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The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV by Editor in Chief: Kuno Francke

E >> Editor in Chief: Kuno Francke >> The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV



#THE GERMAN CLASSICS#




Masterpieces of German Literature

TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH




IN TWENTY VOLUMES




ILLUSTRATED

1914



VOLUME IV

* * * * *





CONTENTS OF VOLUME IV


JEAN PAUL

The Life of Jean Paul. By Benjamin W. Wells.

Quintus Fixlein's Wedding. Translated by Thomas Carlyle.

Rome. Translated by C. T. Brooks.

The Opening of the Will. Translated by Frances H. King.

WILHELM VON HUMBOLDT

Schiller and the Process of His Intellectual Development. Translated
by Frances H. King.

The Early Romantic School. By James Taft Hatfield.

AUGUST WILHELM SCHLEGEL

Lectures on Dramatic Art. Translated by John Black.

FRIEDRICH SCHLEGEL

Introduction to Lucinda. By Calvin Thomas.

Lucinda. Translated by Paul Bernard Thomas.

Aphorisms. Translated by Louis H. Gray.

NOVALIS (FRIEDRICH VON HARDENBERG)

The Story of Hyacinth and Roseblossom. Translated by Lillie Winter.

Aphorisms. Translated by Frederic H. Hedge.

Hymn to Night. Translated by Paul Bernard Thomas.

Though None Thy Name Should Cherish. Translated by Charles Wharton
Stork.

To the Virgin. Translated by Charles Wharton Stork.

FRIEDRICH HOeLDERLIN

Hyperion's Song of Fate. Translated by Charles Wharton Stork.

Evening Phantasie. Translated by Charles Wharton Stork.

LUDWIG TIECK

Puss in Boots. Translated by Lillie Winter.

Fair Eckbert. Translated by Paul Bernard Thomas.

The Elves. Translated by Frederic H. Hedge.

HEINRICH VON KLEIST

The Life of Heinrich von Kleist. By John S. Nollen.

Michael Kohlhaas. Translated by Frances H. King.

The Prince of Homburg. Translated by Hermann Hagedorn.


ILLUSTRATIONS--VOLUME IV

Lonely Ride. By Hans Thoma.

Jean Paul. By E. Hader.

Bridal Procession. By Ludwig Richter.

Wilhelm von Humboldt. By Franz Krueger.

The University of Berlin.

A Hermit watering Horses. By Moritz von Schwind.

A Wanderer looks into a Landscape. By Moritz von Schwind.

The Chapel in the Forest. By Moritz von Schwind.

August Wilhelm Schlegel.

Caroline Schlegel.

Friedrich Schlegel. By E. Hader.

The Creation. By Moritz von Schwind.

Novalis. By Eduard Eichens.

The Queen of Night. By Moritz von Schwind.

Friedrich Hoelderlin. By E. Hader.

Ludwig Tieck. By Vogel von Vogelstein.

Puss in Boots. By Moritz von Schwind.

Dance of the Elves. By Moritz von Schwind.

Heinrich von Kleist.

Sarcophagus of Queen Louise in the Mausoleum at Charlottenburg. By
Christian Rauch.

The Royal Castle at Berlin.

Statue of the Great Elector. By Andreas Schlueter.




EDITOR'S NOTE

From this volume on, an attempt will be made to bring out, in the
illustrations, certain broad tendencies of German painting in the
nineteenth century, parallel to the literary development here
represented. There will be few direct illustrations of the subject
matter of the text. Instead, each volume will be dominated, as far as
possible, by a master, or a group of masters, whose works offer an
artistic analogy to the character and spirit of the works of literature
contained in it. Volumes IV and V, for instance, being devoted to German
Romantic literature of the early nineteenth century, will present at the
same time selections from the work of two of the foremost Romantic
painters of Germany: Moritz von Schwind and Ludwig Richter. It is hoped
that in this way THE GERMAN CLASSICS OF THE NINETEENTH AND TWENTIETH
CENTURIES will shed a not unwelcome side-light upon the development of
modern German art.

