son of the drama himself, before all is over. | from its proper centre, his intellectual universe, He has a whole imaginary geography of Europe no longer a distorted, incoherent series of airin his novels; the cities of Flachsenfingen, landscapes, coalesces into compact expansion; Haarhaar, Scheerau, and so forth, with their a vast, magnificent, and variegated scene; full, princes, and privy-councillors, and serene indeed, of wondrous products, and rude, it highnesses; most of whom, odd enough fel- may be, and irregular; but gorgeous, and lows every way, are Richter's private acquaint- varied, and ample; gay with the richest verances, talk with him of state matters, (in the dure and foliage, and glittering in the brightest purest Tory dialect,) and often incite him to get and kindest sun. on with his writing. No story proceeds without the most erratic digressions, and voluminous tagrags rolling after it in many a snaky twine. Ever and anon there occurs some "Extra-leaf," with its satirical petition, programme, or other wonderful intercalation, no mortal can foresee on what. It is, indeed, a mighty maze; and often the panting reader toils after him in vain, or, baffled and spent, indignantly stops short, and retires perhaps for ever.

Richter has been called an intellectual Colossus; and in truth it is still somewhat in this light that we view him. His faculties are all of gigantic mould; cumbrous, awkward in their movements; large and splendid rather than harmonious or beautiful; yet joined in living union, and of force and compass altogether extraordinary. He has an intellect vehement, rugged, irresistible; crushing in pieces the hardest problems; piercing into the most hidden combinations of things, and grasping the most distant: an imagination vague, sombre, splendid, or appalling; brooding over the abysses of Being; wandering through Infinitude, and summoning before us, in its dim re

All this, we must admit, is true of Richter; but much more is true also. Let us not turn from him after the first cursory glance, and imagine we have settled his account by the words Rhapsody and Affectation. They are cheap words we allow, and of sovereign po-ligious light, shapes of brilliancy, solemnity, tency; we should see, therefore, that they be or terror: a fancy of exuberance literally unnot rashly applied. Many things in Richter exampled; for it pours its treasures with a accord ill with such a theory. There are rays lavishness which knows no limit, hanging, like of the keenest truth, nay, steady pillars of the sun, a jewel on every grass-blade, and scientific light rising through this chaos: Is it sowing the earth at large with orient pearl. But in fact a chaos, or may it be that our eyes are deeper than all these lies Humour, the ruling not of infinite vision, and have only missed the quality with Richter; as it were the central fire plan? Few rhapsodists are men of science, that pervades and vivifies his whole being. He of solid learning, of rigorous study, and ac- is a humorist from his inmost soul; he thinks curate, extensive, nay, universal knowledge; as a humorist, he feels, imagines, acts as a as he is. With regard to affectation, also, there humorist: Sport is the element in which his is much to be said. The essence of affecta-nature lives and works. A tumultuous element tion is that it be assumed: the character is, as for such a nature, and wild work he makes in it were, forcibly crushed into some foreign it! A Titan in his sport as in his earnestness, mould, in the hope of being thereby reshaped he oversteps all bound, and riots without law and beautified; the unhappy man persuades or measure. He heaps Pelion upon Ossa, and himself that he is in truth a new and wonderfally engaging creature, and so he moves about with a conscious air, though every movement betrays not symmetry, but dislocation. This it is to be affected, to walk in a vain show. But the strangeness alone is no proof of the vanity. Many men that move smoothly in the old established railways of custom will be found to have their affectation; and perhaps here Yet the anarchy is not without its purpose; and there some divergent genius be accused these vizards are not mere hollow masks; but of it unjustly. The show, though common, may there are living faces beneath them, and this not cease to be vain; nor become so for being mumming has its significance. Richter is a man uncommon. Before we censure a man for of mirth, but he seldom or never conuescer.de to seeming what he is not, we should be sure that be a merry-andrew. Nay, in spite of its extravawe know what he is. As to Richter in parti-gance, we should say that his humour is of all cular, we think it but fair to observe, that strange and tumultuous as he is, there is a certain benign composure visible in his writings; a mercy, a gladness, a reverence, united in such harmony, as we cannot but think tespeaks not a false, but a genuine state of mind; not a feverish and morbid, but a healthy and robust state.

