RICHTER, JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH

RICHTER, JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH, was born 21st March 1763, at Wunsiedel, in the Fichtelgebirge, Bavaria, where his father, John Christopher Richter, was school-master and organist. Two years after, however, he was appointed parson at Joditz, and finally at Schwarzenbach. He appears in Jean Paul's fragment of autobiography as a clever, witty man, indulgent at home, prone to melancholy, and struggling all his life with debt. Jean Paul's education was conducted at home in an irregular fashion till his thirteenth year, when he was sent to the gymnasium at Hof. He had already acquired an amount of knowledge extraordinary for a boy, by dint of reading everything he could get to read in his father's library, and in the larger one of his friend Vogel, a neighbouring clergyman, and had commenced that system of making copious extracts from the books he read which he continued ever after. At Hof he lived with his mother's parents till the death of his father in 1780, which was shortly followed by the death of his grandmother and grandfather. To his mother, their favourite child, they left their property, which was considerable, in Hof, and she went there to reside. The will was contested by other expectants, and the expenses of the lawsuit and the debts of her deceased husband swallowed up the bequest, and reduced her to poverty. In these circumstances, Jean Paul was sent to the university of Leipzig, to study for the church, it being the ardent wish of his mother that he should follow his father's profession; and Leipzig was preferred to Erlangen on account of the supposed privileges of poor students at the former university. He entered 19th May 1781, and heard Platner lecture on logic and aesthetics, Morus on theology, Wieland on morals, and Hempel on the English language, to which he applied himself. It does not appear that he had at any time the serious intention of becoming a preacher, for his multifarious reading had already brought him under the influence of the scepticism of the time; but he seems to have been willing enough to fulfil his mother's desire, until his intercourse with the humorists of England—Addison, Swift, Pope, Young, Sterne—thoroughly awakened his powers into consciousness, and then it became his fixed resolve to live a literary life, and no other. Dire necessity pushed the resolve into premature action: want stared him in the face. The small sums his mother could afford to send him were insufficient for a bare subsistence; the letters in which he begs money or thanks her for it, consoling her, at

Richter, the same time, for her disappointed hopes of his becoming a preacher by the golden prospects of fame and independence to be won by his writings, are of a most pathetic cheerfulness. For his first book, Lob der Dummheit ("The Praise of Stupidity"), suggested (too obviously) by the Encomium of Erasmus, he could not find a publisher. In no wise daunted, he threw it into the fire, and commenced a second Grönlandische Prozesse ("Greenland Lawsuits"), a series of satirical essays or sketches directed against German follies, and specially against the literary class. These first essays are certainly replete with wit, native and borrowed; and had he himself left nothing to compare them with, much more would be found in them. They were published by Voss at Berlin in 1783, and the author was made rich with 15 louis-d'ors. For a third volume he, after numerous solicitations, could find no publisher nor editor. In 1784 he returned to Hof, and lived with his mother in a very straitened way, cheerfully pursuing his studies, assisted by the books, and often by the money, of his friends Vogel and Otto. In Hof, while his eccentric freedom of dress (he wore his own hair and an open shirt-collar, and was otherwise wild in his attire) and of speech had made him enemies, he had a circle of warm friends, mostly of the fair sex, for whom he was already a great and wonderful man, before Weimar and Berlin had told them so. Two changes intervened before the dawn of his fame. In 1786 he became tutor in the family of a Von Oerthel at Topen, the father of a school and college friend between whom and Richter existed a warm affection. Here, however, he was rendered miserable by the disposition of his pupil and the arrogant narrowness of his employer; and on the death of his friend in 1789 he returned to Hof. It would appear that this occurrence produced a powerful impression on the mind of Richter: he himself dates from it as an epoch, and the recollection, varied and exalted by imagination, is repeated through all his works. Under the influence of this event he first struck the tone of profound melancholy and thoughtfulness, blending with higher hopes, which is the ground-tone of so much that is best in his works, in a little essay, Was der Tod ist ("What Death is"), which he sent to Herder, and which called forth an appreciating letter from Madame Herder, who received it. In 1798 he went to Schwarzenbach, on the invitation of his friends Cloter, Volkel, and Vogel, to teach their children, and resided alternately with each of them. Meantime he worked at a romance, Die unsichtbare Loge ("The Invisible Lodge"), which was published at Berlin in 1791, and which, though not very successful, brought him into notice among the cultivated. He himself described this romance as "a born ruin." But by the successive publication of Hesperus (1791), Quintus Fizelein, and the Blumen, Frucht, und Dornen Stücke ("Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces"), 1796, he raised himself to a recognised place among the greatest writers of Germany, at a time when Herder and Wieland, Goethe and Schiller, were above the horizon at once. If we add Levana and the Flegeljahre, these are the works by which his name is best known out of Germany. A time of wandering followed,—residences in Weimar, where he especially attached himself to Herder, who reciprocated all his love; in Dresden, in Leipzig, and elsewhere; everywhere flattered and caressed, and finding access to the highest and most cultivated society. This severe trial of the successful author Richter met as a man of thoroughly-grounded self-knowledge and insight. Other trials he had with his fair admirers, who were numerous and ardent, and did not all understand his Platonic affection and doctrine of female friendship as he did, or were not so capable of its reserves. The fascination his writings exercised over female minds his presence and conversation completed: twice he had to say a resolute "No" to women who would marry him in spite

