ently so contented, loving all, obeying all (he certainly 
 forgets nothing on a journey), and so good, that I began 
 to perceive that I could gather the fruit of the education 
 of my children, and how much better they really are 
 than they sometimes appear. He slept at night without 
 undressing, and without a bed-cover, like one dead ; and 
 in the morning he was lively, spirited, and gay. The 
 
 z
 
 402 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 thouglit that I must leave liim would not, the whole day, 
 go from my soid. 
 
 " The middle-aged Madam S. comes when I ring, and 
 is respectful and ready, and makes my coffee and bed as 
 I like tliem. The landlord, Toussaint, fulfils every wish, 
 so does the obliging Professor Mehmel. In the morning 
 heaven dwells in my solitary apartment, fuU only of 
 books, and I am as homelike, but more alone than at 
 Bayi-euth. I went into the Italian garden, that stands 
 open without key, and without kreutzers, on the day of 
 the great Pentecost church-consecration, which Otto can 
 paint for you without ink. This garden terrace is the 
 only throne of Nature in the beggarly environs of Er- 
 langen. This alone would frig;liten me from a residence 
 here, which they all wish to persuade me to. I am un- 
 usually well, and joke frequently in society 
 
 " I put by the pen, to sup better than usual. First a 
 
 morsel of cheese, then a morsel of dessert cake, — ah ! 
 
 sliced potatoes, where are ye ? For in a whole week, 
 
 none." 
 
 " June 12. 
 
 " My best ! how I long for a letter from thee ! Since 
 Sunday, for eight days, not a line ! This one cloud, 
 which is indeed broad enough, draws itself through my 
 blue heaven. Had I not since two months certain 
 grounds of consolation, or to-day, not a wonderful con- 
 fidence in my anticipations that ray present cheerfulness 
 does not indicate future misfortunes, I should become 
 fi^arful through your silence, — Heavens ! how much you 
 have to tell me, and formerly you were so industrious a 
 letter-writer ! Be joyful, good Caroline." 
 
 " June 14. 
 
 " At last I am happy without alloy, for I received to-
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 403 
 
 day thy long-desired letter. Take for every heart's word, 
 and heart's deed, in my absence, heart's thanks ! Last 
 Sunday I was properly frightened that I forgot your 
 birthday, and I found it in the calendar under the name 
 of Lucretia. After my return we will celebrate it on a 
 fixed day. If you gave attention, you will have seen 
 that the last week in May I wore your ring on the little 
 finger of my right hand. The heart should also have its 
 festivals.* I could be borne on the waves of society here, 
 for every one comes lovingly to me ; but I have so many 
 books before me that I keep myself solitary, — in the 
 evening, reading, and eating with my dog only. Either 
 the old, true, French wine, of which I drink daily a 
 quarter of a bottle, or the air, or very rarely a draft of 
 rosaliera, or the less work, or all together, make me more 
 healthy than I have been- for years. No thirst, no dry 
 heat, no tremblings ; pardon these little bodily trifles, — 
 but you, dear wife, take in these as much part as I should 
 in the smallest of your ailments." 
 
 " Next day. 
 
 " Yesterday I was in Nurnberg with the Hofmeister, 
 
 young Rottenhahn, and the bookseller Walther, I was 
 
 pleased with the southern, joyful, hearty tone of the 
 
 people. M. will return with me on Friday. How new 
 
 * The last week in May was the anniversary of Richter's marriage. 
 His finding his wife's birthday under the name of Lucretia is thus 
 explauied. The German custom was to celebrate not only the birth- 
 day, but the day in the almanac that bore the person's Cliristian name. 
 The old almanacs contained a name for every day in the year, the 
 name of a saint, or some other remarkable person. When Jean Paul, 
 then, proposed fixing a day to celebrate Caroline's birthday, he would 
 probably choose the day that bore the name of Caroline. I am in- 
 debted for this explanation to the notes upon Mr. Tracey's charming 
 translation of Undine.
 
 404 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 and beautiful all will appear to me ! If you have ex- 
 perienced anything that will not be pleasant to me, write 
 it, that I may forget it on the way, and the heavenly even- 
 ing of our meeting again pass without a cloud. Ah ! the 
 post draws near, and I have so much to say to my faith- 
 ful friend, wdio has done so much for me, and loves me so 
 fervently. Heavens ! how often have I thought of you 
 with ovei'powering ecstasy when at night your face, with 
 its indescribable love's eyes and love's glance, has sud- 
 denly appeared to me, as a form out of the empty air. 
 But that ecstasy remains a reality for me yet, — for you 
 live, and I return. Ah, it goes to your soul as to mine." 
 
 The following year Richter went to Nurnberg to meet 
 Jacobi. The reader will recollect that tliey had corre- 
 sponded for some years, but had never met. 
 
 After mentioning the discomforts of their inn in a let- 
 ter to Otto, he goes on to describe his friend. " I played 
 with accustomed moderation the lamb, and remained se- 
 date, only saying to my ever-hasty companion, ' In the 
 morning we shall have time enough.' I can now bear 
 witness to my second remark, that there is no better sign 
 of a pleasant future than when the first hour in an inn 
 is miserable and uncomfortable 
 
 " At eleven I held to my heart a brother and friend of 
 old longings. He is not a man of the world, Ijut in the 
 most precious sense a quiet, noble ancient. It seems to 
 me that I only meet him again after long separation, we 
 sympatliize so entirely ; his sisters also please me. In 
 the evening they usually go early to bed, and I sit alone 
 with Jacobi. They bid me not to suffer him to speak 
 much of his childhood ; but often as we have been to- 
 gether, we have scarcely begun to talk, and the eternal 
 conversation upon pliilosophy, more rarely disputing than
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 405 
 
 agreeing, will leave scarcely room for questions about his 
 early life and former connections. He seeks earnestly, 
 
 and with pure, warm zeal, unestablished truth In 
 
 the first quarter of an hour he observed my wavering 
 playfulness between jest and earnest, and as I excused 
 myself, his sisters said, 'he did the same himself; but 
 he does not appear to me to have the true disposition for 
 humor, and he said himself that he could not read through 
 the Katzenhurger and the Fibel. He is always calm, not 
 cold, and it is as easy to him to speak to, to listen to, and 
 to satisfy his enemies, as it is difficult for me to do so. 
 
 " He remained till midnight alone with me, and 
 with the shadow of the lamp-screen resting upon his 
 face, speaking softly, and yet listening to the mightiest 
 themes. . And yet, listen ! He will give my earthly 
 planet a new impulse around his higher sun, and be as 
 much to me as Herder was. Yes, more than Herder. 
 Both he cannot be ; and yet, alas ! my religious desires 
 for myself can be fulfilled by no man from without, — but 
 only from within, by myself alone. ' Could I but see 
 him,' I have hitherto thought, ' I should become a new 
 man, and desire nothing more ! ' Ah ! . . . . 
 
 " He can be from morning to midnight in society, en- 
 joying visiting, amusements, and driving, while I remain, 
 much to his astonishment, true to my old rules, and, in 
 the midst of the most animated society, escape to my cool 
 solitude to reproach myself after exciting amusements. 
 As I asked Jacobi whetlier I did not carry my freedom 
 too far, he half assented, and yet in such a way that I 
 had no satisfaction from his answer. Besides, he con- 
 siders too much, and is too anxious about appearances, 
 and his consideration with others, and indeed ventures 
 nothing. Thus he earher negatived my question, whether
 
 4o6 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 I should say in my dedication of the Claris to him, ' that, 
 he had read it before its publication,' although he had. 
 All the reviews of his and Schelling's books, as well as 
 the notice of them in the Hamburg newspaper, he carries 
 neatly folded in paper, about with him ; in all he is 
 praised. The other day, in Erlangen, the profess(Jrs and 
 we all had drunk his health, he stood up, and to the 
 amazement of all, went round with his glass and touched 
 that of every one at the table. Something of this belongs 
 to his age, and to the four female hands that support and 
 rock him.* 
 
 " He wears beautiful, new-fashioned, smooth, white- 
 topped boots, and hosen of good nankin ; and a gray Rus- 
 sian hat, probably on account of his eyes. 
 
 " That he loves me I know from the way in which he 
 takes leave of me, and from his sisters, and from his 
 gentle reproaches if I do not go to him in the intervals of 
 his being at home ; but how much he blames me, either 
 justly or unjustly I know not. He speaks often of his 
 own works ; upon my personalities, social or literary rela- 
 tions, he asked no questions. The excess of our materials 
 for conversation was my fault, and yet there was nothing 
 said of worldly affairs, and not enough of Haman, Goethe, 
 and Klopstock, and the little that was said was in answer 
 to my questions. In jjolitics he is probably liberal. Tiie 
 rest when we meet." 
 
 There is another letter of the same date to his old 
 friend Emanuel. The reader will recollect that he, aa 
 well as Otto, were Richter's neighbors in Bayreuth. 
 
 * These are the same aunts Lehiia and Lotta, whose excessive care 
 of Jacobi Beltine describes so graphically in the " Correspondence with 
 a Child."
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 407 
 
 " Nurnberg, 1812. 
 
 " You gave me only one token of remembrance, namely, 
 the packed coffer. As I unfolded paper after paper, it 
 seemed as if you spake a word of love to me upon each. 
 It is a half-melancholy feeling to have the well-wishing 
 love of an absent friend before one in solitude. For me 
 a solitary apartment is a spiritual Briinning hall, full of 
 medicinal water. Solitude shows itself in new relations ; 
 not in your own solitary apartment are you alone, but in 
 a melancholy palace. I have, ridiculously as it sounds, 
 every day a little perverseness, a little contrariety in 
 thinking and acting. I write every morning that for 
 which in practice I require further medicining. 
 
 " The first maxim is : ' Do everything in its time, put 
 off nothing ! ' and then I have the night equipage carried 
 out of the room, but I leave the coffee equipage upon the 
 other table. 
 
 " The second day I write : ' Rise above little incon- 
 veniences,' — that is, do not croak and cry alas ! when in 
 the morning you have to draw your shirt on or off, or 
 even your narrow Sunday pantaloons and the rest, before 
 you can sit calmly with your book u2:)on the sofa. 
 
 " The third morning : ' After having been in society, 
 have nothing to repent, but be rather too fearful than too 
 bold.' For, my good friend, when with benevolent inten- 
 tion you think you have spoken only boldly, then you 
 have already spoken too boldly, and the previous improve- 
 ment is to be every day recapitulated. 
 
 " ' Arm yourself as powerfully against evil in others as 
 in yourself That I do not obey this rule shows itself in 
 my continuing, through fancy, to blacken myself in com- 
 parison with good men. In short, there are no other 
 means in heaven or upon earth to heal and content tlie
 
 408 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 inward soul, but by strengthening that inmost soul itself, 
 and it is foolish to think small helps from without can be 
 
 lasting means of improvement 
 
 " Solitude on one's birthday is the only worthy per- 
 sonal celebration that a man, thinking calmly and tenderly 
 on the path behind him, and measuring seriously tha't be- 
 fore him, can permit himself. I hate also all business or 
 pleasurable activity on the first day of the year. Frail 
 and feeble man should look upon such elevations in 
 time, like the spider for props to which he fastens the 
 thread of a new web. All weighty things are done in 
 soUtude, that is, without society. The means of improve- 
 ment consist not in projects, or in any violent designs, for 
 these cool, and cool very soon ; but in patient practising 
 for -whole long days, by which I make the thing dear to 
 my highest reason. Reason works longer than feeling, 
 and enlightens more, for it remains after the other has 
 departed. We must first overcome the little faults, and 
 be easy in this exercise of self-conquest, before we drive 
 away the greater ; and yet after all this, a man is only in 
 the outer court of the Most Holy, and preparing to whip 
 out of himself the whole of the old Adam ! 
 
 " R." 
 
 The peace, so ardently desired and so acceptable to 
 Germany, was at first disastrous to Richter. Tiie abol- 
 ishing, by the congress of Vienna, of the grand duchy of 
 Frankfort, and taking away the immense revenue of the 
 Prince Primate Dalberg, interru])ted tlie payment of his 
 pension and threatened to suspend it entirely. It re- 
 mained undecided for two years, and Jean Paul found 
 himself constrained to send a multitude of petitions to 
 persons of both sexes connected with the congress of 
 Vienna ; among others to the Emperor Alexander, which
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 409 
 
 both his biographers have given at large, although it 
 seems to us less important than many other of Paul's pro- 
 ductions. After waiting two years without any result, he 
 presented a petition to his own king and queen of Ba- 
 varia, and the payment henceforth was placed on the 
 pension fund of the kingdom, and regularly received by 
 Richter. That it was not immediately necessary to meet 
 his every-day expenses appears from a note written to 
 Otto, on the Christmas day after he was secure of the first 
 quarter's payment. All his readers must rejoice that a 
 poet had money to lend. 
 
 " December 25, 1815. 
 
 " A joyful festival, my Otto. Inform me, when my pen- 
 sion-money comes, whether Emanuel offers to take a part 
 of it for half a year. Shall I not give him too much 
 trouble, or can he even use it ? I remark, that, when men 
 lend money,- they value only the interest, and thereby 
 become cursedly avaricious, — so I will lend little and 
 spend more. 
 
 " I bring you a long-cherished prayer. My purse is 
 open to you at all times and for any sum within it. Five 
 hundred florins * lie wholly useless there ; so that I de- 
 serve nothing by the change to youi'S, except indeed the 
 
 pleasure. Enjoy it also, old heart's friend. 
 
 " R." 
 
 This is the place to give a few extracts from the pri- 
 vate journal called Via recti, which was begun this year, 
 and is the glass in which we see the man and the author 
 reflected. He says in the beginning, " I am a libertine 
 only from within ; I enjoy neither beer nor wine ; later, I 
 have enjoyed neither company nor punch ; but my inward 
 
 • The half of his pension. 
 18
 
 4IO LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 fantasies, conceptions, and representations have reduced 
 and consumed my life. I say here, Tind before God, that 
 in all my works, and in all my representations, I am pure 
 from all but the best motives, uninfluenced by poverty, 
 the misunderstanding of others, sacrifices, etc. ,1 have 
 held it my duty, not to enjoy or to gain, but to write, — 
 however, much time or money I liave thus thrown away, 
 — yes, joy also, — that is, the sight of Switzerland, which 
 merely the sacrifice of time forbade ! I deny myself mj 
 vesper meal, merely to work ; but I cannot deny myself 
 the interruption that comes from my children. Eating, 
 drinking, money, health, are nothing ! The enjoyment of 
 my children, nature, religion, assert their mastery," 
 
 Paul's nephew relates many beautiful instances of 
 the pleasant intercourse he maintained with his family. 
 " Could one see him when the longing after the exchange 
 of endearing expressions drew him from his quiet and 
 solitary study into the apartment of his wife. In his eye 
 was a sunbeam of the purest love, while the loveliest 
 smile played around his mouth as he seemed embaiTassed 
 to find an excuse for coming." Then, on the first of 
 April, his delight in the innocent mirth tliat belonged to 
 the day. He would mislead every one of his family, and 
 the maid always came in for her share of the mirth. 
 
 Paul proceeds with his rules. 
 
 "■ Throw little pains immediately away. 
 
 " Have nothing to repent in society ; be rather too 
 fearful than too bold. 
 
 " Show love only to children, not pain, or only that 
 which will excite pity, not shame. 
 
 " Leave a good but passionate man time to resolve and 
 cool, as you also need yourself. 
 
 " Say not at tlie first moment. No, but wait.
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 411 
 
 " To love only one man truly, thorouglily ! what enjoy- 
 ment and reward ! 
 
 " Attempt in the midst of woi-k to be indifferent to com- 
 plaints, disturbing noises, etc. 
 
 " One should strive far more earnestly to gain and 
 secure and elevate the love of wife and children than 
 any other foreign love ; for nothing can contribute half as 
 much to the happiness of life. 
 
 " I will give to the children the morning pleasures of 
 morning hours. I can later work and read. 
 
 " Children need love more than instruction ; and use 
 and example alone can give it them. 
 
 " As Winkelman set apart a half-hour daily to contem- 
 plate his Italian joyousness, a man should consecrate a 
 half-hour daily or weekly to reckoning up and consid- 
 ering the virtues of his wife and children, and nearest 
 friends ; so that their perfections may not first, at their 
 death, press together to a burning focus. Often enough, 
 alas ! do we need this pressing together, namely, after an 
 offence, in order to be only justly angry, and reflect all his 
 light upon the offender. 
 
 " Place in imagmation in every company where you 
 speak much an enemy before you ; a satirist, among the 
 enthusiastic ; a spy, among lovers. 
 
 " Practise every day an acting and an opposing power, 
 that you may be every day stronger rather than weaker. 
 Every occasion to withstand or to sacrifice will be dear 
 to you, without which you will never succeed. But you 
 need only to make use of the daily, — go not out of your 
 way to seek sacrifices. 
 
 " With all my inclination to irony upon paper, I have 
 never in actual life, neither alone nor in company, made 
 a man ridiculous, but have answered his weakness with 
 sympathizing earnestness."
 
 412 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 In the same book Paul says : " Nothing exhausts and 
 touches me as fantasien on the piano. I could thus kill 
 myself. All buried feelings and spirits arise again ! My 
 hand and eye and heart know no limits ! At last I close 
 with an eternally returning, but too powerful tone ! One 
 can be satisfied with hearing, but never with making mu- 
 sic ; and every true musician could, like tlie nightingales, 
 trill liimself to death. When I have fantasied long, I 
 break out into violent weeping, without tliinking of any- 
 thing decidedly melancholy. The tones cut deeper and 
 clearer into ear and heart. Tears are my strongest, but 
 most weakening intoxication ! 
 
 " No author can foresee the influence his works will 
 have either for good or for evil, for tliey excite every 
 species of mind, and kindle the inflammable. 
 
 " I could become a great author Avith Hei'der's powers 
 and my own application of the same." 
 
 ^^^^^S
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 EicnTER IN Relation with the Unhappy. 
 
 FOKSTER. 
 
 Letters. — Maria 
 
 E come now to a trait of Richter's a. d. 1814, 
 character that we can dwell upon -^^^ °^- 
 with unmixed satisfaction, — his relations with 
 the unfortunate and unhappy who sought his 
 sympathy or advice. There is no author who lives so 
 entirely in his own creations as Richter. He himself 
 speaks from the lips of his characters, and gives his 
 readers consolation or pity, elevation or lofty trust. He 
 steps before every heart and shows it its inmost wishes ; 
 he lifts the veil of secrecy under which it sighs, and 
 shows tlie reader that he knows and pities all that lies 
 struggling or perplexed within him. He had expe- 
 rienced deeply in his youth that feeling of heart-solitude 
 that weighs heavily upon minds of sensibility, and he 
 offers in his works sympathy and aid against this fret- 
 ting sorrow. He had felt how easy, and yet how dan- 
 gerous it is to take the fii-st wrong step in life, while he 
 knew how to draw lessons of wisdom from the reaction 
 of error or folly. This distinguisliing characteristic of 
 Jean Paul made him the personal friend of his readers, 
 the brother and the father of all orphaned and widowed 
 hearts. By his expanding and never-wearied sympathy
 
 414 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 he responded to every confidence that was placed in him, 
 and showed the beautiful harmony of the author with the 
 man, and the power of a true Christian brother in heal- 
 ing and calming the soul. How many came to him with 
 bowed or broken hearts ; how many in the midst of the 
 storm of passion sought his counsel and his help 1 He 
 ■was trusted with the most delicate and important se- 
 crets by women of all ranks, from princesses to domestic 
 drudges. Men and youths also appealed to him to de- 
 cide affairs that concerned their entire lives. Repentant 
 sinners sought consolation in a confession to him ; and in 
 some cases he was employed to make reparation, where a 
 breath or a whisper would have tarnished tlie honor of 
 the parties. 
 
 He answered with unwearied patience the letters of 
 young authors, and their petitions for his jiulgment upon 
 their literary works. He read them patiently, criticised 
 delicately, and where he could he gave encouragement. 
 His sympathy aTid help, even if he could not give a faxor- 
 able judgment of the work, were never withheld from the 
 author. Thus, while he dwelt at Meiningen he obtained, 
 through his sole exertions, the office of cabinet secretary 
 to the Duke for Ernest AVagner. He obtained also a 
 situation for Kanne, the afterwards well-known enthusi- 
 astic preacher, whose supernaturalism and mysticism, alas ! 
 brought Richter's only son to his grave. 
 
 We have only room for a few of the answers Richter 
 sent to those \xho sought his advice and sympatliy. The 
 first is in answer to a querulous letter from a young man, 
 who writes under the name of Henrich, and which is filled 
 with general complaints at his unhappy destiny. 
 
 " Dare not to judge from one year of unhappiness the 
 Eternal, who has shown his paternal care of mankind for
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 415 
 
 six thousand years, and is tlie same great Father of all. 
 He who has supported, formed, and educated the human 
 race will not desert one, even the least. Of the smallest 
 ephemera of a day his providence has protected the race 
 from Adam to us. Let your heart be tender, but your 
 breast strong, and struggle and hope at the same time." 
 
 The next is a person of a higher order of mind, who 
 sent him several letters, and at last a journal of his life. 
 As the letters were anonymous, they were thrown into 
 the general receptacle of unanswered letters. At last 
 another despairing letter was sent, that hinted at suicide. 
 Eiohter sought, and soon discovered his name, and wrote 
 to him the next day. 
 
 " Wherefore have you not trusted yourself more gener- 
 ously to me ? My silence upon your letters, so filled with 
 mind and heart, was owing principally to the fact that 
 such letters must be answered not with lines, but with 
 sheets ; and that for most of the letters I receive I have 
 not time even for lines. The letter previous to your 
 journal covered my horizon with a thick cloud, through 
 the suspicion of a misfortune to yourself; but your journal 
 dispersed the cloud, and gave me again the sun. To an 
 immediate answer, nothing failed me but the name, which 
 I hoped to find in the first letter, — but behold that was 
 buried in the great letter-vault, where, with a thousand 
 others, it awaited the resurrection, — that is, arrangement 
 and order. But the first grasp in the coffer drew forth 
 your fii'St letter, like a roll of destiny. I should wish 
 and advise you more action and less reflection ; but, if we 
 cannot discover the character of an author from many 
 books, how much less the character of a letter-writer 
 from a few pages ; and how ditficult it is, even after a 
 long acquaintance, to give comprehensive counsels, that
 
 4l6 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 shall embrace the whole of life. Against your overvalue 
 of myself I have nothing to say. To the youth it is 
 always more healthful to reverence too much than to 
 despise too much. You have a pair of gods too many, 
 but a divinity too little. Trust yourself, or rather the 
 universal soul, more. There will fall to you yet tnany 
 of the blossoms of youth. Thrust out the invisible fruit- 
 buds of your soul, and as a man you will profit by the 
 ripened fruit. Flee only the demon of ambition, and the 
 wild ape * of vanity, and you will be reconciled with the 
 angel of the good and the beautiful." 
 
 Among other communications to him was the autobi- 
 ography of a man who possessed the fixed idea that his 
 thoughts, by the medium of animal magnetism, were ab- 
 stracted from his mind and used by other people. At the 
 same time, the same person desired Richter to petition 
 the Emperor Francis for a present of not less than twenty 
 thousand dollars, to enable him to enjoy the leisure to 
 write an epic poem. In the mean time, he prayed Rich- 
 ter to advance two thousand dollars, that he would repay 
 Avhen he received the twenty thousand from the emperor. 
 
 Another letter, from another person, demanded that 
 Paul should petition the allied sovereigns of Europe to 
 free Napoleon from his imprisonment at St. Helena. To 
 such absurd requests he gave of course no answer. 
 
 But I will leave these common instances, to mention 
 only one other, that threw a cloud over Richter's life, and 
 was the occasion of an almost repentant sorrow. The 
 history of the young girl, who knit her being so closely 
 to his that she could not live without him, seems to us, in 
 this prosaic land and age, so like a fiction of romance, as 
 to be almost incredible in its sad reality. She liad known 
 
 * Wdldteufel is also the name of a butterfly.
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 417 
 
 him only through his books ; and what to others is but an 
 abstraction, became to her the life of her soul. 
 
 This has been mentioned as a parallel case to that of 
 Bettine Brentano, whose eccentric letters and journal 
 have revealed to us her youthful passion for Goethe. 
 But the cases are quite dissimilar. Bettine was living 
 in the midst of the refined society where Goethe ruled, 
 and her glowing imagination converted him into a Di- 
 vinity, to be worshipped and loved. Bettine had more 
 imagination than sentiment or passion, and required of 
 Goethe to understand and appreciate her rare intellect as 
 much as answer to her heart. Unfortunately, Goethe was 
 afraid of the ridicule that would attend such a friendship, 
 and wounded her vanity as well as her womanly sensi- 
 tiveness. 
 
 Maria Forster was living in solitude, in the midst of 
 sublime mountain scenery. She had no one to sympa- 
 thize with her passionate nature. She brooded in silence 
 over her communion with Jean Paul, when she found her 
 most secret thoughts, and her own nature revealed to her 
 in his books. To passion and sentiment was united a 
 sensitive conscience and feminine delicacy, and we cannot 
 read her history without the sorrowful conviction, that 
 before she came to the resolution to throw herself into 
 the Rhine, the contest between passion and conscience 
 had destroyed the healthful action of her reason. 
 
 Maria was the daughter of a high-hearted German, who 
 fell under the axe of the guillotine during the reign of 
 terror in Paris. The heroic death of the father, who 
 despised the means of flight that were held out to him by 
 his friends, and the instructions of an equally high-minded 
 mother, had increased the original tendency of the daugh- 
 ter's mind to enthusiasm, and given her an inclination to 
 
 18* AA
 
 4l8 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 solitude, wliere she lived in an ideal world, peopled only 
 with heroes of the ancient world and those among the 
 moderns who were worthy to enter there. Yet she de- 
 voted herself with exact fidelity to all filial and domestic 
 duties, and did not avoid the society about her. She 
 rejoiced with the gay and wept with the sorrowful ; but 
 when her work was done, when the cares of the day were 
 over, when the hours of darkness gave the choice of re- 
 freshment through sleep, or by communion with other 
 minds, then she turned with ecstasy to her books, and 
 drew from her favorite authors not only healthy food, 
 but the intoxication that, in her solitude, and with her 
 peculiar temperament, became poison to her mind. 
 
 Already, in her tenth year, she became acquainted with 
 the writings of Jean Paul, and in her innocent, childish 
 enthusiasm wrote him a letter. As she entered woman- 
 hood, he became the ideal of all that was dreamed or 
 imagined. He was the only living mortal that was ad- 
 mitted into her ideal world ; the purest and holiest of 
 men, a saint, " a new Christ for her," who could alone 
 bear her over the waves of life, that threatened i-ight and 
 left to overwhelm her. To be near him in some foi-m, 
 or in some relation, was the only contingency in which 
 she could find peace. To hold some kind of communion 
 with him was a necessity of her nature. She must speak 
 to him, or she must die. 
 
 Accordingly, in her thirteenth year, .she wrote to him 
 thus : " Is it not too bold, — dare I write to the dearest 
 friend of man, and call him my father ? Ah, I shall per- 
 haps never see him whom I have to thank for so much, 
 for the dearest benefits, the most elevated truths, — all the 
 good that excites my imitation, and a whole eternity that 
 has opened before my soul. When I think of }our infinite
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 419 
 
 goodness, I burst into tears, and my heart is filled with 
 blessings for you. This firm faith in you is a blessing 
 of which no man can rob me. 
 * " You will ask, perhaps, who it is that speaks thus 
 boldly to you ? But I am only a little girl, — too little 
 that I need to mention my name. Ah, were I gi'own, as 
 I shall be, no land and no sea should prevent me from 
 once in my life seeing him who has long held the place 
 of a father in my heart. But my own faults and inter- 
 vening relations hold me back ; and I would not trust 
 myself to write one word to you if I did not hope to de- 
 serve your indulgence and pardon for my wishes. 
 
 " I scarcely have a wish but the highest, to be so good 
 as to deserve your esteem, and the joy of having you once 
 call me daughter. My whole life is only a striving after 
 goodness ; and yet, O father ! wherefore does it go so 
 slowly forwards ? It is gi'ievous that for me it is only 
 goodness ; that I am only true and honest.* But I will 
 not burden you with my faults." 
 
 Maria continued to write, and closed every letter with 
 her ardent ^vish to go to Eichter. The first portion of 
 her correspondence only expressed a wish for a spiritual 
 union with Jean Paul, and a meeting in that future world 
 for which he had prepared her soul ; but at length her 
 letters betrayed her longing to be near him, her impa- 
 tience for a more intimate union. But now her eyes 
 were opened, and it was as if she had touched the god- 
 like with sacrilegious hands. In bitter repentance and 
 tears she wrote the next day a letter, with her name, in 
 which she endeavored to soften the impatience of the 
 first, and to recall the contents of the postscript, but in 
 fact repeating them both. A third and fourth letter fol- 
 
 * She means to say that she has no talent.
 
 420 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 lowed in quick succession, in which she strove in vain to 
 conceal the conflict that devoured her whole moral nature, 
 and Avhile she prayed him to forget lier, she still held fast 
 the hope of being admitted into his family. 
 
 Now she waited with burning impatience for an answer. 
 She could not reckon the distance, the interruption 6f the 
 post by the warlike condition of the country, the literary 
 labors of her friend, or the many possibilities that lie be- 
 tween the reception and the answer to a letter. One 
 only idea took possession of her mind, — the thought of 
 being despised by the most beloved of men ; and to find 
 contempt where she had looked for healing and sympathy 
 was too intolerable to be borne, and this infant, as she 
 was in years and experience, could find no peace except 
 in death. 
 