The secret of the matter, perhaps, is that Richter requires more study than most readers care to give; for, as we approach more closely, many things grow clearer. In the man's own sphere there is consistency; the farther we advance into it, we see confusion more and more unfold itself intɔ order till at last, viewed

hurls the universe together and asunder like a case of playthings. The Moon "bombards" the Earth, being a rebellious satellite; Mars "preaches" to the other planets very singular doctrine; nay, we have Time and Space themselves playing fantastic tricks : it is an infinite masquerade; all Nature is gone forth mumming in the strangest guises.

his gifts intrinsically the finest and most genuine. It has such witching turns; there is something in it so capricious, so quaint, so heartfelt. From his Cyclopean workshop, and its fuligi nous limbecs, and huge unwieldy machinery, the little shrivelled, twisted figure comes forth at last, so perfect and so living, to be for ever laughed at and for ever loved! Wayward as he seems, he works not without forethought; like Rubens, by a single stroke, he can change a laughing face into a sad one. But in his smile itself, a touching pathos may lie hidden, a pity too deep for tears. He is a man of feeling, in the noblest sense of that word; for he loves all living with the heart of a brother; his

scul rushes forth, in sympathy with gladness | but in still smiles, which lie far deeper. It
and sorrow, with goodness or grandeur, over
all creation. Every gentle and generous affec-
tion, every thrill of mercy, every glow of
nobleness, awakens in his bosom a response,
nay, strikes his spirit into harmony; a wild
music as of wind-harps, floating round us in
fitful swells, but soft sometimes, and pure and
soul-entrancing as the song of angels! Aver-
sion itself with him is not hatred; he despises
much, but justly, with tolerance also, with
placidity, and even a sort of love. Love, in
fact, is the atmosphere he breathes in, the me-
dium through which he looks. His is the
spirit which gives life and beauty to whatever
it embraces. Inanimate Nature itself is no
longer an insensible assemblage of colours
and perfumes, but a mysterious Presence, with
which he communes in unutterable sympathies.
We might call him, as he once called Herder," a
Priest of Nature, a mild Bramin," wandering
amid spicy groves, and under benignant skies.
The infinite Night with her solemn aspects,
Day, and the sweet approach of Even and
Morn, are full of meaning for him. He loves
the green Earth with her streams and forests,
her flowery leas and eternal skies; loves her
with a sort of passion, in all her vicissitudes
of light and shade; his spirit revels in her
grandeur and charms; expands like the breeze
over wood and lawn, over glade and dingle,
stealing and giving odours.

is a sort of inverse sublimity; exalting, as it
were, into our affections what is below us,
while sublimity draws down into our affections
what is above us. The former is scarcely less
precious or heart-affecting than the latter; per-
haps it is still rarer, and, as a test of genius, still
more decisive. It is, in fact, the bloom and
perfume, the purest effluence of a deep, fine,
and loving nature; a nature in harmony with
itself, reconciled to the world and its stinted-
ness and contradiction, nay, finding in this
very contradiction new elements of beauty as
well as goodness. Among our own writers,
Shakspeare in this as in all other provinces,
must have his place: yet not the first; his
humour is heartfelt, exuberant, warm, but sel-
dom the tenderest or most subtile. Swift in-
clines more to simple irony; yet he had genu-
ine humour too, and of no unloving sort, though
cased, like Ben Jonson's, in a most bitter and
caustic rind. Sterne follows next; our last
specimen of humour, and, with all his faults,
our best; our finest, if not our strongest, for
Yorick, and Corporal Trim, and Uncle Toby, have
yet no brother but in Don Quixote, far as he lies
above them. Cervantes is indeed the purest
of all humourists; so gentle and genial, so full
yet so ethereal, is his humour, and in such ac-
cordance with itself and his whole noble na-
ture. The Italian mind is said to abound in
humour; yet their classics seem to give us
It has sometimes been made a wonder that no right emblem of it: except, perhaps, in
things so discordant should go together; that Ariosto, there appears little in their current
men of humour are often likewise men of sen- poetry that reaches the region of true humour.
sibility. But the wonder should rather be to In France, since the days of Montaigne, it seems
see them divided; to find true genial humour to be nearly extinct. Voltaire, much as he dealt
dwelling in a mind that was coarse or callous. in ridicule, never rises into humour; and even
The essence of humour is sensibility; warm, with Molière, it is far more an affair of the un-
tender fellow-feeling with all forms of existence.derstanding than of the character.
Nay, we may say that unless seasoned and
That in this point, Richter excels all German
purified by humour, sensibility is apt to run authors, is saying much for him, and may be
wild; will readily corrupt into disease, false- said truly. Lessing has humour,―of a sharp,
hood, or, in one word, sentimentality. Wit-rigid, substantial, and on the whole, genial sort:
ness Rousseau, Zimmermann, in some points yet the ruling bias of his mind is to logic. So
also St. Pierre: to say nothing of living in-likewise has Wieland, though much diluted by
stances; or of the Kotzebues, and other pale
hosts of wobegone mourners, whose wailings,
like the howl of an Irish wake, from time to
time cleft the general ear. The last perfection
of our faculties, says Schiller with a truth far
deeper than it seems, is that their activity, with-
out ceasing to be sure and earnest, become sport.
True humour is sensibility, in the most catholic
and deepest sense; but it is this sport of sensi-present age, however, there is Goethe, with a
bility; wholesome and perfect therefore; as it
were, the playful teasing fondness of a moth:
to her child.

