From: The Dial, Vol. III, No. III (Jan. 1843)
Author:
Published: E. P. Peabody 1843 Boston
GERMAN literature is richer and abler in every other department than the historical. Not that this field has been wholly neglected; but, comparatively speaking, it has been cultivated with little success, The German histories are mostly philosophies of history, and interest us rather by their speculations, than by their narrative. There are exceptions, we grant. Muller’s history of Switzerland and Schiller’s of the defection of the Netherlands, and the Thirty Years War, are very remarkable ones; and there are several others. But such is not the prevailing character of German historical composition. The Germans are more given to speculate than to narrate. Their very novels, Lafontaine’s, Lamotte-Fouque’s Jean Paul’s, Tieck’s, are not so much stories as they are theories of life.
This defect in the German library is most remarkable, and most to be lamented, as it regards distinguished individuals, who have become important to us through their works, and who, in consequence of this defect, are suffered to pass without any further record. Biography, memoir, the whole literature of personalities, in which the French and the English are so fluent, seems uncongenial with the German mind. Is it their inveterate tendency, to generalize individual traits into formal characteristics, which sinks the individual in the class? Or is it the habit of seeking in all things the indwelling principle, in all phenomena the noumenon, in all persons the idea personified, which leads them to overlook and slight the accidental and merely extensive in the life of man? The point is worth considering. We have no time for it now, but we should like to consider it in some future number, time and mood permitting.
Meanwhile, this idealistic tendency of the Germans has served to throw around their great men, a mystery exceedingly unsatisfactory to English readers, who insist on following the great man off the stage, into his study, his drawing room, his nursery, his very kitchen; and who never think they are acquainted with him till they know something of his family, his furniture and his table-talk. On all these points, the literary history of Germany is, for the most part, profoundly silent. Her philosophers have found no Boswell, her poets no Johnson.
The latter defect has been supplied, in the case of Schiller, by Carlyle’s excellent biography; and the author or authoress (if she will permit us so far to invade her privacy) of the work before us, has performed a similar office for the antipode of Schiller the rare, the einziger Jean Paul.
An acquaintance of twenty years’ standing with this, our favorite author, has prepared us to welcome a work of which he was the subject. Accordingly we seized with some eagerness on these two volumes, and we have read them with a satisfaction equal to that with which we received their first announcement from the press. We can speak of them frankly, as a worthy tribute to a great name. The first condition of a good biography is, that the biographer comprehend his subject; and this condition has, we think, been fully satisfied in the present instance. The author has surveyed her hero from a point, sufficiently within the sphere of his own spirit, and at the same time, sufficiently removed from indiscriminate adoration, to insure a correct estimate of his proportions. Equal justice has been done to the nature of the man and to his position. She has placed herself in rapport with that great soul, and traced to psychological idioms, inborn and inbred, the prevailing Jean-Paulisms of his life and works. At the same time, she has diligently considered the influence of contemporary minds and external condition; and made her look not less valuable as a contribution to the literary history of Germany, than it is, as a biography of Jean Paul.
We should like to extract largely, but must content ourselves with the author’s closing remarks.
“The reader may be surprised that I have uniformly called Jean Paul a poet; but if the definition of poet be, one that gives expression to what others feel; one, who interprets that in the heart, which, like the inarticulate lisping of the child, cannot be made known for want of adequate expression, then he as truly deserves the name of poet, ns if every line he has written were measured, and rhymed with another line. His great heart beat with the united pulses of all human hearts. He is- the truest interpreter of joy and sorrow, love and grief; and all those bidden feelings that are revealed by the poet, all the sunbeam penetrates the mine, am! shews its hidden treasures.
“Finally, no poet’s inward life is more distinctly made known than Jean Paul’s, in his works. In his elevated characters; in his Gustavus, his Albano, his Debore. Like a solitary sage he looked out from his hermitage upon the ever-swelling and rushing waves of the literature and politics of that remarkable period in which he lived. Unmoved by its passions, still and cairn, he was like a holy prophet of its issue. Glowing for freedom, truth, and the happiness of man, yet never failing in the clearness of his understanding, or the firmness8 of his will. Full of scorn and hatred of all servility and all tyranny, yet ever free from the folly and madness of enthusiasm. With impartiality and justice he weighed the advantages of this world in the same scales in which he had placed the hopes of another.
“I have seen a cast of the Alps, a few feet square, in which mountain and valley, river and lake, ure represented in their true position and just proportions. The avalanche, the cataract, and the shepherd’s little hut are there; nothing is added, though much is left out; but ah, how inadequate to represent those giant palaces of nature, those glorious musses of light and color, rising in the blue depths of ether, close neighbors to the stars. Such a representation the present biography must bear to the real Jean Paul. .May it induce those who have the power, to become acquainted with him in his works.”—Vol. II., pp. 322, 323.
We have had no opportunity of comparing with their originals, the translations from the German; but they bear internal evidence of correctness. The errors we have noticed are mostly errors of the press, and these, we regret to say, are very frequent.
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