 In the twilight of a May morning she sought the river, 
 and there, to make her resolution doubly sure, she placed 
 a knife in her bosom. She looked round on the home 
 where her mother still slept, which the first rays of the 
 sun was just touching with splendor, and the thought of 
 the inconsolable sorrow of her widowed mother made her 
 waver in her purpose, and her sister, who had been a 
 witness of the despairing night Maria had passed, and 
 had followed her without betraying the cause of her fear- 
 ful anticipations, arrested her, and saved her from her 
 despair. They walked home in silence, and Maria re- 
 solved that while her mother lived she would never 
 leave her. 
 
 But at last the expected letter arrived from Richter, 
 and here it is. 
 
 " Your four letters from a good but over-excilcd heart 
 have been received. I guessed the name, and so did a 
 friend of mine, in the first hour. Your noble, departed
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 421 
 
 father is worthy of so good a daughter. But as the earth 
 did not reward liim, may he now, Avlien he looks down 
 upon his daughter, be rewarded by seeing her full of a 
 pure ardor for goodness and virtue. He would speak to 
 her thus : ' May a good man receive my dear Maria as a 
 daughter, and be to her a spiritual father. lie will calm 
 her excitement Avith a kindness and indulgence that can- 
 not be imagined ; he will tell her that in actual life, 
 especially in marriage, the strength of passion in women, 
 even innocent violence, has been the thorns and daggers 
 upon which happiness has fallen and bled ; that the 
 mightiest and holiest of men, even Christ, was all gen- 
 tleness, mildness, and peace. He will tell her she may 
 soar with the wings of the spirit, but with the outward 
 limbs must she only walk. She may kindle a holy fire 
 in her heart, but must not act till the fire has become a 
 pure light to guide her. I also, who speak to you in the 
 name of your own father, desire such for my dear Maria, 
 and will be that father to her. 
 
 "Your dream to come to me, you have, on awaking, 
 laid aside. Leave your mother ? Never ! I shall more 
 probably go to you than you come here. I and my wife 
 both love you, and greet you kindly. Remain always 
 good, my daughter. i, p ,, 
 
 Maria received the handwriting of Richter with floods 
 of tears, before she looked within the letter for consolation 
 and hope. She answered gratefully, and sent him, at the 
 same time, the letter she had written the night before 
 that frightful May morning, when slie had entreated him 
 to look upon her as one departed, who could not endure 
 to live imder the thought of his contempt. 
 
 Richter was shocked and alarmed at the recklessness
 
 422 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 to -nliich the choice between life and death seemed so 
 easy. His own peace was endangered as well as Maria's 
 happiness, and he wrote again with true paternal ear- 
 nestness. 
 
 " Dear Maria : The abundance of what I have to 
 say to you, of which much should go only from the lips 
 to the ear, and my want of time, have delayed my an- 
 swers to your, last letters. The first that you wrote to 
 me after my answer has shaken me more than any calam- 
 ity for many years ; for had it not been for an apparent 
 accident, you would have thrown a frightful death-shadow 
 over the whole of my future life. You should see my 
 coffer of letters, of which at the best I have not, for want 
 of time, answered one sixth part, and between me and 
 my best friends there is often a delay of months. Your 
 first four letters truly animated me. I saw in them only 
 a rare exalted love, and a glowing soul, but not a single 
 line unwortliy of you or of me, and I answered them with 
 more interest and joy than I usually express. You de- 
 manded the answers only too hastily, too punctually. 
 Might I then not have journeyed, or been sick, or dead, 
 or absent, or engaged in business ? The fearful step that 
 you would on that account have taken I must, notwith- 
 standing the greatness of mind it betra3S, condemn most 
 severely ! — but never let there be mention of it between 
 us. Besides, I wish you on your own account, and on 
 mine, to show my two letters to your good mother, whose 
 most painful sorrows I well know how to imagine. You 
 think much too well of me as a man. No author can be 
 as moral as his works, as no preacher is as pious as his 
 sermons. Write to me in future very often all that is 
 nearest your heart, either of joy or sorrow. You will
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 423 
 
 thus relieve yoiu' mind of what rests upon it. You have 
 become, by a peculiar bond, more luiit to my life than 
 any other absent acquaintance : only draw not false con- 
 clusions from my long silence. Very delightful to me 
 will be our first meeting. May you be happy, my child ; 
 may these apparently only slightly and calmly written 
 words rejoice, and not confuse or wound your heart. 
 " Your father, ,, ^ „ 
 
 After the reception of tliis letter peace returned to the 
 heart of Maria, but only for a short time ; the arrow had 
 entered deeply, and the wound would not heal. In the 
 fatal hour that she resolved on self-destruction she imag- 
 ined that her inclination was more than a childish rever- 
 ence, that it demanded a warmer love than that of a 
 father, and on this account she resolved never to see 
 Richter, and bound hei'self with a sacred vow never to 
 indulge the wish of meeting. She wrote to him : — 
 
 " The only honorable way that can lead me to the 
 heart for which I so long is the grave. You will never 
 be seen by me on this earth, for I love you too much ; 
 therefore, write to me something consoling ; tell the poor 
 Maria that you will love her when we meet beyond this 
 world. She can think of no joy in heaven, if there, as 
 here, she is divided from the only soul through which she 
 lives. 
 
 " Never again write me a letter so full of wisdom as 
 the fii'St, but rather one in which there is nothing but a 
 lock of your hair ; and- be assured I will not cease to 
 write till you tell me you have sent it willingly, and your 
 good wife, also, for I deserve it, and would give half my 
 hopes of happiness for it. 
 
 " I have no greeting for you from my mother, highly
 
 424 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 as she esteems Jean Paul, as neither she, nor any one 
 knows to whom I write, nor anything of the whole his- 
 tory. For, as she asked me at that time ' wherefore I 
 would tear myself from her,' I promised her never to 
 leave her if she would ask me no questions. She cannot 
 know how resolute I am. nor yet again how unreseri'ed, 
 and that it is my dearest happiness that Jean Paul has 
 taken me for his adopted child. Ah, my father, love me 
 only and be happy." 
 
 Richter sent the desired lock of hair and wrote : — 
 
 " Dear Maria : The lock that my wife has cut from my 
 bald pate is the best answer to your last letter. Be not 
 anxious, I pray you, that T shall let your letters, written 
 as they will, be misunderstood to your disadvantage. I 
 understand your warm, idealizing heart and its great 
 pcfwer ; how then shall the words of a moment make me 
 err ? What I complain of is, that the sun-heat of your 
 mind ripens too soon, or rather scorches and dries up its 
 sweet fruit. Your vow never to see me comes to nothing, 
 (now comes sermonizing, which you have forbidden.) for 
 in the first place, one cannot vow for others ; and, sec- 
 ondly, we vow only to do what is good and leave the 
 bad ; and tliis vow we bring with us into the world in the 
 form of conscience, and no newer oath can contradict it. 
 Another thing ; to swear to avoid a certain city, or a 
 certain man, without reason, is to seek to control Provi- 
 dence : and, finally, your vow does not extend to me, and 
 I sliall see you whenever I can. No, I paint to myself 
 the hour when you will first see my Caroline and my 
 children, and then me, and I shall also see all your 
 friends. 
 
 " Dear good Maria, you are the only invisible corre-
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 425 
 
 spondent to whom I write so unreservedly, and send my 
 hair. Could I do it if I had not so much esteem for you, 
 and so much confidence that you would do much more 
 for me than I deserve or can ever repay ? Would you 
 only not err when from business or necessity I am silent 
 to your Jetters. Do not torment yourself, for your pain 
 is doubled in me. Your father, ., -^ 
 
 " P. S. I have much cause to wish that you should 
 tell all to your mother and sister, and find in their confi- 
 dential love no occasion for opposition." 
 
 The result of this, perhaps, too kind and tender letter 
 was far otherwise than Richter expected. The words so 
 gently admonitory sank like poison drops into Maria's 
 heart. " He loves me," she cried, " he will seek me ! 
 He suifers on my account." Again the hope, the desire 
 to see him grew to madness, and yet the veil of holy 
 innocence lay upon her, and the fear that she had passed 
 the limits of womanly delicacy and reserve distracted her. 
 
 Richter observed, with deep anxiety, the conflicting 
 tempest in her soul, — but he wrote no more. Then 
 light flashed into her mind ; she saw her error, and with 
 heart-breaking i-epentance she wrote to him, promising to 
 be again only a child, — a loving child, and nothing more. 
 Then he wrote to her thus : " I have received your last 
 six letters regularly, but not always actually without the 
 seals broken.* .... Your last three letters were wel- 
 come to me, as they again beautifully spake of the oidy 
 possible relation that can exist between us, that of a 
 father and daughter. A relation in wliich your first let- 
 ters enchanted me, and which has hitherto remained un- 
 
 * Richter wished her to understand that her letters were inspected 
 in passing througii the post-ofBce.
 
 4-26 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 changed on my part. In this relation alone I ventured 
 to love you so deeply, to send you the lock of my hair, to 
 give you my confidence, and to oppose your incompre- 
 hensible scruples to our meeting. The word father is for 
 a father, no less than the word daughter, a sacred and 
 holy word. Dearer than all other words ! ^ 
 
 " Why do you imagine me troubled ? I am happy with 
 my children and my Caroline, and as truly beloved by 
 them as they are by me. The sciences are my heaven. 
 "Wliy then should I be unhappy, except at these disastrous 
 times when all the nations of Europe bleed ? 
 
 " Your unreserve gives me no pain, at least, unless you 
 feel it yourself; on the contrary, it gives me only joy. 
 You idolize me too much instead of following my coun- 
 sels. I shall, therefore, offer you no more advice, so 
 well do I know the female heart, especially the souls of 
 fire to which you belong. Send me, instead of letters 
 that I have not time to answer, rather journals of your 
 life, your family, your little experiences. 
 
 " May it be well with you, dear daughter, and the 
 gentle spirit of love, without that of fire, fill your breast. 
 
 "R." 
 
 Maria's self-tormenting spirit now assumed another 
 form. The image of the best and most beloved of 
 men, as it dwelt in her heart, had been profaned, and 
 to restore herself to him demanded an expiation. No 
 sacrifice was too great, and she would have thrown off 
 the burden of lite had not her promise to her suffering 
 mother restrained lier. But the mother died, and Maria 
 Avas free. Anotlier care restrained her, the solitary and 
 beloved orphan sister. But at this time an old friend of 
 the family returned, unexpectedly, after a long absence, 
 and took the orphan sister under his protection. He was
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 427 
 
 an honest, firm, and benevolent man, and Maria could 
 safely trust her sister's happiness to his keeping. 
 
 Now she could go to the beloved, and fall at his feet, 
 and ask again to be his daughter. No ! the meeting she 
 desu-ed must be for anotlier world, where there can exist 
 none hut spiritual relations. 
 
 The domestic affairs of her friend and sister were all 
 arranged ; every minute care taken for their comfort ; all 
 her duties scrupulously performed, and now that the aim 
 of her wishes was reached, she wrote to Richter. 
 
 " Do not be angry, dearest father, at receiving these 
 lines from your unfortunate Maria. My mother has been 
 two months dead, and she will consent that I shall now 
 follow her. She wislied me to take care of my sister, 
 — that is done. Her happiness is secure, and I can no 
 longer endure to live, where mine has so incomprehen- 
 sibly failed. All ! in the great universe of God there 
 will yet be a place where I can recover my peace, and 
 be as I wish. I have suffered so much ! I dare to die ! 
 Ah, you will despise me as long as I live, for you will 
 never understand how I have languished to do something 
 for you, or for those dear to you, and how much the 
 thought has killed me, when I learnt that I could not 
 make you happy. But despise me not so much, as not 
 to let your children, of whom I cannot think without 
 tears, accept a little present from me. Let them not 
 know from whom it came. I would willingly be wholly 
 forgotten, and unmarked vanish away. No one can learn 
 my history from myself. I have burnt all books and 
 journals. Your hair only remains on my neck, and 1 
 take it with me. Farewell, beloved father ! Ah, that it 
 must be so with me ! Oh that it were all a dream, and 
 I had never written to you ! My unfortunate spirit will
 
 428 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 hover about you. Perhaps I shall be permitted to give 
 you a sign, or to bring you some higher knowledge." 
 
 Together with Maria's letter, Richter received one from 
 the friend already mentioned, giving an account of her 
 death. 
 
 " The letter of Maria which you will receive with this 
 will leave no doubt of her sad fate. What to us is a dark 
 riddle will find perliaps with you, who knew the unfortu- 
 nate better than we did, a clear solution. She had long 
 desired that death should come to her accidentally. But 
 in vain. How often she inhaled, but without effect, tlie 
 poisonous breath of pestilence. A thousand times she 
 stretched herself upon the sick couch of the dying, and 
 pressed her cheek ujion that of death ; but the jjoisoned 
 aiTOw touched her not, and no bloom faded from her youth- 
 ful cheek. Then came May again, with its dark recol- 
 lections from the past year ; but Maria was apparently 
 happy, with a festive and wild gayety alternating with 
 earnest and cheerful calmness. On the fatal day she 
 read and wrote, and prepared the evening meal for the 
 friend and her sister. She covered the table, and ful- 
 filled with graceful attention, the duties of a kind hostess. 
 She rose from table to write a letter, and at about eight 
 o'clock asked her sister to sit down with their friend at 
 the piano, and embraced her at the same moment with 
 warmth and agitation. tShe threw herself on the breast 
 of the friend, and said, while her voice was choked with 
 tears, ' Take care of my sister.' Scarcely had slie gone, 
 when an inexpressible anxiety was felt by both. They 
 looked around, and saw the letters Maria had left, and 
 hastened to seek the unfortunate ! 
 
 " They met a multitude of people bringing the body 
 of a young girl, that a fisherman had drawn from the
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 429 
 
 stream. It was Maria! They bore the body into the 
 nearest house, and means of resuscitation were used, till 
 at length she opened her eyes." 
 
 But Maria's purpose to die was too strong ; she re- 
 sisted all the means of recovery, and although perfectly 
 conscious and calm, and self-possessed, before moraing 
 she had ceased to breathe. 
 
 Her death drew a dark cloud over Jean Paul ; but he 
 rejoiced that he had not followed the counsels of those 
 who had advised him to treat her with severity or ridi- 
 cule. 
 
 I do not envy the mind that can find anything to ridi- 
 cule in the melancholy history of this poor victim of the 
 imagination, or in the far less tragical result of Bettme's 
 enthusiastic admiration of Goethe. Bettine lived in the 
 same society with Goethe, and was happy in all the 
 actual relations of life. Maria, on the contrary, brooded 
 in solitude over an ideal image of the poet ; or rather she 
 found her own nature reflected in his pages, and, like Nar- 
 cissus of old, she fell in love with her ovm ideal. 
 
 With all his boasted knowledge of the female heart, 
 we must still tliink that Jean Peal eiTed in his treatment 
 of Maria. At this time she was seventeen, and he was 
 fifty years old ; and, as his biographers assert, he had lost 
 the traces of the poet, at least in his exterior appearance. 
 Had he permitted Maria to go to him, no doubt her pas- 
 sion would have been cured. She would have found him 
 fulfilling all the duties of a good citizen, a kind father, a 
 faithful husband ; living a prosaic life, with his squir- 
 rels and birds ; her imagination heated by solitude, and 
 an intense spiritual egotism, would have fallen naturally 
 into the calmness of the every-day domestic duties in 
 which woman's destiny is cast.
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 Eichter's Love of Travelling. — Visits Prince Dalberg. — 
 Visits Heidelberg. — Receives his Doctor's Ditloma. — 
 Henry Voss. — Animal Magnetism. 
 
 E turn now to more cheerful inci- a. d. isie 
 dents. We have already learnt -^t- 53. 
 from Kichter's youthful history how much 
 value he attached to the pleasures and advan- 
 tages of journeying. During the war, and while his pen- 
 sion was withheld, the old desire slumbered, or was only 
 indulged in short excursions to Erlangen and Nurnberg. 
 But now he was again easy in his pecuniary relations, 
 and his history will be best learnt from his letters to 
 Caroline, on his various journeys, from 1816 to 1821. 
 We cannot but wonder that the beloved wife was never 
 his companion upon these excursions ; but tlien lie would 
 not have enjoyed what he called the chief pleasure of 
 travelling, the delight of returning to her. 
 
 Caroline was a true woman and a true wife ; one of 
 those self-sacrificing, devoted beings, who, regai'dless of 
 her own pleasures, was careful for the comfort of others. 
 Everything was prepared by her for Richter's conven- 
 ience on these occasions, even to the packing of the car- 
 riage, where he continued his literary works on the road, 
 reading and writing, as if he were in his own study.
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 431 
 
 Paul left exact directions for his family in his absence : 
 a sort of testament for each. To the youngest daughter 
 was committed the care of the weather-frog ; to her sister 
 the canary-birds and the spiders ; and for his wife such 
 written directions as the following : — 
 
 " In case of fire, the dark-bound manusci-ipts must be 
 first saved. Second. The money ; and paper-coffer after- 
 wards. Third. Record every dollar that you take out, 
 and the date, but further of the spending, not. Fourth. 
 Let both the doors of my study be shut, and do not let 
 the squirrel go in. Let all the ^vindows be closed also, 
 on account of the flies, and open them only on the day 
 of my arrival. Fifth. Lend no book without recording it. 
 I pray thee heartily to eat regularly, and to drink a little 
 beer, that you may be blooming. Do not be anxious 
 about me. Do not remain always in the house, and take 
 Spitz with you when you go out." 
 
 He rewarded Caroline's minute cares by long and con- 
 stant letters. He appears in all his journeys to have 
 written to her every other day. We regret that her let- 
 ters are not also given to us ; but from the few we have, 
 modest and beautiful as they are, we see his genius re- 
 flected in hers as the light of a distant star is reflected in 
 the dew of the violet. 
 
 Richter's first journey is to visit the prince primate 
 Dalberg, to whom he had been indebted for the first two 
 years of his pension. The grateful disposition of the poet 
 is evinced in this, that, instead of visiting the enchanting 
 scenes upon the Rliine he had so longed for, he should 
 first go to the solitary Regensburg before all things, to 
 fulfil a duty of remembrance to the deserted and forgotten 
 Dalberg.
 
 432 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 TO OTTO AND EMANUEL. 
 
 " Regensburg, August, 1816. 
 
 " The prince is a tall, old man, somewhat bent, with a 
 strongly marked profile, especially the nose ; the If ft eye 
 is always, through weakness, closed. In conversation, as 
 in everything else, he is more of a learned man than of a 
 
 prjnce The first day, from eleven to twelve, he 
 
 asked only about my wife, and at dinner also, when he 
 drank her health. By evening our acquaintance was 
 more perfect than, since Herder's death, I have enjoyed 
 with any one. Never in so short a time has a prince 
 won my love. Since then, I have been with him every 
 day from six o'clock until half past seven. We sit in the 
 twilight with a half-emptied flask between us, and talk 
 about religion, philosophy, and all the sciences. In faith 
 and works he is a spiritualist, in the best sense of the 
 word. He told me, unreservedly, of the mistakes of his 
 youth, in short, of a hundred things, that can only be re- 
 peated verbally. His working day consists of ten hours ; 
 two hours he gives to public transactions ; two he labors 
 upon his work upon Christianity. After intellectual 
 exertion, prayer, he said, strengthened and refreshed 
 his mind more than anything beside. His religious 
 axioms are, the highest veneration for God, and the 
 deepest self-humiliation. Against my placing Christ 
 beneath God, he said, in a gentle tone merely, no ! 
 He desired my judgment of the great question of Pi- 
 late. It is not easily answered, but mine satisfied him. 
 I spare the good old man of seventy-four all disputa- 
 tions. 
 
 " He told me if he ever received the twenty thousand 
 florins, that without solicitation the Congress of Vienna
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 433 
 
 had agreed to pay him, he should do something for my 
 wife, after my course was finished.* 
 
 " About eiglit o'clock last evening the Prince took me 
 to visit the Count Westerhold, a friend of Lavater's, who, 
 on account of his ten years of gout, admits no one earlier. 
 Enter his apartment, you have been there for years ! 
 Think of a table with a curious lamp, that I know not 
 how to name, suspended above it. On the sofa his mild 
 and sweet Avife ; the Prince near her, and opposite the 
 eldest daughter, who is mending pens for her two little 
 sisters, who, at a distant table, are preparing their lessons 
 for their teacher ; the Count, also, was writing at the 
 great work-table. I have never seen such home-like 
 simplicity in the apartment of a noble. We were all 
 happy, especially the Prince, and I was like an old, out- 
 serviced poodle, that had got comfortably upon his stool. 
 There was tea, with rack, and afterwards archbishop.f 
 
 " Evening suppers and tea, as with us, are unusual 
 here. Except the first time, I have been always in boots. 
 You see to what boldness a quiet, self-formed man may 
 come. I would the situation of the learned were more 
 respectable here. I was never so moderate in conver- 
 sation ; and in di'inking I am completely to be won- 
 dered at." 
 
 " My beloved Caroline : " Yesterday, as I came 
 from the heavenly garden at Prutlingen, I received your 
 precious letter. It brought me a more beautiful Eden 
 than the one I had just left. From strong emotion I 
 was silent. Ah, could I have, instead of the pale image 
 in my thoughts, your warm, living eyes before me ! I 
 
 * The prince died suddenly, withuut a will, and Caroline received 
 nothing. 
 
 t Mulled wine, with roasted oranges in it. 
 
 19 BB
 
 434 I^IFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 shall leave here Friday the sixth, and get home about 
 seven on Saturday. The cliildren can go half an hour 
 before to see if I have come, so that I may have you 
 alone at first. 
 
 " Wlierefore, good soul, do you excuse your nQcessary 
 expenses ? I fear only that you spare the money too 
 much. I shall employ the two days of my journey back 
 in moral observations, for which I have written a special 
 book (that I studied also at Bayreuth, little as you ob- 
 served me) to strengthen my mind against the perversity, 
 which I inherit from my father, of making everywhei'e 
 false lights and shades. My Primas alone has a heart 
 full of pure love, and free from all selfishness. You 
 would fall weeping upon his breast. Farewell, my be- 
 loved ! Act fx'eely, and do not trouble thyself, nor thine 
 
 " R." 
 
 The following year, 1817, Richter visited Heidelberg, 
 and saw, for the first time, the enchanting shores of the 
 Rhine. His preparation for, and indeed his whole ac- 
 count of, this journey are too interesting to be omitted. 
 He wrote to his friend Henry Voss, before starting. 
 
 " May 12, 1817. 
 " At length I have the joy to petition you about twenty 
 or tliirty things, all concerning the apartment that I will 
 thank you to provide for me between Wliitsuntide and 
 the longest day. An apartment without a little sleeping 
 chamber attached. I ask only a bed and a poor sofa, 
 as I only read and write upon one, a bed-maker and a 
 woman to bring my coffee, and only the most indispensable 
 furniture. But this little chamber must not look towards 
 the rising sun, but rather towards the west ; and if pos- 
 sible, where there is not much bustle in the mominsc
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 435 
 
 hours, wliich for me Lave more gold in them than many 
 stolen hours ; besides, I can make my Hernhutt hollow 
 out of the city. The centre need not be large, if only the 
 circle extends, for the first creates the last. 
 
 " Everything must be hired, and I must pay for every- 
 thing. I lived thus in Erlangen, in Nurnberg, and 
 would have done so in Regensburg had not the Prince 
 Primas chosen to pay for me ; but as a guest I had not 
 the joy of freedom. Besides, I would escape from books. 
 They indeed, but not men, mountains, and rocks, can we 
 prosci'ibe or banish. 
 
 " P. S. I shall come alone ; my wife perhaps will 
 come after me." 
 
 Jean Paul wrote to his wife at Bamberg, the first stage 
 of his journey. 
 
 " Wednesday. 
 
 " Tlie first thing I do after taking a seat is to take a 
 pen and write to thee, dearest ! The weather is cool, 
 clear, and splendid, but fortune taunted me again (yet I 
 kept up my old hope and joy), first through a false direc- 
 tion on the road I was betrayed into a bad inn ; that also 
 on account of market-day was so crowded that I could 
 get only a poor upper chamber. Since a thousand years 
 I have not had so pitiful a prospect. 
 
 " What motherly care you have taken of me, thou 
 good soul ! Every little moment I am reminded of thy 
 dear hand ! AU goes well. Thine » j^ „ 
 
 " Heidelberg, Sunday. 
 " My dear Caroline : I have this moment arrived, 
 entirely well and without loss, except through the reck- 
 oning of the host. Heidelberg is divine in its surround- 
 ings and beautiful in itself I have seen onlv tlie faithful
 
 4.36 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 German, Voss. My cliamber is onl}'^ too good. I have 
 only time to pay the coachman and go to bed. Kiss my 
 dear Kinderlein. They must kiss their mother, and be 
 really obedient and good." 
 
 His account of the rece])tion of his Doctor's diploma, 
 and of a fete that was made for him upon the Neckar, are 
 so naive, and betray so innocent a vanity, that tliey should 
 not be withheld from the reader. 
 
 " Heidelberg, July, 1817. 
 
 " On the very day, my beloved dear heart, that I have 
 become Doctor of philosophy,* will I write to you. How 
 shall I paint to you the love and esteem, even to excess, 
 with which I am here received. The dog even, could he 
 speak, would tell you he had never been so well fed, and 
 from such beautiful hands. I have lived hours such as I 
 never passed before, especially on the water excursions ; 
 listening to the vivats of the students, and the singing of 
 old Italian music. But I thank the All Good as much as 
 I can thank him, by mildness, (juietness, modesty, love, and 
 justice to every one. I am most intimate with Paulus, 
 and his wife, who is not, after the Jena re[)ort, a pretend- 
 ing, literary coquette, but an eidightencd, accomplished 
 Haiisfrau, and their beautiful daughter, Sophia, who reads 
 in«leed, nothing but me and the Bible, and understands the 
 most difficult parts, or suffers herself to be enlightened. 
 
 " On Sunday there was a water party on the Neckar. 
 It seemed to me like lii'e in my romances, as the long 
 vessel with an awning, ornamented with oak branches 
 and ribbon streamers, and followed by a Ijoat filled with 
 musicians, parted for the mountains of Bergen. The 
 
 * Paul's delight at receiving his Doctor's diplojna was expressed 
 with the most childlike simplicity. He tells Caroline that Max must 
 translate it, so that she could show it to the friends and neighbors.
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 437 
 
 greater part of the ladies and men sat at the long table 
 in the centre of the vessel. Students, professors, beau- 
 tiful girls, women, the crown prince of Sweden, and a 
 splendid Englishman ; a young Prince von Waldeck, all 
 united in the most innocent enjoyment. My cap and the 
 hat of the Prince were demanded from the other end of 
 the table by two beautiful girls, and returned wreathed 
 with oak-leaves, and we must both wear them thus 
 
 " One cloud after another withdrew from the sky. Upon 
 the old castle rocks waved flags and handkerchiefs, and 
 the young people shouted vivats. In our vessel there 
 was much singing, and boat after boat followed us with 
 music. In the evening a youth with a guitar sang my 
 favorite song, ' Name not the name.' I was so power- 
 fully affected, that I was obliged to think of foolish aud 
 stupid things to restrain the excess of my emotion ; and 
 thus in a beautiful evening the whole little world of joy 
 returned, without the smallest interruption, accident, or 
 misunderstanding, to their homes. 
 
 " Thus blessed, and indeed encroaching on the gifts 
 of the Infinite, I stood in the dai-kness of the night in 
 a circle of students, singing vivats, and gave my hand to 
 be seized by a hundred hands, wliile I looked gratefully 
 to heaven." 
 
 " August. 
 " Dearest ! I write again upon my holy mountain ! 
 How shall I paint to you the open heaven into which 
 I looked as the Upper Rliine opened before me. It flows 
 eternally before me. I have passed from admiration to 
 admiration. I was received in all the cities in the same 
 manner. In Manheim they gave, on my account, the 
 opera of the Vestal, by Spantini, which usually melts and 
 weakens, by its exquisite beauty. I would, hearing these
 
 438 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 tones, dejiart fioia life. What lovely female forms came 
 before mo ! I have not seen for ten jears so many, and 
 so youthful, and been kissed with such emotion ; but I 
 felt, thereby, the holiness and elevation and deep-rooted 
 nature of married love, and that this, in comparison, is 
 only a rootless and scentless flower. The love of married 
 life, in comparison with this, is like embracing one's own 
 children rather than those of a stranger. I know de- 
 cidedly that my domestic heaven can and will be only 
 the repetition of what it has l)een ; and that it shall exceed 
 the past for thy happiness, thou true and good ! 
 
 " Max nuist study at Heidelberg. Pure, protecting 
 spirits, in the i'orm of my friends, will surround him. 
 You will always, dear Max, be to your mother as you 
 were the day after your communion, and not afar off 
 trouble me. I so gladly think of you thus ; and it would 
 be hard if, on my return, I could not embrace you with 
 the same affection as the others. I think often of you, 
 dearest Caroline, often with painful longing; I will never 
 repeat so long a journey without you. You would be so 
 loved here, by Swartz, Hegel, and Paulus ! 
 
 " . . . . Ah well, dearest! I have here much, too 
 much to do, althoifgli I steal time to work from the fairest 
 hours. When I return I will accomplish more, go out 
 less, live abstemiously, and say often to the body, ' Thou 
 must!' It is incomprehensible the true oversight that 
 one takes of himself, and the faults that one discovers in 
 himself, when he arrives in a new place under new rela- 
 tions. It is so with me, and I shall return to thee a 
 new and improved edition of myself. Farewell, beloved ! 
 Greet my Emanuel, and his Emanuelle, and Otto, and 
 the good Kindcrlein ; they will soon again be crowding 
 on my sofa."
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 439 
 
 In this Heidelberg journey Ricbter formed the most 
 intimate friendship Avith Henry Voss, a man much younger 
 than himself, indeed, young enough to Iiave been the friend 
 of his son. He wrote with great delight to his wife, " that 
 in the true German Voss he had, in his old age, found a 
 new thou." * Richler was now fifty-four years old, and 
 Voss " stood beside him like his youth." It is a rare bless- 
 ing to the old to go back, and, as it were, live over again 
 their youthful yeai"s in another and younger mind. It is like 
 a new blossoming of life after the fruit has been gathex'ed. 
 