of himself; and in both cases the women—Madame von Kalb in Weimar, and Emilie von Berlespsch, a young and rich Swiss widow whom he met at Eger—were women of personal attractions, rank, and fortune. Richter wished, longed for a quiet retirement, where he might live his youth over again, not far from the very spot where its scenes first passed. He had no ambition of the worldly kind: quiet domestic joys, secured by his own exertions, were his ideal of happiness. In 1799 he formed an engagement with a young noble lady at the court of Hildburghausen. They were even betrothed; but the engagement was broken off, for reasons that did not transpire. Next year he met Caroline Meyer in Berlin; and on the 27th May 1801 he married her. The union was a happy one; their ideas of domestic happiness were the same; and she proved exactly the quiet, worshipping, careful Hausfrau whom Richter wanted and was seeking. In the meantime, he had published his Palingenesien, Clavis Fichtiana, some smaller works, and the first volume of Titan (1799). The Clavis had a success "of occasion" derived from the reputation of the object of the satire. Richter, who in respect of philosophy, was a follower of Jacobi, and to whom a personal Deity and a personal immortality were necessities of the heart, had no sympathy with the destructive logic of Fichte; and through his whole works may be found, now in exquisite ridicule (as in the man with the fixed idea that he has lost his Ich), now in deep and powerful protest (as in that truly appalling "Oration of Jesus Christ to the Universe," proclaiming that there is no God), evidences of his revolt from the new idealism. After a visit to Weimar, a year's stay in Meiningen, where he published the Flegeljahre ("Wild Oats," according to Carlyle), and a short residence in Coburg, he finally fixed himself (1804) at Bayreuth, where, near his dearest friend Otto, and in a house overlooking the Main, he spent the rest of his life as he had longed to do, diversifying it only by short annual tours to visit his scattered friends. During the heat of the war, when literature was at a discount, he felt the pressure of poverty, and solicited and received a pension of 1000 gulden (L.85) from the Prince-Bishop von Dalberg, paid, however, after 1811 by the Bavarian government. Of the works he published in these latter years, the most notable are the Vorschule der Aesthetik ("Introduction to Aesthetics"), 1813; Levana, a work on education, showing a remarkable insight into the nature of children, and full of the wisest practical suggestions; Leben Fibels ("The Life of Fibel"), 1812, a little work of strange humour; and Der Comet oder Nicolaus Marggraf, 1820-22. In 1811, already feeling the effects of incessant toil, he received a severe blow in the loss of his only son Max, at the age of nineteen. The youth had distinguished himself much at Munich, especially in languages, and went to Heidelberg, where he appears to have ruined his health by excessive study and needless privations. From this stroke he never completely recovered. His eyesight failing, he sent for his nephew, Otto Spazier, from Dresden, to assist him in revising his writings for a complete edition; and the work was only interrupted on the day of his death, 14th November 1825.

The affectionate adjective with which the Germans accompany the name of Jean Paul, der Einzige ("the Unique"), well denotes the difficulty of describing and the impossibility of classifying him. He is his own species, in a manner. That other common designation of him, as "a western oriental," is a real attempt at description; but it does not go beyond the mere first impression made on every reader of Jean Paul by the combination of contrasting qualities which he presents, by the copiousness of his imagery, by frequent obscurity, and by the boldness of his imaginative flights. The reason why so little that is definite can be said, beyond the expression of amazement and admiration,

