these respects. The spell works powerfully, but not with accuracy. In answer to its invocation prodigious quantities of matter appear which are unadapted to the plan, irrelevant to the purpose. And his sympathy with his production is so great that it biases his judgment, supersedes taste, and nullifies the rightful canon of acceptance and rejection. Whatever comes must be embraced. He cannot bear to turn his back on any pleading child of his brain. Thus his sympathy often overrules his critical sense, and aggregates his material into overwhelming, amorphous masses. The imagination of Richter is as gigantic in mould and as sensitive in substance almost as that of Shakespeare; but it wants its sound firmness and its unerring co-ordination.

On the whole, then, the relation of the creative working of the mind to forms of art is this. Spiritual products, ideas, and emotions are elaborated in an obscure dynamic realm of necessity, the ontologic darkness of the brain; and they arise thence into the complicated relations and free movements of consciousness, there to be fashioned and directed. This process, in the most perfect artistic natures, as that of Mozart in music, goes on in unprompted spontaneity, automatically, or under the influence of primordial stimulants administered by Nature herself in the organic deeps of the mind. But we can partially initiate or enhance and guide it by a conscious stimulant voluntarily applied. This stimulant is a preconceived aim detained in attention, acting as an incantation to allure appropriate materials, and bring them into the significant groups desired. Then the critical judgment, or the faculty of taste, acts as a beacon, one pole of whose light guides the freighted ships into the port, while the other repels all the monsters and drift. The degree of artistic genius is marked by the conjoined power and precision with which these two functions are performed.

But if the art of Jean Paul seems lame and weak in the conduct and total form of his work, we should not forget, or fail to see, that it is often exact and faultless in details. This is shown almost invariably in his maxims and incidental reflections, very frequently also in detached images, and in special passages of description. The story of the "Titan" is

highly dramatic and intense, yet it is wellnigh lost sight of in the tropical wilderness of riches by the way. So involved is it with mysteries and whimsicalities, wheels within wheels, that it is an arduous task to master its outline, and thread and carry along its incidents in any sort of collective unity. But there is hardly a paragraph of it in which there is not something rich and strange to stimulate the thoughtful, to gratify and instruct the curious, to touch or console the tender, to inspire the noble, to develop the sense of beauty, to cherish the love of virtue and humanity, and to clothe the ideas of nature and God with new attractiveness and majesty. To neglect or condemn this vast array of appetizing spiritual riches for its comparative disorder, is as foolish as it would be to despise a chamberful of gold because the ingots were not piled in regular rows. It is also a weakness of which some are guilty, to see only the excessive garnish and adornment of Jean Paul's board, and so to conclude that he sets forth no solid feast. But it does not always follow that there is little nutriment where there is much condiment. Cannot a sword with a jewelled hilt be wielded as effectively as if it had a plain hilt? The plume does not injure the helmet; nor will a shopful of trinkets make a cabinet of gems worthless. The imagination, digested knowledge and experience, wit, pathos, wisdom, humor, and devotion of Jean Paul outweigh those of hundreds of favorite authors who have none of his harmless foibles. If any are inclined to question this statement, let them examine that portion of his works in which he most especially excels, in which, indeed, he appears to scarcely less advantage as an artist than as a thinker, namely, his critical studies of character and life. It is true that most of his personages are not wholly dramatized, but partly described. He ekes out his deficiency in the perfect interior possession and enactment of his characters, by means of outward paintings and expositions of them. He makes skilful use of the artifice of a chorus of explanatory and critical remarks accompanying the action and dialogue, an artifice of which the greatest masters have no need. In a degree, he imposes the diverse features and elements of men and experience on persons, instead of thoroughly conceiving

original moulds of character, and running life and nature into them. Yet, in despite of this comparative limitation, by his wonderful psychological tact and his familiarity with the workings of human nature, especially on the side of the affections, added to his vast and acute knowledge and sympa thy, he gives a surpassing interest and reality to the chief personages in his works. They are living beings to us. We can never forget them, nor the powerful lessons they insinuate into our souls. They are acquaintances whom we have actually known; and, warning, amusing, inspiring, with their wickedness, their grotesque drollery, their grand and tender nobility, they stay with us, and we are glad to have them stay. We cling to the personalities of Schmelzle, Fixlein, Fibel, Katzenberger, Margraf, Gustavus, Victor, and a score of others, with the same tenacity with which we cleave to those of Shakespeare's Shallow, Bottom, Touchstone, Falstaff, Bassanio, Jacques, and the rest. This is genius of a high order, no matter what abatements are made. Nor, we may be sure, was the result accomplished without agencies of the utmost note and worth, calculated to reward a studious investigation.