KUNO FRANCKE.




JEAN PAUL

* * * * *

THE LIFE OF JEAN PAUL

By BENJAMIN W. WELLS, Ph.D.

Author of _Modern German Literature_.

"The Spring and I came into the world together," Jean Paul liked to
tell his friends when in later days of comfort and fame he looked back
on his early years. He was, in fact, born on the first day (March 21)
and at almost the first hour of the Spring of 1763 at Wunsiedel in the
Fichtelgebirge, the very heart of Germany. The boy was christened
Johann Paul Friedrich Richter. His parents called him Fritz. It was
not till 1793 that, with a thought of Jean Jacques Rousseau, he called
himself Jean Paul.

Place and time are alike significant in his birth. Wunsiedel was a
typical German hill village; the ancestry, as far back as we can trace
it, was typically German, as untouched as Wunsiedel itself, by any
breath of cosmopolitan life. It meant much that the child who was in
later life to interpret most intimately the spirit of the German
people through the days of the French Revolution, of the Napoleonic
tyranny and of the War of Liberation, who was to be a bond between the
old literature and the new, beside, yet independent of, the men of
Weimar, should have such heredity and such environment. Richter's
grandfather had held worthily minor offices in the church, his father
had followed in his churchly steps with especial leaning to music; his
maternal grandfather was a well-to-do clothmaker in the near-by town
of Hof, his mother a long-suffering housewife. It was well that Fritz
brought sunshine with him into the world; for his temperament was his
sole patrimony and for many years his chief dependence. He was the
eldest of seven children. None, save he, passed unscathed through the
privations and trials of the growing household with its accumulating
burdens of debt. For Fritz these trials meant but the tempering of his
wit, the mellowing of his humor, the deepening of his sympathies.

When Fritz was two years old the family moved to Joditz, another
village of the Fichtelgebirge. Of his boyhood here Jean Paul in his
last years set down some mellowed recollections. He tells how his
father, still in his dressing gown, used to take him and his brother
Adam across the Saale to dig potatoes and gather nuts, alternating in
the labor and the play; how his thrifty mother would send him with the
provision bag to her own mother's at Hof, who would give him goodies
that he would share with some little friend. He tells, too, of his
rapture at his first A B C book and its gilded cover, and of his
eagerness at school, until his too-anxious father took him from
contact with the rough peasant boys and tried to educate him himself,
an experience not without value, at least as a warning, to the future
author of _Levana_. But if the Richters were proud, they were very
poor. The boys used to count it a privilege to carry the father's
coffee-cup to him of a Sunday morning, as he sat by the window
meditating his sermon, for then they could carry it back again "and
pick the unmelted remains of sugar-candy from the bottom of it."
Simple pleasures surely, but, as Carlyle says, "there was a bold,
deep, joyful spirit looking through those young eyes, and to such a
spirit the world has nothing poor, but all is rich and full of
loveliness and wonder."

Every book that the boy Fritz could anywise come at was, he tells us,
"a fresh green spring-place," where "rootlets, thirsty for knowledge
pressed and twisted in every direction to seize and absorb." Very
characteristic of the later Jean Paul is one incident of his childhood
which, he says, made him doubt whether he had not been born rather for
philosophy than for imaginative writing. He was witness to the birth
of his own self-consciousness.

[Illustration: JEAN PAUL]

"One forenoon," he writes, "I was standing, a very young child, by
the house door, looking to the left at the wood-pile, when, all at
once, like a lightning flash from heaven, the inner vision arose
before me: I am an _I_. It has remained ever since radiant. At that
moment my _I_ saw itself for the first time and forever."

It is curious to contrast this childhood, in the almost cloistered
seclusion of the Fichtelgebirge, with Goethe's at cosmopolitan
Frankfurt or even with Schiller's at Marbach. Much that came unsought,
even to Schiller, Richter had a struggle to come by; much he could
never get at all. The place of "Frau Aja" in the development of the
child Goethe's fancy was taken at Joditz by the cow-girl. Eagerness to
learn Fritz showed in pathetic fulness, but the most diligent search
has revealed no trace in these years of that creative imagination with
which he was so richly dowered.

