if we meant to assert that his humour is in all cases perfectly natural and pure; nay, that it is not often extravagant, untrue, or even absurd: but still, on the whole, the core and life of it are genuine, subtile, spiritual. Not without reason have his panegyrists named him Jean Paul der Einzige," Jean Paul the Only :" in one sense or the other, either as praise or censure, his critics also must adopt this epithet;|fection should be forgiven. It is true, the for surely, in the whole circle of literature, we look in vain for his parallel. Unite the sportfulness of Rabellais, and the best sensibility of Sterne, with the earnestness, and, even in slight portions, the sublimity of Milton; and and let the mosaic brain of old Burton give forth the workings of this strange union, with the pen of Jeremy Bentham!

in sincerity of heart, joyfully, and with undivided will. A harmonious development of being, the first and last object of all true culture, has therefore been attained; if not completely, at least more completely than in one of a thousand ordinary men. Nor let us forget, that in such a nature, it was not of easy attainment; that where much was to be developed, some imperbeaten paths of literature lead the safeliest to the goal; and the talent pleases us most, which submits to shine with new gracefulness through old forms. Nor is the noblest and most pecuiar mind too noble or peculiar for working by prescribed laws: Sophocles, Shakspeare, Čer. vantes, and in Richter's own age, Goethe, how little did they innovate on the given forms of composition, how much in the spirit they breathed into them! All this is true; and Richter must lose of our esteem in proportion. Much, however, will remain; and why should we quarrel with the high, because it is not the highest? Richter's worst faults are nearly allied to his best merits; being chiefly exuberance of good, irregular squandering of wealth, a dazzling with excess of true light. These things may be pardoned the more readily, as they are little likely to be imitated.

To say how, with so peculiar a natural enowment, Richter should have shaped his ind by culture, is much harder than to say at he has shaped it wrong. Of affectation e will neither altogether clear him, nor very oudly pronounce him guilty. That his maner of writing is singular, nay, in fact, a wild Lomplicated Arabesque, no one can deny. But the true question is,-how nearly does this manner of writing represent his real manner of thinking and existing? With what degree of freedom does it allow this particular form On the whole, Genius has privileges of its of being to manifest itself; or what fetters and own; it selects an orbit for itself; and be this perversions does it lay on such manifestation? never so eccentric, if it is indeed a celestial For the great law of culture is: Let each be-orbit, we mere star-gazers must at last comcome all that he was created capable of being; pose ourselves; must cease to cavil at it, and expand, if possible, to his full growth; resist-begin to observe it, and calculate its laws. ing all impediments, casting off all foreign, That Richter is a new planet in the intellecespecially all noxious adhesions; and show himself at length in his own shape and stature, be these what they may. (There is no uniform of exc-ilence, either in physical or spiritual nature: all genuine things are what they ought to be. The reindeer is good and beautiful, so likewise is the elephant. In literature it is the same: "every man," says Lessing, "has his own style, like his own nose." True, there are noses of wonderful dimensions; but no nose can justly be amputated by the public, not even the nose of Slawkenbergius himself: so it be a real nose, and no wooden one, put on for deception's sake and mere show.

To speak in grave language, Lessing means, and we agree with him, that the outward style is to be judged of by the inward qualities of the spirit which it is employed to body forth; that, without prejudice to critical propriety, well understood, the former may vary into many shapes as the latter varies; that, in short, the grand point for a writer is not to be of this or that external make and fashion, but, in every fashion, to be genuine, vigorous, alive, -alive with his whole being, consciously, and for beneficent results.

Tried by this test, we imagine Richter's wild manner will be found less imperfect than many a very tame one. To the man it may not be unsuitable. In that singular form, there is a fire, a splendour, a benign energy, which persuades us into tolerance, nay into love, of much that might otherwise offend. Above all, this man, alloyed with imperfections as he may be, is consistent and coherent: he is at one with himself; he knows his aims, and pursues them

tual heavens, we dare not affirm; an atmospheric meteor he is not wholly; perhaps a comet, that, though with long aberrations, and shrouded in a nebulous veil, has yet its place in the empyrean.

