æsthetic romance. The multiplicity of the claimants clamoring for public attention now-a-days begets impatience and a habit of flippant judgment. The authors who furnish the most pungent entertainment on the lowest terms have the best chance for success. Those who offer the profoundest instruction and the choicest culture with the highest delight, but demand a proportionate price in the form of patient heed and varied effort on the part of the reader, are the most likely to suffer injustice and to be neglected. Jean Paul is a distinguished example of this wrong. Many persons turn from his writings in despair, not to say disgust, because of certain bizarre qualities of their style, certain broad incongruities of their substance, a certain combination of colossal vastness and intricate subtilty that makes them not perfectly easy to be understood. We have known even cultivated scholars, offended by the extravagances and obscurities of Jean Paul, to cast him contemptuously aside, as unworthy of their notice. Nothing could be more unwise or more unbecoming. True, it is a weakness to be insensible to glaring faults; but, surely, it is a far greater weakness to be insensible to surpassing merits. The wise and catholic man will rank faults in their place, and there leave them; but he will cordially embrace merits, and endeavor to assimilate them. If an author has great essential and original value, glorious worth triumphant over all compromising faults, he should be studied and honored, despite his defects. Not difficulties, but comparative worthlessness behind the difficulties, can justify neglect. Tin may glitter ready on the surface, and gold be covered with earth; yet it is wise to dig for the gold. A quartz pebble is only a pebble, although it lie bare and clean; and a diamond is a diamond, although it be held in a rough matrix. A great and noble author deserves to be approached with faith and reverence, with girded faculties, indeed, but with a modest spirit of receptivity, and to be studied with unwearied care, that the features of his character may be reflected in his pupil, and his mode of looking at human life and the universe apprehended. To approach him with a scornful sense of superiority, with the dry indifference of a dilettante, or in the spirit of a hard, critical surveyor bent on taking his measure, is an outrage. Nor can the frequency with which this is done lessen its intrinsic offensiveness. If he who stands beneath. the dome of St. Peter's or before the fall of Niagara divests himself of egotistic feelings, and allows time for his mind to grow to the dimensions of the scene, much more should he be humble and expectant who goes through the visible works into the invisible temple of a holy and sublime soul. Notwithstanding many seeming crudenesses and many real imperfections, the chief qualities which give power and attraction to works of literary genius coexist in Jean Paul in a high degree. He has wealth. He teems with treasures. For his materials of statement and illustration, he ransacks heaven and earth, every province of art and learning, every department of science and experience, all varieties of natural scenery and human history. He pours forth thought, feeling, imagery, without hinderance and almost without bound. The copiousness of his spiritual riches is somewhat astonishing. He has wisdom in a degree only inferior to his wealth. He is not a mere omnivorous collector of facts and opinions he is also a comprehensive and patient student of them. He surveys the matter of his information and thoughts, arranges it, criticises it, knows its relative place and value, is master of its uses. His huge and ardent imagination melts down his mental treasure, and his massive and powerful understanding recasts it into appropriate shapes. He is an amply competent critic of all kinds of philosophical and literary works, a still more competent judge of human nature and experience and their manifold diversities. His strokes of discrimination are ever penetrative and shrewd, and his abundant aphorisms rank him with the soundest and most nutritious of ethical thinkers. He has likewise health in a striking degree. He invigorates his reader. To peruse one of his works is to feel a fresh breeze of victorious strength and sympathy. No one keener than he to see and feel the wickedness and the sorrow of men, and the discords and hurts of time and the world; but his reason, faith, and affection are so large, elastic, and healthy, that he finds more to revere than to despise, more to love than to hate, more to enjoy than to fret about. He neither mopes nor whines nor fumes. His bosom heaves with waves of joy; his voice rings in jubilant shouts; his eye is full of admiration and tenderness; his words are words of gratulation, encouragement, and healing. The true test of a literary work is, Does it strengthen and cheer? If so, clasp it to your breast. Does it sour, enervate, or confuse? Then fling it into the fire. Jean Paul may court this criterion, for the total influence of his writing is surprisingly wholesome. Furthermore, he has skill to set his thoughts in grace and beauty, to present his material in forms that delight the reader. However frequently he appears to violate, or actually violates, the canons of good taste, shocking the proprieties of fine art, and repelling the fastidious, he is familiar with the principles of æsthetics, knows thoroughly the rules for producing the choicest effects, and neglects them, not from ignorance or incapacity, but from an overbearing inward fulness and impetuosity, or for the securing of some end which he considers of superior importance. He can on occasion give his thoughts and images with a delicacy and force, a simple perfectness of finish, a lucid precision, which might awaken