Richter. lies chiefly in the formlessness of his works,—a formlessness veiled and excused by the all-embracing atmosphere of pure ethereal humour in which they are as it were suspended, and which sweeps about them on all sides in copious mist-drapery. Taking for a moment a low and certainly unjust view of Jean Paul as a writer, it would seem as if, conscious of deficiency in the power of conceiving and representing the real, in constructing and narrating probable events, and in the dramatic synthesis of character, he employed his humour as artists unskilful in anatomy, but skilful in colour, employ drapery, to conceal those deficiencies, and allow him an opportunity of pouring forth, in digressive monologue, the precious stores of his wit and wisdom. Dropping the idea of purpose, such a supposition well enough describes the general character of Jean Paul's works. It is in fact the fault of the reader if he expects in any of them a coherent, probable story, probable characters well developed, dramatic dialogue and incident. But if he throw himself upon the contents alone, without fastidiousness, no author will more speedily repay studious and resolved perusal. A wealth of profound wisdom and keenest insight is contained in them, to the utterance of which a wonderful knowledge of nature and of science is compelled to minister, mirroring it in singular and typical forms. Further intimacy will acquit Jean Paul completely of all affectation, or use of humour for such purposes as above indicated, and will show it to be the compelled expression of a really powerful and Shaksperian soul, to which the vastness and the mystery of the universe, with the petty singularities of details, the noble and godlike attributes of humanity, with its infinite littlenesses and contradictions, were continually present together. Still, with the fullest appreciation of the rich compensation provided by the humour and the wisdom of Jean Paul, it is impossible not to note the deficiencies for which they compensate. In his great works Hesperus and Titan, the reader is painfully sensible that the story is absurd, that the characters are exaggerated and quite impossible, and that the ambition with which they are delineated ends in failure. Beside the story, and in the story, there is wisdom, and drollery, and poetry of the highest kind, enough to furnish forth with these things a library of fiction; but the story itself, and its men and women, are naught. Much better does he succeed in this way, when, without aspiring to produce heroes and heroines of the grand kind, who cannot act, and in whose mouths his finest sentiments are mere windy fustian, he simply relies upon self-delineation, and upon the recollections of the humble personages and the humble life in which he had been reared, and on which his observation, always fine and microscopic, had been exercised from boyhood. Nothing can be more perfect as comedy than the scenes of Siebenkäs, no character more true to life than Lenette; Walt and Vult in the Flegeljahre, Fixlein, Fibel, Schmelzle, are all in their way, and allowing for the necessary caricature, beings thoroughly human; and all are side-views of that Jean Paul whom he knew so well, and at whom he could laugh so heartily. But he is unsuccessful in supplying personages to complete his drama; and his story, after transacting itself for a short season on the solid earth, dissipates and ascends into the air as vapour, shapes itself into fantastic cloud-forms, and leaves the reader with elevated, perhaps, but also with disappointed look, gazing after it. Closely connected with this defect of structure, and allied to his dominating humour, are the serious defects of style in his works; and it is as much these faults as those of structure that render him so untranslatable, and consequently limit so much his influence and his fame. Beyond all the whims of mere humour, and all the requirements and value of the mere thought, his expression is far too frequently involved and overloaded. It is true, as Carlyle has remarked, that in the Vorschule der Aesthetik, which

may be considered his apology, there are excellent observations on this subject of style which show that he understood the subject as well as any French or German critic. Of subjecting himself to its laws, however, in practice, he has no idea; yet, if they are laws at all, they rise out of the nature of the thing. Of the judicious parsimony and restraint which is the first law of good writing Jean Paul has no notion. All the trifles and straws which he had gleaned out of a life's laborious reading of books, useful and useless, are whirled along in the current of his thought: cryptic and unintelligible allusions are huddled round this or that idea; the humour or aptness of many a comparison is lost, one side of it requiring for most readers, even well informed, elaborate explanation; we are astonished, we admire, but we neither laugh nor are much the wiser. It is absurd to gloss this copiousness and confusion of trifles, that no man cares to keep, with the name of intellectual wealth, for Richter would be none the poorer were it swept from his pages. His real wealth is not his learning, but his wisdom,—his knowledge of, and intense sympathy with, the human heart,—his fine sensibility and his elevated religion. As humorist, he is unquestionably to be placed in the highest rank. But he is something more. Mere humour, intellectually considered, is mere universal destructiveness. As wit, which is the compressed logic of analogy, when uncontrolled by truth, tends to juggling with analogical fallacy and mere paradox; so humour, which brings forth for sport's sake the innumerable contradictions, self-deceptions, illusions, and pretensions in the world, tends to utter scepticism and mere buffoonery, unless it has its work completed by the vision of faith which brings forward the eternal reality, and its hand checked by sympathy with real holiness and real suffering, and humble reverence for real greatness, nobleness, and elevation. Of the contradictions between free aspiration and necessity, none is more striking than that arising out of the demands of the moral nature of man and the urgencies of his passions; and these contradictions may be clashed against each other in sport. But it depends on the humorist on which side the laugh will be; and according as he is, will the laugh he raises be a degrading and deteriorating one, or an elevating and humanizing one. It is Jean Paul's highest merit, that a noble love of humanity, a keen sympathy with suffering, and a humble reverence for the truly great and holy, always subdued, controlled, and directed his wonderful powers of ridicule, and place him above the class of humorists, among the seers, the sages, and the comforters of humanity. The complete works of Jean Paul were published after his death by his nephew Otto Spazier, to whom we are also indebted for a biographical commentary. A second edition of the works appeared at Berlin, 1840, in 33 volumes. The Paris edition, in 4 vols., 1837, is said to be a more faithful reprint of the original editions. A complete French translation was projected in 1834 by M. Philarete Chasles, but only four volumes, containing Titan, appeared. Levana, portions of the Flegeljahre and of the Blumen, Frucht, und Dornen Stücke have been translated into English; Quintus Fixlein, by Carlyle, in his "German Romances," vol. 3, 1827, with a characteristic notice prefixed, which remains still the best word spoken on Jean Paul; the Campaner Thal, by Miss Gower, in 1857; besides many fragments and short sketches in magazines. (W. H. C.)