 In this journey Richter also made the discovery of his 
 power of imparting animal magnetism, and he afterwards 
 made use of it to alleviate pain in his suffering friends. 
 While he was at Heidelberg a lady brought her daughter, 
 suffering from severe toothache, to him, after he had re- 
 tired for the night. He rose instantly, and came into the 
 hall with bare feet, and with the utmost patience and ten- 
 derness exerted the magnetic power, and sent the young 
 lady home in a deep and quiet sleep. But while, on one 
 side, the discovery of this power was a rich source of 
 humoi'ous excitement, and an occasion of benevolent ex- 
 ertion for others, the practical use of it at so late a period 
 of life suddenly impaired his vigor, and helped, with other 
 evils, to bring on an early and premature old age. 
 
 The following year, 1818, Jean Paul left home again, 
 to visit Frankfort and renew his pleasure by again seeing 
 Heidelberg and the Rhine ; but he seems to begin to 
 feel the weariness of travelling alone. He wrote to 
 Caroline : — 
 
 " The fdirest prospect to me this afternoon was your 
 
 * The reader will recollect thou is only used in the familiar inter- 
 course of intimate friendship.
 
 440 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 apartment, surrounded by our children. In the morning 
 "W'ill your eyes and heart hover about me, and remind me 
 of a day * that has now become holier and dearer than in 
 its first birth. Be only joyful and hoping, as I am, and 
 we shall need nothing more. Children ! would yoa create 
 a joy for your father, while he is away, make your mother 
 happy by your goodness and love, and you \vill be truly 
 dear to your father." 
 
 The next day : " Perhaps I have consecrated our 
 yesterday's festival by a health-giving action. I passed 
 through Wurzburg, on account of the misdirection of my 
 pension by the finance director. But I said not a word 
 of the mistake, for he had a consumptive daughter of six- 
 teen years, that the family physician had given over. I 
 proposed to this man (as he had no faith in it) magnetism, 
 merely as a last possible saving means. With his consent 
 I magnetized the daughter in bed, and put her into a pro- 
 found and gentle sleep. Another physician, an excellent 
 young man, who has learnt in Berlin, will continue the 
 magnetism. I have, at least, saved the good mother from 
 premature tears, for witbout magnetism tlie daughter must 
 certainly die. Her face is already like white marble 
 sculptured on a monument. It was my only consolation 
 yesterday, when I had nothing to press to my heart but 
 my own empty arms, that you would make for youi-solf a 
 real joy, in thinking of this day, of our short separation 
 and eternal reunion. Farewell, most beloved, my heart 
 kisses the children ! Had I, of the six or eight eyes, one 
 only here ! " 
 
 " Frankfort, Miiy 30. 
 
 " To Caroline : Yesterday, in the midst of the coldest 
 weather, I reached this great, splendid city. On the way 
 
 * Tvventj'-seventh of May, their wedding-day.
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 44I 
 
 I have gained on the right ear a wholly gray lock, and on 
 the left one nearly so. I must thank either the cold or 
 
 the cap for this natural powder I am in the house 
 
 of the rich bookseller, Wenner. Paying is not to be 
 thought of. I could not, without great trouble, insist 
 upon paying for wine and beer. His somewhat sickly, 
 but noble and diffident (childless) wife, a singer and 
 sketcher, and my warmest reader, has provided for the 
 most minute conveniences. I have three splendid cham- 
 bers and a private staircase. Near the writing-table a 
 bell for the servants, wax lights, and silver candlesticks, 
 and, if I desire it, the most complete solitude. The lady 
 wept for joy when I came here. Wenner has much good- 
 ness in his countenance, in which there is a strong re- 
 semblance to Goethe, and he always acts without many 
 words. 
 
 "■ There are as many ugly female faces here as there 
 were beautiful in Mainze, — tiiily, broadly ugly. Till 
 now I have only met and spoken with matrons, except 
 two single ladies, which the humorist, Goetlie's early pas- 
 sion, invited me to meet this evening at Brentano's. I 
 can scarcely enjoy this heavenly weather, because there 
 is no garden out of the city where I can go. 
 
 " . . . . How often I thought yesterday, on the water, 
 under the splendid canopy of night, of you, and said, ' Ah, 
 could my Caroline enjoy her birthday festival with me ' ; 
 and this morning I awoke melancholy at the thought that 
 you are always alone, or only with the children, on your 
 birthday. But I need no festival of life to remind me of 
 your love. The careful preparation and packing of every 
 article, the new wristbands on the shirts, every morning 
 remind me of the pious hand that so lovingly orders 
 everything for my comfort." 
 19*
 
 442 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 The Frankfort enthusiasm for Richter was a repetition 
 of the Heidelberg. They also gave him a night festival 
 in boats on the Main, which was nearly a repetition of 
 that on the Neckar, except that the boats were illumi- 
 nated with colored lamps, and the shore with torches. 
 
 He extended his joui-ney to Heidelberg, and' seems 
 almost for the first time in his life to have made the 
 melancholy discovery, that the same joys, although the 
 elements are the same, are never felt a second time with 
 the same mtensity. 
 
 He wrote to Caroline : " I depart from Heidelberg in 
 a wholly different disposition from the last time, although 
 there was nothing then that ought to have been unpleas- 
 ant or painful to you. Indeed, I look with too prosaic 
 eyes upon everything. The poetic flower of love of the 
 last year, is (alas, for it was so innocent !) entirely faded, 
 as in its nature it could know neither continuance nor 
 resuscitation. What I truly dream of is our evenings 
 together. How long shall they last? First Max with- 
 draws, then the little girls, and we sit alone together ; at 
 last you are wholly alone. Ah ! let us love as long as 
 there is yet time to love ! Eternally your own 
 
 " .... As I passed through Offenbach, a beautiful 
 mother of six children came out to meet me, and pressed 
 into my hand a leaf of thanks for the Levana. Never 
 female eyes, except ypurs, looked so amiably at me. 
 What open, beautiful faces there are in this Offenbach. 
 The love of my fellow-men is the only dew for my arid 
 soul." 
 
 To understand the first part of the letter just read, it 
 is necessary to refer to a circumstance mentioned by one 
 of Richter's biographers. 
 
 In liis first journey to Heidelberg the daughter of Pau-
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 443 
 
 lus, the beautiful and spirituelle Sophia Paulus, is said to 
 have made an impression on the heart of Richter, that 
 renewed all his romantic dreams of a spiritual love. Tliis 
 lady was afterwards celebrated for her literary produc- 
 tions, and by a short and unhappy man-iage with William 
 August Schlegel. Notwithstanding Jean Paul's deep and 
 hardly gained knowledge of the female heart, he is said 
 to have spoken, after his return home, with such openness 
 and frequency of Sophia, as to awake a painful jealousy 
 and humiliating distrust in the heart of his devoted 
 wife. 
 
 The reader may judge, by a letter he wrote to the 
 beautiful Sophia after his return, how far the jealousy of 
 Caroline had any real foundation. 
 
 " August 10, 1817. 
 
 " My Sophia : My first written word is to you. In 
 the evening, in Manheim, I could not leave the apartment 
 where there had been so much love, and in the morning 
 I could not remain there,* but went for the whole day 
 to Steinburg. Steinburg held out to me a pure heaven, 
 and if you will share it a perfect one. He and others 
 would get up for me the opera of the Vestal, which ig 
 
 the Madonna, the others are only nuns among operas 
 
 You and the Rhine belong together, and when I meet it 
 again, your image like that of a star will hover over it, 
 and cast a splendor upon it wherever it flows. How 
 often I took the front seat in the carriage yesterday, to 
 look at the Heidelberg mountains, that arose shining in 
 the distance, as the clouds hung over the place where I 
 
 was And so farewell nevei'-to-be-forgotten Sophia. 
 
 Write me above all things every pain that you feel, for I 
 
 * Sophia and her father accompanied him to Manheim, on his 
 return.
 
 444 
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 know your joys. Nothing can divide us, not even the 
 great happiness that I so devoutly wish thee ! * 
 
 " R." 
 
 * Her mamage with August Schlegel, which lasted only a few 
 weeks, when she returned to her parents in Heidelberg. The mother 
 of Sophia was one of the most distinguished literary women in Ger- 
 many, and she was herself remarkable for her study of Shakespeare 
 and knowledge of English literature.
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 Visits Munchen. — Richtee. — His Son Max. — His Melancholy 
 AND Death. 
 
 ICHTER'S journey in the spring of a.d. I820 
 1820 was to visit his son Max, who -^t- 57. 
 had been placed, at the age of sixteen, at the 
 Gymnasium at Munchen. An extract from 
 one of his letters will afford an insight into the character 
 of this interesting young man, whose early death threw a 
 cloud over his family that never wholly passed away. 
 
 " Dear Caroline : Upon the way from Regensburg 
 to Landshut, God sent me in the forenoon three cloud- 
 less, heavenly blue, sunny hours, and I had for the first 
 and last time in that journey an idyllic frame of mind, 
 for which I have languished long years ; and that endures 
 no society except that of the coachman, who sings in the 
 distance as mine does. In the afternoon, where the dis- 
 tant prospect over Landshut opens richly, the Devil him- 
 self I believe seized the opportunity, and poured so out 
 of the clouds, that he drowned the beautiful Isar, and the 
 bridge and the mountain crown over Landshut. 
 
 " This rainy introduction into Munchen continued as 
 far as the Black Eagle. I sought Max in vain in his 
 nest up five flights of stairs, and then went to the
 
 446 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 SchlichtgeroU's. I found them as spirituelle as in former 
 times, but they convinced me of a truth I have long sus- 
 pected, that year^ take from women more of the outward 
 than from man of the inward. 
 
 " They conjectured that ]\Iax was with their son ; and 
 in two minutes he hung sobbing upon my breast. ' His 
 form and face have filled out splendidly. He is half a 
 head taller than I am ; blooming, and fuller in the face. 
 He was more neatly and elegantly dressed than I am, and 
 yet wears only the clothes he brought from home. His 
 personal appearance corresponds with, yes, exceeds his 
 letters, and my whole heart yearns towards the pure, free, 
 powerful, but unpretending youth. As he went with me 
 from the SchlichtgeroU's, he asked, ' How then is my 
 mother ? ' but his voice failed him for weeping. This is 
 pure, honest sincerity, without extravagance. He will 
 take nothing of all I brought for him, not even the watch, 
 as he says, ' he needs nothing.' .... He deprived me of 
 one night's sleep, by telling me of his sorrowful life in the 
 beginning of winter, in his first destitute lodgings, with 
 only a little iron stove that imparted no heat, his win- 
 dows broken, and his wood stolen, with nothing to enjoy 
 at morning and evening, as at home ; his clothes, from 
 his extreme thinness, all too wide for him ; and in the 
 solitary city without one friend, he wept all night from 
 home-sickness, and yet continued to study till twelve 
 o'clock." 
 
 This letter will prepare the reader to understand tlie 
 character of this son of the poet, whose melancholy fate 
 opened a wound in the father's heart that never closed, 
 but continued to bleed till it exhausted his own life. 
 From early childhood Max had devoted himself to learn- 
 ing with incredible industry. In his fifteenth year he
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 447 
 
 had read the Old and New Testaments in the original 
 languages, Homer, and the Greek tragedians. His too 
 ascetical and mistaken sense of duty in Munchen, and in 
 Heidelberg, where he was afterwards sent ; the intensity 
 of his industry, the faithfulness with which he imitated 
 his father's frugality, the few alleviations and comforts he 
 would allow himself, and the high tone of his religious en- 
 thusiasm, soon and imperceptibly undermined the healthy 
 tone of his body and mind. 
 
 Although distinguished for the facility with which he 
 learned all languages, he was deficient in imagination and 
 in creative power, and the poor young man was discour- 
 aged in not finding the rich results he had expected from 
 his faithful industry ; and in his painful doubts of himself, 
 he attributed his failure to a want of sincerity of purpose, 
 and took refuge in the mysticism of a severe, innocence- 
 condemning, supernatural theology. 
 
 From early childhood Max devoted himself with in- 
 credible industry to all intellectual pursuits, and in the 
 study of languages he made surprising advances. Philo- 
 logical studies, although he had not become perfect master 
 of their forms, filled his thirsting spirit, and while he was 
 environed by a cheerful family life, he lived a satisfied 
 and happy youth. Jean Paul drew into his own life's 
 circle all who approached him, and this, his only son lived 
 only in him. 
 
 In HeidelbergTie wept through whole nights of home- 
 sickness, believing, poor youth ! that it was necessary to 
 repeat in himself the self-denial and the abnegation of 
 every natural instinct, in imitation of his father's ascetic 
 and self-denying youth. 
 
 Unhappily, Heidelberg was at this time the hot-bed 
 of those unintelligible teachers, to whom the poor youth
 
 448 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 turned for support in the sea of his doubts ; and when he 
 could not comprehend their mystical and pliilosophical 
 phrases, he attributed it to his own intellectual incapaci- 
 ty, and, instead of turning to his father to find the cheer- 
 ful and rational exercise of true devotion, he sank deeper 
 in despondency. 
 
 The early martyrdom of this interesting youth Avas 
 partly the tragic result of Jean Paul's system of educa- 
 tion. The whole tendency of his teaching is to cultivate 
 the higher powers of the intellect, to excite the imagina- 
 tion, to make poets and literary men ; and those to whom 
 nature had not imparted the higher intellectual gifts were 
 discouraged in his presence. His personal influence, also, 
 upon every one who came into intimate association with 
 him, was overpowering ; they believed the true aim of 
 life was to become like him, a poet, or a literary man. 
 Even women were not exempt from this influence, and 
 his eldest daughter believed it her duty to remain unmar- 
 ried, and to devote herself to the pursuits of her father, 
 as his companion and friend. Happily, the instincts of 
 woman's nature will sooner or later lead out of the laby- 
 rinths of theory, and after her father's death she became 
 a happy wife, contented with the i'eminine duties of a 
 good Hausfrav. 
 
 Richter had seen from the beginning the errors to 
 which his son inclined ; and though he, had warned him 
 seriously and earnestly, he thouglit them perhaps only a 
 stage in tiie intellectual progress of the youth, that he 
 would soon pass over. But, alas ! the poisoned arrow 
 had entered too deeply, and his father's letters, instead 
 of healing, but intimated prophetically the issue. He 
 wrote to him : — 
 
 " Mt good Max : Your letters have rejoiced and
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 449 
 
 touched our hearts. But the Kanne theological water- 
 ing-pot, that has showered you so effectually, makes me 
 anxious for your youth ; an irrecoverable period of life, 
 that should be cheerful and joyous, without monkish 
 vagaries, and but a preparation for a serious, useful 
 manhood. This Kanne, always and eternally one- 
 sided, is exactly as enthusiastic in his theology, and in 
 the pitiful life of liis saints, as he was in his ancient 
 wars, where he held all the historical persons of the 
 Old Testament, merely as astronomical emblems. 
 
 " Study the history of the establishment of Christian- 
 ity ; the letters of the Apostles and Evangelists, tliat were 
 first collected at the end of the second century, that were 
 known through Irenasus, and particularized in the begin- 
 ning of the third century by Origen. In all the conver- 
 sations of Christ there is not a single word of the doctrine 
 of all souls falling at the same time with Adam, or of 
 satisfaction for sin. May God, my dear son, direct you 
 to the cheerful Christianity of a Herder, and Jacobi, and 
 Kant. Read rather, as I did in Leipzig, Ai-rian's Epic- 
 tetus, the loving Antoninus's observations, and Plutarch's 
 biogi-aphies, than Kanne, who is as worthless as an ex- 
 eget as he is as an historian. There is no other Revela- 
 tion than the ever-continuing. Our whole orthodoxy, 
 like Catholicism itself, first centred in the Evangelists, 
 and every century opens and produces new views. O, 
 could I complete my work on ultra Christianity ! With 
 this new monkism you will destroy in yourself all joy, 
 power, and ardor, and in the end gain nothing. 
 
 " I am somewhat calmed with regard to your ultra 
 Christian despondency, by the liope that it has a physi- 
 cal source in your exclusively sedentary and studious life- 
 It is indeed a poor consolation. The vigor of youth may 
 
 CO
 
 450 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 enable you for some years to surpass others in knowl- 
 edge, but tlien, alas ! my son ! you come before me, in 
 imagination, in the years of full ripeness, twenty-five or 
 thirty, pale, emaciated ! apparently more dead than alive ! 
 God spare me that sight ! " 
 
 The father was, indeed, spared that sight ! The in- 
 clination of his son to mysticism took a more decided 
 form, and, leaving philology as a human science, he de- 
 voted himself entirely to theology, as to the free gift of 
 God. Religious enthusiasm assumed with this poor young 
 man not only the form of distrust in and contempt for 
 all his intellectual gifts, but it was united with a severe 
 asceticism of life, that he concealed for a long time from 
 his parents. To his strenuous self-consuming industry 
 he added the most limited parsimony in food and expenses 
 of every kind, and threw over this life-consuming self- 
 denial the tender veil of duty, thinking thus to spare his 
 parents every sacrifice on his account. 
 
 His mother, also, upon whom he hung with childlike 
 love, and who stood by him as a consoling and protecting 
 spirit, wrote to him thus : — 
 
 " My dkarest Son : Your letter, under all the views 
 we can take of it, must yet make us melancholy ; and I 
 hasten, before everything else, to inform you of it, and 
 draw you, dear Max, from your tormenting errors. Your 
 father loves you inexpressibly, and esteems you so en- 
 tirely, that he can ask nothing from Providence but such 
 a son as you are. I, and your sisters, and all our friends, 
 bless God that you are so pure, so innocent, the joy of 
 your family and of the world ; that you have preserved 
 the honesty and truth of your mind in striving after 
 science, and that there is ever developed in you the
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 451 
 
 love of the holy, the true, and the beautiful. What 
 would you then further? Can men be gods? Nothing 
 is to be said against your placing your ideal so very high. 
 But if your jealousy of yourself, on one side, holds you in 
 that touching humility that so well becomes the greatest 
 men, yet real religion is only apparent when, added to 
 our earnest struggle for the highest, cheerfulness stands 
 as a companion at her side. To strive against the limi- 
 tations of humanity, that are opposed more or less to 
 every individual mind, is not pious, — is not permitted 
 by God. 0, suffer your beautiful enthusiasm for faith 
 to show itself in this childlike submission. Strive, but 
 torture not yourself with just nor unjust criminations, 
 when neither the one nor the other belong to you. De- 
 pend upon the aid that is lent you, and the success flow- 
 ing therefrom will give you rest and peace. 
 
 ' The lioness covets not the lion's mane; 
 The mother pheasant sighs not for ornament; 
 With proud neck the swan sails the sea, 
 Humbly his mate shelters her j'oung. 
 The rivulet murmurs most sweetly, 
 But bears no proud na.vj on its breast. 
 The ruby outlasts the fragrant rose, 
 But the dewy tears of evening 
 Shed no mild radiance from it. 
 Vain man! What wouldst thou be? 
 Be thyself! Covet no greater gift.' 
 
 " This extract from Plato's poems, that pleased me so 
 much on the first reading, happily expresses my views. 
 O how painful to me is your melancholy, and the slav- 
 ish, unjust self-accusation before God, that impairs all 
 your active powers ; that excess of religious sensibility, 
 that, instead of the cheerful and loving power of Christian 
 faith, pours only death-streams into all the veins of life.
 
 452 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 " Adieu, my dear son. I embrace you a thousand times 
 with the wai'mest love." 
 
 This wise and tenderly maternal letter will make the 
 reader regret there are not more of Caroline's to her son, 
 where the riches of an intellectual nature are united with 
 the tenderness of a mother's heart. 
 
 The anxious solicitude of the parents of Max was only 
 too soon justified. The too sensitive and conscientious 
 youth returned home at the end of the year, shaken, pale, 
 emaciated ! and a nervous fever of a, few days' continu- 
 ance consigned him to an early grave. 
 
 This melancholy death of his son, at the age of nine- 
 teen, like a heavy blow, seemed to strike our Richter to 
 the earth. Tlie firm, strong man, whom we have seen, like 
 a block of marble, by every previous stroke becoming only 
 more polished and statuelike, was shattered and broken 
 by the death of his son. He could not bear the sight of 
 any book his son had touched ; and the word Philology, 
 (the science in which Max excelled) went through his 
 heart like a bolt of ice. He had such w^onderful power 
 over himself as to go on with his comic romance of Nicho- 
 las Margraf, while his eyes continually dropped tears. 
 He wept so much in secret that his eyes became im- 
 paired, and he trembled for the total loss of sight. "Wine, 
 that had previously, after long-sustained labor, been a cor- 
 dial to liiin, he could not bear to touch ; and after em- 
 ploying the morning in writing, he spent the whole after- 
 noon lying on the sofa in his wife's apartment, his head 
 supj)orted l)y her arm. Caroline stifled the yearnings of 
 a mother, bereaved of her only son, to comfort and sup- 
 port her husband. She contrived ev^ry artifice to draw 
 him from his grief, — proposing amusements for her 
 daughters, to induce him to dress and shake off his de-
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 453 
 
 spondency, and go out ; but at the same time she repre- 
 sented him " as a true angel " in his sorrow. 
 
 At the end of three months Richter was able to write 
 to his friend, Henry Voss. 
 
 " How often for a quarter of a year have you com- 
 plained of me, excused me, and again complained, and 
 yet at last excused me, poor devil that I am. Ah! I 
 could not do otherwise. My being has suffered not 
 merely a wound, but a complete cutting off of all joy. 
 All former losses are unlike the last, and my longing 
 after him grows always more painful. Not on his ac- 
 count do I need consolation, but for the loss of his love. 
 I have still the power to avoid constantly dwelling upon 
 him, although every Grecian author, yes, even the word 
 PliUology, cuts me to the heart. But to hear or see any- 
 thing that was his ! Ah, that I cannot bear ! Enough 
 of this. 
 
 " I am revising the third volume of the Comet. The 
 book upon immortality demands the strength that I can 
 only dare to think of in the fulness of health. In look- 
 ing over the thirty years' work I find that it descends 
 into the depths of philosophy.* 
 
 I will open new light for a thousand veiled and tearful 
 eyes, and show them new kingdoms in the future world 
 of existence ! What new year shall I wish to you all ? 
 One only, that has not the most distant resemblance to 
 my own ! f 
 
 * The Campaner Thai. Jean Paul bejran, on the day of his son's 
 burial, a new work on the immortality of the soul, upon the foundation 
 of the Campaner Thai. 
 
 t In Richter's letters to his wife I have translated only what was 
 personal to himself and family; allusions to persons and passing events 
 are wholly unintelligible to us.
 
 CHAPTER VIII, 
 
 EiCHT^ii VISITS Dresden. — The Impression he made upon his 
 Relatives. 
 
 HEN the spring returned, that sea- a. d. 1832, 
 son that Richter so loved, and that ^'- ^^• 
 had never failed to exhilarate him, his friends 
 urged him again to joui'ney, hoping to awaken 
 new hopes or to turn his thoughts from his heart-consum- 
 ing sorrow. The loss of his son, also, made him wish 
 to draw closer the honds of relationship with the mem- 
 bers of his wife's family. Caroline's sister, Minna Spa- 
 zier, had lived many years in Dresden, and supported 
 her orphan children by her literary exertions.* One of 
 these sons was born in the same year and month with the 
 poet's son Max. Such a coincidence could not fail to in- 
 terest the imagination of a man who attached so much 
 importance to coincidences, and to the time of his own 
 bii-th. He wrote, therefoi'e, to his sister-in-law : — 
 
 " I bring you a written petition, for whose fulfilling I 
 Avill thank you verbally. In April I would enjoy again 
 the beautiful city of Dresden, where many years ago, in 
 
 * Caroline Williclmine, called Minna Spazier, married the second 
 time a person of the name of Uthe, and added his name to that of 
 Spazier, her literary name. Slie was now living in Dresden, editor 
 of the Sinvgriin (Evergreen), a periodical, in which Jean Paul and 
 many distinguished female authors assisted her.
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 455 
 
 the train of the Frau von Bcrlespsh, I lost more -than I 
 found. Ah ! I need now not to forget, for that would be 
 impossible, but to continue to remember all that I have 
 
 ever loved I seek in Dresden only music, nature, 
 
 that is, the environs of the city, and loving men. In 
 myself or around me much hiis changed. Time treats 
 wounded men like a block of marble, and beats off with 
 heavy blows piece after piece, even if it were the form 
 of a son. Ah ! that we were indeed of marble ! " 
 
 To the young Richard Spazier, the twin cousin of 
 Max, to whom we have been much indebted through the 
 course of this biography, we owe an account of the first 
 meeting with Richter. He says : — 
 
 " The children had been educated in the utmost rever- 
 ence for their uncle, the poet, and although they had heard 
 of his works, they had never read a line of his. Their 
 mother received the announcement of his visit with some 
 timidity, and prepared her children for his reception with 
 stories of his severity, of his penetrating knowledge of 
 every weakness in others, and infinite firmness in their 
 suppression in himself. Even my eldest pattern brother 
 trembled at the thought of appearing before Richter. 
 My situation was most painful ; born on the same year 
 and day with his own son Max, my mother, in her ma- 
 ternal solicitude, looked upon it as the finger of Provi- 
 dence, indicating that I should supply to the afflicted 
 father the loss of his son, and pointed out this as the de- 
 cisive moment of my life. Ah, what could be expected 
 of a youth of nineteen years, who had never read a line 
 of his works, who had been half a year at the university, 
 and was just in the most shining period of Philistery. 
 What would the severe moralist say to my beard, my re- 
 nownist dress, my pipe, my open breast, my unshorn locks.
 
 456 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 I heard his voice in the hall and would have fled, but it 
 was too late, and pale as a cloth, and with trembling lips 
 I stood before him. But it was only for a moment, and 
 fear gave place to astonishment. I saw a strong, but un- 
 der-sized, apparently kind-hearted man, with brown face, 
 an eye that did not annihilate, but beamed mildly, even 
 tenderly upon me. He was dressed in a summer coat of 
 invisible green, with a straw hat. He held a strong stick 
 in his hand, and was followed by a white poodle. I felt 
 in a moment that here was a man who would leave to 
 every one his own independence, who would not make 
 himself the standard of morals or manners, and that the 
 want of a neckcloth would be no crime in his eyes. And 
 so it remained the whole time he was with us, — he de- 
 manded nothing, — he asked not that we should give him 
 our time, or yield our opinions to his. He received grate- 
 fully, the attentions we offered him, but left every one the 
 liberty to speak freely the freest opinions. Instead of 
 feeling reserve or constraint in his presence, he seemed 
 to enlarge the region of self-dependence, to excite and 
 draw out the resources of our minds. My student's na- 
 ture that others abhorred he would draw towards him 
 and protect, — yes, he was often the direct advocate of 
 youthful impulses. 
 
 " After he had been with us some time, from gratitude, 
 and, perhaps, to give him pleasure, I read the most cele- 
 brated of his works, the Titan : the book left me for the 
 most part cold, with the exception of the charming scenes 
 in Italy, in Ischia and upon the Epomea, and the charac- 
 ter of Linda ; but my indignation was extreme at the 
 catastrophe of Linda. Kichter received, without the 
 smallest surprise, my declaration that I had never before 
 read anytliing of his, and observed just as calmly, that I
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 457 
 
 was extremely displeased at the fate of Linda. He even 
 led himself to my excuse by saying, that Jacobi and the 
 best judges had expressed the same displeasure ; but for 
 the purpose he had in view it could not have been other- 
 wise ; and no encouragement to read another of his works 
 passed his lips. At last it happened one morning that he 
 asked after my studies and my aim in life. I answered 
 only, ' that I would learn all that was best and most 
 beautiful, but that I had not yet made choice of a pro- 
 fession.' He sought to help me to know myself, by ask- 
 ing ' if I had not a favorite author ? ' I had not, at that 
 time, but I told him ' that as a boy I had leanit Homer 
 by heart, and that I now longed to read Tacitus.' ' I 
 see,' said he, ' that, like every youth, you would be an 
 author,' and he asked me to show liim any essay that I 
 had ever attempted to write, etc." 
 
 In the five weeks that Richter spent in Dresden, every- 
 thing united, as by mutual consent, to restore his wounded 
 spirit to its former cheerfulness. The fairest blue heaven 
 rested the whole time upon the valley of the Elbe. Dis- 
 tinguished strangers, such as Tieck, Tiege, Kalkreuth, 
 and Carl Forster, were then in Dresden. The inhabit>- 
 ants, indeed, manifested for him nothing but curiosity, 
 and the court did not notice him. Distinguished and ac- 
 complished women, as usual, crowded around him ; but, 
 to avoid all exciting emotions, he strictly adhered to the 
 rule he had laid down for himself, not to visit more than 
 once at any house. His sister-in-law's family afforded 
 him a domestic circle, where he could enjoy the j)rivacy 
 and the intimate friendship he loved. The highly nervous 
 state of his mind made it necessary for him to avoid all 
 excitement, and all deep impressions. He therefore did 
 
 not set his foot within the Dresden Gallerv, or any other 
 
 20
 
 458 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 hall of art. He avoided the theatres, and only once heard 
 a mass in a Catholic church, surrounded by friends who 
 shielded him from all exciting emotions. 
 He wrote as usual to bis wife. 
 
 " Dresden, May 8j 1822. 
 