That faculty of irony, of caricature, which often passes by the name of humour, but consists chiefly in a certain superficial distortion or reversal of objects, and ends at best in laughter, bears no resemblance to the humour of Richter. A shallow endowment this; and often more a habit than an endowment. It is but a poor fraction of humour; or rather, it is the body to which the soul is wanting; any life it has being false, artificial, and irrational. True humour springs not more from the head han from the heart; it is not contempt, its essence is love; it issues not in laughter,

the general loquacity of his nature, and impo-
verished still farther by the influences of a
cold, meagre, French skepticism. Among the
Ramlers, Gellerts, Hagedorns, of Frederick the
Second's time, we find abundance, and delicate
in kind too, of that light matter which the
French call pleasantry; but little or nothing
that deserves the name of humour. In the

rich true vein; and this sublimated, as it were,
to an essence, and blended in still union with
his whole mind. Tieck also, among his many
fine susceptibilities, is not without a warm keen
sense for the ridiculous; and a humour rising,
though by short fits, and from a much lower
atmosphere, to be poetic. But of all these men,
there is none that, in depth, copiousness, and
intensity of humour, can be compared with
Jean Paul. He alone exists in humour; lives,
moves, and has his being in it. With him it
is not so much united to his other alities, of
intellect, fancy, imagination, mora. feeling, as
these are united to it; or rather unite them-
selves to it, and grow under its warmth, as in
their proper temperature and climate. Not as

1.1

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; 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 imperfection should be forgiven. It is true, the beaten 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 enCowment, Richter should have shaped his ind by culture, is much harder than to say at he has shaped it wrong. Of affectation se will neither altogether clear him, nor very oudly pronounce him guilty. That his manLer of writing is singular, nay, in fact, a wild complicated Arabesque, no one can deny. But he 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; expand, if possible, to his full growth; resisting all impediments, casting off all foreign, especially all noxious adhesions; and show himself at length in his own shape and stature, be these what they may. There is no uniform of excelence, 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,-what, in strict language, we can term unities: 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

pose ourselves; must cease to cavil at it, and begin to observe it, and calculate its laws. That Richter is a new planet in the intellectual 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

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 he roines, 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 reve or 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 reser Yet 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 repre the 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.

who will look on twigs as mere dissevered twigs, and a handful of water as only so many drops, we present the following. It is a summer Sunday night; Jean Paul is taking leave of the Hukelum Parson and his wife; like him we have long laughed at them or wept for them; like him, also, we are sad to part from them.

"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 Eolian Harp of the Creation to tremble and tc sound, blown on from above; and my immor.

Richter's Philosophy, a matter of no ordinary interest, both as it agrees with the common philosophy of Germany, and disagrees with it, must not be touched on for the present. One only observation we shall make: it is not mechanical, 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 crum. bled 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, tat in dim remoteness, and sketched in hurried, transitory outline, are some features of Jean Paul Friedrich Richter and his works. Germany has long loved him; to England also he must one day become known; for a man of this magnitude belongs not to one people, but to the world. What our countrymen may decide of him, still more what may be his fortune with posterity, we will not try to foretell. Time has a contracting influence on many a wide-spread fame; yet of Richter we will say, that he may survive much. There is in him that which does not die; that Beauty and Earnestness of soul, that spirit of Humanity, of Love and mild Wisdom, over which the vicissitudes of mode have no sway. This is that excellence of the inmost nature which alone confers rishment and shade.

STATE OF GERMAN LITERATURE.*

[EDINBURGH REVIEW, 1827.]

Let us not quarrel, however, with our author; his merits as a literary historian are plain, and by no means inconsiderable. Without rivalling the almost frightful laboriousness of Bouterwek or Eichhorn, he gives creditable proofs of research and general information, and possesses a lightness in composition, to which neither of these erudite persons can well pretend. Undoubtedly he has a flowing pen, and * 1. Die Poesie und Beredsamkeit der Deutschen, von Lu-word, an affected style. His stream of meanthers Zeit bis zur Gegenwart. Dargestellt von Franz Horn. (The Poetry and Oratory of the Germans, from Luther's Time to the Present. Exhibited by Franz Horn.) Berlin,