The weaknesses and errors of ordinary authors are never so glaringly revealed, the genius and equipment of great authors never so impressively apparent, as when they deal immediately with the characters and lives of specialized men and women, - give us the criticisms and estimates which are the results of their own personal consciousness and varied examinations of human nature and experience. No other province of literature can have the importance, for readers of advanced development and culture, which belongs to this. Jean Paul courts this test. Here is where his best strength and skill, his subtlest insight and maturest wisdom, lie. In the "Titan," we are introduced to a world of sharply defined and wellsupported characters, characters of many qualities, grades, and positions, whose contrasts of spirit and conduct are strikingly brought out by a happy management of lights and shades in the incidents of the narrative and the conversation of the actors. There is the cold, able, imposing Gaspard, who neither hates nor loves, but with icy power moves to his mark;

the odious ventriloquist Uncle, the execrable Baldhead, with his double-distilled hatefulness of universal indifference and universal deceit; the vain and trivial Falterle, who is complaisance itself, also untruth itself, and who is always laboring before the looking-glass, like a copper-plate engraver, on his dear self; the lustful, treacherous, detestable mock-artist, Bouverot; the sincerely pious, though professional, old priest, Spener; the mean, irascible, hard-hearted father, Froulay, who hates from his very soul every lie he does not himself utter; the grotesque individualities and collocation of good Doctor Sphex and his fat drummer, poor Malt; brave and vigorous Dian, the Italian sculptor, healthy to the core, generous, affectionate, full of his art, running over with joy; true-hearted, unhappy Schoppe, in whom a vision too keen has grafted on a sensibility too tender a remedial satire, incarnation of wisdom and ridicule, of sky-kicking mirth and deadly sadness; the powerful, gifted, selfish, ruined Roquairol, a terrible being, at once fascinating and loathsome, with fiery eye, glazed face, and rotten heart, in whom, from sensuality and want of conscience, "life has run down into a jelly of corruption"; and numerous others, who, though subordinate in their parts, are carefully drawn, and possess no small amount of interest. The female characters in this romance also form a memorable group, all most distinctly defined, depicted, and sustained throughout with singular felicity. Not one of them, however often or rarely she comes upon the scene, ever loses her distinctive personality, though, with the verisimilitude of nature, it is constantly varying in its manifestations. We have the passive, victimized wife of Von Froulay; the frigid, hateful Princess, who plays the coquette simply to feed her pride with falsehood, and to scatter pain and vengeance from "her womanishly inhuman heart"; the impulsive, much-knowing Julienne, nobly scorning conventionalities in her self-poised superiority; the joyous, guileless, unsophisticated Rabette, betrayed and withering under the breath of Roquairol, like a fresh wild rose plucked and held in a blast of scalding vapor; Chariton, the model of a wife and mother, a household goddess, full of love and grace, dutiful cares and energetic peace; the aerial, pathetic Liana, an

angel of love and sweetness, gentle to timidity, yet loftily strong, the uncomplaining sufferer, the beautiful fragility of her fading form seeming the transparent investiture of a spirit too delicate and too pure to stay on earth; the volcanic heart, haughty intellect, royal nature and bearing, of Linda de Romeiro, the burning descriptions of whose superb beauty rival Shakespeare's picture of Cleopatra in her barge, and literally intoxicate the reader; and, lastly, Idoine, the ideal woman, intermediate between Liana and Linda, with all of the one except her sickliness, and all of the other except her extravagance, on the altar of whose being stand the pure images of Wisdom, Love, Moderation, Holiness, and Faith. Idoine, easily inclined by her tense temperament to fits of vexation, that little skirmish of wrath, had, by long, sharp exercise, freed herself from this finest, but strongest, poison of the soul's happiness, till she at last stood in her heaven as a pure, light moon, without a rainy and cloudy atmosphere of earth."

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We have reserved Albano, the grand central character and hero of the romance, to whom its name of the Titan refers, for separate mention. We say that Albano is the Titan, the word being used in a good sense, denoting, not the heavenstormer, but the strong one, who contrasts with common men as an Olympian with earthlings, as Hyperion with Satyrs. We entirely agree with Dr. Hedge in rejecting that specious interpretation which gives the title a bad sense by making it refer exclusively to the rebellious and vanquished Roquairol. "The Titan here is not the heaven-storming, but the heaventraversing, the sun-god, son of Coelus and of Terra, deriving his ideal and mission from the one, the topics and conditions. of his action from the other, his life the resultant of the two." This felicitous statement finds a powerful confirmation in a passage which we have discovered in an earlier work of Jean Paul, the Flegeljahre. The passage reads thus: "Men, with all their faults, are, in their loving youth, like the Titans: Heaven is their father, Earth only their mother; but later, the father dies for them, and the mother finds it difficult to nourish the orphans." The view of the French critic, whose fanciful and turgid exposition we are surprised that Mr.