nise in it the erratic footsteps of a poet, and lament with me that his course has ended so far short of the goal.

JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER.

JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER, one of the chosen men of Germany and of the World, whom I hoped, in my vanity, perhaps to gratify by this introduction of him to a people whom he knew and valued, has been called from his earthly sojourn since the commencement of my little task, and no voice, either of love or censure, shall any more reach his ear.

The circle of his existence is thus complete: his works and himself have assumed their final shape and combination, and lie ready for a judgment, which, when it is 'just, must now be unalterable. To satisfy a natural and rational curiosity respecting such a character, materials are not wanting; but to us in the mean time they are inaccessible. I have inquired in his own country, but without effect; having learned only that two Biographies of Richter are in the press, but that nothing on the subject has hitherto been published. For the present, therefore, I must content myself with such meagre and transitory hints as were in circulation in his lifetime, and compress into a few sentences a history which might be written in volumes.

Richter was born at Wunsiedel in Bayreuth, on the 21st of March 1763. His father was clergyman of the place, and afterwards of Schwarzbach on the Saale. The young man also was destined for the clerical profession; with a view to which, having finished his school-studies in the Hof Gymnasium, he in 1780 proceeded to the University of Leipzig, with the highest testimonials from his former masters. Theology as a profession, however, he could not relish; poetry, philosophy and general literature, were his chief pursuits while at Leipzig; from which, apparently after no long stay, he returned to Schwarzbach to his parents, uncertain what he should betake him to. In a little while, he attempted authorship; publishing various short miscellaneous pieces, distinguished by intellectual vigour, copious fancy, the wildest yet truest humour, the whole concocted in a style entirely his own, which, if it betrayed the writer's inexperience, could not hide the existence in him of a highly-gifted, strong and extraordinary mind. The reception of his first performances, or the inward felicity of writing, encouraged him to proceed in the midst of an unsettled and changeful life, his pen was never idle, its productions never otherwise than new, fantastic

and powerful: he lived successively in Hof, in Weimar, Berlin, Meiningen, Coburg, 'raying forth, wherever he might be stationed, the wild light of his genius over all Germany.' At last he settled in Bayreuth, having here, in testimony of his literary merit, been honoured with the title of Legations-Rath, and presented with a pension from his native Prince. In Bayreuth his chief works were written; he had married, and been blessed with two children; his intellectual labours had gained him esteem and love from all ranks of his countrymen, and chiefly from those whose suffrage was of most value; a frank and original, yet modest, good and kind deportment, seems to have transferred these sentiments to his private circle with a heart at once of the most earnest and most sportful cast; affectionate, and encompassed with the objects of his affection; diligent in the highest of all earthly tasks, the acquisition and the diffusion of Truth; and witnessing from his sequestered home the working of his own mind on thousands of fellow-minds, Richter seemed happy and at peace; and his distant reader loved to fancy him as in his calm privacy enjoying the fruit of past toils, or amid the highest and mildest meditations, looking forward to long honourable years of future toil. For his thoughts were manifold; thoughts of a moralist and a sage, no less than of a poet and a wit. The last work of his I saw advertised, was a little volume entitled, On the Ever-green of our Feelings; and in November (1825), news came that Richter was dead; and a heart, which we had figured as one of the truest, deepest and gentlest that ever lived in this world, was to beat no more.

Of Richter's private character I have learned little; but that little was all favourable, and accordant with the indications in his works. Of his public and intellectual character much might be said and thought; for the secret of it is by no means floating on the surface, and it will reward some study. The most cursory inspection, even an external one, will satisfy us that he neither was, nor wished to be considered as, a man who wrote or thought in the track of other men, to whom common practice is a law, and whose excellencies and defects the common formulas of criticism will easily represent. The very titles of his works are startling. One of his earliest performances is named Selection from the Papers of the Devil; another is, Biographical Recreations under the Cranium of a Giantess. His novels are almost uniformly introduced by some fantastic narrative accounting for his publication and obtainment of the story. Hesperus, his chief novel, bears the secondary title of a Dogpost-days, and the chapters are named Dog-posts, as having been conveyed to him in a letter-bag, round the neck of a little nimble Shock, from some unknown Island in the South sea.

The first aspect of these peculiarities cannot prepossess us in his favour; we are too forcibly reminded of theatrical clap-traps and literary quackery; nor on opening one of the works themselves is the case much mended. Piercing gleams of thought do not escape us; singular truths conveyed in a form as singular; grotesque and often truly ludicrous delineations; pathetic, magnificent, far-sounding passages; effusions full of wit, knowledge and imagination, but difficult to bring under any rubric whatever; all the elements, in short, of a glorious intellect, but dashed together in such wild arrangement, that their order seems the very ideal of confusion. The style and structure of the book appear alike incomprehensible. The narrative is every now and then suspended to make way for some "Extra-leaf," some wild digression upon any subject but the one in hand; the language groans with indescribable metaphors and allusions to all things human and divine; flowing onward, not like a river, but like an inundation; circling in complex eddies, chafing and gurgling now this way, now that, till the proper current sinks out of view amid the boundless uproar. We close the work with a mingled feeling of astonishment, oppression and perplexity; and Richter stands before us in brilliant cloudy vagueness, a giant mass of intellect, but without form, beauty or intelligible purpose.