 " Thy loving and liberal soul would be truly joyful 
 over my chamber, which, of all the chambers that I ever 
 inhabited is the most agreeable, and fulfils all my travel- 
 ling dreams. In the midst of verdure, and in the distance 
 mountain circles, it is yet only half a street from the 
 centre of the city. The windows look towards the setting 
 sun, and are so airy, clear, and cool, with a garden beneath 
 them. Tbe chambers are furnished with every necessary 
 article. I lie blest upon my sofa in the morning, and in 
 the evening I hardly go out till sundown. And with all 
 this, the friendly mistress and the cheerful, attentive, and 
 willing maid ! That which is to me the most delijihtful I 
 enjoy again, the Idyllic life that I lived in Eilangen, 
 then the neighborhood of our Minna and her husband, 
 whom I learn every day more to love and value."' 
 
 A lady at this time speaks thus of his reserve and self- 
 control m society, when he did not always take the hand 
 tliat was held out to him, and suffered ladies to stand long 
 moments, unnoticed behind his chair. " These little ap- 
 parent incivilities should not bring into question the just, 
 enlightened, ever-compassionate disposition that has made 
 the soul of this extraordinary man its temple. How 
 beautifully does he extend to every one, even the least 
 intellectual in society, a spiritual arm. He comes to the 
 aid of the poorest with the riches of the mind. How his 
 host and hostess revere him. A wild animal, since he 
 has been under their roof, has become mild and humane ; 
 a miser would build a house, merely to make him a con-
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 459 
 
 venient chamber. No, never shall I forget the night 
 when my daughter, suffering from a severe toothache, 
 burst into his lodgings at midnight, and waked him sud- 
 denly from his first sleep. How indulgently he came, 
 barefooted, down the garden steps (for the fainting child 
 had thrown herself into a garden seat), and began to 
 stroke her magnetically. Soon her pain was alleviated, 
 and after half an hour she was carried in a deep sleep to 
 her own house." 
 
 How did Richter himself enjoy what gave others so 
 much pleasure ? He wrote to Caroline : " After a long 
 
 time a blue sky is united with blue mountains God 
 
 wills that I should again, and without display, be a little 
 joyful. Among the women who here particularly interest 
 me, is the wife of Professor Forster, who sends me fre- 
 quently, by her little daughter, fruit and flowers. I enjoy 
 here many pleasures through the society of enlightened 
 men and the arts, but I long inexpressibly for our life 
 again, at home together." 
 
 To his young friend, Henry Voss, he also wrote : — 
 
 " The pleasure-gardens of Dresden exceed all Germany 
 in beauty of prospect. The Bruhlesh terrace, in the 
 evening, with its lights, mountains, the bridge, and the 
 Elbe, gave me an hour of inw^ard inspiration, that I have 
 for many years sought in vain ; when all hovered over 
 me as in the spring of youth, and within and without all 
 were blessed dreams. It was not melancholy, not even 
 longing ; but full intoxication of happiness from within." 
 
 The Dresden weeks were the last of light and joy 
 Richter ever passed. The death of his friend Henry 
 Voss, immediately after, bereaved him of one who hung 
 upon him even with feminine tenderness ; and it was
 
 460 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 during the Dresden residence that he accidentally discov- 
 ered that the sight of his left eye was so much gone, that 
 he could only see about one inch from it, and that the 
 right eye also Avas rapidly failing. 
 
 He wrote most touchingly to the mother of ,Henry : 
 " He and my Max lie buried in my soul in one grave, for 
 I know how both could love me ! Whatever other poAvers 
 your Henry possessed, one glowed within him with re- 
 sistless fervor, — the disciple John's capacity of loving. 
 It was strong, firm, trusting, sacrificing ; but not the acci- 
 dental impulse of an imbecile. His heart beat as sti'ongly 
 against one as for another. O Henry ! forever lost ! 
 Never more upon this earth shall I be so loved ; but even 
 this guarantees to thee and to us the assurance of meetine: 
 again. The sciences need for their enjoyment no immor- 
 tality ; but love demands the continuance of its objects ! 
 May your husband and son bind up your maternal heai-t 
 till the wound closes, or until all depart together to join 
 the lost one." 
 
 It may seem to the reader that there has been in the 
 last year of Jean Paul's life an uimianly despondency, 
 inconsistent with that Christian stoicism with which he 
 bore all his early disappointments. But to one whose 
 whole employment and life had consisted in literary pur- 
 suits, who had still many works planned for which he had 
 made voluminous preparation, the prospect of closing his 
 writing-desk and leaving his work unfinished, must have 
 been full of melancholy. He had planned also, before 
 the death of his friend Voss, a complete revision of all his 
 printed works, in a new and improved edition, for which 
 Voss was to become the editor. He had also begun the 
 Autobiography, wliich makes the first part of this work ;
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 461 
 
 and his reluctance to speal? of himself at first, and the 
 cloud which his son's death threw over the present, pre- 
 vented him from continning that picture of his youth that 
 lay behind him in magic sunlight. But above all, there 
 lay warm on his heart his beloved work on the Immor- 
 tality of the Soul ; that work, by the beginning of which 
 he had consecrated the burial-day of his Max, and from 
 whose sepulchre he hoped it would rise phcenix-like, and 
 point the way to that immortal home which was indeed 
 the home of his spirit, and that where he now centred 
 his dearest hopes. And after all these works were com- 
 pleted and all his life's duties finished, he had held bright 
 in prospect before him a journey to Switzerland and 
 Italy, countries that he had thirsted to visit, and that he 
 had looked to as the reward of a life of industry and zeal ; 
 but now a dark cloud had descended, and blotted out all 
 but the inward consciousness of duty fulfilled. 
 
 Richter's nephew mentions the pain with which Jean 
 Paul recurred, in his last days, to the loss he had suffered 
 in never having been able to look upon the sea ; and his 
 severe disappointment, that in his latter days he could 
 not have ascended the Rigi, where he fancied he should 
 see Nature in her greatest elevation and her most lovely 
 beauty.
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 The purely Comic Works of Jean Paul. — The Life of Fibel. 
 — Nicholas Margraf, or the Comet. 
 
 HAVE omitted, for the purpose of bringing 
 the active part of the life of Jean Paul to a 
 close, all mention of his later, and purely comic 
 works. After the publication of the Flegeljahre 
 the troubles of the wars of Napoleon came on, when his 
 deep interest in the fate of his country, and the necessity 
 of providing for the daily demands of his family by short 
 narratives, essays, and reviews, that brought an immedi- 
 ate pecuniary return, prevented him from completing any 
 great and long-sustained work. The Life of Fibel, which 
 he says in tlie preface was begun in 1806, was given to 
 the public in 1812. In this preface Paul calls the work 
 " an octavo volume, in which some few harmless, guiltless, 
 lightless, splendorless beings, with the like fate, live their 
 little life. The whole is a quieting still life, a cradle for 
 the far-niente of growing readers ; a soft, gray, evening 
 rain, that, instead of drawing perfume from flowers, draws 
 it from the lowly, invisible earth ; where at most only a 
 finger-breadth of evening glow shines out." 
 
 Spazier says that Fibel was as much a turning-point 
 in the author's works as was the Invisible Lodge ; and 
 both are explained and understood only through his life
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 463 
 
 and his succeeding works. The first was written at the 
 period when emotion and earnest feelmg burst forth from 
 the ice-rind in which the winter-cold of satire had im- 
 prisoned them. In the follomng season of blooming and 
 ever-increasing love he had risen in creative power, and 
 in richness of fancy, as his experience of life became more 
 varied and full, till he reached nearly his own ideal in 
 the Titan. Here, in ripened power and self-conscious- 
 ness, he followed with the Flegeljahre, in which he ana- 
 lyzed and exhibited his inseparable double nature ; his 
 deep and earnest emotion, united with eccentric and 
 comic humor. In the Esthetics he sought to justify 
 and reconcile his poetical peculiarities, and the nature 
 of his works, with the universal laws of art and beauty. 
 But now in these last works he returned to the point 
 from whicli he started ; but with altered view^s, the result 
 of his life and experience. The calm satisfaction and 
 contentment, the harmonious quiet, the spirit of repose 
 and order that breathed in his life, is imparted to all the 
 works that were written after the Titan. There is mod- 
 eration in his earnestness and emotion, as well as a genial 
 tenderness in his humor, that divides these last from his 
 earlier works, and proves that his poetry was only the 
 reflection of his life, and deeply rooted in it. 
 
 The theme of all Jean Paul's works is the same, what- 
 ever the form in which it is expressed or evolved. This 
 theme, the experience in human life, from the Godlike in 
 man, in contention with the littleness of life ; the spark 
 of the immortal, struggling with earthly damps and ob- 
 structions. This, in Paul's convictions, is not the dis- 
 tinction of the few, who, in lively consciousness of the 
 contest, think themselves unfortunate beings, but is more 
 or less the inheritance of every human being. In his
 
 464 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 later works it is no longer a subject for pain, for the 
 illusions of life soften its strivings, and in themselves 
 make man happy. He is healed by the same spear that 
 Avounds him. The strivings of the ideal in man ; the 
 disproportion between his aspirations and his attainments, 
 that in his earlier satires were the occasion of bitter jests, 
 become in his later works the subject of a genial and 
 sympathizing humor. The illusions that nourish these 
 aspirations become the source of the highest and purest 
 joys in elevated characters, and often produce in others, 
 as in Don Quixote, a humor in which the noblest minds 
 can sympathize. Fibel has his illusions, that recreate his 
 whole life ; but the ludicrous conti-asts in it are purely 
 objective, and are revealed to the reader alone. The 
 author jokes here, as in his satires, but with wholly dif- 
 ferent feelings, with sorrow-enlightened wisdom rather 
 than cutting contempt. He contrives to maintain in the 
 breast of the reader the secret consciousness that he is an 
 exception to the general folly that would live upon illu- 
 sions, — a feeling that gives to every satirical work its 
 pi-incipal value. It produces, therefore, a strange mix- 
 ture of feeling, the consciousness of universal insufficiency 
 and of individual success. This is {)artly the effect of the 
 limited nature of his hero, and partly the result of the 
 period in which it was written, and the circumstances of 
 the author's life. 
 
 The outward relations of Jean Paul had become so 
 harmonious and happy that liis mind was kept in perfect 
 equilibrium. He had reached as far as is ever allowed 
 humanity to attain to the ideal of his former aspirations ; 
 his pension of four hundred dollars raised liim above all 
 pecuniary anxiety ; his children, blooming in liealth of 
 body and mind, hung upon him with infinite love ; he
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 465 
 
 enjoyed the fruit of his early industry in his materials 
 for further works, and the food of his mind in the envi- 
 ronment of his beloved nature ; his works appeared to 
 him the best that he could create, and their failures and 
 imperfections not as peculiar to them, but as belonging to 
 the universal imperfection of humanity. 
 
 The Germans deem the author more successful in hia 
 later than in his earlier works. His humorous works 
 are more completely ai'tistic and perfect as works of art 
 than his serious. Although he tliought otherwise, humor 
 is more completely his native element. He could not 
 represent a perfect, unfortvmate, elevated character ; but 
 he was completely successful in his happy fools and sim- 
 pletons. 
 
 Fibel is nothing less than the Don Quixote of litera- 
 ture ; not merely in the construction of his ABC book, 
 with its bad pictures, and worse verses ; but he believes 
 he is a world-blessing genius, and that he has given to 
 posterity the most precious works, when he has collected 
 and put his name to all the old, contemptible rubbish 
 swept from the waste-heaps of a bookseller's shelves. 
 
 Richter, who always united persijlage upon himself 
 with universal satire, represents the heterogeneous con- 
 tents of the books printed with the name of Fibel as not 
 unlike his own productions, prepared from his world-wide 
 extract books ; and identifies the enviable happiness of a 
 being gifted with the illusion of Fibel with himself, as the 
 relator of it. and endeavors to remove the- joke from his 
 hero to himself. The reader finds himself in Fibel's 
 childhood, upon the same ground and under the same cir- 
 cumstances as in the poet's earlier Idyls. In the school- 
 houses of Joditz and Schwarzenbach, with the well-known 
 consumptive figure of the finch-hunting schoolmaster, and 
 
 20 * DD
 
 466 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 believes at first that as Wuz and Fixlein had both busied 
 themselves with literary amusements, this is only a repe- 
 tition of their characters. But Fibel differs from them 
 in this, that it establishes the possibility of the happiest 
 and most joyful existence in the abdication of all wishes 
 and employments except those connected with the' illu- 
 sion. The hero seeks no honey except that made from 
 the modest flowers of his own little garden. This stands, 
 therefore, in intimate connection and contrast with the 
 theme of the serious romances, — the misery which the 
 unsatisfied demands of an over-excited imagination occa- 
 sion in the breast of man being the theme of some of the 
 former. 
 
 Between the publication of Fibel and the Comet Paul 
 had the happiness to prepare many of his old works for 
 new editions. We are reminded in this, as well as in his 
 love of animals, and in many other peculiarities, of his 
 resemblance to Sir Walter Scott. It was a woi'k of love. 
 His new editions were all furnished with new prefaces, 
 from which, as in Scott's, many humorous incidents and 
 little biographical particulars may be gathered. 
 
 In the Comet, the other humorous romance of Richter, 
 the same idea (happiness from the illusions of life, ren- 
 dered comic by the disproportion between the means and 
 the end) lies, as with Fibel, at tlie foundation of the 
 work. But the conditions of happiness, through the pre- 
 ponderance of imagination in the hero of the Comet, are 
 two : First, the power of this fancy turns within upon the 
 possessor, and plays only before him ; and, secondly, hia 
 intellectual power is so limited that he is not conscious of 
 the errors and falsehoods that his fancy impose upon him. 
 This seems to differ little from the fixed idea of any mad- 
 man, and Jean Paul might have found a hero for his ro-
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 467 
 
 mancc in almost any lunatic asylum. This is the opposite 
 of that exalted fanaticism of Emanuel, Liana, Linda, and 
 Gustavus, who would bring into actual life the ideal of a 
 higher existence, which is now in contradiction with this 
 actual life, but hereafter may be the soundest wisdom. To 
 such exaltation all poetical natures are more or less in- 
 clined. Every species of unrestrained imagination leads to 
 innocent madness ; if from outwai'd circumstances it has 
 not play room, it concentrates itself upon a fixed idea, 
 that has no connection with the circumstances of actual 
 Ufe. 
 
 The difference between Don Quixote and the hero of 
 the Comet is as wide as the circumstances of the times 
 and of their respective nations. Cervantes placed the 
 eccentricity of the fixed idea of his hero close upon the 
 limits of probability, while he unites with the errors of 
 imagination in Don Quixote a refined understanding and 
 extensive cultivation ; and the satire turns ujjon the mania 
 of the people of an age just passed. In our times, the 
 fixed idea carried to such absurd extent would soon make 
 its possessor the inmate of an asylum. 
 
 Jean Paul takes for the hero of the Comet a man whose 
 fantasy has led him from his earliest youth to cherish the 
 imagination that he is the son of a prince, and that he 
 must so accomplish himself as to act the prince through 
 life, and thus he will find the father upon whose throne 
 he expects to ascend. The psychological interest, and 
 the humorous result, arise from his efforts to conduct 
 himself right royally in the midst of the most ludi- 
 crous outward difficulties, and surrounded by unbeliev- 
 ing friends, who make sport of him, and from the blind- 
 ness of his fixed idea, and his own limited nature, are 
 able completely to govern him.
 
 468 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 Nicholas Margraf is the son of parents wholly oppo- 
 site in character ; his mother, a gentle and amiable Cath- 
 olic, enthusiastic in her love for holy images, and pictures 
 of the saints, while her husband is cold and heartless ; a 
 miser, wholly engaged in the avaricious heaping up and 
 increase of riches, by the gains of his apothecary's 'shop, 
 and little scrupulous as to the means. The fixed idea of 
 the son must be nourished by the lavish use of money ; 
 and this must be obtained by making diamonds with 
 the chemical apparatus furnished by the apothecary's 
 business. 
 
 Richter begins his work in the biographical form, and, 
 as usual, with the childhood and education of his hero. 
 He brings out in rich profusion secret and avowed mo- 
 tives, and surrounds his hero with characters of every 
 grade of humor and folly. 
 
 .Jean Paul professed the artistic faith, that a fictitious 
 character will not engage the sympathies of the reader, 
 unless he creates a moral interest in spite of his faults 
 and weaknesses ; he therefore unites with his hero's lim- 
 ited faculties a disinterested desire to make others happy ; 
 and with his superficial smattering of all the sciences, a 
 princely desire to lavish money. In the course of the 
 work Paul touches with exquisite satire most of the fol- 
 lies and vices of the time. The vertigoes of education 
 and finance ; the follies of gold-seeking and title-seeking, 
 of proselyte-making and system-making ; the coquetry of 
 love, and the affectation of tlie fine arts. And, in this last 
 great work he contended with noble courage, armed with 
 his own weapons, for the political freedom of his country, 
 and the object dearest to his heart, the cause and the 
 freedom of the people. 
 
 In going back to his ovm childhood to describe that of
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 469 
 
 his hero, to whom he gave the same contrasts between 
 the destitute present and the anticipated splendid future ; 
 the same fantasy for changing stones into gold that be- 
 longed to his own, Jean Paul formed the resolution to 
 unite his own life in a peculiar manner with that of his 
 hero ; and while he parodied the poetry in that of Nicho- 
 las ]\Iargraf, to place the actual life near it as a com- 
 panion. He no doubt borrowed the idea from Goeth^s 
 Dichtung und Wahrheit ; but instead of interweaving 
 them, as Goethe has done, the truth from his own life 
 was placed near its poetry in the image of another. In 
 this way only can the comic tone and the apparent affec- 
 tation of speaking in the third person in his Autobiog- 
 raphy, be explained or excused. Richter apparently 
 seized the idea of appending liis own biography to a 
 comic romance, as only under a humorous form could 
 he lay bare before the world his concealed emotions, 
 his crushing poverty, and the low and narrow circum- 
 stances of his early life. But he seems soon to have 
 found that it was far more agreeable to idealize his own 
 life under the mask of his fictitious heroes, as he had al- 
 ready done from Wuz to Fibel, and tlius reflect upon it a 
 poetic splendor, that vanished as soon as the naked truth 
 was opposed to the poetical illusion ; he proceeded, there- 
 fore, only to his thirteenth year : afterwards the death of 
 his son, rendered the humorous form in which he had 
 begun it, displeasing to him, and his succeeding blind- 
 ness, never permitted him to resume it. 
 
 Jean Paul had made more extensive preparation for 
 his Comet than for any preceding work. The books 
 forming the Quarry consisted of sixteen volumes of 
 twelve sheets each. It was left, as already mentioned,
 
 470 
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 incomplete, although German critics pronounce it one of 
 the most artistically perfect of all the author's works.* 
 
 * To give a complete analysis of Nicholas Margraf would require 
 sheets instead of pages, and would be quite beyond the limits of this 
 ■work. 
 
 In the Autobiography the reader has a specimen of Jean Paul's 
 humorous style; the extract from the Campaner Thai, in the Appen- 
 dix, is in his earnest, or what is called his sentimental manner; while 
 his description of his Curland Visit, also in the Appendix, is a fair 
 specimen of Paul's usual manner of writing.
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 ElCHTER VISITS NUENBURG ON ACCOUNT OF HIS EyES. — KaNNE. — 
 
 His Blindness. — Last Letters. — " Selina." 
 
 CCOMPANIED by his daughter a.d.i823, 
 ^,M^y[ Emma, once again only did Rich- -^'- ^*'- 
 ' ' ter leave home, to visit a celebrated eye- 
 surgeon in Nurnburfr. An extract from his 
 
 letter to Caroline must suffice. 
 
 " Xurnburg, August 30, 1823. 
 " . . . . Yesterday, at noon, I arrived here. In Erlan- 
 gen I visited ScheUing, whose pleasing wife gave us tea. 
 He was full of love, but cannot satisfy me.* Wednesday 
 1 was with Kanne in his stove-heated chamber, on ac- 
 count of his gout. His is a noble, splendid physiognomy. 
 The outer head has won, through Christianity, what the 
 inner has lost. He received me with heartfelt love. But 
 in the midst of his cheerfulness he put out his theological 
 sheep's-ears against his art as a physician, thus — 'that 
 medicine can do no good, — only help from above.' Of 
 objections the little ears would hear nothing. He pointed 
 with true friendly love to my heart, and said ' he would 
 rely upon that — that it would be at last,' — (namely, 
 Kannish). I answered, 'that with age I removed further 
 
 * With his philosophical views.
 
 472 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 from him.' lie said, 'In the end we shall see,' — I, 'and 
 beyond the end!' We could live years happily together; 
 yet, without one moving the smallest pebble's weight of 
 
 the other Next week I shall end my useless visit 
 
 here. My e}es will make journeying always an empty 
 pleasure, and the most beautiful days one enjoys better 
 at home. Here there is, alas ! no distinguished head ! 
 Among the men not one. The last time I had Schweig- 
 ger, Pfaif, Hegel. But I knew all this before, and the 
 ascendency of the merchants, and their coldness towards 
 poetry and philosophy and the arts ; and the want of ele- 
 vation in the women, that always keeps pace with the 
 others, and on whose heads there are rarely faces such as 
 one meets in the Wendelschen tea-dance by the dozen. 
 I found only one beautiful exception, and was, on my way 
 home, under the starry heavens, a little blessed. 
 
 " I knew all this before, and therefore I remain in 
 the house, and am glad when the weather is somewhat 
 bad 
 
 " . . . . The people here are well-meaning and oblig- 
 ing ; as the bookseller Eichhorn, who makes his servant 
 mine, and my good old Osterhausen, who will take me 
 
 to-morrow to a pleasure-garden The common people 
 
 refresh me through their orderly appearance and their 
 true-heartedness. 
 
 "PoorHof! The flames shine always horribly before 
 me. If one could dare to think of himself in sucli a calam- 
 ity ! But one imagines the loss can be as important no- 
 where as to himself. Thus I reflect that, for the second 
 time, all the memorials of my youth are burnt ; in Schwar- 
 zenbach and in llof, and if I sliould return tliere, nothing 
 is left for memory and reflection, and my youth has a 
 second time passed away. We will love each other more
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 473 
 
 truly, my Caroline, since life is so short, so full of changes, 
 so decaying ! 1 greet ye, my dear children. Greet all 
 thy friends warmly." 
 
 Richter made no more journeys. His increasing blind- 
 ness rendered all the tender attentions of home necessary, 
 if not to his cheerfulness, at least to his daily comfort. 
 He consulted many celebrated oculists, tried glass after 
 glass, and many reputed healing remedies ; but, although 
 he parted with the light of day and his beloved occupa- 
 tions with painful struggles and ever-increasing regret, he 
 was obliged at last to feel that the contest was hopeless, 
 and resignation his latest duty. 
 
 Once again was he separated from his wife, which gave 
 occasion to a few more letters, the last, except a few notes, 
 that he ever wrote. 
 
 Caroline never left home, except upon some call of 
 sorrow or duty ; namely, at the death of her father she 
 visited the widowed mother, and spent some time in Ber- 
 lin ; now slie was summoned to the dying bed of her 
 sister, Minna Spazier, who has been often mentioned 
 as supporting by literary exertions her young family in 
 Dresden. From scattei'ed hints it would appear that 
 IVlinna was veiy unhappy in her second marriage. 
 
 No reader can have avoided noticing the singular fact, 
 that, united as were Richter and his wife, and apparently 
 sympathizing in every agreeable emotion and in every 
 social enjoyment, Caroline was never the companion of 
 those little journeys from which Richter derived such 
 elevation of spirits that it would seem as if the being he 
 loved best must have been indispensable to his complete 
 enjoyment. But for this there were many reasons. Their 
 income was never sufficient to permit them to relax the 
 strictest rules of economy in their expenses ; and, although
 
 474 I-IFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 the recreation of journeying was absolutely necessary to 
 restore the powei*s of the author, exhausted by intense 
 application during ten months of the year, Caroline, in 
 her quiet, domestic, feminine duties, did not require the 
 alleviation of novelty or pleasure. 
 
 Eichter, also, in all his journeys, was received and 
 feted as a literaiy lion, a distinguished author ; he was 
 patronized by people of rank, and invited to the palaces 
 of princes, not on a footing of equality, but as one who 
 was expected by his wit and celebrity to repay the con- 
 descension and flattery graciously bestowed upon him.* 
 
 Jean Paul had less obsequiousness, and a more manly 
 independence in his intercourse with princes and nobles 
 than any foreign author with whose works we are ac- 
 quainted ; and, although it is difficult for us in the New 
 AVorld to understand the wide differences of rank in the 
 old aristocratic countries, we can easily imagine that to a 
 woman of true nobility of soul and refined delicate feel- 
 ings all condescending attentions, that implied any inferi- 
 ority in outward advantages, would have been painful 
 and derogatory. 
 
 From what we can gather of the chai*acter of Caroline, 
 she seems to have been the guiding and protecting spirit 
 of all who came within her influence ; all her journeys 
 were errands of mercy, all her letters messages of love. 
 She had become, like those beautiful plants that ft-om the 
 centre of the flower send out protecting branches, that 
 shade and refresh after the blossom has fallen. 
 
 In this last separation Richter wrote to her thus : — 
 
 "June 18, 1824 
 
 " Beloved Caroline : The clock-work of housekeep 
 ing goes and strikes accurately, as you have wound is up. 
 * See Appendix.
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 475 
 
 Emma does everyfliing well, and takes excellent care of 
 me. She is an excellent Haiismutter (house-mother). The 
 children are good, and every day give me a new joy. I 
 have nothing to wish but one dearer than all tlie others 
 near me. We speak longingly of thee, and I shall rejoice 
 at your return, as formerly at ray own, when so heavenly 
 a time always followed it." 
 
 Again : — 
 
 " Beloved Caroline : Letter-writing is, as you know, 
 extremely difficult on account of the gray paper. The 
 sulphur bath, for which Emma takes punctual care, works 
 excellently, but not immediately upon the eyes ; but read- 
 ing, and, still more, writing, is impossible, as the light is 
 not strong enough. 
 
 " Ah, this melancholy half-year of my life ! The for- 
 mer years of poverty and contempt were Sundays in com- 
 parison. Now, I am deprived of so much, and condemned 
 to so much 
 
 " Enjoy, at least for thy sacrificing days a few joyful 
 hours. Be not too anxious for us who are sound at 
 heart. Visit the terrace often at evening, and farewell ! 
 farewell ! " 
 
 " Next day. 
 
 " Your letter has touched and refreshed me, dearest ! 
 and increased the longing for your return that I have 
 hitherto concealed. Exactly on the morning that, the 
 first time for many months, I went to Rolwenzil's,* your 
 heart's words delighted me. I must indeed suffer much, 
 — mucli ! for as yet all means help only a little, or im- 
 perceptibly ; but I firmly believe God will send me, even 
 in this extremity, only what is best for me ! 
 
 * The cottage, out of the city, where Jean Paul had his study.
 
 476 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 " For God's sake provide a good opportunity to return. 
 Venture upon no risks, but think of the poor children 
 Avho love thee so inexpressibly ! Control yourself, and 
 take no formal leave of Minna, — rather take none, and 
 tell her before that you must leave her, else she "will die 
 in your arms. How do I already rejoice at your relations 
 of your Dresden life. Come, only, soon ! You uill be 
 received with thirsting love and jubilee ! Greet the 
 sufferer. Thine ! „ j, „ 
 
 Thus adjured, Caroline was obliged to leave the death- 
 bed of her sister, and when she returned to her home she 
 found her husband almost wholly deprived of the light. 
 His blindness obliged him to relinquish the hope of finish- 
 ing Selina, the book upon the immortality of the soul. 
 So fondly had he cherished the hope of completing his 
 proofs of this liighest consolation of humanity, that he 
 seemed really to believe the Eternal Providence would 
 grant him time ; that darkness would not fall upon him 
 until he had made it light to others ; and in this view he 
 withstood all indications of illness, and repelled any an- 
 ticipations of death. 
 
 The dramatic interest of Selina is sliglit. The char- 
 acters of the earlier work, Campaner Thai, are again 
 brought before the reader with the beautiful addition of 
 Selina, the daughter of Gione, of the former work. The 
 pj'oofs of immortality are drawn from the positive religious 
 belief of every nation, and of all times ; and Richter 
 wislied to impart to tliem the highest degree of complete- 
 ness by poetic illustration, as well as by arguments of the 
 deepest philosophy. 
 
 " There are souls," he says, " for whom life has no 
 summer. These should enjoy the advantages of the in-
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 477 
 
 habitants of Spitzbergen, where, through the winter's 
 day the stars shine clear as through the winter's night. 
 They should liave the nearest compensation for their 
 colder and more distant sun." For such persons the 
 book is written. "Take from the wounded soul, lying on 
 the sick-bed of life, the prospect from above, and he is 
 doubly unhappy, and robbed and wounded." 
 
 The divisions of the book bear the names of the 
 planets ; and it is said in the preface, " as Herodotus 
 gave the divisions of his history, Goethe his Herman and 
 Dorothea, the names of the Muses, so, on account of the 
 greater number and the inferior value of his chapters, 
 Jean Paul gave them the names of the eleven planets. 
 At least, he says there is one resemblance in his chap- 
 ters of which the wandering stars need not be ashamed, 
 *' that these, as themselves, revolve around a sun as their 
 centre, which has the double name of God or Immortality." 
 
 When Richter found his strength, as already men- 
 tioned, rapidly failing, instead of going on to the comple- 
 tion of the whole work, he did what he had never done 
 in any former work, went back and revised and improved 
 the five planets, or first chapters ; and a few weeks before 
 his death said, with a deeply melancholy tone, entirely 
 unusual to him, "• that now these chapters were ready 
 for printing." This was the more remarkable, as he was 
 apparently unconscious of the near approach of death, 
 and, although he despaired of ever seeing the light again, 
 he hoped by the help of an amanuensis, to complete the 
 numerous works already planned. 
 