Of Richter's individual works, of his opinions, his general philosophy of life, we have no room left us to speak. Regarding his novels, we may say, that, except in some few instances, and those chiefly of the shorter class, they are not what, in strict language, we can term unities: with much callida junctura of parts, it is rare that any of them leaves on us the impression of a perfect, homogeneous, indivisible whole A true work of art requires to be fused in the mind of its creator, and as it were, poured forth (from his imagination, though not from his pen) at one simultaneous gush. Richter's works do not always bear sufficient marks of having been in fusion; yet neither are they merely riveted together: to say the least, they have been welded. A similar remark applies to many of his characters; indeed, more or less, to all of them, except such as are entirely humourous, or have a large dash of humour. In this latter province, certainly he is at home; a true poet, a maker: his Siebenkäs, his Schmelzle, even his Fibel and Fixléin are living figures. But in heroic personages, passionate, massive, overpowering as he is, we have scarcely ever a complete ideal; art has not attained to the concealment of itself. With his heroines again he is more successful; they are often true heroines, though perhaps with too little variety of character; bustling, buxom mothers and housewives, with all the caprices, perversities, B

and warm, generous helpfulness of women; fearlessness, but also with the martyr reveor white, half-angelic creatures, meek, still, rence, of men that love Truth, and will not aclong-suffering, high-minded, of tenderest affec- cept a lie. A frank, fearless, honest, yet truly tions, and hearts crushed yet uncomplaining. spiritual faith is of all things the rarest in our Supernatural figures he has not attempted; time. and wisely, for he cannot write without belief. Of writings which, though with many reserYet many times he exhibits an imagination of vations, we have praised so much, our hesitat a singularity, nay, on the whole, of a truth and ing readers may demand some specimen. To grandeur, unexampled elsewhere. In his dreams unbelievers, unhappily, we have none of a there is a mystic complexity, a gloom, and amid convincing sort to give. Ask us not to reprethe dim, gigantic, half-ghastly shadows, gleam-sent the Peruvian forests by three twigs pluckings of a wizard splendour, which almost recalled from them; or the cataracts of the Nile by to us the visions of Ezekiel. By readers who a handful of its water! To those, meanwhile, have studied the Dream in the New-year's Eve we shall not be mistaken.

"We were all of us too deeply moved. We at last tore ourselves asunder from repeated embraces; my friend retired with the soul whom he loves. I remained alone behind with the Night.

"And I walked without aim through woods, through valleys, and over brooks, and through sleeping villages, to enjoy the great Night, like a Day. I walked, and still looked, like the magnet, to the region of midnight, to strengthen my heart at the gleaming twilight, at this upstretching aurora of a morning beneath our feet. White night-butterflies flitted, white blossoms fluttered, white stars fell, and the white snow-powder hung silvery in the high Shadow of the Earth, which reaches beyond the Moon, and which is our Night. Then began the Æolian Harp of the Creation to tremble and tc sound, blown on from above; and my immor

who will look on twigs as mere dissevered twigs, and a handful of water as only so many Richter's Philosophy, a matter of no ordinary drops, we present the following. It is a suminterest, both as it agrees with the common mer Sunday night; Jean Paul is taking leave philosophy of Germany, and disagrees with it, of the Hukelum Parson and his wife; like him must not be touched on for the present. One we have long laughed at them or wept for them; only observation we shall make: it is not me- | like him, also, we are sad to part from them. chanical, or skeptical; it springs not from the forum or the laboratory, but from the depths of the human spirit; and yields as its fairest product a noble system of morality, and the firmest conviction of religion. In this latter point we reckon him peculiarly worthy of study. To a careless reader he might seem the wildest of infidels; for nothing can exceed | the freedom with which he bandies to and fro the dogmas of religion, nay, sometimes, the highest objects of Christian reverence. There are passages of this sort, which will occur to every reader of Richter; but which, not to fall into the error we have already blamed in Madame de Staël, we shall refrain from quoting. More light is in the following: "Or," inquires he, in his usual abrupt way, (Note to Schmelzle's Journey,) "Or are all your Mosques, Episcopal Churches, Pagodas, Chapels of Ease, Tabernacles, and Pantheons, any thing else but the Ethnic Fore-tal Soul was a string in this harp.-The heart court of the Invisible Temple and its Holy of of a brother, everlasting Man, swelled under Holies?" Yet, independently of all dogmas, the everlasting heaven, as the seas swell under nay, perhaps in spite of many, Richter is, in the sun and under the moon.-The distant the highest sense of the word, religious. A village clocks struck midnight, mingling, as it reverence, not a self-interested fear, but a noble were, with the ever-pealing tone of ancient reverence for the spirit of all goodness, forms Eternity. The limbs of my buried ones the crown and glory of his culture. The fiery touched cold on my soul, and drove away its elements of his nature have been purified blots, as dead hands heal eruptions of the skin. under holy influences, and chastened by a—I walked silently through little hamlets, and principle of mercy and humility into peace and well-doing. An intense and continual faith in man's immortality and native grandeur accompanies him; from amid the vortices of life he looks up to a heavenly loadstar; the solution of what is visible and transient, he finds in what is invisible and eternal. He has doubted, he denies, yet he believes. "When, in your last hour," says he, (Levana, p. 251,) "when, in your last hour, (think of this,) all "Towards morning, I described thy late faculty in the broken spirit shall fade away lights, little city of my dwelling, which I beand die into inanity,-imagination, thought, long to on this side the grave; I returned to effort, enjoyment, then at last will the night- the Earth; and in thy steeples, behind the byflower of Belief alone continue blooming, and advanced great midnight, it struck half-past refresh with its perfumes in the last darkness." two: about this hour, in 1794, Mars went down To reconcile these seeming contradictions, in the west, and the Moon rose in the east; and to explain the grounds, the manner, the con- my soul desired, in grief for the noble warlike gruity of Richter's belief, cannot be attempted blood which is still streaming on the blossoms here. We recommend him to the study, the of spring: Ah, retire, bloody War, like red tolerance, and even the praise, of all men who Mars: and thou, still Peace, come forth like have inquired into this highest of questions the mild divided Moon!"-End of Quintus with a right spirit; inquired with the martyr | Fixlein.