When Fritz was thirteen his father received a long-hoped-for promotion
to Schwarzenbach, a market town near Hof, then counting some 1,500
inhabitants. The boy's horizon was thus widened, though the family
fortunes were far from finding the expected relief. Here Fritz first
participated in the Communion and has left a remarkable record of his
emotional experience at "becoming a citizen in the city of God." About
the same time, as was to be expected, came the boy's earliest strong
emotional attachment. Katharina Baerin's first kiss was, for him, "a
unique pearl of a minute, such as never had been and never was to be."
But, as with the Communion, though the memory remained, the feeling
soon passed away.

The father designed Fritz, evidently the most gifted of his sons, for
the church, and after some desultory attempts at instruction in
Schwarzenbach, sent him in 1779 to the high school at Hof. His
entrance examination was brilliant, a last consolation to the father,
who died, worn out with the anxieties of accumulating debt, a few
weeks later. From his fellow pupils the country lad suffered much till
his courage and endurance had compelled respect. His teachers were
conscientious but not competent. In the liberally minded Pastor Vogel
of near-by Rehau, however, he found a kindred spirit and a helpful
friend. In this clergyman's generously opened library the thirsty
student made his first acquaintance with the unorthodox thought of his
time, with Lessing and Lavater, Goethe and even Helvetius. When in
1781 he left Hof for the University of Leipzig the pastor took leave
of the youth with the prophetic words: "You will some time be able to
render me a greater service than I have rendered you. Remember this
prophecy."

Under such stimulating encouragement Richter began to write. Some
little essays, two addresses, and a novel, a happy chance has
preserved. The novel is an echo of Goethe's _Werther_, the essays are
marked by a clear, straightforward style, an absence of sentimentality
or mysticism, and an eagerness for reform that shows the influence of
Lessing. Religion is the dominant interest, but the youth is no longer
orthodox, indeed he is only conditionally Christian.

With such literary baggage, fortified with personal recommendations
and introductions from the Head Master at Hof, with a Certificate of
Maturity and a _testimonium paupertatis_ that might entitle him to
remission of fees and possibly free board, Richter went to Leipzig.
From the academic environment and its opportunities he got much, from
formal instruction little. He continued to be in the main self-taught
and extended his independence in manners and dress perhaps a little
beyond the verge of eccentricity. Meantime matters at home were going
rapidly from bad to worse. His grandfather had died; the inheritance
had been largely consumed in a law-suit. He could not look to his
mother for help and did not look to her for counsel. He suffered from
cold and stretched his credit for rent and food to the breaking point.
But the emptier his stomach the more his head abounded in plans "for
writing books to earn money to buy books." He devised a system of
spelling reform and could submit to his pastor friend at Rehau in 1782
a little sheaf of essays on various aspects of Folly, the student
being now of an age when, like Iago, he was "nothing if not critical."
Later these papers seemed to him little better than school exercises,
but they gave a promise soon to be redeemed in _Greenland Law-Suits_,
his first volume to find a publisher. These satirical sketches,
printed early in 1783, were followed later in that year by another
series, but both had to wait 38 years for a second edition, much
mellowed in revision--not altogether to its profit.

The point of the _Law-Suits_ is directed especially against
theologians and the nobility. Richter's uncompromising fierceness
suggests youthful hunger almost as much as study of Swift. But
Lessing, had he lived to read their stinging epigrams, would have
recognized in Richter the promise of a successor not unworthy to carry
the biting acid of the _Disowning Letter_ over to the hand of Heine.