 The last words he ever penned, except a short note to 
 Otto, and these with trembling hand, the lines running 
 into each other and almost illegible, were : " Knowing 
 each other again (in a future world) is the cardinal point
 
 478 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 of immortality, as many paternosters close with a relic." 
 " Life departs not from the soul, but in the soul. It 
 lays its organic sceptre down, and dismisses the world 
 that had hitherto served it, or rather it abandons its 
 empire." 
 
 Thus unfinished, the work was hidden from Richter's 
 eyes, that yet lay so warmly at liis heart that he wrote 
 by the hand of his wife to her nephew, Otto Spazier, to 
 lend him his eyes and pen for its completion. He closes 
 his letter thus : — 
 
 " I expect a delightful life with you. Every morning 
 till ten o'clock you shall be left to your own studies ; 
 then I shall request you also to lend me your eyes, if not 
 your hand, for the chaos of my library. We will read a 
 little, copy a little, talk a little, be a little joyful, and that 
 
 is all I ex[)ect from you You cannot guess what a 
 
 balsam your arrival will be for my wounded eyes, and 
 for the half of my life crushed by destiny ! " 
 
 " Such a call from the immortal old man, as it entered 
 my solitary apartment," says his nephew, " filled me with 
 delight. The reverend image of his beautiful old age, a 
 just reward for a holy life, rose before me, and with joyful 
 haste I travelled through the wet days of October, and 
 entered liis study on the evening of the twenty-fourth of 
 that month. Tlie same joyful tremor affected me as for- 
 merly, when at the twilight hour, I had listened here with 
 his family to his voice of wisdom. The windows of his 
 room looked towards the rising sun, and far over the 
 garden and over scattered trees and houses towards the 
 Fichtelgebirge, that bounded the horizon. A mingled 
 perfume of flowers and grapes led the fancy to southern 
 climes, to beautiful blue June days, or to the vintage on 
 the Rhine. In the middle of the room stood a tarnished
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 479 
 
 repositorium, with iron fastenings, heaped to the brim 
 with manuscripts and extracts. His sof;i, where he 
 usually read in a reclining posture, was opposite this win- 
 dow, and before it his writing-table, upon which appeared 
 a regular confusion of pens, paper of all colors, glasses, 
 flowers, books, among which last were the small English 
 editions of Swift and Sterne. At the other window stood 
 a small piano, and near this a smaller table. Depending 
 from the cage of his birds was a little ladder, that led to 
 his own work-table, where the birds were permitted to 
 roam among the confusion, sprinkling with water from the 
 flower-glass the sheet upon which the poet was writing. 
 Often was Paul seen to stop in his most excited passages, 
 to let his little canary with her young travel undisturbed 
 over the page, where the water she scattered from her 
 feathers mingled with the ink from his pen. In the cor- 
 ner of the room was a door by which, unobserved, Richter 
 could descend the steps into the garden, and on a cushion 
 near it rested his white, silky-haired poodle. A hunting- 
 pocket and rosewood staff hung near. All three had often 
 been the companions of his wanderings, when, on beauti- 
 ful days he went through the chestnut avenue to the little 
 Rolwenzil cottage. 
 
 " All in the room retained its usual position, but the rul- 
 ing hand appeared to have been absent. The light was 
 shaded, and the windows hung with green curtains ; the 
 robust form that in former years, even before the snow- 
 drop had loosened the icy crust of winter, had worked 
 long hours with uncovered breast in the open air, lay 
 supported with cushions, and shrouded in furs upon the 
 sofa ; his body drawn together and eyes forever closed. 
 " Heaven," said he, " chastens me with a double rod, and 
 one is a heavy cudgel 1 (meaning his blindness ;) but I
 
 480 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 shall be well again now. Ah ! we have so much to say 
 and to do. But we shall have a thousand hours, — at 
 least, minutes." His voice was weaker, his words slower, 
 and it cut me to the heart to hear him speak of himself. 
 It was late, — and soon his wife, ever watchful, called me 
 away, to return to him again in the morning." 
 
 Early the next morning he began a complete re\nsion 
 of his works. The nephew read aloud, and Paul inserted 
 his alterations. When Spazier thought one necessary, 
 he indicated it by pausing, to draw his attention. With 
 great mildness and patience Paul listened to every objec- 
 tion ; and himself related, explained, praised, and blamed. 
 He reconsidered and over-lived thus his whole spiritual 
 life in his works. In the illustrations scattered tlirough 
 his sixty-four volumes, of which, indeed, every page is 
 filled, he found only two or tln-ee were repeated. 
 
 The arrival of his nephew, and tlie hope of completing 
 Selina, and the revision of the new edition of his works, 
 gave new life to Richter. Great indeed was his joy, 
 as they were read to him, that he could assert, he had 
 never written a line against virtue, or one that for this 
 reason he could wish to blot. But he soon began to per- 
 fect rather those that he considered unfinished than to 
 continue his new works ; and we must ever regret that 
 he left his Autobiography unfinished ; that he went home 
 before he had given us this golden key to his works ; the 
 psychological unfolding of his poetic nature ; the impres- 
 sion that the ever-changing scenes of life and litei'ature 
 had made upon him since his childhood. This he in- 
 tended to make a memorial of gratitude to those great 
 men, Gleim, Herder, and Jacobi, to whom he felt himself 
 so much indebted. He liad already spoken earnestly of 
 his eternal gratitude to Gleim, for the timely present of
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 481 
 
 fifty dollars ; and he intended to give a full-length picture 
 of the princely form of Herder, and to illustrate his char- 
 acter with beams of light. But, alas ! it was now too late. 
 His weakness increased so rapidly that he was obliged 
 to resign, but with all possible submission, the design of 
 continuing any of his works. He withdrew from all self- 
 activity, and gave up the pleasure of speaking of subjects 
 that in his circumstances would have had only an egotis- 
 tical interest, and devoted himself for the short remainder 
 of life to the happiness of those about him. The long, 
 dark days of November were cheered by reading. The 
 books that until the last he delighted most to listen to 
 were HerbarCs Psychology and Herder's Philosopliy of the 
 History of 3fan. When wearied of these, he desired to 
 smile at some humorous work, and his nephew laments 
 that German literature is so poor in books of this kind. 
 
 At this moment rose higher than ever within our Rich- 
 ter the apostle John's power of love. Age often serves 
 the heart as it does the outward form, takes from it the 
 fulness and tenderness of sympathy, and leaves it hard 
 and shai'ply angular ; but in the heart of Jean Paul love 
 was a plant that found ever a richer and a warmer soil, 
 disclosed continually new buds and blossoms, spread its 
 roots and fibres always farther, and extended, in his last 
 days, the perfumed shadow that gave him peace and 
 blessed dreams. 
 
 He sat, as Spazier describes him, like an innocent, 
 tranquil child, with the firmest confidence in God and in 
 future good, although the present was sinking around 
 him. His own pain only increased his interest in the 
 joys of others. His weakness, that denied him acts of 
 love, impelled him to express more fully the language 
 of affection, that had been till now concealed in actions. 
 
 21 ££
 
 482 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 The fiiends who visited him never heard a complaint 
 over his blindness ; but to anxious questioning he an- 
 swered with low, but cheerful, hopeful, signification. 
 When others, thinking to conceal from hiq;! his situation, 
 spoke of hopes and joys for the future, he drew them 
 immediately to subjects of more univei-sal interest. Self- 
 forgetting, he would speak to his visitors of any other 
 subject. As this was the time of the so-called freedom's 
 contest in Gennany, deeply as his true German heart 
 had ' been directed to the interests of freedom, now its 
 beams spread a glow in his evening sky. 
 
 As his eyes were extinguished and expression denied 
 him through this organ, he sought by a more tender tone 
 of voice to draw others to his heart, and when his voice 
 also failed, love pervaded the whole exjiression of his 
 countenance. His cheerfulness was much increased when 
 one or two friends were added to his domestic circle. 
 Otto or Emanuel came almost every evening. They 
 clustered around his sofa, and here, like an electric spark, 
 he kindled all about liira. Every new thought received 
 from liiin organization, and lie ever suggested something 
 new ; his pictiu'e-language never wearied ; and the de- 
 parture of his fi-iends was always too early. One even- 
 ing the conversation turned upon the sense of smell, and 
 Richter mentioned how strongly the recollection of per- 
 fumes excited the imagination. lie said, " that his father, 
 sometimes, in his boyhood, shut him into his room, and 
 that when he went again into the open air he met the 
 fumes of the tobacco the carpenters smoked, and that 
 tobacco now ])rought l)ack, like the sound of the cowbell, 
 his whole childhood before his soul. Through the sense 
 of smell, as its impressions are so undecided, tlie romantic 
 is singularly excited. Schiller always rejoiced in per-
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 483 
 
 fumes, while Goethe, the phistic artist, was more inter- 
 ested by the form of the nose. Smell is the most refined 
 of the senses. A gentle and refined Indian would think 
 us all oHeiisivje animals. Herder had the most delicate 
 sense ol" smell, but in everything he was an elephant." 
 With this one word Richter delineated Herder's great- 
 ness, his delicate oi'gauization, which also distinguishes 
 the elephant among animals, and his Indian nature. 
 
 In the last weeks of his life he could take a less active 
 part in the conversation, on account of the weakness of 
 his voice. For this he often toucliingly asked pardon ; 
 and Caroline sat with her ear close to him, to interpret 
 to those less accustomed to his accents. 
 
 Eight days before his death the darkest night settled 
 upon him. Even then he sat patiently, trusting the com- 
 ing spring would bring again for him the warm sun, and 
 the blue heaven, and the eternal stars. Many times he 
 raised his darkened eyes to tlie window, hoping a faint 
 ray would pierce the gloom ; once only his pain broke 
 out in words, as his friends were lamenting the helpless- 
 ness of his situation, that prevented him from seeking 
 relief for his other infirmities. The thought for a mo- 
 ment overpowered him, and in the most touching voice 
 he cried out with Ajax in the Iliad, 
 
 " Light! light only, then may the enemy come! " 
 
 The extraordinary talent for music that Richter pos- 
 sessed has often been mentioned. When weary with 
 thought, he would seat himself at the instrument, and 
 .with an accompaniment on the keys with one hand, he 
 would translate with the other the emotions that filled 
 his mind. "\Ylien they were tender, he as well as all who 
 heard hiin would break out in tears, till all hearts were 
 melted. The music of others also affected liira deeply,
 
 484 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 and once in a large party he could not restrain his tears, 
 when Migno7is song was sung bj a young lady. 
 
 Tn the evening, during this last dark period, when the 
 day had exhausted him, he longed for the refreshment 
 of music ; but the voices of his children overpowered him, 
 and his father's heai*t wept at their simplest tones ; but 
 when in the next apartment the sounds appeared to come 
 from a distance, he could listen to the voices that he loved. 
 Then he would turn his face towards the wall, and earth 
 and sorrow were forgotten, while he flew with the sounds 
 to fairer climes and flowers and mountains and beautiful 
 forms. When his family returned, they would find liim 
 sitting upright on the sofa, and in his face were the 
 traces of emotion that his darkened eyes could no longer 
 express. 
 
 Schubai't's splendid composition of the music of the 
 Erl King, " Thou dear child ! come, go with me," Zel- 
 ter's song of the Harper in Meister, and the many-voiced 
 little song of the people, " So many stars are in the sky," 
 and many of Goethe's songs lulled him so blessedly, that 
 they seemed to exert a wonderful physical power on his 
 well-being. One evening he said it was as if, during the 
 singing, some one had drawn over him a soft and warm 
 mantle, and when the sounds ceased, he wondered to find 
 no covering upon him. He was deejdy moved one even- 
 ing, when a young girl sung a Spanish song before his 
 door, accompanied by the guitar. It brought the south 
 into his winter apartment, and excited and warmed his 
 fancy. 
 
 Richter went every morning to his study, and continued 
 revising with his nephew the new edition of his works, 
 until from weakness of the breast his voice could no 
 longer be heard. The soul seemed to have withdrawn
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 485 
 
 from all the external orcrans, and to communicate with 
 the outward -world only through tlie ear ; the eye was 
 turned inwai'd upon the soul, and his biographer says : 
 " The volume of the noble brow seemed to expand still 
 more, as if thought sat visibly upon it ; the outline of 
 the delicate nose became more beautiful, and around 
 the firmly closed mouth the most amiable mildness 
 played. That which has come to us from tradition of 
 the bust of Plato ; what the saints have told us of the 
 expression of the holy Christ hovered upon his face. 
 Deprived of the veil of human senses, with which the 
 earth protects the dwelling-place of thought, the beau- 
 tiful form spoke only of the spirit, and of immortality ; a 
 tremor of reverence filled the heart of the spectator, and, 
 unconsciously, the hands were folded as if in prayer ; 
 every one who entered spoke softly, as if in the presence 
 of a holy being." 
 
 On the morning of the 14th of November, when hig 
 nephew came down, Richter for the first time was absent 
 from his study. Spazier found, him in the apartment of 
 his wife, and, although early, Otto and his physician were 
 with them. Caroline sat with her ear close to the mouth 
 of her husband, for she only could now understand the 
 well-known but imperfect accents. He said " good morn- 
 ing " when his nephew entered, for his hearing was still 
 acute. 
 
 Through the perpetual night about him, and the irregu- 
 larity of his repose, Richter had lost the consciousness of 
 the course of time, and thought it was already evening, 
 lie was confirmed in tliis impression by the presence of 
 the physician, who usually made his visit in the evening, 
 and not to make him more uneasy they humored the 
 error, and did not try to undeceive him.
 
 486 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 His nephew read the newspaper to him, and some pas- 
 sages from Herder's spiritual works ; but he seemed this 
 day to thirst more than ever for the voices of his wife and 
 children ; liis youngest daughter climbed perpetually on 
 the back of his chair, and held her youthful face dose to 
 his. The son of Herder came in ; and it so happened that 
 just at this time the transfer of the Princess of Lucca took 
 place in Bayreuth. The incident w^as more noticed be- 
 cause it was to the same Saxon Prince Max, the transfer 
 of whose first wife, also an Italian princess, Jean Paul 
 had described in Hesperus. So remarkable a coincidence 
 could not escai)e a poet, who professed, as Richter, to be- 
 lieve in the duality of all things. Young Herder told 
 him that the bust of the prince, as the portrait in Hes- 
 perus, accompanied the pi-incess, borne in a sedan-cliair, 
 and, what appears infinitely comic, dined and reposed 
 wherever the princess rested. This led the conversa- 
 tion to Hesperus, and Richter Avhispered many alterations 
 he intended to make in that work, and, said it had failed 
 totally of the object he wished to accomplish in writing it. 
 
 Noon had by this time arrived. Richter, thinking it 
 was night, said, " It was time to go to rest," and wished 
 to retire. He was wheeled into his sleeping aj)artmcnt, 
 and all wa*? niranged as if for repose ; a small table near 
 his bed, with a glass of water and his two watches, a 
 common one and a repeater. His wife now brought him 
 a wreath of flowers that a lady had sent him, for every 
 one wished to add some charm to his last days. As he 
 touched them carefully, for he could neither see nor smell 
 them, he seemed to rejoice in the images of the flowers in 
 his mind, lor he said rej)eatedly to Cai-oline, " My beauti- 
 ful flowers, my lovely flowers ! " 
 
 Although his friends sat around the bed, as he imagined
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 487 
 
 it was niglit, they conversed no longer; he arranged 
 his arras as if preparing for repose, which was to be to 
 him the repose of death, and soon sank into a tranquil 
 sleep. 
 
 Deep silence pervaded the apartment. Caroline sat at 
 the head of the bed, with her eyes immovably fixed on 
 the face of her beloved husband. Otto had retired, and 
 the nephew sat with Plato's Phcedon in his hand, open at 
 the death of Socrates. At that moment a tall and beau- 
 tiful form entered the chamber ; and, at the foot of the 
 bed, with his hands raised to heaven and deeply moved, 
 he repeated aloud the prayer of his Mosaic faith. It was 
 Emanuel, and, next to Otto, the most beloved of Richter's 
 friends. 
 
 About six o'clock the physician entered. Richter yet 
 appeared to sleep ; his features became every moment 
 holier, his brow more heavenly, but it was cold as marble 
 to the touch ; and as the tears of his wife fell upon it, he 
 remained immovable. At length his respiration became 
 less regular, but his features always calmer, more heav- 
 enly. A slight convulsion passed over the face ; the phy- 
 sician cried out, " That is death ! " and all was quiet. 
 The spirit had departed! 
 
 All sank, praying, upon their knees. This moment, 
 that raised them above the earth with the departing 
 spirit, admitted of no tears ! 
 
 *' Tlius Richter went from earth, great and holy as a 
 poet, greater and holier as a man ! " 
 
 Involuntarily we recall the death-bed of another great 
 poet, on that delicious summer's day when the windows 
 were all open, and the only sound the ripple of the Tweed 
 upon its stony bed. Here, in the midst of winter, a deeper 
 repose must have consecrated the death-bed of Richter, as
 
 4»8 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 if Nature herself stood reverently still when her worship- 
 per and interpreter laid down the _2;arnient in which he 
 had ministered in her temple. 
 
 Richter was buried by torch-lia:ht : the unfinished man- 
 uscript of Selina borne upon his coffin, and the noble ode 
 of Klopstock, — 
 
 " Thou shalt arise, my Soul! " 
 
 sung by the students of the Gymnasium at the burial- 
 vault. 
 
 Otto could not survive his loss. He lived only a few 
 months, in order to arrange the unfinished slieets of 
 Selina ; and then, in secret mourning, followed the de- 
 pai-ted friend.
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 HAVE now finished my task, and I might 
 safely leave the biography of Richter to make 
 its impression upon the reader without one 
 word of commentary ; but, like Otto, I linger 
 by the tomb of my friend, unwilling to pait with him who 
 has been my companion so long. 
 
 I have not the presumption to imagine that I can en- 
 lighten those who have had opportunities to study the 
 works of Jean Paul, from which alone his character can 
 be appreciated ; but in this country it has been the cus- 
 tom to contrast him with Goethe, and to class them as 
 belonging to opposite schools in literature. They are, 
 indeed, widely different, but the one need not blind us to 
 the excellence of the other. They were widely different 
 in their lives. Goethe grew up in a happy home, where 
 the genial disposition of his mother, who used playfully 
 to say, " her AYolfgang and herself were of the same age," 
 (in fact, he was born in her seventeenth year,) led him to 
 enjoy every natural good, every innocent pleasure ; while 
 Jean Paul, born in poverty, brought up in almost ascetic 
 frugality, tended by a mother so sorrow-bowed, so fearful 
 of joy that she could not even understand her gifted son's 
 fame ; living in an obscure village with few associates, 
 
 21*
 
 490 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 and none superior to himself, so that he could form no 
 impartial and accurate estimation of himself, differed in 
 this as in every other respect from Goethe. Goethe 
 stood upon an elevation above his fellows, attained by 
 what the Germans call universality, the power of Qbserv- 
 ing all the bearings and points of the times, from an 
 elevation far above them all. 
 
 The difference between Goethe and Richter is not more 
 striking than the anomaly in the character of each, and 
 the discrepancy between that character and their works. 
 Goethe, whose classical culture would not allow him to 
 violate the unities, whose polished exterior gave him the 
 appearance of a Grecian god, in private life permitted 
 himself much license, and of his associates would cry out, 
 " that they had the heart to commit some absurdity ! " 
 while Jean Paul, in his works so wild and luxuriant, that 
 he might be compared to a great, gnarled oak, making 
 grand music in its branches as they stretched towards 
 heaven, while the little singing-birds nestled in its leaves ; 
 in private life hedged himself round with rules and reso- 
 lutions, and all the safeguards of order and form. His 
 journals are tilled with reiterated regulations, and ex- 
 pressions of repentant sorrow whenever he violated the 
 least of them. It was safe for Goethe to allow himself 
 the seductions of social and polished life ; but Richter, 
 whose great and irregular nature was always breaking 
 through the jjolished border of conventionalism, planted 
 himself around with the thorny hedge of minute observ- 
 ances. Goethe needed no rules, no restraints ; he was in 
 no danger of the discourteous developments of a generous 
 manhood ; his nature was polished to elegance. If he 
 ever struggled, " the graces," as Bettine said, " kept him 
 prisoner."
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 49I 
 
 He needed no reiterated hints in his journal to do 
 everything in its season, and keep everything in its place ; 
 the clockwork of his nature went neither too fast nor too 
 slow, and struck the hour at the exact second, while the 
 virtue of neatness was in him almost sublime. 
 
 Richter's life may be divided into three epochs, and his 
 works into three corresponding divisions. The first, that 
 of pure satire, terminated with the writing of the " Con- 
 tented Schoolmaster." 
 
 The infancy and early youth of Richter alone were 
 genial and poetical. Fi'om his entrance into the Hof 
 gjTiinasium, through his Leipzig life, he was struggling 
 with actual want, and opposing an iron resolution to an 
 adverse destiny. At this time a cold scepticism shrouded 
 his mind ; he had not broken the crust of tliat merely in- 
 tellectual period of his life, when the buds of his fancy 
 and all the warm springs of his heart were imprisoned by 
 the ice of an ungenial belief. At this time, his French 
 and English studies led him to Pope, Shaftesbury, Swift, 
 Rabelais, and the Encylopedists. He wrote only satires. 
 To give interest to these essays, that were without all 
 poetical or dramatic charm, he acquired his peculiar man- 
 ner of writing, crowded his page with figures, comparisons, 
 and antithesis ; ransacked heaven and hell, and all the 
 regions of earth for illustrations, anecdotes, proverbs, and 
 quaint expressions, and acquired what Cai'lyle has called 
 his claptrap manner. This manner was foreign and arti- 
 ficial, for his private journal, written at this period, is free 
 from everything of the kind. This manner of writing 
 became a second nature ; he says himself, he could not 
 help it, " that his figures and illustrations were like mice 
 let out of a trap, one caught hold of the tail of the other 
 in interminable succession."
 
 492 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 The usual theme of Richter's satires is the contrast of 
 the infinite in man's breast with the low and narrow cir- 
 cumstances in which he is placed, and in this early period 
 it is treated with the bitter and cutting coldness of a 
 sarcastic laugh. 
 
 But his soul was soon unsatisfied. He began to long 
 after his inheritance. He could no longer quiet his thirst 
 after a higher good with a scornful laugh. We find in 
 bis journal that, " he laid long hours in the night upon 
 the dewy grass, and longed to allay the thirst of his soul 
 by looking into the starry heavens. When he arose and 
 saw the impression his body had made upon the grass, he 
 thought of his grave, and the flowers thus pressed to- 
 gether ; the terror of annihilation seized him with iron 
 hand. Then came the warm beams of the arisen sun ; 
 and the blessed thought of God and his love to man, that 
 would burst the gate of the grave ; and his sunken heart 
 rose again." 
 
 Such moments sometimes occur in life, when a strong 
 and powerful emotion has the effect of the most startling 
 events. We know not whether Richter meant to repre- 
 sent this moment as a turning from darkness to light ; 
 but the death of his two youthful friends, tliat occurred at 
 this period, fixed his thoughts upon immortality, and a 
 strenuous exertion freed his soul from its fetters. Now, 
 he turned back in imagination to his childhood in Joditz 
 and Schwarzenbach, and it appeared in the ever-increas- 
 ing light of poetry ; the perfume of his cliildish faith and 
 early education was again breathed into liis life. Now, 
 his heart began to overflow with emotion, and bitter i)ain 
 at a misdirection of his talents, that had deprived his 
 youth of elevation and spiritual joy. He had no longer 
 before his mind the cold conception of the follies of fools
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 493 
 
 and simpletons, but also the disajipointments and fond 
 longings of the suffering and good. IIow significant is 
 this passage in his journjd of November, in this year : 
 "And you, my brothers, I will love more, I will create 
 for you more joy. I will give up my greater plans, and 
 limit my endeavors to make you cheerful, and turn my 
 comic powers no longer, as hitherto, to torment you. I 
 will use my art to make myself cheerful, to content my- 
 self with every necessary limitation ; and thus to win joy 
 for you. I will make you happy by imparting what I 
 have hitherto gained. Fantasy and wit shall be united to 
 find consolation, cheerfulness, and joys in the most limited 
 of life's relations." The result of this holy purpose of his 
 life were the works, beginning with Wuz and ending only 
 with the Selina. Few have been like him, faithful to a 
 great idea. He had, as we have seen, consecrated him- 
 self to instructing his countrymen through the press, and 
 no office, no emolument, no honor, seduced him. In his 
 cold and hungry hut, in his humble school, he wrought 
 out in patience and solitude the gems that he afterwards 
 joyfully produced. He surrendered his soul to God, and 
 his life became in harmony with the true, the beautiful, 
 the good. 
 
 The very limited relations in which Richter stood with 
 others, the poverty of incidents in his life, the few char- 
 acters he knew, the small number from which he could 
 choose his hero, compelled him to go back to his early 
 recollections ; and his memory and fantasy supplied him 
 with a model that answered to the wants of his soul, that 
 in poetry, as in life now, thirsted for love. Wuz is the 
 embryo of a whole succession of such characters appear- 
 ing in Jean Paul's after romances. He is the first result 
 of the author's creative imagination, and the transition
 
 494 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 from his satirical to his serious, earnest works. In this 
 conception is tirst apparent tlie so much talked-of double 
 nature of Richter, the contradiction, the contest of form 
 with tendency. Richter had not in the beginning of bis 
 change the courage to manifest his feelings and emptions. 
 He was ashamed to open his heart to the public ; he is, 
 therefore, in his work, through ridiculous follies in Wuz, 
 constantly interrupting the earnest impression of the 
 work. But although he had freed by this exertion his 
 earnest creative power from the mastery of the comic and 
 familiar, the process took place too late for the comic ever 
 to be entirely subjected. The contest continued through 
 all his serious works, and takes the form hi ^them of the 
 most genial humor. He compares this tendency of his 
 nature to the bird Merops, whose tail is turned towards 
 heaven, but in this direction continues to rise. 
 
 The second peculiarity of Wuz, which is more or less 
 that of all Richter's serious works, is, that he lends to the 
 character the peculiarities of his own childhood. Hence, 
 for the first time his father and himself, and all the idyls 
 of village life, ai)pear in the borrowed liglit of poetry. 
 As they pass before him he gives them individuality, and 
 the coloring of reality. It seemed only necessary for him 
 to touch his native ground, the home of his childhood, 
 and from them he immediately received inspiration. 
 
 The contest, as I have said above, of the serious and 
 humorous never ceased. Humor was often, even in his 
 most serious works, the quality that ruled his nature ; the 
 product not now of contempt, but of love ; springing from 
 the heart as much as from the imagination, and pouring 
 the balm of a sympathizing spirit over the wounds of 
 humanity. If I mistake not, Richter's humor is the qual- 
 ity that has made him so beloved by the Germans. Its
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 495 
 
 origin is a true sensibility to the discrepancies and con- 
 trasts of life, and a quick perception of the alleviations, 
 which his rare gifts enabled him to present with a simple 
 and touching pathos. 
 
 In his preface to Quintus Fixlein, which is an enlarged 
 repetition of Wuz, he tells us the purpose for which he 
 writes. " That I may show to the whole earth that we 
 ought to value little joys more than great ones; the night- 
 gown more than the dress-coat ; that Plutus's heaps are 
 worth less than his handfuls ; the plum than the penny 
 for a rainy day ; and that not great, but little good-haps 
 can make us happy. Can I accomplish this, I shall, 
 through means of my book bring up for posterity a race 
 of men finding refresliment in all things ; in the warmth 
 of their rooms, and of their niglit-caps ; in their pillows, 
 in mere apostles' days, in the evening moral tales of their 
 wives, (fee. You perceive my drift is, that man may be- 
 come a little tailor-bird, which, not amidst the crashing 
 boughs of the storm-tost, roaring, immeasurable tree of 
 life, but upon one of its leaves sews itself a nest together, 
 and there lies snug." * 
 
 The whole of this preface, with its quaint illustrations, 
 is an exquisite essay upon contentment, and worth all the 
 philosophy and all the sermons that ever were written on 
 the art of being happy. 
 
 In the succession of works that followed this, Jean 
 Paul's power of conception and ci'eation rose higher and 
 higher, till he reached the ideal of his Titan. But the 
 theme is always the same, the contrast of the ideal with 
 the real, the Godlike spark striving with the mists of 
 eartli. This leads us to the third series of his w^orks, — 
 
 * I avail myself gratefully of Carlyle's translation, as I have not the 
 original at hand.
 
 496 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 the Comic, -where the striving after the ideal becomes an 
 ilhision, and the source of joy and contentment rendered 
 infinitely humorous by the limited nature of his heroes, 
 and the contradiction between the striving of the heart 
 and the striving of the head ; the contrast of the grand 
 idea with the limited and paltry power of execution ; as 
 in Nicholas Margraf, who believes himself born to be a 
 king, and conducts himself right royally under the mean- 
 est and most pitiful environment. All such characters 
 protect themselves by their ideal, from the frosts and 
 miseries of the external world. A true enthusiasm, as 
 Richter says, is " like the bird of paradise, that slumbers 
 flying, and on liis outspread pinions oversleeps, imcon- 
 sdiously, the earthquakes and conflagrations of life, in 
 its long fair dream of its ideal mother-land " ; an illusion 
 becomes comic and ridiculous only, wlien it is like that 
 foolish bird, who thinks she protects her body by hiding 
 her head. 
 
 I have said too much, perhaps, upon this subject, but it 
 seems to me to solve what has been called the enigma of 
 Jean Paul's works. 
 