close by their outer church-yards, where crumbled upcast coffin-boards were glimmering, while the once bright eyes that had lain in them were mouldered into gray ashes. Cold thought! clutch not like a cold spectre at my heart: I look up to the starry sky, and an everlasting chain stretches thither, and over, and below; and all is Life and Warmth, and Light, and all is Godlike or God. . .

Such, seen through no uncoloured medium, | immortality on writings; that charm which but in dim remoteness, and sketched in hurried, still, under every defacement, binds us to the transitory outline, are some features of Jean pages of our own Hookers, and Taylors, and Paul Friedrich Richter and his works. Ger- Brownes, when their way of thought has long many has long loved him; to England also ceased to be ours, and the most valued of their he must one day become known; for a man merely intellectual opinions have passed away, of this magnitude belongs not to one people, as ours too must do, with the circumstances but to the world. What our countrymen may and events in which they took their shape or decide of him, still more what may be his for- rise. To men of a right mind, there may tune with posterity, we will not try to foretell. long be in Richter much that has attraction Time has a contracting influence on many a and value. In the moral desert of vulgar Litewide-spread fame; yet of Richter we will say, rature, with its sandy wastes, and parched, that he may survive much. There is in him that bitter, and too often poisonous shrubs, the which does not die; that Beauty and Earnest-writings of this man will rise in their irregular ness of soul, that spirit of Humanity, of Love luxuriance, like a cluster of date-trees, with and mild Wisdom, over which the vicissitudes its greensward and well of water, to refresh of mode have no sway. This is that excellence the pilgrim, in the sultry solitude, with nouof the inmost nature which alone confers rishment and shade.

STATE OF GERMAN LITERATURE.*

[EDINBURGH REVIEW, 1827.]

giggle, than any dignified smile, or even any | of wit, in regard to this and so many other sufficient laugh with gravity succeeding it. subjects! For surely the pleasure of despising, This sentence is among the best we recollect at all times and in itself a dangerous luxury, of him, and will partly illustrate what we mean. is much safer after the toil of examining than We submit it, for the sake of its import before it. likewise, to all superfine speculators on the Reformation, in their future contrasts of Luther and Erasmus. "Erasmus," says Horn, "belongs to that species of writers who have all the desire in the world to build God Almighty a magnificent church,-at the same time, however, not giving the Devil any offence; to whom, accordingly, they set up a neat little chapel | close by, where you can offer him some touch of sacrifice at a time, and practise a quiet household devotion for him without disturbance." In this style of "witty and conceited mirth," considerable part of the book is written. But our chief business at present is not with Franz Horn, or his book; of whom accordingly, recommending his labours to all inquisitive students of German, and himself to good estimation with all good men, we must here take leave. We have a word or two to say on that strange literature itself; concerning which our readers probably feel more curious to learn what it is, than with what skill it has been judged of.