To readers who believe that intrinsic is inseparable from superficial excellence, and that nothing can be good or beautiful which is not to be seen through in a moment, Richter can occasion little difficulty. They admit him to be a man of vast natural endowments, but he is utterly uncultivated, and without command of them; full of monstrous affectation, the very High Priest of bad taste: knows not the art of writing, scarcely that there is such an art; an insane visionary floating forever among baseless dreams, which hide the firm Earth from his view; an intellectual Polyphemus; in short, a monstrum horrendum, informe, ingens (carefully adding) cui lumen ademptum; and they close their verdict reflectively, with his own praiseworthy maxim: "Providence has given to the English the empire of the sea, to the French that of the land, to the Germans that of the air.”

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In this way the matter is adjusted; briefly, comfortably and wrong. The casket was difficult to open; did we know by its very shape that there was nothing in it, that so we should cast it into the sea? Affectation is often singularity, but singularity is not always affectation. If the nature and condition of a man be really and truly, not conceitedly and untruly, singular, so also will his manner be, so also ought it to be. Affectation is the product of Falsehood, a heavy sin, and the parent of numerous heavy sins; let it be severely punished,

but not too lightly imputed. Scarcely any mortal is absolutely free from it, neither most probably is Richter; but it is in minds of another substance than his that it grows to be the ruling product. Moreover, he is actually not a visionary; but, with all his visions, will be found to see the firm Earth in its whole figures and relations much more clearly than thousands of such critics, who too probably can see nothing else. Far from being untrained or uncultivated, it will surprise these persons to discover that few men have studied the art of writing, and many other arts besides, more carefully than he; that his Vorschule der Esthetik (Introduction to Esthetics) abounds with deep and sound maxims of criticism; in the course of which, many complex works, his own among others, are rigidly and justly tried, and even the graces and minutest qualities of style are by no means overlooked or unwisely handled.

Withal, there is something in Richter that incites us to a second, to a third perusal. His works are hard to understand, but they always have a meaning, and often a true and deep one. In our closer, more comprehensive glance, their truth steps forth with new distinctness, their error dissipates and recedes, passes into venality, often even into beauty; and at last the thick haze which encircled the form of the writer melts away, and he stands revealed to us in his own stedfast features, a colossal spirit, a lofty and original thinker, a genuine poet, a high-minded, true and most amiable man.

I have called him a colossal spirit, for this impression continues with us to the last we figure him as something gigantic; for all the elements of his structure are vast, and combined together in living and life-giving, rather than in beautiful or symmetrical order. His Intellect is keen, impetuous, far-grasping, fit to rend in pieces the stubbornest materials, and extort from them their most hidden and refractory truth. In his Humour he sports with the highest and the lowest, he can play at bowls with the sun and moon. His Imagination opens for us the Land of Dreams; we sail with him through the boundless abyss, and the secrets of Space, and Time, and Life, and Annihilation, hover round us in dim cloudy forms, and darkness, and immensity, and dread, encompass and overshadow us. Nay, in handling the smallest matter, he works it with the tools of a giant. A common truth is wrenched from its old combinations, and presented us in new, impassable, abysmal contrast with its opposite error. A trifle, some slender character, some weakling humorist, some jest, or quip, or spiritual toy, is shaped into most quaint, yet often truly living form; but shaped somehow as with the hammer of Vulcan, with three strokes that might have helped to forge an Ægis. The treasures of his mind are of a similar description with the mind itself; his knowledge is

gathered from all the kingdoms, of Art, and Science, and Nature, and lies round him in huge unwieldy heaps. His very language is Titanian; deep, strong, tumultuous, shining with a thousand hues, fused from a thousand elements, and winding in labyrinthic

mazes.

Among Richter's gifts, perhaps the first that strikes us as truly great is his Imagination; for he loves to dwell in the loftiest and most solemn provinces of thought; his works abound with mysterious allegories, visions and typical adumbrations; his Dreams, in particular, have a gloomy vastness, broken here and there by wild far-darting splendour, and shadowy forms of meaning rise dimly from the bosom of the void Infinite. Yet, if I mistake not, Humour is his ruling quality, the quality which lives most deeply in his inward nature, and most strongly influences his manner of being. In this rare gift, for none is rarer than true humour, he stands unrivalled in his own country; and among late writers, in every other. To describe humour is difficult at all times, and would perhaps be still more difficult in Richter's case. Like all his other qualities, it is vast, rude, irregular; often perhaps overstrained and extravagant: yet fundamentally it is genuine humour, the humour of Cervantes and Sterne, the product not of Contempt but of Love, not of superficial distortion of natural forms, but of deep though playful sympathy with all forms of Nature. It springs not less from the heart than from the head; its result is not laughter, but something far kindlier and better; as it were, the balm which a generous spirit pours over the wounds of life, and which none but a generous spirit can give forth. Such humour is compatible with tenderest and sublimest feelings, or rather, it is incompatible with the want of them. In Richter, accordingly, we find a true sensibility; a softness, sometimes a simple humble pathos, which works its way into every heart. Some slight incident is carelessly thrown before us: we smile at it perhaps, but with a smile more sad than tears; and the unpretending passage in its meagre brevity sinks deeper into the soul than sentimental volumes.

It is on the strength of this and its accompanying endowments, that his main success as an artist depends. His favourite characters have always a dash of the ridiculous in their circumstances or their composition, perhaps in both: they are often men of no account; vain, poor, ignorant, feeble; and we scarcely know how it is that we love them; for the author all along has been laughing no less heartily than we at their ineptitudes; yet so it is, his Fibel, his Fixlein, his Siebenkäs, even his Schmelzle, insinuate themselves into our affections; and their ultimate place is closer to our hearts than that of many more splendid heroes. This is the test of true hu