 When we come to the execution of his works, to the 
 outward form, there indeed he falls far shoi-t of his own 
 ideal. He pronounced one of his works a born ruin. 
 All, more or less partake of that character. His con- 
 ceptions were glorious, perfect ; the edifice stood whole 
 and secure in his mind, but when he comes to the execu- 
 tion upon paper, it seems to fall together in a confused 
 mass ; the fair-proportioned columns, that should support 
 the edifice, stand alone, or are prostrate ; ignoble parts of 
 the structure are thrust out in close contact with the 
 beautiful, and mar the just proportions of tlie whole ; the 
 divine pictures and cabinets of gems, that should adorn
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 497 
 
 with chaste beauty, are scattered in reckless profusioa 
 over every part ; meanness and grace, beauty and de- 
 formity, are everywhere mingled together. 
 
 That Richter was deficient in taste has been allowed 
 by his warmest admirers. He had an eye open to beauty, 
 but he had also no disgust at defoi-mity. He seems, 
 indeed, to have imagined beauty in all deformity except 
 that of vice. This want of taste may be accounted for 
 by the homely poverty and meanness of his early life. 
 He had a deep and pervading feeling of moi'al beauty, he 
 also discerned beauty in the humblest forms, where other 
 eyes had never looked for it. But as he was ignorant of 
 the conventionalisms and elegances of polished life, he 
 did not see meanness and deformity wliere a fashion- 
 educated eye would have found both. Every form of 
 human life, the humblest domestic occupation, possessed 
 beauty for him ; and, in his view, the hunting of rats was 
 as heroic as the hunting of hares. In this respect he re- 
 minds us of Shakespeare, — how soon, after an acquaint- 
 ance with Shakespeare, ai-e what the French call liis bar- 
 barisms forgotten. 
 
 The result of the perusal of one of Jean Paul's works 
 is like going through a gallery of pictures where celestial 
 Madonnas, St. Johns, and St. Cecilias hang side by side 
 with Dutch Inns, Sancho Panzas, and drinking boors ; 
 but we go back again and again to study the divine pic- 
 tures, and feel their elevating influence, while the others, 
 although admired for their truth and nature, are forgotten 
 as works of art. 
 
 Another peculiarity of Richter, which has been ridi- 
 culed by superficial readers, is what has been called his 
 sentimentalism. It is not a weeping or sickly sentiment 
 that characterizes Jean Paul, but a tenderness of heart,
 
 498 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 a poetry of his own, that leads him to cheiish the flower 
 planted by the hand of love ; to remember birthdays and 
 anniversaries; and to institute many festivals of the heart. 
 It is a religion of the affections that belongs to the Ger- 
 mans more than to any otlier nation, that makes them 
 capable of superstitious illusions, but that it would "be un- 
 just to call sentimentalism. Humor also is united with 
 this sentiment, as in no other author, except Sterne, 
 whom Richter is said to resemble. In this respect he 
 also resembles Burns, uniting with a deeper tenderness 
 an equally jjlayful and heartfelt pathos. Humor is fatAl 
 to false sentiment, extinguishing it as fire devours water, 
 but it lieightens the tenderness of Richter, as a smile on 
 the lip enhances the chai'm of a tear in the eye. 
 
 Ah ! I feel how impossible, and how presumptuous it 
 may be, to endeavor through translations to do adequate 
 justice to an author whose writings awoke the enthusiasm 
 of the whole German nation ; excited the admiration of 
 every rank, and were equally felt by such opposite char- 
 acters as Lavater and Herder, Jacobi and the ancient 
 Gleim. The circumstances of our own country are, it is 
 true, widely different. Richter appeared in Germany in 
 tlie midst of that mighty shaking that was given by the 
 French Revolution to all established institutions, to all 
 artificial distinctions among men. As one of his critics 
 writes, " The whole nation, like Jean Paul himself, was 
 laboi-ing with the great idea of spiritual and social eman- 
 cipation. Napoleon's giant hand had arrested the advan- 
 cing steps of freedom, and the nation gave itself back to a 
 secretly growing scepticism of feeling, before wliich the car- 
 nest emotions were ashamed to appear. Under this secret 
 pressure of the heart, Jean Paul's works were like the 
 words of a prophet who appeared before them with the
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 499 
 
 freshest and purest emotions of nature ; he had the cour- 
 age to bare for them his breast and his beating heart, 
 while at the same time he held the scourge over the piti- 
 ful restraints and vulgar ridicule before which the tearful 
 eye concealed its love, its longing, its enthusiasm, and its 
 higher faith." Eichter's heart beat in unison with the 
 heart of his fellow-men. While Goethe withdrew in 
 philosophic retirement to study osteology, or mark the 
 beautiful shades upon the lip of a shell, or the corolla of 
 a plant, Richter threw himself with all his powers, heart 
 and soul, into that uprising of the German people for 
 freedom, which has been called a living Poem. With us 
 there is, indeed, no restraint in thinking, writing, or speak- 
 ing; but is there not a secret infidelity as to the existence 
 of disinterested and self-sacrificing love ; an extremely 
 practical course of thought, that leads us to place all 
 spii'itual relations among the illusions of life ? Is there 
 not a cold egotism that disposes us to undervalue every- 
 thing whose material existence cannot be proved by its 
 solid advantages ? All that deviates from the straightfor- 
 ward I'ailroad path of life, is with us called transcenden- 
 taUsm. Even Richter has been said, in this country, to 
 belong to the Bedlamite school. It would be nearly as 
 just to call Paradise Lost of the Bedlamite school. 
 
 The charge of affectation that has been made against 
 Jean Paul is perhaps as unjust, but is not so easily dis- 
 proved. All affectation supposes some insincerity, or at- 
 tempt to appear otherwise than strict truth allows. Now 
 Richter was the truest of men ; he was so open and fear- 
 less in the assertion of all his opinions, that he made 
 almost as many opponents as persons with whom he con- 
 versed. But the charge of affectation applies only to the 
 form of his writings, and, as already mentioned, arose
 
 500 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 
 
 from the nature of his first works. I repeat again, that 
 they were essays and satires, without dramatic form or 
 fictitious incident. To give novelty to old themes, he 
 sought out every strange and striking form of expression ; 
 exhausted every department of science, and all the.f ealms 
 of nature for illustrations ; heaped image upon compari- 
 son, and comparison upon image ; distorted and reversed, 
 and turned his sentences topsy-turvy. He was like a jug- 
 gler, who, in the absence of all dramatis personee, makes 
 one material assume many different forms, — to be now a 
 bird, and directly, by sleight of hand, a jewel, a flower, 
 or a stone. This manner became habitual to him, and 
 later he could not, if he would, have thrown it off. Otto 
 was always urging liim to translate some one of his works 
 into plain German, and publish it without name or pref- 
 ace. Richter answered, " that he would preserve his own 
 manner in an age when Schiller found nothing in Thum- 
 mel, and Herder nothing in Schleiermacher and Tieck, 
 Schlegel everything ; when Herder called his (Richter's) 
 style classical, and Merkel called it poor ; when Goethe 
 said the stupid Genovefa was good ; and all were pitifully 
 in op{)osition to tliemselves and to each other." 
 
 It was a heavy disadvantage for Richter, that his es- 
 trangement from Goethe took place at the beginning of 
 his poj)ulai-ity ; he lost the benefit of that severe, but can- 
 did and friendly criticism, that to one so regardless of all 
 form would have been of incalculable benefit. The re- 
 views, as he justly complained, bestowed upon him only 
 indiscriminate praise or boundless censure. INIrs. Austen, 
 among Englisli critics, has been most impartially just. 
 She says, " Jean Paul has overlaid a world of genuine 
 and humane wisdom with bewildering conceits, and far- 
 fetched, unintelligible illustrations. But the reader who
 
 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. 501 
 
 will look below the surface will find that his knowledge 
 of actual human nature was profound, and his views as to 
 what human nature should be benevolent, elevated, and 
 consistent with the soundest I'eason and humanity." 
 
 Mr. Carlyle, to whom we have been so eminently in- 
 debted for his beautiful and eloquent essays upon Rich- 
 ter, has been singularly happy in presenting him to the 
 English reader. But I must be permitted to say, that his 
 genuine admiration has led him to exaggerate the pecu- 
 liarities of Jean Paul. He has taken the color of that 
 upon which he fed, and now gives it back in intenser 
 shades. His later translations from Jean Paul have been 
 deeply overlaid with Carlyleisms. 
 
 What may be called the machinery of Jean Paul's ro- 
 mances is as strange as their form. Like Scott, he pref- 
 aces his works with a humorous account of the motive 
 and the manner of their composition, and however serious 
 the subject it is usually set in a comic frame. His char- 
 acters are few in number, but with little change they are 
 always the same company, and appear again and again in 
 tragedy, comedy, or farce. Sometimes, as he says him- 
 self, they play their parts upon the " cold Mont Blanc 
 of aristocratic life " ; then, in a sheltered cottage in the 
 valley, or in a shepherd's hut ; his favorite theatre is the 
 quiet parsonage of a country minister, where he takes a 
 part himself, and holds the wire that involves or extri- 
 cates the mysterious motions of his puppets. One of his 
 favorite modes of addressing the public is in a letter to 
 one of his own fictitious characters, in which he indulges 
 himself in all sorts of witty allusions and humorous 
 remarks. 
 
 His various works are like episodes, where we meet in 
 other, and far different circumstances, our old acquaint-
 
 502 LIFE OF JEAN PAUL 
 
 ances, who belong to one great Avhole, like characters in 
 real life, who meet and part and meet again. Those that 
 Ave have met in their early years in one romance Ave see 
 again in a happy old age, or we listen to the eulogy tliat 
 is pronounced by a successor upon their grave. 
 
 The reader may be surprised that I liave uniformly 
 called Jean Paul a poet ; but if the definition of poet be, 
 " one that gives expression to Avhat others feel " ; one, 
 who interprets that in the heart Avhich, like the iuai'ticu- 
 late lisping of the child, cannot be made known for want 
 of adequate expression, then he as truly deserves the 
 name of poet as if every line he has Avritten were meas- 
 ured, and rhymed with another line. His great heart 
 beat Avith the united pulses of all human hearts. He is 
 the truest interpreter of joy and sorrow, love and grief ; 
 and all those hidden feelings that are revealed by the 
 poet, as the sunbeam penetrates the mine and shows its 
 hidden treasures. 
 
 Finally, no poet's inward life is more distinctly made 
 knoAvn t)iau Jean Paul's, in his Avorks, in his elevated 
 characters; in his Gustavus, his Albano, his Dahore. 
 Like a solitary sage he looked out from his hermitage 
 upon the ever-swelling and rushing AA^aves of the litera- 
 ture and politics of that remarkable period in which he 
 lived. Unmoved by its passions, still and calm, he was 
 like a holy prophet of its issue. GloAving for freedom, 
 truth, and the happiness of man, yet never failing in the 
 clearness of his understanding or the firmness of his Avill. 
 Full of scorn and hatred of all servility and all tyranny, 
 yet ever free from the folly and madness of enthusiasm. 
 AVith imj)aitiality and justice he weighed the ad\ antages 
 of this Avorld in the same scales in which he had placed 
 the hopes of another.
 
 APPENDIX 
 
 I 
 
 INCE the first edition of this work I have learnt some 
 interesting partlcuhirs of this lady, who entered with 
 singular power into the life and poetry of Jean Paul. 
 Born in 1761, after losing both her parents she lived 
 a youth of strangely varied experience. By nature 
 genial, susceptible, enthusiastic, and with unusual personal attrac- 
 tions, she grew up without a regular education ; but there was col- 
 lected in the head of this young maiden an indiscriminate harvest of 
 miscellaneous reading. The Bible, the Koran, Voltaire, Rousseau, 
 Shakespeare, Klopstock, were only shining points in the limitless 
 range of her reading. She was of all the women who followed in 
 the festival procession of the great German poets the richest in in- 
 tellectual gifts. Nature had intended her for a poet, but the deeply 
 painful result of family necessities compelled her to a marriage with 
 a man so little loved that she was borne fainting from the altar. 
 This marriage was to secure her fortune to the family interest of 
 her husband, and, as she said afterwards, it was no more doubtful 
 of happiness than other unions where mutual inclination failed, and, 
 on her side, disinterested. 
 
 Schiller met her with her husband. Major von Kalb, when she 
 was twenty-three years old, and for six years, till his marriage in 
 1790, she held a deep and powerful, an irresistible influence over 
 the mind and heart of the poet. 
 
 Her fascination must-have been greater than when, at thirty-five, 
 she charmed the great humorist, Jean Paul. When he met her in 
 Weimar, twelve years after her marriage, he says : " She is a woman
 
 504 APPENDIX. 
 
 like none, with an all-powerful heart and an indomitable will, — a 
 Titanade." 
 
 The close of her intimate friendship with Schiller, at the time of 
 his marriage with Charlotte Lengfield, discloses the utter misery 
 of such connections, even if they do not pass tlie limits of friendship. 
 
 Jean Paul continued always to regard her with fender sympathy 
 and admiration. After her friendship with him ceased, on account 
 of her son she would not consent to a divorce from her husband. 
 Her estate was lost to her, and before her death she became totally 
 blind. One of the Prussian princesses gave her an apartment in the 
 Royal Castle in Berlin, where she died at the age of eighty-two 
 years. 
 
 After receiving the book in which the preftice was supposed to 
 have reference to her, she wrote as follows, the last letter of hers 
 that has been given in the Life of Jean Paul. 
 
 "June 19, 1799. 
 
 " This is the day I expected a letter from you, and received none, 
 but I will write what has occurred to me respecting your book. 
 
 " The preface has beautiful thoughts. It may prepare for a better 
 time in (juiet dispositions ; but how liard it is, when men will have 
 for themselves the evangel of selfishness, but for woman tlie severity 
 of the law. There are also views of things that will have no effect. 
 No caricature can improve or make moral, that is, calm and happy 
 men. 
 
 " The Wandering Aurora has pleased me much ; so has the Essay 
 upon Dreams; and, indeed, all the Philoso])liical letters. I have 
 written to Herder about them. 
 
 " The Testament for Dau<]hlers is too light a work for you. I 
 must write a testament for daughters, if I am ever so stupid as to 
 know my own errors. The testaments of men, for daughters, sound 
 about thus : ' You have no rights in life. There will be no love 
 for you; you will be despised or appropriated. You must love, 
 and make one only happy ; but you dare neither have understand- 
 ing nor will of your own. You must not manifest cither wishes, 
 joy, or sympathy ; and the desires that you possess in common 
 with us, in recollection will appear like guilt.' 
 
 " I know nothing weaker or more ridiculous in a man than to 
 make known such a knowledge of the female heart ; certainly not 
 for jiurjioscs of injury, but for information.
 
 APPENDIX. 505 
 
 " The satire upon the authorship of women I find not entirely 
 true. I may have nothing to do with either ; and even my daughter 
 shall not trouble herself; pride would forbid it. But what you do 
 from self-interest does not make you get rid of our souls. Like the 
 Devil, they will remain in eternity. The happy, loving woman will 
 be no author ; and to the unhappy no one will have recourse. 
 Wherefore will you not that women sustain the same troubles and 
 live by tiie same illusions as yourselves. Ambition has never the 
 same power over a female heart as over a man's. She can never 
 forget that she has a heart, and can love! No illusion, no enthu- 
 siasm, increases this consciousness of the highest, and the love, of 
 which men sing, is with women an eternal truth. 
 
 " Jean Paul must take care that with his garden-shears he does 
 not prune the delicate plant too much. He cannot check true 
 genius ; but he may increase its burdens, and accelerate many fol- 
 lies. Shall not women be what they may and can be ? 
 
 " It must be that they have children, and cook and stitch ; but the 
 graces may unite with the understanding for all these purposes." 
 
 Madam von Kalb, although Richter calls her a disciple of Herder, 
 was deeply imbued with the aesthetic doctrines taught by Goethe and 
 the Schlegel school, .^^isthetics, as far as I understand it, is the pur- 
 suit and worship of the beautiful as the perfection of human life. 
 All morality takes a subordinate station ; but religion is one with 
 the perfect, or beautiful, and by sesthetics, or the love of beauty, the 
 mind is able to soar to religion and immortality. Thus a finely- 
 organized soul can exist only in a state of perfection or beauty. 
 One may easily understand the practical consequences of this doc- 
 trine ; for as morals were subordinate to the love of the beautiful, 
 and only finely-constituted souls could have any affinity with each 
 other, the relations of social life, if not happily formed, became sub- 
 ordinate, and were violated ; or became the occasion of profound and 
 terrible misery, as in Goethe's Elective Affinities. Few, like Ottilia, 
 would choose the better part, and die, " because breathed on by un- 
 hallowed passion." The evil that Richter most lamented in the 
 aesthetic philosophy was, that it conspired with passion to deceive ; 
 and men imagined that, as all purity was within, outward relations 
 might be violated without sullying the purity of eine shiine seele. 
 
 We see indications of this philosophy in all Madam von Kalb's 
 letters ; and the letter that occasioned the rupture with Jean Paul 
 22
 
 5o6 APPENDIX. 
 
 avowed the ncsthctic doctrine " that religion upon this earth consists 
 in the perfection of all the powers, physical as well as spiritual, and 
 that these powers should suffer no restraint, but the weak yield to 
 the strong." 
 
 Jean Paul's abhorrence of these doctrines, and of the immorality 
 and misery in domestic life that might be ascribed to them, is ex- 
 pressed in every one of his works, but particularly in a little tale, 
 " The Secret Lamentation of the Men of our Times," in which two 
 young persons become attached to each other, with circumstances 
 of singular interest. Their misery and shame, when they discover 
 that tliey are brother and sister ; the remorseful agony of the father, 
 and the contempt that takes the place of love in the breast of the 
 injured wife, make the interest and instruction of the story ; but, 
 like all narratives written for an express moral, it fails in that 
 freedom and fulness of thought that distinguish his spontaneous 
 works. 
 
 Speaking of domestic morality in Weimar, Paul says: "This is 
 certain, a spiritual and more important revolution than the politic.il, 
 and far more murderous, is now beating in the heart of the world ; 
 therefore is the vocation of an author, whose heart beats with wholly 
 ditferent principles and aims, so necessary, and demands so much 
 heed and circumspection." 
 
 Madam von Kalb's views of love were entirely of the aesthetic 
 school ; but Kichter had too much delicacy in his to wish to marry 
 a divorcee, and after his decided opposition to the divorce, on liis 
 second residence in Weimar, there was no further question about it. 
 Madam von Kalb extended her friendship to Paul's wife ; and, 
 although she afterwards demanded the return of her letters, their 
 fricndsliip did not wholly cease.
 
 APPENDIX. 507 
 
 II. 
 
 WIELAND was born in 1733 (just thirty years before Eichter), 
 in Biberac, in Suabia. His father was a Lutheran minister. 
 In his fourteenth year lie was sent to a cloister, where he penetrated 
 deeply into the spirit of the ancients, and became acquainted with 
 En^^lish literature. Everything conspired to make Wieland a poet, 
 — his humble natal roof, hallowed by the presence, of his father, a 
 learned, patriarchal pastor ; the ancient cloisters of Bergen, the still 
 monastic Tiibingen, his devotion to Sophia La Roche as to the idea 
 of perfection, and the hope, ever retreating before him, but always 
 kept in view, of one day consecrating himself to her, and to the 
 highest virtue, as to one and the same thing ; his long residence in 
 Switzerland, where he elaborated his works, and gave them the ele- 
 gance, the clearness, and the natural grace which cannot be attained 
 by mere drudgery. These glad, bright regions of the golden time ; 
 this paradise of innocence, when he regarded what he imagined and 
 dreamed as absolute reality, he dwelt on long ; but disappointments 
 came ; he could not succeed in combining these high interests with 
 the necessities of every -day existence ; the conflict with the outward 
 world began, and, after long struggles, he accepted the actual as 
 the necessary, and henceforth made war upon his former romantic 
 dreams ; his idea of Platonic love, and upon all that cannot be 
 shown to exist in reality. Henceforth he permitted no single im- 
 pression to have dominion over him. 
 
 Wieland's change of views may be in part attributed to his resi- 
 dence with Count Stadion. The Count's library, rich in modern 
 French and English literature, helped him to descend from that 
 ideal region in which he loved to dwell with Sophia La Roche, and, 
 after he had been wounded by what is called experience, he threw 
 himself entirely on the side of the real. • 
 
 In his fortieth year he was invited by the Duchess Amelia to 
 superintend the education of her sons ; and from this time he was 
 assured of a life of leisure and independence, which was continued 
 to him after he had done with his pupils by a pension from the 
 Duke. 
 
 Wieland, in possession of complete literary leisure, longed for a 
 more poetical retirement, and bought an estate in Osmanstadt, not
 
 5o8 APPENDIX. 
 
 far from Weimar. Man, born for society, often cheats himself with 
 the sweet dream that he can live better, more joyfully in seclusion. 
 In the excitable days of youth we imagine that solitude is the great 
 refuge against ourselves, the grand remedy for the wounds we re- 
 ceive in the contests of life. It is a grave error. The experience 
 of life teaches us that neither the enjoyments of literature "nor art 
 can fill the abyss of the soul. Wieland's happiness was interrupted 
 by the death of Sophia La Roche, the daughter of his first love, and 
 the excellent, careful partner of his life, whom Jean Paul thought 
 he could never survive. He did survive for the space of twelve 
 years, but the solitude of Osmanstadt became too oppressive to his 
 bereaved heart, and his friend the Duchess Amelia recalled him to 
 herself He was henceforth a member of her court and house, and 
 when, with others, he had to bear the afflictive event of her death, 
 court and city vied with each other to console him.* 
 
 Wieland's heart's history, of which Jean Paul says he imparted 
 the particulars to him, a willing listener, was in part his early and 
 innocent connection with Sophia La Roche, the grandmother, that 
 Bettine mentions so often in her letters to Gunderode. She was 
 the daughter of an eminent physician. Her father possessed an 
 extensive and excellent library, and when she was only two years 
 old he taught her to read by the titles of the books, as they rested 
 on the shelves. Her parents gave her early religious instruction, 
 and cultivated a love for all that is beautiful in nature or art. In 
 her sixteenth year she was strikinglj' beautiful, and was sought in 
 marriage by a learned Italian, who instructed her in the language 
 and literature of his native land. At this time Sophia had the mis- 
 fortune to lose her excellent mother, and her father became desirous 
 to have her marriage completed ; differences arose, however, in con- 
 sequence of religious scruples, — Bianconi insisting that all the chil- 
 dren of the marriage, daughters as well as sons, should be educated 
 in the Catliolic form ot Christianity. The f^ither of Sophia imme- 
 diately animlled the engagement, and poor Sophia was obliged, in 
 the presence of her grandmother, father, and aunts, to destroy all 
 the letters and souvenirs of her happy love; the picture of Bianconi 
 was cut into shreds, and a ring, set with brilliants, broken into 
 pieces, and all committed to the flames. 
 
 Her mother, who had been her tendcrest and most sympathizing 
 
 * From the notes to Mrs. Austen's Characteristics of Ooethe.
 
 APPENDIX. 509 
 
 friend, died too early for the happiness of her daughter ; for she 
 would, no doubt, have found a way to smooth all difficulties ; but 
 Sophia, who would shed no tear in the presence of her stern rela- 
 tives, retired to weep in the solitude of her chamber, where she 
 struggled alone with a new temptation. She received a note from 
 Bianconi, urging her to a secret marriage, and a flight to his own 
 country', to the bosom of a noble and loving fimily. He fortified 
 his request by more than thirty letters from her father, where he 
 had unconditionally promised him his daughter. Sophia would 
 not leave her father without his blessing ; but in the depths of her 
 soul, and in unconsoled solitude, she vowed constancy to the mau 
 who had done so much for her intellectual nature. With this view 
 she desired to enter upon a novitiate, in order to pass her life in a 
 cloister. Her father would not permit this sacrifice ; but he allowed 
 her the uncontrolled use of her time, and to live in retirement, where 
 she devoted herself to study and to the sciences and accomplish- 
 ments that Bianconi preferred. 
 
 Sophia's disinclination to society obtained for her permission from 
 her father to go with her sisters to live with her maternal grand- 
 father, who was brother to the mother of Wieland. The death of 
 the grandfather occurring soon after, Sophia entered the family 
 of Wieland's father, where she lived, as her biographer expresses 
 it, by her own economy. 
 
 Young Wieland came in the vacation to his father's house, and 
 the beautiful maiden of nineteen inspired him with the most enthu- 
 siastic passion. He was two years younger ; but Sophia could then 
 appreciate his noble character; a close friendship was formed be- 
 tween them, and even in old age they thanked God for having led 
 them both under the same roof. Often they kneeled together, and 
 devoted themselves in prayer to the eternal pui-suit and worship of 
 truth and duty. 
 
 Wieland says : " It was an ideal, but a true enchantment in which 
 I lived ; and the Sophia that I loved so enthusiastically was the idea 
 of perfection embodied in her form. Nothing is more certain than 
 that if destiny had not brought us together I should never have been 
 a poet." They vowed to love each other as long as either lived, 
 and virtue eternally. 
 
 Sophia returned to her father's house, and Wieland to Tubingen ; 
 but longing to see Sophia impelled him, at the end of two years, to 
 return. He then went to Switzerland, where he lived eight years,
 
 510 APPENDIX. 
 
 but always without the prospect of any provision tliat would allow 
 them to marry. At the end of this time Sophia gave her hand to 
 Herr La Kochc. It does not appear whether her father's authority 
 was ai^ain, as in the first instance, exerted, or whether considerations 
 of prudence iiiHuenced herself, but the marriage was a very happy 
 one. She informed Wieland of it by a letter, and he seems to have 
 been convinced that her upright and true heart could not liave done 
 otherwise ; and he prayed for the continuance of her friendship. 
 " A friendship that had been so pure and disinterested need not be 
 broken by another union, and in the land of the blessed, if never in 
 this life, we shall meet each other again." 
 
 Many years after Sophia's marriage Wieland visited her. As she 
 sat at the window, there was a knock at the door ; a presentiment 
 that it was her friend ran through her frame, and she called out to 
 him to enter. At the well-known sound of her voice Wieland re- 
 mained transfixed, when she opened the door, and met him with 
 the heartiest welcome. He stood speechless. Seeing her eldest 
 son, a beautiful youth, he called him to him, and bowing his head 
 over that of the boy, shed silent tears. Sophia's husband entered 
 the room, when, taking the hands of Wieland and his wife in his, 
 he pressed them together. The noble La Roche cemented the bond 
 of their friendship, which endured yet many years. 
 
 Sophia could not be otherwise than happy with a man so gifted 
 witli every noble quality as the one with whom Providence had 
 united her, although she married against the voice of her heart. 
 She had hitherto lived in retirement, or in learned circles ; she was 
 now introduced by her husband into the exclusive society of the 
 German nobility ; and her knowledge of the world, gained by read- 
 ing, was corrected by experience. Her truly enlarged mind rose 
 above the conventionalism and artificial distinctions of rank, and 
 enabled her to see and acknowledge worth and talent wherever it 
 existed. 
 
 After sixteen years' service at the court of a German prince, where 
 Sophia liad every opportunity to form friendships with distinguished 
 characters, her husband retired to an estate in OfiVnliach, the beau- 
 tiful residence from which so many of Bettine's letters are dated, 
 and the letter was written from thence that is published in the body 
 of this work. Here she lived with her liusband in the enjoyment 
 of the quiet of domestic life ; in devotion to her favorite sciences, 
 surrounded by a beautiful nature ; — a poet called her house a
 
 APPENDIX. SII 
 
 temple of Euphrosyne, where the pious sacrifice flame was always 
 lighted. Goethe, in his biography, gives an interesting account 
 of the manner of life at Offenbach and of Madame La Roche. 
 Here, after thirty-five years of happy union, she lost her husband, 
 and soon after the blooming youth of twenty-four years old, whom 
 she mentions so touchingly in lier letter to Jean Paul. 
 
 In consequence of the French war she lost the greater part of her 
 turtune ; but her trust in Providence was so firm, that she never or 
 a moment lost her cheerfulness. After thirty years' separation, she 
 visited Wieland at Osmanstadt, near Weimar, where he was living 
 at the time of Jean Paul's second visit at Weimar. Wieland had 
 taken the daughter of Sophia La Roche (Sophia Brentano) into 
 that intimate friendship he had ever preserved with the mother; 
 and after the death of both he said : " What I have once tenderly 
 loved never dies for me. I help myself with illusions. They are 
 dead only to my outward sense, and that is certainly painful." 
 
 The life of Sophia La Roche was a high ideality, and age, instead 
 of lessening it, only increased its pure and lofty purpose. She was 
 a living proof of the immortality of the soul, for her life was so spir- 
 itual, that it must have come immediately from a higher sphere, and 
 immediately returned there. Her deep religious faith and firm con- 
 fidence in Providence were immovable ; hence her enthusiastic love 
 of plants, and all the works of God, and her knowledge of all the 
 appearances and phenomena of nature. She was extensively ac- 
 quainted with the sciences, well versed in ancient and modern his- 
 tory, and her knowledge of the philosophy of history, and observa- 
 tion of the fate of nations, as well as of eminent men, not only 
 established the benevolence of her heart, but made her patient under 
 sorrows, and grateful for her own happy destiny. Everything con- 
 nected with the beautiful arts was infinitely dear to her. In early 
 life her poems and pictures of touching scenes were charming. 
 
