JOHANN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER. Born 1763. Died 1825. ing affluence of images and illustrations, is what first strikes us in his writings. The paragraph labors and staggers with meanings and double meanings, and after-thoughts and side-thoughts, conceits appended to every third word, and ornaments stuck in, some sufficiently bizarre, and others of supernal beauty, making altogether "a piece of joinery so crossly indented and whimsically dovetailed, a cabinet so variously inlaid, such a piece of diversified Mosaic," as no other writing can parallel. He has absolutely no rival in what may be called the inborn poetry of the heart, that sympathy and identification of himself with all forms and ways of being, that secret understanding with Nature, that profound humanity which, in an inferior degree, so happily distinguishes Wordsworth among English poets. Some of his pieces, for example, Fibel and Quintus Fixlein, constitute a new and higher order of idyl; combining the subjective piquancy of modern thought with the classic outwardness of the ancient model. NEXT to Schiller there is no writer whom | continent, the inconceivable, the overwhelmGermany cherishes with more enthusiastic attachment than Jean Paul,-so he called himself, while living, and is still called since his death. Confined to a narrower circle than Schiller, he is even more intensely loved within that circle than the great dramatist himself; for he is a writer to be loved, if tolerated. There is that in him which allows of no indifference. He must either attach or repel. Where he does not create an irreconcilable aversion, he binds with indissoluble friendship. Those who read him much, come into personal relations with him, and sympathize with him as with no other. Indeed, there is no other like him in the history of literature. He is incommensurable, and refuses to be classed; combining the most contradictory characters and gifts; the humorist and the prophet; the wildest fun with the steepest elevation of thought and an infinite pathos; the sharpest satire with an all-embracing love; a feeling for all littleness and little ones, with the loftiest sentiments and aspirations; a prevailing subjectiveness, with clear and original intuitions of men and things. The humorist predominates; and such humor! It is not the humor of Cervantes, though simny and wholesome as his. It is not the humor of Rabelais, having nothing of the satyr or the swine; and yet Rabelais himself is not more wildly fantastic. It is not the humor of Swift, though it lacks nothing of his irony; nor is it the humor of Sterne, though not less kind and contemplative, and stuffed with conceits. It is a humor quite his own, "compounded of many simples and extracted from many objects." In this, as in other things, he resembles no one else in the world but just Jean Paul. He is Jean Paul, "the only." He was sumptuously, marvellously endowed, and if he wanted many essential qualifications of a great poet, or even of a good writer, there are others which he possessed in unrivalled perfection. He has but one rival, and that is Shakspeare, in exuberance of fancy. The in In power of imagination, also, he takes rank among the first. Many of his characters are wholly new creations, and have an individuality and a self-subsistence which only true genius can impart. It is in his visions, however, with which his works abound, that Richter's imagination is most active, producing an apocalypse of the most extravagant and unheard-of portents, a swarming phantasmagory' of beautiful and terrible apparitions, which make the application more appropriate to him than to any other, of those lines which describe one of his contemporaries: "Within that mind's abyss profound, More shapes and monsters did abound His faults as a writer are sufficiently prominent, but, for the most part, so blended and complicated with his peculiar merits, that we cannot imagine them removed without destroying some characteristic excellence. An utter want of grace and form, an habitual lugging in of irrelevant learning, an excessive delight in verbal quibbles and other conceits, obscurity, constant iteration of one or two types of character, exaggeration of one or two features of society, want of action in his narratives, a superfluity of tears and ecstasies not sufficiently motived, a passion for extremes- these are faults which have often been pointed out, and which his warmest admirers will hardly deny. On the other hand, the charge of affectation is unjust. A mannerist he certainly is, but it is the mannerism of idiosyncrasy, a bias in the nature of the man, a kink in his genius, a maggot in his brain, without which he would not be Jean Paul. It is the moral qualities of Richter, far more than his intellectual, which endear him to his countrymen. To that true and loyal soul the deep heart of Germany responds with all its music. So loving, and believing, and hoping, and aspiring, so innocent of all guile, and free from all wrath, and bitterness, and evil speaking, so full of all fine sentiments and generous views, so abounding in compassion for all the suffering, willing to clasp them all to his great heart, which throbbed evermore with unebbing and unspeakable affection for all his kind; so devout, and pure, and good; he commends himself not only to his own people, but to humanity everywhere; to all that is best in the nature of man. It is good to converse with him. His word is sound and sanative, "pure as the heart of the waters," and "pure as the marrow of the earth." The life's history of Jean Paul is gathered partly from his autobiography, commenced not many years before his death, and extending to his thirteenth year; partly from an appendix to that beginning by Herr Otto, a friend of the deceased; and partly from his correspondence with friends and contemporaries. A "Life of Jean Paul," in 2 vols. 12mo., embodying a translation of the autobiographical fragment, and continuing the narrative from the other sources above mentioned, was published in Boston,* a few years since, by a lady who seems to have spared no pains to make herself acquainted with her subject. To these two *Life of Jean Paul Frederic Richter, compiled from various sources, together with his autobiography, translated from the German. Boston: Charles C. Little & James Brown. volumes the editor of this work refers with pleasure, as the best biography of Richter known to him. 66 Richter was born at Wunsiedel, in that part of Germany called the Fichtelgebirge, or Pinemountain. His father, then organist and underteacher at the gymnasium in that town, was soon after appointed pastor (Lutheran) of a church, in the small village of Joditz, and, some years later, promoted to the larger living of Schwarzenbach, on the Saale. From his father Richter received his first instruction in the languages. At sixteen, he was placed at the gymnasium in Hof, a neighboring small city. At eighteen, he entered the university of Leipzig, where he began the study of theology, but soon gave himself up to general culture, and began his career as author, with the publication of the "Greenland Lawsuits." His father had died meanwhile, and he was thrown entirely upon himself. His first attempts at authorship were not successful, his situation was perplexing, and the future looked grimly on the penniless youth. Fortune seemed to have let loose her bandogs, and hungry Ruin had him in the wind."* His mother had removed to Hof, her birth-place, and there Jean Paul joined her, in a house which had but one apartment, pursuing his studies amid "the jingle of household operations;" writing books which would not sell, and tasting all the bitterness of extreme penury. "The prisoner's allowance," he says, "is bread and water, but I had only the latter."—"Nevertheless, I cannot help saying to Poverty: Welcome! so thou come not at quite too late a time! Wealth bears heavier on talent than Poverty. Under gold-mountains and thrones who knows how many a spiritual giant may lie crushed down and buried! When among the flames of youth, and above all, of hotter powers, the oil of Riches is also poured in - little will remain of the phoenix but his ashes; and only a Goethe has force to keep, even at the sun of good fortune, his phoenix-wings unsinged."* For ten years and upwards he fought this fight, during which time his only support was the money earned by the occasional but rare admission of one of his contributions to the public journals. Nevertheless he refused the situation of a private tutor, determined to succeed as author, or starve in the attempt. And he triumphed, at last. * Carlyle's Miscellanies, vol. II. |