The _Law-Suits_ proved too bitter for the public taste and it was
seven years before their author found another publisher. Meanwhile
Richter was leading a precarious existence, writing for magazines at
starvation prices, and persevering in an indefatigable search for some
one to undertake his next book, _Selections from the Papers of the
Devil_. A love affair with the daughter of a minor official which she,
at least, took seriously, interrupted his studies at Leipzig even
before the insistence of creditors compelled him to a clandestine
flight. This was in 1784. Then he shared for a time his mother's
poverty at Hof and from 1786 to 1789 was tutor in the house of
Oerthel, a parvenu Commercial-Counsellor in Toepen. This experience he
was to turn to good account in _Levana_ and in his first novel, _The
Invisible Lodge_, in which the unsympathetic figure of Roeper is
undoubtedly meant to present the not very gracious personality of the
Kommerzienrat.

To this period belongs a collection of _Aphorisms_ whose bright wit
reveals deep reflection. They show a maturing mind, keen insight,
livelier and wider sympathies. The _Devil's Papers_, published in
1789, when Richter, after a few months at Hof, was about to become
tutor to the children of three friendly families in Schwarzenbach,
confirm the impression of progress. In his new field Richter had great
freedom to develop his ideas of education as distinct from
inculcation. Rousseau was in the main his guide, and his success in
stimulating childish initiative through varied and ingenious
pedagogical experiments seems to have been really remarkable.

Quite as remarkable and much more disquieting were the ideas about
friendship and love which Richter now began to develop under the
stimulating influence of a group of young ladies at Hof. In a note
book of this time he writes: "Prize question for the Erotic Academy:
How far may friendship toward women go and what is the difference
between it and love?" That Richter called this circle his "erotic
academy" is significant. He was ever, in such relations, as alert to
observe as he was keen to sympathize and permitted himself an
astonishing variety of quickly changing and even simultaneous
experiments, both at Hof and later in the aristocratic circles that
were presently to open to him. In his theory, which finds fullest
expression in _Hesperus_, love was to be wholly platonic. If the first
kiss did not end it, the second surely would. "I do not seek," he
says, "the fairest face but the fairest heart. I can overlook all
spots on that, but none on this." "He does not love who _sees_ his
beloved, but he who _thinks_ her." That is the theory. The practice
was a little different. It shows Richter at Hof exchanging fine-spun
sentiments on God, immortality and soul-affinity with some half dozen
young women to the perturbation of their spirits, in a transcendental
atmosphere of sentiment, arousing but never fulfilling the expectation
of a formal betrothal. That Jean Paul was capable of inspiring love of
the common sort is abundantly attested by his correspondence. Perhaps
no man ever had so many women of education and social position "throw
themselves" at him; but that he was capable of returning such love in
kind does not appear from acts or letters at this time, or, save
perhaps for the first years of his married life, at any later period.

The immediate effect of the bright hours at Hof on Richter as a writer
was wholly beneficent. _Mr. Florian Fuelbel's Journey_ and _Bailiff
Josuah Freudel's Complaint Bible_ show a new geniality in the
personification of amusing foibles. And with these was a real little
masterpiece, _Life of the Contented Schoolmaster Maria Wuz_, which
alone, said the Berlin critic Moritz, might suffice to make its author
immortal. In this delicious pedagogical idyl, written in December,
1790, the humor is sound, healthy, thoroughly German and
characteristic of Richter at his best. It seems as though one of the
great Dutch painters were guiding the pen, revealing the beauty of
common things and showing the true charm of quiet domesticity.
Richter's _Contented Schoolmaster_ lacked much in grace of form, but
it revealed unguessed resources in the German language, it showed
democratic sympathies more genuine than Rousseau's, it gave the
promise of a new pedagogy and a fruitful esthetic; above all it bore
the unmistakable mint-mark of genius.