 She held the purity of the female character to be the foundation 
 of all domestic happiness, without which no other womanly virtue 
 could have its influence or power. She studied the science of edu- 
 cation, not only tiirough her tender interest in her own children, but 
 to make her little books for the benefit of young people more useful. 
 All these virtues are cx])rcssed in her writings, and make her one 
 of the most distinguished minor authors of Germany. They are 
 not highly imaginative, but they recommend virtue and domestic 
 happiness in a noble, simple, and attractive manner. Her stories
 
 512 APPENDIX. 
 
 are domestic scenes after the manner of Richardson. She wrote 
 many real and imaginary journeys for young people ; many stories 
 to teach resignation under affliction ; books of instruction for young 
 wives and housekeepers, and published many translations from the 
 French and English. The literature of Germany is ricli in books 
 of the kind above mentioned, and those of the Fraulein La Roche 
 arc among the best. 
 
 After her death Wieland had the melancholy satisfaction of editing 
 her whole works, and writing many prefaces and notes. — Abridged 
 from Schindel's Biography. 
 
 III. 
 
 HERDER was the son of poor parents. His father was the 
 teacher of a humble school for girls, " but an earnest, duty- 
 fulfilling, honest man ; his mother, a sensible, industrious, quiet 
 UausJ'rau, distinguished by her gifts of mind and person, and by 
 accomplishments surpassing others of her sex in lowly life." The 
 history of Herder's youth is the often-repeated talc of the unfolding 
 of mind under every circumstance of oppression and want. In his 
 father's fiimily all the domestic business and the hours of reading 
 were strictly regulated. If there was anything to be done, the chil- 
 dren durst not excu,se themselves. It must be done. It was only 
 by strenuous industry that his father could make his small income 
 meet the expenses of a large family. When his fatlier was satisfied 
 with him his countenance expressed it, and he laid his hand upon 
 his head and called him Gottes-Friedc (God's peace). His name 
 was Godfiied. 
 
 Herder's youth was so quiet and reserved that his teacher thought 
 him dull, and advised bis father to bind him to some meciianical 
 cmjiloynient ; but his father observed that the young man kept his 
 light burning late at night, and, going into his room long after mid- 
 night, he found the bed covered with Greek and Latin classics, 
 open, as if they had been studicil, and the boy lying asleep in the 
 midst, with the lighted candle in his hand. 
 
 Aboutthis time a regiment was quartered in Herder's native place.
 
 APPENDIX. 513 
 
 The surgeon, a benevolent and enlightened man, was favorably im- 
 pressed by the young Herder, and offered to take him to Konigs- 
 berg, to study either medicine or surgery, and to obtain help for his 
 already impaired eyes. The offer was received by his parents as a 
 light from Heaven in a dark night ; and although Herder felt no 
 inclination to surgery, he regarded this deliverance from his desti- 
 tute and oppressed situation with joy. 
 
 Immediately after his arrival at Konigsberg his friend led him to 
 an anatomical school, and the young Herder sank fainting upon the 
 floor ; from henceforth he could not hear the name of surgery with- 
 out a nervous shudder. 
 
 As he returned from the school he met an old schoolfellow, who 
 was a student of theology, and he resolved to present himself for ex- 
 amination to the theological faculty of the college. He was imme- 
 diately admitted ; and although his worldly possessions were only 
 three Prussian dollars and eight groschen, he wrote to his parents 
 that he would support himself by his own industry. He kept his 
 word, although he practised the strictest economy, and his food was 
 often, for many days together, only bread and water. 
 
 At the age of twenty Herder was chosen a teacher of the Domschule 
 in Riga, and began to preach. With true religious feeling, Herder 
 knew how in his preaching to excite careless minds and insensible 
 hearts. His themes were immortality, love to God and man, and 
 every virtue. With soul-moving eloquence, the ornaments of a 
 youthful fancy, and a persuasive voice, he seized irresistibly upon 
 every heart ; while his fine speaking countenance, his eloquent 
 eye, and graceful gestures heightened the impression made by his 
 sermons. 
 
 It would be delightful to follow Herder through his life ; but I 
 wish to speak of him only in his union with his accomplished wife. 
 In reading the lives of literary men and women, no one can avoid 
 the melancholy conviction that divorces, consequently unhappy mar- 
 riages, are more frequent among them than with any other class. 
 The reasons that might be given for this would open a sorrowful 
 page in the history of women. 
 
 It is delightful to find, in the lives of Herder and his wife, two 
 
 literary characters living from youth to age in the most beautiful 
 
 harmony of mind and of pursuit. Caroline helped her husband in 
 
 his literary difficulties, sympathized in his disappointments, and via- 
 
 22* GO
 
 514 APPENDIX. 
 
 dicated his memory in an eloquent and touching memoir, published 
 after liis death. 
 
 They were l)etrothed long before their poverty would allow them 
 to many. Herder iiad become governor to a j'oung Prince of 
 Darmstadt, and, in accompanying him on a visit to a kindred 
 Prince, he was invited to preach in the court chapel. Caroline 
 gives the following account of her first meeting with hen future 
 husband : — 
 
 " Herder was invited to preach. I heard the voice of an angel, 
 and soul's-words such as I never heard before. In the afternoon I 
 saw him, and stammered out my thanks to him. From this time 
 forth our souls were one. Our meeting was God's work ! More 
 intimately could not hearts be united than ours. My love was a 
 feeling, a harmony. Ah, certainly no one knew him as I did, 
 thanks be to God ! From this time forward we saw each other 
 daily. I felt a happiness never experienced before, but also an in- 
 describable melancholy; I feared I should never see him again ! 
 
 " The 25ih of August we celebrated, in the little circle of his 
 friends, his birthday. He gave me his first letter, and with this 
 letter I received the holiest gift this earth contained for me, — his 
 love ! Ah, I could only thank God ! The 27th he left Darmstadt, 
 to go to Strasburg. At the moment of separation I spoke witii him 
 for the first time alone. But no words were necessary ; we were one 
 heart and one soul ! No separation could ever divide us." 
 
 It was upon this residence in Strasburg, for an operation upon his 
 eyes, that Herder met Goethe, who has given a minute account of 
 their intercourse in his Dichtung unci Wci/irheit. 
 
 Caroline gives the following account of tlnir marriage: "A 
 worthy old clergyman married us, in the circle of my relations, 
 by the rose-light, of a beautiful evening. It was God's blessing 
 that seemed audibly spoken over our union. The separation from 
 my sisters was painful, but he indemnified me for all, and gave me 
 a thousand-fold more than I deserved. I thought now with pain 
 how, during our betrotlimcnt, I had tormented liirn with asking 
 him to forget me ; for I had no fortune, and possessed no other ad- 
 vantages to make Jiim as liappy as he deserved. In every letter he 
 told me that I was the blessing of his life ; that I durst not, I should 
 not leave him, for thus he would be alone in the world. That God 
 would never leave us ; that He would bless our union." 
 
 Thirty-three years afterwards Caroline wrote to Jean Paul, on
 
 APPENDIX. 515 
 
 this anniversary : " I am to-day alone, and in the other world. It 
 is the 2d of May, our marriage day." 
 
 Their marriage was indeed a happy one. Herder usually wrote 
 by the side of his wife, and she assisted him by copying his rough 
 sketches and first thoughts. 
 
 Three years after liis marriage Herder was invited to Weimar to 
 fill the place of Consistorial Rath and court preacher. Many re- 
 ports had preceded Herder, of his heresy and his contempt of forms. 
 They had said, among other things, that he preached in boots and 
 spurs, and that after every serftion he rode three times around the 
 church and out tlie door on horseback. Accordingly, the church 
 was crowded to hear his first sermon. All were charmed with his 
 eloquence. Herder refers to the reports about him in a letter to a 
 friend, where he says : "I live in the whirlpool of business, a quiet 
 and retired life, and preach in Dr. Luther's coat and surplice." 
 
 Herder and his wife were both distinguished members of that 
 literary society that formed around the Duchess Amelia ; where 
 they enjoyed the fairest evening hours, with spiritual men and ac- 
 complished women, and read the Poets and acted Shakespeare ; 
 and where we meet again Wieland and Goethe, Knebel and Eiusle- 
 del, Madam von Kalb, and all the names so familiar to us in the 
 life of Jean Paul. 
 
 Herder's first separation from Caroline was occasioned by a jour- 
 ney to Italy, where he spent nearly a year. This was the occasion 
 of many delightful letters. I translate only one. 
 
 " To-day is the day of our Verlobung in spirit, when I brought you 
 my first letter, my Caroline. O, a thousand, thousand times dearer 
 than when, trembling, I gave it to you. 0, believe it, thou much- 
 tried, good, dear, richly-sacrificing, heroic soul ! You have made 
 me all that I now am ; have cared for all, and have given yourself 
 to me a thousand times ! And what have I done for you ? how 
 can I repay you 1 Spare your health ; and I am certain, as of my 
 existence, that we shall lead a new bridal life together, happier than 
 the old ; for we are wiser, and in the future we shall be better. I 
 am certain our short separation has been a present from the All 
 Good. Remove all doubts from your heart, and be with me with 
 thy good, strong soul, as thy dear, beautiful form is always at 
 my side." 
 
 Herder wrote also to Jacobi at this time : "I have a wife tiiat is
 
 5l6 APPENDIX. 
 
 the tree, the consolation, and the happiness of my life. Even in 
 quickly-flying, transient thoughts (which often indeed surprises us) 
 we are one ! She suffers only when she sees me suffer ; at other 
 times she is all peace and activity, full of good courage and cheer- 
 ful views." 
 
 Herder's situation in Weimar was never favorable to his happi- 
 ness. He was oppressed with a multiplicity of affairs, obliged to 
 preach all kinds of occasional sermons, especially to eulogize all the 
 members of the Ducal family ; and he was constantly opposed iu 
 his efforts to improve the schools and the churches under his care, 
 and to place a barrier against the fashionable levity and irreverence 
 for religion that made giant strides in Weimar during the time of 
 the revolution in France. 
 
 Herder died, not of old age, but, as his wife expressed it, " from 
 disappointment over his false position, his failed life ; of highly- 
 excited nerves, and a heart wounded and broken by the evils of the 
 times." 
 
 After his death Caroline exerted all her power to collect mate- 
 rials for his life, which she did not publish herself, but prepared 
 them for a literary friend. She arranged his unpublished papers, 
 and prepared them for a complete edition of his works ; saw her 
 six sons well established in life, and her only daughter married, 
 — and then followed him, from whom her thoughts had never 
 strayed.* 
 
 I have given this little notice of the Herders, to show that literary 
 women are not necessarily eccentric or egotistical ; not necessarily 
 mad enthusiasts or careless housekeepers, faithless wives or neg- 
 lectful mothers, but that they may perform all the duties of life as 
 cheerfully, as gracefully, and as faithfully as if they had never learnt 
 the alphabet of literature. 
 
 • From the Life of Herder, by Carl L. Ring.
 
 APPENDIX. - 517 
 
 IV, 
 
 THE Campaner Thai is so beautiful a work, that I wish to give 
 a fuller account of it than I had room for in the text. It pur- 
 ports to be part of a journal kept by the author in travelling through 
 France, and is addressed to Victor, the hero of the Hesperus. Jean 
 Paul was in the habit of addressing letters to his fictitious charac- 
 ters, as to his other correspondents ; and it seems as if it must have 
 been difficult for him to draw the line between his living and his 
 imaginary friends. 
 
 To return. In this imaginary journey he meets a gentleman, 
 Carlson, galled the Riding-master, who had been travelling with a 
 party of friends, consisting of the Baron Wilhelmi, his wife, wife's 
 sister, and their domestic chaplain. Carlson had been deeply at- 
 tached to Gione, the newly-married wife of the Baron ; and it is 
 delicately hinted that the attachment had been mutual ; but some 
 German conventionalisms interfering, she had married, although 
 not very unhappily, against the voice of her heart. The party rest 
 at an inn, where a bridal party are celebrating their nuptials in one 
 apartment, while the young and beautiful daughter of the host lies 
 in her shroud in another. The sight of the pale face, with its crown 
 of roses, affects Gione, whose nerves are already weakened, in such 
 a manner as to produce a fainting fit, so long as to assume the ap- 
 pearance of death. Carlson, whose love for Gione had taken the 
 nun's veil, and he had built around his heart a cloister wall, is 
 betrayed by the sight into the discovery of his concealed passion, 
 which he expresses in an ode, " The Complaint without Consolation," 
 and leaves the party before Gione had recovered from her swoon. 
 Just now Jean Paul overtakes him ; and having been later at the 
 inn, tells him it was only a fainting fit that had assumed the appear- 
 ance of death. He returns to the party, and takes Paul with him. 
 
 They all agree to travel on foot through the beautiful valley 
 (Campaner Thai), situated in the Upper Pyrenees, at the termi- 
 nation of which is the castle of the Baron, the future home of Gione. 
 The description of the valley is in Jean Paul's best manner, and 
 the female characters are made known with exquisite touches. 
 Nadine, the sister, to whom intercourse with the world and a 
 happy temperament have given a playful light, ever cheerful ex-
 
 5i8 APPENDIX. 
 
 terior, is contrasted with Gione, who has a tender and earnest 
 expression, with a slender and perfectly Grecian style of beauty. 
 Carlson is not an atheist, but his " complaint without consola- 
 tion " has betrayed- his disbelief of a future life, and liis belief in 
 annihilation. The chaplain is a disciple of Kant. Jean Paul un- 
 dertakes to support the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, 
 and a future recognition of friends beyond the grave. AfreV assert- 
 ing many proofs drawn from analogy, the Kantian said, " That 
 from the unity of the universe it may be concluded that emigrants 
 from the earth will visit every planet ; and those delicate souls who 
 ehun the sun will find themselves happy in Uranus : that the widely 
 differing climates in the planets was no conclusion against the future 
 residence of man upon them, because man can accommodate him- 
 self to every climate." 
 
 Jean Paul answered : " I have a strong objection against the 
 future toi/oge pittnrfisijae throutrh the planets ; we bear in our own 
 breasts a heaven, full of constellations. There is in our hearts an 
 inward, spiritual world, that breaks like a sun upon the clouds of 
 the outward world. I mean that inward universe of goodness, 
 beauty, and trutli; three worlds that are neither part, nor shoot, 
 nor copy of the outward. We are less astonished at the incom- 
 prehensible existence of these transcendent.il heavens because they 
 are always there, and we foolishly imagine that we create when we 
 merely perceive them. After what model, with what plastic power, 
 and from what could we create these same spiritual worlds? The 
 atheist should ask himself how he received the giant id^a of God, 
 that he has neither opposed nor embodied ? an idea that has not 
 grown up by comparing different degrees of greatness, as it is the 
 opposite of every measure and degree. In short, the atheist speaks 
 as others, of prototype and original. 
 
 " As there are idealists of the outward world who believe that 
 perceiving a tiling creates the thing itself so there are idealists of 
 the inward world who deduce the being from the appearing, the 
 sound from the echo, instead of, on the contrary, inferring appear- 
 ance from reality, consciousness from tlie object itself We take 
 erroneously the power of analyzing our inward world for the pre- 
 formation of the same; that is, we think oursclf the originator and 
 founder, when we are only the genealogist. 
 
 "This inward world, that is indeed more splendid and admirable 
 than the outward, needs another heaven than the one above us, and
 
 APPENDIX. 519 
 
 a higher world than that the sun warms ; therefore, we say justly, 
 not a second earth, or globe, but a second world beyond this uni- 
 verse." 
 
 Gione interrupted me : " And every virtuous and wise man is a 
 proof of another world." 
 
 "And," continued Nadine, quickly, " every one who undeservedly 
 suffers ! " 
 
 " Yes," I answered, " that is what draws our thread of life through 
 a long eternity. The threefold echo of virtue, truth, and beauty, 
 created by the music of the spheres, calls us from this hollow earth 
 to the neighborhood of the music. Why and wherefore were these 
 desires given us 1 Merely that, like a swallowed diamond, they 
 should slowly cut through our earthly covering. Wherefore were 
 we placed upon this ball of earth, creatures with light wings, if, 
 instead of soaring with our wings of ether, we are to fall back into 
 the earth-clods of our birth ? " 
 
 Carlson asked : " But could not our spiritual powers be given us 
 to preserve and heighten the enjoyments of the present life 1 " 
 
 " To preserve ? " I answered ; " as if an angel would be impris- 
 oned in the body to be its dumb servant ; its stove-warmer and 
 butler ; its cusinier and porter at the door of the stomach 1 Shall 
 the ethereal flame merely serve to fill the circular stove with life's 
 warmth, obediently burn and warm, and then become cold and ex- 
 tinguished ! Every tree of knowledge is a Upas-tree to the body, 
 and every refinement a slow poison infused into the cup of sensual 
 pleasure ; but, on the contrary, corporeal needs are the iron key 
 to freedom of soul ; the stomach is the rich forcing-glass of future 
 bloom ; and the different animal impulses are only the earthly steps 
 to the Grecian temple of our higher nature. 
 
 " For enjoyment do you say ? That is, we receive the food of 
 animals to satisfy the taste and hunger of the gods 7 The part of us 
 that is of earth, this, indeed, like the earth-worm, is filled and nour- 
 ished with earthly food. All the conditions of our earthly existence 
 must be complied with ere the demands of the inward nature can 
 be made known. Is the bellowing animal circle fed, the animal 
 contest finished ; then the inward being demands its nectar and am- 
 brosial bread ; but if this inward being nourishes its appetites with 
 earthly food alone, they become avenging angels, or change to a god 
 of hell that impels to self-murder, or is destroyed in a poisonous 
 mixture of all joys. For the eternal hunger in man, the unappeased
 
 520 APPENDIX. 
 
 longing of his heart demands not richer, but other food. Thus our 
 indigence is not satisfied with the quantity, but depends on the spe- 
 cies of the food. The imagination can paint itself a degree of satis- 
 faction, but it is not happy in the accumulation of all possessions, 
 if they are other than truth, beauty, and goodness." 
 
 " But the finer souls ? " said Nadine. 
 
 I answered : " This discrepancy between our wishes anS our re- 
 lations, between the soul and the earth, remains a riddle if we con- 
 tinue ; and if we cease to live, a blasphemy. Strangers, born upon 
 mountains, Ave consume in lowly places, with unhealthy heiiniveh 
 (home-sickness). We belong to higher regions, and an eternal long- 
 ing grows in our hearts at music, which is the Kuhreigen of our 
 native Alps." .... 
 
 " From hence what follows ? " asked the chaplain. 
 
 " Not that we are unhappy, but that we are immortal ; and that 
 this world within us demands and manifests a second without us 1 
 Ah, what can we not say upon this second life, whose beginning 
 is so evidently in this, and that so wonderfully doubles our joys ? 
 Wherefore does a certain higher purity of character disable us from 
 being always more useful, as, according to Herschel, there are suns 
 to which no earths belong ? Wherefore is the heart consumed 
 and broken by the long, feverish, but infinite love for an infinite 
 object; and only alleviated with the hope that this heart-sickness, 
 like the physical, will be stilled with the ice of death, and afterwards 
 raised ? " 
 
 " No," said Gione, with a voice trembling with emotion, " it is not 
 ice, but lightning ; that when the heart is laid on the altar as a sac- 
 rifice, falls from heaven and consumes it, as a proof that the sacrifice 
 is well pleasing to God." 
 
 I know not why, but her touching voice and eye entered my soul, 
 and totally interrupted the concluding links of my chain of argu- 
 ment. 
 
 Nadine, who is usually victorious over all emotion, was touched 
 by her sister's voice. She reached her hand into a neighboring 
 garden, and took from under the hairy leaf of a potato-branch a 
 large night-butterfly, and slrowed it to us with a calm and tender 
 smile. It was the so-called death's-head. I stroked the depressed 
 wings, and said, " It had its birlh in Egypt, the land of mummies 
 and graves ; it bears a memento mori upon its back, and a miserere 
 in its plaintive note."
 
 APPENDIX. 521 
 
 " It is, nevertheless, a butterfly," said the chaplain. 
 
 Upon Gione's face again rested that reflective calmness that made 
 her, through the silence of her sorrow, so infinitely beautiful and 
 great. " Once you said the female Psyche, although pierced through 
 with burning iron, should not beat violently and convulsively her 
 wings, for thus she would destroy her exquisite, unruffled beauty ! 
 Ah, how true a word ! " 
 
 At this moment the already mentioned ode of Carlson's is read, 
 in which he laments the annihilation of so much beauty and truth, 
 and avers his inconsolable sorrow. 
 
 Jean Paul resumes : " I cannot tell thee, my Victor, how painful, 
 how monstrous and horrible, the thought of an annihilating death, 
 of an eternal grave, for this noble form, in all its spiritual beauty, 
 now appeared to me ! If Carlson was right, this innocent soul, that 
 had never been happy, would pass from its prison upon the earth 
 to its hollow prison under it. Men often bear their errors, as their 
 truths, about in words, and not in feeling; but let the believer in 
 anniliilation place before him, instead of a life of sixty years, one 
 of sixty minutes ; then let him look upon the face of a beloved 
 being, or upon a noble and wise man, as upon an aimless hour-long 
 appearance ; as a thin shadow, that melts into light, and leaves no 
 trace ; can he bear the thought? No ! the supposition of imperish- 
 ableness is always with him. Else there would hang always before 
 his soul, as before Mahomet's, in the fairest sky, a black cloud ; and 
 as Cain upon the earth, an eternal fear would pursue him ! " 
 
 I continued, but all argument was now changed to feeling : " Yes, 
 if all the woods upon this earth were groves of pleasure ; if all the 
 valleys were Campaner valleys ; if all the islands were blessed, and 
 all the fields Elysian ; if all eyes were cheerful, and all hearts joy- 
 ful, — yes, then — no ! even then, had God, through this very bles- 
 sedness, made to our spirits the promise, the oath of eternal dura- 
 tion ! But now, O God ! when so many houses are houses of 
 mourning, so many fields battlefields, so many cheeks are pale ; 
 when we pass before so many eyes, red with weeping or closed in 
 death ; O ! can the grave, that haven of salvation, be the last swal- 
 lowing, unyielding whirlpool 1 No, the trampled worm dares raise 
 itself towards its Creator, and say, ' Thou durst not create me to 
 suffer alone ! ' " 
 
 "And who gives the worm the right to make this demand?" 
 asked Carlson.
 
 522 APPENDIX. 
 
 Gione answered, Boftly : " The All-Good himself, who has given 
 us compassion, that speaks aloud in us for all, and which alone 
 would give us a hope, a claim upon him ! " 
 
 This gentle and beautiful word could not immediately calm me. 
 About my inward eye collected the forms of those whose hearts had 
 been without guilt, as tlicir lives without joy ; who had not^attained 
 one wish of their innocent souls, and were now lying under the 
 snow of the past; for they had been like men, who, in freezing, try 
 to sleep. And the forms of those who have loved too well, and lost 
 all, like the beautiful one near me, and so many otiiers, who are 
 most surely martyred by destiny, as the beautiful flower Narcissus 
 is consecrated to the God of Hell ! Then I remembered your true 
 remark, " That you never heard the words sorrow and the past 
 spoken by a woman without at the same time hearing a sigh over 
 the eternal union of those two words," — for women, in the nar- 
 rower theatre of their plans, and with their ideal wishes, build more 
 than we do upon the worth of others, and have to suffer for more 
 failures than their own. 
 
 The sun sank deeper behind the mountains, and the giant shadows 
 rose like birds of night out of tiicir eternal snows ; I took the hand 
 of Carlson, and, looking in his beautiful, manly face, I said : "Ah, 
 Carlson, upon what a blooming world do you throw your immeas- 
 urable gravestone, that no time can lift. Your two difliculties, which 
 are founded upon the necessary uncertainties of men, if solved, 
 would only have the effect to destroy our faith, which is the solu- 
 tion of a thousand other difficulties, without which our existence 
 is without aim, our pains without solution, and the Godlike trinity 
 in our breast three avenging spirits. From the formless earthworm 
 up to the beaming human countenance; from the chaos of the iirst 
 day up to the present age of the world ; from the first faint motion 
 of the heart to its full, bold throbbing in the breast of manhood, the 
 invisible hand of God leads, protects, and nourishes the inward 
 being, — the nursling of the outward; educates and polishes, and 
 makes it beautiful, — and wherefore? That when it stands as a 
 demi-god in the midst of the ruins of the temjjlc of the body, upright 
 and elevated, the blow of death may prostrate it forever, that noth- 
 ing shall remain from the corpse-veiled, the mourning and mantled, 
 imiiieasurablo universe, but the eternally sowing, never Iiarvcsting, 
 solitary spirit of the world ! One eternity looking despairingly at 
 the other! and in the whole spiritual universe no end, no aim I
 
 APPENDIX. 523 
 
 And all these contradictions and riddles, whereby not merely the 
 harmony, but the strings, of creation are tangled, must we take, 
 merely on account of the two difficulties, that indeed o.ur annihila- 
 tion cannot solve ! * Beloved Carlson ! into this harmony of the 
 spheres, that is not over, but ever around us, will you bring your 
 shrieking discord 1 See how gently and touchingly the day departs, 
 and how holily the night comes ! O, can you not believe that even 
 thus our spirits shall arise from the dust, as you once saw the full 
 moon rise from the crater of Vesuvius ? " 
 
 Carlson touched accidentally the strings of Clone's lute that he 
 carried. 
 
 Gione took it with one hand, and gave him the other, while she 
 said, in a low tone: " Among us all will you alone be tormented 
 with this despairing faith f You, who deserve one so beautiful 1 " 
 
 Her words touched the buried love of his long-closed heart, and 
 two hot drops fell from his blinded eyes. He looked at the moun- 
 tains, and said : " I can bear no annihilation but my own ! My heart 
 is of your opinion ; my head will slowly follow." 
 
 The party now drew near the castle, the future home of Gione, 
 which was already illuminated, and filled with music to receive its 
 mistress ; and tlie book closes with the celebration of her nuptials. t 
 
 Jean Paul called the Campaner Thai the living work of youth. 
 In it the proofs of immortality are drawn more from feeling than 
 from philosophical investigation. In the Selina, which was begun 
 on the burial-day of his son Max, he intended it should be other- 
 wise. The same party are introduced, with the changes that would 
 naturally take place in thirty years. Gione, the beloved of Carlson, 
 is dead, but in her daughter Selina she has left a full echo of her 
 heart and a bright reflection of her form. Her voice also resembles 
 her mother's, and she enhances the likeness by always wearing her 
 mother's favorite colors. 
 
 Upon Carlson, who had borne his love-veiled heart into many 
 Lands, time had left few marks. From the melancholy shadows 
 that hovered over his noble countenance, and the traces of pain 
 about the firmly-closed mouth, it was difficult to determine whether 
 his sorrow had been recent or remote. 
 
 * Carlson's two difficulties were the uncertainty of our union with the body and 
 of our union with friends in a future world, 
 t This short extract will give the reader but an imperfect idea of the work.
 
 524 ATPEXDIX. 
 
 Carlson had at length married a lady of the court of Albano and 
 Idoine, and was the father of two sons. He had become a firm 
 believer in a future life ; but his eldest son, Alexander, professed 
 his father's ancient faith in annihilation ; and on Jean Paul's visit, 
 with which the book commences, this faith is combatted with philo- 
 sophical arguments and poetical illustrations of the mosb beautiful 
 order. 
 
 Paul says, among other beautiful things, that " our investigations 
 of our immortality are too often held in a time of sorrow and mourn- 
 ing, when we seize the proofs from spiritual necessity, and therefore 
 they are not transparent. The graves of others are like icy moun- 
 tains, that traveller's visit with veils upon their faces. 
 
 " My principal object in Selina has been to gain a height where 
 the prospect may be open on every side, where the glance may be 
 freely thrown into the grave, into earth and heaven. Endeavor to 
 free the mind from systems and early prejudices, and then look 
 boldly around. Do you find no consolation near, rise and seek it 
 higher ; like the bird of paradise, who, when his feathers are ruffled 
 by storms, rises higher, where none exist." 
 
 Speaking of the church, he says : " To the crucifixion and girdle 
 of thorns they should add hopes and joys ; or flowers, as well as 
 herbs. In the vineyard of the Lord they grow herbs and emetic 
 wine ; but the little Hamburg piece of land and the little church 
 flower-plot is wanting, as cheerfulness is wanting in religion." 
 
 V. 
 
 THE friendship between Otto and Jean Paul was one of the 
 most beautiful that literary history has made known to us. 
 But the frequent outbreaking jealousy of Otto, at what he imagined 
 approaching coldness in Paul, was the occasion of many letters that 
 disclose the generous and forbearing spirit of his friend. As these 
 letters would have taken too much room for the body of the work, 
 I have placed some extracts from them in the Appendix. Otto's 
 were written immediately after Paul finally left Hof to accompany 
 his brother to Leipzig.
 
 APPENDIX. 525 
 
 FROM OTTO TO EICHTER. 
 
 " You have appeared to me, my Richter, in these latter times, to 
 be uo longer the same. Inspired by fame, you only now and then 
 returned to yourself and to me; when, in a moment of emotion, 
 your countenance itself (but probably under the thought of separa- 
 tion) painfully declared it. Your short letters, if you were neces- 
 sarily absent, wounded me ; and when in the evening you came, 
 our conversation was constrained and one-syllabled. I missed 
 everywhere the accustomed warmth of our former life : we had 
 become strangers to each other. Thus we lived near each other, in 
 different houses, and nothing but the near neighborhood seemed to 
 bring us together. I felt as if I must withdraw in some degree of 
 self-dependence within myself, and not advance too submissively ; 
 thus I endeavored to harden myself in your absence, but never in 
 your presence. I consented that you should live with others, but a 
 secondary sympathy through narration I could not give up. I said, 
 as I withdrew into myself, Man can have nothing nearer than him- 
 self; he must, let him be what he will, have a reliance upon himself; 
 he must be self-grounded. If he would be self-consistent, he must 
 advance and rise by himself. The judgment that he must pass 
 upon himself can be formed through no foreign help ; he must 
 therefore depend solely upon himself. 
 