We differ from the Père Bouhours in this matter, and must endeavour to discuss it differently. There is, in fact, much in the present aspect of German Literature, not only deserving notice but deep consideration from all thinking men, and far too complex for being handled in the way of epigram. It is always advantageous to think justly of our neighbours; nay, in mere common honesty, it is a duty; and, like every other duty, brings its own reward. Perhaps at the present era this duty is more essential than ever; an era of such promise and such threatening, when so many elements of good and evil are everywhere in conflict, and human society is, as it were, struggling to body itself forth anew, and so many coloured rays are springing up in this quarter and in that, which only by their union can produce pure light. Happily, too, though still a difficult, it is no longer an impossible duty; for the commerce in material things has paved roads for commerce in things spiritual, and a true thought, or a noble creation, passes lightly to us from the remotest countries, provided only our minds be open to receive it. This, indeed, is a rigorous proviso, and a great obstacle lies in it; one which to many must be insurmountable, yet which it is the chief glory of social culture to surmount. For if a man who mistakes his own contracted individuality for the type of human nature, and deals with whatever contradicts him, as if it contradicted this, is but a pedant, and without true wisdom, be he furnished with partial equipments as he may,-what better shall we think of a nation that, in like manner, isolates itself from foreign influence, regards its own modes as so many laws of nature, and rejects all that is different as unworthy even of examination?

Above a century ago, the Père Bouhours propounded to himself the pregnant question: Si un Allemand peut avoir de l'esprit? Had the Père Bouhours bethought him of what country Kepler and Leibnitz were, or who it was that gave to mankind the three great elements of modern civilization, Gunpowder, Printing, and the Protestant Religion, it might have thrown light on his inquiry. Had he known the Nibelungen Lied; and where Reinecke Fuchs, and Faust, and the Ship of Fools, and four-fifths of all the popular mythology, humour, and romance, to be found in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, took its rise; had he read a page or two of Ulrich Hutten, Opitz, Paul Flemming, Logau, or even Lohenstein and Hoffmanns-waldau, all of whom Of this narrow and perverted condition, the had already lived and written in his day; had French, down almost to our own times, have the Père Bouhours taken this trouble, who afforded a remarkable and instructive example; knows but he might have found, with what- as indeed of late they have been often enough ever amazement, that a German could actually upbraidingly reminded, and are now themhave a little esprit, or perhaps even something selves, in a manlier spirit, beginning to admit. better? No such trouble was requisite for the That our countrymen have at any time erred | Père Bouhours. Motion in vacuo is well known much in this point, cannot, we think, truly be to be speedier and surer than through a re- alleged against them. Neither shall we say, sisting medium, especially to imponderous with some passionate admirers of Germany, bodies; and so the light Jesuit, unimpeded by that to the Germans in particular they have facts or principles of any kind, failed not to been unjust. It is true, the literature and chareach his conclusion; and, in a comfortable racter of that country, which, within the last frame of mind, to decide negatively, that a Ger- half century, have been more worthy perhaps man could not have any literary talent. than any other of our study and regard, are still very generally unknown to us, or, what is worse, misknown: but for this there are not wanting less offensive reasons. That the false and tawdry ware, which was in all hands, should reach us before the chaste and truly ' excellent, which it required some excellence to recognise; that Kotzebue's insanity should have spread faster, by some fifty years, than Lessing's. wisdom; that Kant's Philosophy should stand in the back-ground as a dreary and abortive dream, and Gall's Craniclogy be held out to us from every booth as a reality;

Thus did the Père Bouhours evince that he had "a pleasant wit;" but in the end he has paid dear for it. The French, themselves, have long since begun to know something of the Germans, and something also of their own critical Daniel; and now it is by this one untimely joke that the hapless Jesuit is doomed to live; for the blessing of full oblivion is denied him, and so he hangs suspended in his own noose, over the dusky pool which he struggles toward, but for a great while will not reach. Might his fate but serve as a warning to kindred men

all this lay in the nature of the case. That country has awaked in its old strength, our atmany readers should draw conclusions from tention to it has certainly awakened also; and imperfect premises, and by the imports judge if we yet know little or nothing of the Gertoo hastily of the stock imported from, was like-mans, it is not because we wilfully do them wise natural. No unfair bias, no unwise in- wrong, but, in good part, because they are disposition, that we are aware of, has ever been somewhat difficult to know. at work in the matter; perhaps, at worst, a degree of indolence, a blamable incuriosity to all products of foreign genius: for what more do we know of recent Spanish or Italian literature than of German; of Grossi and Manzoni, of Campomanes or Jovellanos, than of Tieck and Richter? Wherever German art, in those forms of it which need no interpreter, has addressed us immediately, our recognition of it has been prompt and hearty; from Dürer to Mengs, from Händel to Weber and Beethoven, we have welcomed the painters and musicians of Germany, not only to our praise, but to our affections and beneficence. Nor, if in their literature we have been more backward, is the literature itself without blame. Two centuries ago, translations from the German were comparatively frequent in England: Luther's Table-Talk is still a venerable classic in our language; nay Jacob Boehme has found a place among us, and this not as a dead letter, but as a living apostle to a still living sect of our religionists. In the next century, indeed, translation ceased; but then it was, in a great measure, because there was little worth translating. The horrors of the Thirty Years' War, followed by the conquests and conflagrations of Louis the Fourteenth, had desolated the country; French influence, extending from the courts of princes to the closets of the learned, lay like a baleful incubus over the far nobler mind of Germany; and all true nationality vanished from its literature, or was heard only in faint tones, which lived in the hearts of the people, but could not reach with any effect to the ears of foreigners.* And now that the genius of the