the envy of the greatest masters of style, even of Goethe himself. His pages sparkle with separate sentences and paragraphs, which are gems of blended wisdom and beauty scarcely susceptible of improvement. "I use the acute mind of Fichte as a great knife, not to cut with it, but to sharpen my own on it." "Whither shall the sunflowers turn which stand upon the sun? Towards the greater sun round which ours rolls." "Past and Future wrap themselves from us; that in the widow's veil, this in the maiden's." "The sufferings of the sinner are like an eclipse of the moon, by which the dark night becomes still darker and wilder; the sufferings of the saint are like an eclipse of the sun, which cools the hot day, and casts a romantic shade wherein the nightingales begin to warble." The artistic accuracy of insight and taste which he shows in the parts of his works often fail him in the wholes, so that their outlines are blurred, and their filling-up confusedly crowded. because the misleading excess of his sympathy, or an overfondness for the teeming products of his own mind, obscures his critical perceptions, and causes him, rather than reject anything that occurs to him, to indulge in a gorgeous accumula This is tion of ornament, to associate with the straightforward matter an involved medley of allusion, inference, and suggestion, a swift interaction of seriousness and wit, which cannot but confound and baffle an unprepared reader. This vitiating deficiency of clearness and simplicity in the plot and conduct of his works a formidable obstacle to popularity it must be acknowledged has produced in many quarters an unfortunate blindness to his extraordinary merits. That blindness, we trust, Mr. Brooks's full and happy translation of the Titan will do much to remove from American and English readers. His life In addition to the four attributes of spiritual wealth, wisdom, health, and skill, which Jean Paul shares in common with all truly great authors, the endeared and enduring benefactors of mankind, he has many original traits well worthy of notice. His character is one of the most unaffected, vigorous, and beautiful of modern times. excellently narrated by Mrs. Lee is a romance of powerful interest, surcharged with costly instruction, with inspiring influence, and with touching pathos. He passed through many bitter struggles, but came out of every one undefiled and victorious. Temptations met him only to yield him new conquests of wisdom and virtue. Afflictions smote him but to deepen the springs of his life, purify his faith, and widen his sympathies. The deliberate writings of such a man, -writings to whose production he devoted his whole existence with the most absorbing and heroic fidelity, his summed experience and estimate of human life, constitute a legacy not to be slight ingly tossed aside, nor to be handled by any criticism into which gratitude and respect do not largely enter. Among the characteristic traits of Jean Paul, no one can overlook his sincere and constant love of nature. It is speaking too coldly to say that his enjoyment of natural scenery and phenomena was fervid and pervasive; it amounted to an intense passion. He walked hand in hand with the seasons, communed with forest and mountain, sky and river, as his breathing kindred, lay down on the hillside or in the meadow as a child nestling in the bosom of his mother. A sublime landscape or a lovely sunset would thrill him with rapture, melt him to tears, make him turn pale and tremble. A rose leaf was as inebriating to him as the grape to others. His sensibility was world-embracing, world-dissolving. He had withal an Oriental vastness of imagination, which could suffuse the universe with its own color and feeling, animate the very spaces of infinitude, and set the wildernesses of astronomic orbs in motion. Nor did his powers of description halt a whit behind. Hardly a page of the Titan that does not afford some amazing instance. "Thus did I see the sun go down under the waves, the reddening coasts fled away under their misty veils, the world went out, land after land, from one island to another, the last gold-dust was wafted away from the heights, and the prayer-bells of the convents led up the heart above the stars. O how happy and how wistful was my heart, at once a wish and a flame, and in my innermost being a prayer of gratitude went forth for this, that I was and am upon this earth." "Is it not as if all the gods stood, with thousands of cornucopias, on the mountains around Lago Maggiore, and poured down wine and cascades, till the lake, like a goblet of joy, foams over and gushes down with the brimming juice?" "Overhead the whole, second world, like a veiled nun, looked with a holy eye through the silver-grating of the constellations." "How firmly stood the world-rotunda, built with its fixed rows of stars high and far away over the flying tent-streets of the city! How was the heated eye of Albano refreshed by the giant masses of the glimmering spring, and the sight of day slumbering under the transparent mantle of night! Over the dark meadows and bushes the dew had already been sprinkled, whose jewel-sea was to burn before the sun; and in the north floated the purple pennons of Aurora as she sailed toward morning." "On the hill, before the cascades that leap down with their lightnings upon the flowers, before the green of the flashing vale, the stream, like a wounded eagle, beats its wings all about on the earth." "The moon, the benumbing lily which the earth wears on her breast; and the whole dazzling Pantheon of the starry heavens; and the city, with its piercedwork of night-lights; and the high, majestic, dark avenues; and on meadows and brooks the milk-white lunar-silver, wherewith the earth spun itself into an evening-star; and the night |