 " Rank and station appeared to exert an increasing influence 
 upon you, and you appeared to give into the pretension to both 
 that distinguished and accomplished talent establishes. You be- 
 lieved that you penetrated all things (but sometimes you yield to 
 first impressions that you rarely contradict with the second), and, 
 as you did not betray yourself, you thought I should not perceive 
 your feelings ; but I knew quickly all that you felt, for all that in- 
 terests so deeply makes us penetrating and sharp-sighted.* .... 
 
 " When I wrote the above, I said to myself. Yes, we are forever 
 divided ; but you w d never find a man a friend who will love and 
 understand you better. Ah ! there is much passed that will never 
 return. The most precious bloom and consciousness of beauty in 
 every thing, in every being, when once past, never, never returns ; 
 all disposition, every effort, every exertion to recall it helps nothing — 
 but to make the loss more deeply felt. In vain we stretch out our 
 
 * There are many more charges, too long to be inserted. Paul's answer makes 
 them apparent.
 
 526 APPENDIX. 
 
 hands ; nothing returns but the longing and the shadow, that van- 
 ishes when we would hold it. 
 
 " At that time, long passed, when sleeping together, we never 
 thought of speaking ; we thought not of entertaining each other. 
 I neither saw, nor feared, nor thouglit, nor felt that yoa^could de- 
 scend tome! Ah, then it was other and better than now! Now 
 I sit alone, and think of those lost times of freedom and equality. 
 But since I liave been compelled to understand that our roses are 
 withered, I have gained self-reliance, that came not indeed from 
 reason, but from necessity ; and I am obliged to acknowledge that 
 I am reduced to myself. 
 
 "In that early time, when you found me in the upper apartment; 
 when we were pressed to impart to each other; and if we were silent 
 it was not oppressive, and we parted again, strengthened and joyful. 
 Formerly, you enjoyed for me as for yourself ; now, for yourself 
 alone. Formerly, the fleeting and changing joys of the moment 
 were prolonged, and received a greater value from the thought of 
 repeating and enjoying them again with me. Think not that I do 
 not miss this communion. That I have not reminded you of it was 
 because I would only receive the gift with tlie double value, that 
 generosity makes itself doubly iiappy when it imparts to another. 
 Formerly, you were more lenient towards every one, — you csioemed 
 what every one gave, according to his good will, and not after the 
 measure of his mental riches ; now, you demand, besides the gift, 
 that the giver sliould be rich. Now you take consciously what you 
 formerly received unconsciously. 
 
 " By degrees your letters became colder, hastier, more selfish, — 
 self-sustained, measured, prudent, passing more ceremoniously over 
 the present, and anticipating the future with no animating hope ; 
 and in your letters the cold you would more frequently come, if you 
 did not reluctantly recollect yourself, than the intimate and precious 
 thou (dd). 
 
 " I am not susceptible ! You do not yet wholly understand me ; 
 and my worst and best sides not just!)'. 
 
 "If you should return again, you could not alter. The past will 
 never return ! The tender, once blooming, but not perennial past, 
 never, never ! There is a self-confidence, a repose in one's self, that 
 suffers every man to be what he can be ; and to mine belongs this 
 faith in, this clear perception of, an unchangeable destiny. I knew 
 too well that it depended most upon me ; but yet, somewhat upoQ
 
 APPENDIX. 527 
 
 you. I have never, never believed you inconstant, and never will. 
 Say, always, that I do you injustice ; say that I misunderstand you ; 
 but yet I cannot conceal from you that I believe you have not yet 
 left all the errors of your life behind you; that it seems to me as if 
 you stood very near the last ; and that it is my fervent wish and 
 hope, if you conquer it, or can ever conquer it, that we should again 
 approach each other. 
 
 " Be not angry on account of what I have written ; or, if you are 
 and must be, tell me so at least; be not silent, — this time not 
 silent. In future, as often and as long as you will. But if you 
 are silent, — if you can be angry with me, yet I will love you as 
 formerly, as now, unalterably, as none other ! eternally ! eternally ! 
 " Thine ! « q-j<j<q « 
 
 Richter answered immediately, and would not by a single day's 
 delay allow Otto to think he was wounded. 
 
 " Dear Otto : Your letter gave me, occasionally, little shudders ; 
 but it is well that you should lay before me the whole web of your 
 errors, that I may unravel them. May you never, in future, weave 
 a single thread that shall cut into your heart. How have you mis- 
 understood me, but always from love ! and all that gives me pain 
 in your letter is your sorrow. 
 
 " I will now go through with all the objections against me in 
 your letter, either to acknowledge or remove them, — this is the only 
 way to relieve the oppressive fulness of my lieart. 
 
 " ' R. appears to me so absorbed by fame as not to remain wholly 
 himself.' I have often thought that to many I should appear thus, 
 and that they would thus represent me. But I assure you, my Otto, 
 my inward being cannot, by all the laurels in the world, be raised 
 one inch higher than it was before the publication of the Mummy.* 
 I have a humility within me that no man can guess, and that is not 
 a victory over, but a necessity of, my nature ; as I alone know how 
 to separate my industry, my added growth of years, from my natural 
 
 powers. Towards the R s, towards Renata, towards your family 
 
 I am as I have always been ; but when the mercantile, despising, 
 money-loving, egotistical Hofers came, then not my intellectual 
 nature, that the public alone have praised too much, but my moral 
 
 * The Mummy was another name for Siebenkds, or Flower, Fruit, and 
 Thorn Piecet.
 
 528 APPENDIX. 
 
 nature arose, and compared the Hofers with strangers ; and I could 
 not forget how they formerly, and indeed always, have treated me, 
 and liow they despised and deserted my poor mother in her poverty. 
 Rememher that the contempt (a contempt that I felt much more 
 strongly in my poverty) was only expressed against arrogance, at 
 least against the H s never, never against thee or thinb ! 
 
 " Evenings when we met we sought painfully for conversation ; 
 he appeared to let himself down to me ; sought to talk politics, to 
 speak of the peace, &c. 
 
 " This suspicion had heen fearful to me if I had guessed it, and I 
 should have been altogether silent, or remained away. But with 
 you, my Otto, I felt always that fantasying freedom to speak either 
 about everything or nothing. I cannot tell you how happy I went 
 from you, because I had been excused the trouble and eiuiui of seek- 
 ing after conversation. Mc, poor innocent, how pitiful my quiet 
 satisfaction now appears to me ! I asked about the peace because 
 the newspapers torment me, and I read them very unwillingly, and 
 your opinion was more valuable to me than my own ; and tlie idol- 
 atry in these for the to me scarcely human French, permitted me 
 no questions. Politics or history always turned a new side towards 
 us, and was more prolific than any other subject. Then our Schwar- 
 zenbach conversation had the double charm of exchanging mutually 
 our novelties from the eight days' separation. Your judgment upon 
 politics, and not my own, was the only one that I had faith in. I 
 never thouglit that friendship need entertain, or that silence was a 
 sign that the lieart was cold. 
 
 " Of the ' letting down,' had my heart, as my understanding, no 
 sense, — never a thought. Ah ! how can I represent to myself such 
 an idea ? Yes, our personal separation was indeed a happiness if 
 such a monstrous, infinitely painful, suspicion was to continue to 
 gain strength. Or, if not the separation, a letter such as you have 
 written. 
 
 " ' Concealing my departure.' Tliis you do not understand. I 
 do not kno^y whether you are acquainted with the fearfully destroy- 
 ing power of emotion that the excitement of imagination leaves. 
 What I see, and do not think about, I can bear ; but if the object 
 turns from the eye to tlie fancy, which is the key of my heart, then 
 the weakening power of emotion is so great that I seek levity in- 
 stead of tenderness, merely that I may not think. I could write 
 slieets upon this sulyect. Formerly I loved the storms of feeling;
 
 APPENDIX. 529 
 
 but no longer, for they destroy. I ask for little from the world that 
 I have already tasted ; less on account of the pain than the physical 
 consequences. Emotion is never wholly bitter when the love therein 
 makes it sweet ; but I would deny it if it injured others. 
 
 " The last Sunday I was with you there arose in me a whole 
 world of tears as I looked at you ; and as I saw in your expression 
 the same emotion, I could look no longer, but stifled my tears and 
 left you rather. 
 
 " ' He believes that he has discovered everything.' I believe it, 
 never ! As I know that, on account of my imagination, I see noth- 
 ing justly in the beginning; and also that at first all things — men, 
 places, books, music — appear to me too good. 
 
 " ' He considers me vain.' I have never found tliis vanity exer- 
 cised towards me. I was satisfied with everything in you, and 
 thought you knew it. I never think when I love any one of assur- 
 ing him of my esteem. In the ecstasy of love I see nothing ; I think 
 not of appearances, I merely rejoice. When I made you guilty 
 of vanity, and wrote you a cold letter, it was when you were at 
 Bayreuth. 
 
 " ' Ah, there is much past that will never return.' Every stroke 
 of the clock is to me the funeral-bell of a past emotion, but also the 
 baptismal-bell of a new one. Ah, the twenty years' feeling of friend- 
 ship, the twenty years' delight of love, are past, and will enjoy no 
 eartlily morning ; but as old stars go down new ones rise. No emo- 
 tion remains the same, but the new-born are sweeter ; and the heart, 
 if it is more unhappy, is not colder than of old. Upon this subject 
 I could write a book. Nothing fades ! The growing plant throws 
 off its leaves in harvest, but it blossoms again, and at length is a 
 perfect tree. Man has many springs, and no winter. 
 
 " ' Why do I tell you so little of myself.' Ah, innocent as a child 
 do I stand before thee. The eternal repetition of my I was hateful 
 to me, as I could only speak of my works. Every day the indi- 
 vidual features became worse, and I gave you, unwillingly, a his- 
 tory, that, as I became more accustomed to it, appeared only a 
 perpetual abstract of the same thing ; and, further, I did not think 
 you expected it 
 
 " I have read yours, and this letter again. Mine does not satisfy 
 me. In yours I find excellent remarks, and a love that I can never 
 forget, although the same faults that you reproach me with, namely, 
 
 23 HH
 
 53>^ APPENDIX. 
 
 upon you aloue has my new relation with the public produced a 
 change 
 
 " I never mingle you with others ; my feeling for you is unique, 
 and belongs to no other human being. Often when I hear musiC; 
 and long for my Hofer friends, you alone come before rr\y heart ; 
 and it is always, as it was lately in a dream, when Renata appeared 
 grown old, and your younger brother led Albretch with swollen 
 lips ! At last you came ; and for joy loudly weeping, I fell upon 
 your neck, and awoke ! 
 
 " Only when I need to shall I write. Ah, that is always. But 
 I have no time ; and when the need is strongest I had rather not 
 write, but fantasy on the piano ; that gently quiets the longing that 
 writing increases. Ah, every year my love for you increases, be- 
 comes purer and nobler, spite of the faults that I discover in you. 
 I would that it were the same with you ! When in the spring I 
 again find myself in the blooming circle of your love, and the old 
 disturbing relations have passed into pure benevolence, then we 
 shall find no firmer love and joy, but a higher, a greater, a more 
 heavenly, — and I willingly give the past for the future. 
 
 " Nevertheless, you only are right. I fail often without knowing 
 it. There are also other reasons why you misunderstand me. I 
 have more faults than you know. Until now I have only given 
 negative answers ; to the positive belong a book. How strange it 
 has been the last year with my inward being no one can guess. 
 Enough. I give you again my hand, and say, forgive me, for I 
 have nothing to forgive ! Forget your pain, and stand by me eter- 
 nally, as I by you ! " B."
 
 APPENDIX. 531 
 
 VI. 
 
 ONE other journey of Richter's deserves a place, because it has 
 been the occasion of a very pleasant description of the amuse- 
 ments of the court of Kurland, published by Cotta in the Ladies' 
 Pocket-Book ; and shows that the cheerful, hospitable country life at 
 a German court is very much like the country life of the wealthy 
 classes in England. 
 
 Jean Paul was rewarded, i. the year 1819, for the want of a spring 
 journey by the splendid blue harvest weeks in Lobichau, the estate 
 of the Duchess of Kurland, where, with her three daughters and her 
 sister, the Countess Eliza von der Reck, and a multitude of distin- 
 guished visitors, — literary men, artists, and beautiful women, — 
 they lived after the true old German custom, in princely hospitality. 
 I translate from the printed account. 
 
 "If I should now tell you that a quarter of a hundred strangers 
 have made the castle their autumn quarters, and that sometimes on 
 Sundays thirty-five guests sit down in the dining-saloon, you would 
 not wonder if I should go on to say that there are not many exam- 
 ples of guests remaining only a few days. Besides those from the 
 neighboring city, who can come and go when they please, there are 
 many, like myself, who stay from the 31st of August to the 17th of 
 September. There are others, with families, who have been here 
 four, five, six weeks. But at last, dearest, I will surprise you with 
 the fact, for you cannot yet guess the reason of the union of so many 
 people in one place, so that guests of every species sit or wander 
 about. Counts and countesses, barons and baronesses, doctors of 
 medicine and doctors of theology, doctors of justice and laws, presi- 
 dents and painters, sons of the muses, poets, all with or without 
 •wife and children. For the present, to mention only the poets, 
 there are Schink, Tiedge, and myself. .... 
 
 " But, my good reader, you would know, from a true hand, the 
 Duchess of Kurland, and how a princess, who can summon together 
 such a wide circle, can hold them fast in a ring of enchantment. 
 Her name would often be pronounced with delight in the whole of 
 Europe, but she loves rather to bloom in the midst of the surround- 
 ing blossoms of her daughters ; for whoever would look with pene- 
 tration behind the enchanting eye, and deeper than the beautiful
 
 532 APPENDIX. 
 
 face, where the soul, with its peace and mildness and love, dwells, 
 would find the face faded little by time, for the inward keeps the 
 outward young. 
 
 " But I will describe the Lobichau daily life itself, and begin in 
 the morning, when all is apparently solitary and calm. , Every 
 guest breakfasts in his own room, and merely sees from his window 
 — if, like myself, he has one upon the balcony — ladies wandering 
 at that cool morning hour in the park ; or a few chambermaids, who 
 are not yet before the hot fire, engaged in folding and plaiting their 
 mistresses' white dresses. Many gentlemen, who belong to the 
 learned class, are at work among their papers ; but if it is with 
 them as with me, they bring little to pass. A little later, morning 
 visits begin from the gentlemen to the ladies, such as from me to 
 my friend the Fraulein von Ende, whose apartment, with that of her 
 son, is close to mine. The princesses, who live in the adjoining 
 palace of Tannefeld, now receive visits from young gentlemen or 
 from me. The Duchess Dorothea sits in her chamber and reads 
 and writes. 
 
 " All this goes on after the early private breakfast, and before the 
 call to the general breakfast, that takes place about twelve o'clock. 
 Many, among whom I place myself, are of opinion that the word 
 breakfast is altogether unjust, for apparently this is what used to be 
 called, after the good old custom, although an hour later, the Ger- 
 man dinner. It consists of a multitude of warm dishes, such as are 
 to be served at what used to be called the German supper, at six 
 o'clock ; but which is now, an hour later, called our dinner, and 
 differs from the lircakfast, not by the greater variety of dishes, but 
 by more distinguished splendor in the service, which for the stomach 
 in its reckoning of time has little weight. Whoever, from love to 
 the old customs, or from any other cause, prefers the old dining hour 
 of two or three o'clock, may remain away without excuse, for all 
 may come and go ; and conversation and dressing goes on, free 
 from all court restraints. 
 
 " I consider the princess happy who can wear a light hat, free 
 from the heavy weight of a royal crown, for she can bow her head 
 without inconvenience to the humblest field-flower of joy, or raise it 
 to the highest star for devotion. The canopy 6f the throne is open 
 to the prince, and leaves him some little freedom of prospect ; bat 
 the courtier is often more closely imprisoned by the flowery chain 
 of favor than by the fetters of displeasure. The princess is bound,
 
 APPENDIX. 533 
 
 at the same time, by the hereditary golden chain of rank, the silken 
 cord of sex, that enfolds her like an ornament, and the iron ring of 
 conventional custom. 
 
 "Freedom descends here to little things ; for say what you will, 
 dearest, it is very agreeable to a literary counsellor like myself, if he 
 is about to appear at court, and has no three-cornered hat, and no 
 shoes, and consequently would have to borrow them, to be able to 
 appear as he is. Wonderful indeed is it that at court, where every- 
 thing rounds itself into a circle, the hat alone must show its three- 
 pointed corners, or that the throne should be a Vesuvius, which it 
 is well known can only be ascended in shoes. But what is the 
 absence of extensive or minute forms of constraint to the blessed 
 power of freedom of speech 1 Fair reader, you may sit at the table 
 at Labichau, or afterwards upon the sofa, and attack or defend any 
 opinion you please. You may be for or against Magnetism, for or 
 against the Jews, for or against Ultras or Liberals. Yes, you can, 
 in the last circumstance, if you are a lady, raise your beautiful voice 
 the loudest for Liberalism ; no one will say anything against it, or, 
 at most, give his reasons. There happened a political contention, 
 where all fought together, — the learned, princesses, and the other 
 ladies, — when the always calm and cheerful Dorothea entered upon 
 the theatre of the war. Immediately the burning beams and oppos- 
 ing lights, that were rushing together, sank apart, and changed into 
 a mild, pure radiance, in which all could see and rejoice. This 
 freedom in social conversation, as in social enjoyment, is now the 
 contract social in Lobichau. Give but freedom, and both joy and 
 knowledge will advance of themselves. The tree of freedom sup- 
 ports the clusters of the vine of joy as well as the branches of the 
 tree of knowledge. 
 
 " I remark, first, that we have not yet risen from the table of the 
 so-called breakfast, where, if conversation succeeds, it may endure 
 some hours. Afterwards every one goes where it may seem to him 
 good ; into his study or his reading; apartment, where he may pro- 
 vide himself from the select French and German library of the 
 Duchess, or into the library itself; or, if it be a lady, into her dress- 
 ing-room, to prepare for the evening dinner ; or, as I often do, into 
 the carriage with the Countess Eliza von der Reck,* where I see, 
 
 * The Countess von der Reck was one of the most distinguished female authors 
 of Germany.
 
 534 APPENDIX. 
 
 in this distingnished woman, in her pious will, her firm faith, and 
 warm love, a wholly different being than in the journals of Biesters 
 or Nicholai ; or, at last, I and many others go to Tannefeld to the 
 princesses, who rarely all appear at the mid-day breakfast. All in 
 that little dwelling-room is as brightly cheerful as if it, with the 
 chambers of the heart therein, formed together a spring t&mple for 
 the sun. There are Johanne and Pauline and Wilhelmine, and 
 sometimes the beloved loving mother, with her guests from the hall, 
 united in cheerful conversation or business ; as we said above, it is 
 open to every guest. 
 
 " The evening dinner, that begins about seven o'clock, lasts, after 
 we have risen from the table, till twelve o'clock at night, and this is 
 the most delightful part of the day. It possesses a charm that fills 
 and rejoices every heart ; for one becomes weary of the harvest of 
 joy merely, when they do not gather the fruit from the tree itself. 
 
 " About seven o'clock the writer, whose window opens upon the 
 balcony that leads to the several apartments, has the satisfaction 
 of seeing the guests collect for dinner, and he could have thrown 
 flowers upon the beautiful heads of the ladies as they passed under 
 his window. All the inhabitants of the Tannefeld enchanted castle 
 appear at the evening dinner, and remain to share the evening joy ; 
 and for a benevolent heart it is a beautiful spectacle to see with 
 what mutual joy mother and daughters meet after a short separii- 
 tion ; and how with them those signs of tenderness which have be- 
 come vapid in the world receive a new dignity and warmth through 
 their heartfelt sincerity. 
 
 " The dinner now begins under the departing beams of the sun. 
 Upon the writer the long table, to which sometimes, especially on 
 Sundays, a supplementary was added, filled with gay youths, with 
 the dare obscure of twilight, which before the artificial lights were 
 brought in excited the gay society most agreeabU' ; but upon the 
 writer (to whom it always renewed the memory of his childhood's 
 years, where, in the poor village of his birth, the evening meal in 
 summer was taken in the soft 'twilight) it made a childlike, poeti- 
 cal, enchanting impression, 
 
 " What took place after dinner it would be difficult to prophesy. 
 Sometimes a celebrated violinist, as it hajjpened twice, played for 
 us. Princess Paulino, and her sister Wilhelmine, could sing in a 
 masterly manner from Tancred or a Stabat Mater, or the whole choir 
 could unite in the German and Swiss national songs, or they read
 
 APPENDIX. 535 
 
 aloud, or played charades, or danced, or did all at once, for each 
 took part in all ; or if one wished to devote himself to one alone, 
 there was no restraint,- but perfect freedom in the choice of joys. 
 Flowers of joy are no artificial growth, but the sensitive-plant of 
 feeling. 
 
 "But I must excuse the absence of what every less cheerful 
 society possesses, namely, cards. I will not deny that the higher 
 we rise the more indispensable they become, and that where a king 
 is present the four card-kings are either regents or vassals, for with- 
 out the four cardinal colors the heavenly chart of social pleasure 
 cannot be illuminated. Also, the noble cannot dispense with his 
 card-table, as a free table of gain, where the whole collection of 
 friends sit at their tables and pray mutually, as the people in Blan- 
 kensea, by Altona, do in the church, that God would shipwreck the 
 one for the advantage of the other. But how were mixed society 
 held together without cards 1 The card is the olive-leaf, or sticking- 
 plaster of secretly angry people, who otherwise would wound each 
 other with something sharper than trumps. For to men that have 
 nothing to say, at least to women, they present cards out of tender- 
 ness, as a passport, or a dispensation-bill from conversation, and 
 thus they can pay their debts of wit in good card-paper during the 
 evening. But a quadruple alliance of the four card-kings against 
 ennui and peevishness was not necessary in the Tetrarchate of 
 Lobichau. 
 
 " Every evening the beautiful world, or a part of it, danced for 
 some hours, and the other part sat and looked on. Frequently they 
 chose hastily a charming princely dancer, and placed her at the 
 Vienna Piano, where she formed, alone, a complete orchestra, till 
 another took her place. 
 
 " The 12th of September, the harvest-festival, was also made a 
 spiritual harvest. A valuable altar-service of gold and silver ves- 
 sels, with a new altar-cloth, the Duchess Dorothea had from the 
 first intended for the harvest-festival, when in the afternoon all the 
 guests collected in the little friendly church to hear the harvest- 
 sermon. Besides, the four princesses had not waited for such an 
 occasion to visit the church for the first time. A warm, pure lovo 
 of religion ennobled both mother and daughters. In this women 
 differ from men in the most decided manner, especially in the higher 
 ranks, which always upon their journeys visit the churches to per- 
 torm their devotions before the pictures, pillars, and colored glass
 
 536 APPENDIX. 
 
 cf the windows, so that they often interrupt a full church in their 
 singing and preaching. Therefore, as in French cities, a bell is 
 rung before the Porte-Dieu, called the Jew's ijell, to inform the Jews 
 of the entrance of the crucifix, and frighten them awaj', — thus for 
 travellers and connoisseurs, before thej enter a church on Sundays, 
 a bell should be rung, that they may not unawares disturb a» whole 
 church in their devotion. 
 
 " In the Lobichau church there was devotion, pious joy, and 
 gratitude to Heaven, that had given them the rich harvest and the 
 benevolent princess. This gratitude looked beautiful in so many 
 country faces. Many of the old heads were worthy of a painter, — 
 I had nearly written, — as if the artist himself had not been made 
 by the original Artist, whom a Raphael had earlier to thank for his 
 own enchanting face than for his painted fixces. An hour after the 
 service was ended a more joyful and beautiful procession than God 
 usually receives (for whom, among us, there are only sorrowful and 
 praying processions) brought the princess the signs of grateful love 
 and joy. 
 
 " They collected with music before the castle, upon whose bal- 
 cony the Princess stood surrounded by her friends, — boys and 
 girls, virgins and youths, and old men, with wreaths of flowers 
 upon their instruments of agriculture, and cried aloud their love- 
 and joy. The Duchess threw them, not merely glances, but words 
 of her own gratitude and joy, which, for true men like them, were 
 more acceptable than presents of money, stamped with the crown. 
 
 " The young men looked up delighted, forgot the gift in the giver, 
 and looked their thanks for a second. Some of the ancients brought 
 their speeches, and a printed poem, with freer bearing tlian, alas! 
 the learned of middle rank can usually command. They received 
 from the Duchess, with grateful modesty, the offer of a free ball at 
 the Wetihhaus, but declined it, as they would rather themselves pay 
 the last joy of their harvest-festival. 
 
 " I here add my harvest-sermon, as a thanksgiving to my hostess, 
 composed in tlie chapel of my sleeping-chamber, on the 15th of 
 September, in a dream. 
 
 " ' My devout hearers, from Kurland and Germany.' — So far the 
 beginning of the sermon, — for, alas ! in awaking I had completely 
 forgotten the introduction, and the thirty-two parts into which the 
 sermon was divided ; only the application, or the iisus epanortlioticus, 
 remained with me, and sounded thus : ' I have, then, dearest flock,
 
 APPENDIX. 537 
 
 in the thirty-two parts of my sermon, shown for what harvest of 
 sheaves and clusters of joy we have to thank our revered Dorothea 
 that we have enjoyed the highest freedom from all the bandages 
 of court restraint, for the bonds of love, in reason of their lightness, 
 are counted for nothing ; our fetters have been only formed of flow- 
 ers ; not in the sweat of our faces, but in the smiles of the same, 
 have we all gathered our joy-sheaves, from hence to Tannefeld ; 
 and the preacher himself returns to Bayreuth, overpacked with the 
 most respectable tithes. 
 
 " ' Beloved children of my flock, whether in Lobichau or Tanne- 
 feld, consider the happy neighborhood of the mother church to the 
 filial church yet more attentively, whereof in the twenty-fifth division 
 of my discourse I have already hinted. In heaven, as astronomy 
 teaches us, the suns are so far apart that they do not disturb the 
 attraction of each other's planets ; but, on the contrary, in Lobichau 
 and Tannefeld the neighborhood of the different suns increases the 
 attraction of the revolving comets ; and the worshippers of the four 
 stars of beauty maintain, after present astronomers, that they con- 
 sist of Dorothea, Johanne, Pauline, and Wilhelmine '" 
 
 Only one more of Paul's thoughts, in his chapel at Lobichau. 
 " The more tenderly and warmly one loves, so much more does he 
 discover in himself defects rather than charms, that render him not 
 worthy of the beloved. Thus are our little faults first made known 
 to us when we have ascended the higher steps of religion. The 
 more we satisfy the demands of conscience the stronger they become. 
 Love and religion arc here like the sun. By mere daylight and 
 torchlight the air of the apartment is pure and undisturbed by a 
 single particle, but let in a sunbeam, and how much dust and motes 
 are hovering about ! " 
 
 I have given these long extracts as a fair specimen of Jean Paul'8 
 most familiar and trifling manner of writing.
 
 53? APPENDIX. 
 
 VII. 
 
 AS the last sheets of the third edition of this work were passing 
 through the press, the author received from Rev. Ouakles 
 T. Brooks the following interesting document. 
 
 The venerable Gleim having written the anonymous letter to 
 Eichter given in the text, and enclosing a very timely present of 
 fifty dollars, Jean Paul published the following answer, in the form 
 of an intelligence-leaf to the Flower-pieces. 
 
 " Hof, in Voigtland, July 5, 1796. 
 
 " I beg permission or pardon of my readers for printing here 
 something which does not concern them all, but only the single 
 reader, who, under the name of Septimus Fixlein, wrote to me from 
 Shuran on the 23d of May, 1796. 
 
 " Too good Septimus ! I entreat thee earnestly, write me thy 
 true name ; for here, on the open sea of the world, amid a hundred 
 ships, I cannot scream to thee through the speaking-trumpet of the 
 press what I had much rather whisper to thy face and to tliy breast. 
 Imitate as much as you will the Great Spirit, only not in being in- 
 visible. Thy real name, I assure thee, will not disturb our relation. 
 The mantle of love hides all faults, but must it remain itself hidden 
 like a fault ? Write me at least, in thine own handwriting, some 
 address, under which I may safely bring before thee some words of 
 my soul. If, however, thou shouldst never ask after my intelli- 
 gence-leaf, and shouldst remain forever veiled in mystery, then take 
 here my thanks for all indications of thy beautiful spirit. May thy 
 life turn round like a world in gentle alternations, now to the sun- 
 light of reality, now to the moonlight of poesy, — and in all thy 
 clouds may there be only evening redness, or a rainbow, but no 
 tempest, — and when thou art happy, then may thy genius remind 
 thee of the 23d of May ; and when thou art sad, may some good 
 man send thee a letter full of love, such as thou hast written to me. 
 Yes, may he even write under it his real name. 
 
 "J. P. F. RICHTER." 
 
 So much as the above stood twenty years ago on the last leaf 
 of the first edition of this story. The=e lines might, as well as many
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 S39 
 
 others, have been left out of the second edition, to sink into oblivion, 
 but there is so weighty a reason at hand for their remaining on the 
 surface, that they ought rather, in all the future editions, to swim 
 ahead in the preface of the fourth volume ; and that reason is simply 
 that Septimus Fixlein was no other than old Gleim, whom I wished 
 to thank as an unknown benefactor for a pecuniary present season- 
 able to my then existing necessities. 
 
 Subsequently I became more nearly acquainted with this genuine 
 and great original German, face to face, as well as deed to deed ; 
 and I heartily longed for the place in my autobiography where I 
 can mention him more at length. 
 
 Bayreuth, March 7, 1818. 
 
 THE END. 
 
 Cambridge : Stereotyped and Printed by Welch, Bigelow, & Co.

 
 
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