In fact prepossessions of all sorts naturally enough find their place here. A country which has no national literature, or literature too insignificant to force its way abroad, must always be, to its neighbours, at least in every important spiritual respect, an unknown and misestimated country. Its towns may figure on our maps; its revenues, population, manufactures, political connections, may be recorded in statistical books; but the character of the people has no symbol and no voice; we cannot know them by speech and discourse, but only mere sight and outward observation of their manners and procedure. Now, if both sight and speech, if both travellers and native literature, are found but ineffectual in this respect, how incalculably more so the former alone! To seize a character, even that of one man, in its life and secret mechanism, requires a philospher; to delineate it with truth and impressiveness, is a work for a poet. How then shall one or two sleek clerical tutors, with here and there a tedium-stricken esquire, or speculative halfpay captain, give us views on such a subject? How shall a man, to whom all characters of individual men are like sealed books, of which he sees only the title and the covers, decipher from his four-wheeled vehicle, and depict to us, the character of a nation? He courageously depicts his own optical delusions; notes this to be incomprehensible, that other to be insignificant; much to be good, much to be bad, and most of all indifferent; and so, with a few flowing strokes, completes a picture which, though it may not even resemble any possible object, his countrymen are to take for a national portrait. Nor is the fraud so readily Not that the Germans were idle; or altogether en- detected: for the character of a people has gaged, as we too loosely suppose, in the work of com- such complexity of aspect, that even the honest mentary and lexicography. On the contrary, they observer knows not always, not perhaps after rhymed and romanced with due vigour as to quantity only the quality was bad. Two facts on this head may long inspection, what to determine regarding deserve mention: In the year 1749, there were found, in it. From his, only accidental, point of view, the library of one virtuoso, no fewer than 300 volumes the figure stands before him like the tracings of devotional poetry, containing, says Horn, “a treasure of 33,712 German hymns ;" and, much about the same on veined marble,—a mass of mere random period, one of Gottsched's scholars had amassed as many lines, and tints, and entangled strokes, out of as 1500 German novels, all of the 17th century. The which a lively fancy may shape almost any hymns we understand to be much better than the novels, or rather, perhaps, the novels to be much worse than the image. But the image he brings along with hymns. Neither was critical study neglected, nor in-him is always the readiest; this is tried, it deed honest endeavour on all hands to attain improvement witness the strange books from time to time put forth, and the still stranger institutions established for this purpose. Among the former we have the "Poetical Funnel," (Poetische Trichter,) manufactured at Nürnberg in 1650, and professing, within six hours, to pour in the what? essence of this difficult art into the most unfurnished head. Nürnberg also was the chief seat of the famous Meistersänger and their Sängerzünfte, or Singerguilds, in which poetry was taught and practised like ten 6048 poetical pieces, among which were 208 tragedies any other handicraft, and this by sober and well-mean- and comedies; and this, besides having all along kept ing men, chiefly artisans, who could not understand why house, like an honest Nürnberg burgher, by assiduous labour, which manufactured so many things, should not and sufficient shoemaking! Hans is not without genius, also manufacture another. Of these tuneful guild- and a shrewd irony; and above all, the most gay, childbrethren, Hans Sachs, by trade a shoemaker, is greatly like, yet devout and solid character. A man neither to the most noted and most notable. His father was a be despised nor patronized, but left standing on his own tailor; he himself learned the mystery of song under one basis, as a singular product, and a still legible symbol, Nunnebeck, a weaver. He was an adherent of his great and clear mirror, of the time and country where he lived. contemporary Luther, who has even deigned to acknow- His best piece known to us, and many are well worth ledge his services in the cause of Reformation: how perusing, is the Fastnachtsspiel (Shrovetide Farce) of the diligent a labourer Sachs must have been, will appear Narrenschneiden, where the Doctor cures a bloated and from the fact, that, in his 74th year, (1568,) on examin-lethargic, patient by cutting out half a dozen Fools from ing his stock for publication, he found that he had writ- his interior!

answers as well as another; and a second voucher now testifies its correctness. Thus each, in confident tones, though it may be with a secret misgiving, repeats his precursor; the hundred times repeated comes in the end to be