_Wuz_ won cordial recognition from the critics. With the general
public it was for the time overshadowed by the success of a more
ambitious effort, Richter's first novel, _The Invisible Lodge_. This
fanciful tale of an idealized freemasonry is a study of the effects in
after life of a secluded education. Though written in the year of the
storming of the Tuileries it shows the prose-poet of the
Fichtelgebirge as yet untouched by the political convulsions of the
time. The _Lodge_, though involved in plot and reaching an empty
conclusion, yet appealed very strongly to the Germans of 1793 by its
descriptions of nature and its sentimentalized emotion. It was truly
of its time. Men and especially women liked then, better than they do
now, to read how "the angel who loves the earth brought the most holy
lips of the pair together in an inextinguishable kiss, and a seraph
entered into their beating hearts and gave them the flames of a
supernal love." Of greater present interest than the heartbeats of
hero or heroine are the minor characters of the story, presenting
genially the various types of humor or studies from life made in the
"erotic academy" or in the families of Richter's pupils. The despotic
spendthrift, the Margrave of Bayreuth, has also his niche, or rather
pillory, in the story. Notable, too, is the tendency, later more
marked, to contrast the inconsiderate harshness of men with the
patient humility of women. Encouraged by Moritz, who declared the book
"better than Goethe," Richter for the first time signed his work "Jean
Paul." He was well paid for it and had no further serious financial
cares.

Before the _Lodge_ was out of press Jean Paul had begun _Hesperus, or
45 Dog-post-days_, which magnified the merits of the earlier novel but
also exaggerated its defects. Wanton eccentricity was given fuller
play, formlessness seemed cultivated as an art. Digressions interrupt
the narrative with slender excuse, or with none; there is, as with the
English Sterne, an obtrusion of the author's personality; the style
seems as wilfully crude as the mastery in word-building and
word-painting is astonishing. On the other hand there is both greater
variety and greater distinction in the characters, a more developed
fabulation and a wonderful deepening and refinement of emotional
description. _Werther_ was not yet out of fashion and lovers of his
"Sorrows" found in _Hesperus_ a book after their hearts. It
established the fame of Jean Paul for his generation. It brought women
by swarms to his feet. They were not discouraged there. It was his
platonic rule "never to sacrifice one love to another," but to
experiment with "simultaneous love," "_tutti_ love," a "general
warmth" of universal affection. Intellectually awakened women were
attracted possibly as much by Richter's knowledge of their feelings as
by the fascination of his personality. _Hesperus_ lays bare many
little wiles dear to feminine hearts, and contains some keenly
sympathetic satire on German housewifery.

While still at work on _Hesperus_ Jean Paul returned to his mother's
house at Hof. "Richter's study and sitting-room offered about this
time," says Doering, his first biographer, "a true and beautiful
picture of his simple yet noble mind, which took in both high and low.
While his mother bustled about the housework at fire or table he sat
in a corner of the same room at a plain writing-desk with few or no
books at hand, but only one or two drawers with excerpts and
manuscripts. * * * Pigeons fluttered in and out of the chamber."

At Hof, Jean Paul continued to teach with originality and much success
until 1796, when an invitation from Charlotte von Kalb to visit Weimar
brought him new interests and connections. Meanwhile, having finished
_Hesperus_ in July, 1794, he began work immediately on the genial
_Life of Quintus Fixlein, Based on Fifteen Little Boxes of Memoranda_,
an idyl, like _Wuz_, of the schoolhouse and the parsonage, reflecting
Richter's pedagogical interests and much of his personal experience.
Its satire of philological pedantry has not yet lost pertinence or
pungency. Quintus, ambitious of authorship, proposes to himself a
catalogued interpretation of misprints in German books and other tasks
hardly less laboriously futile. His creator treats him with unfailing
good humor and "the consciousness of a kindred folly." Fixlein is the
archetypal pedant. The very heart of humor is in the account of the
commencement exercises at his school. His little childishnesses are
delightfully set forth; so, too, is his awe of aristocracy. He always
took off his hat before the windows of the manor house, even if he saw
no one there. The crown of it all is The Wedding. The bridal pair's
visit to the graves of by-gone loves is a gem of fantasy. But behind
all the humor and satire must not be forgotten, in view of what was to
follow, the undercurrent of courageous democratic protest which finds
its keenest expression in the "Free Note" to Chapter Six. _Fixlein_
appeared in 1796.

Richter's next story, the unfinished _Biographical Recreations under
the Cranium of a Giantess_, sprang immediately from a visit to
Bayreuth in 1794 and his first introduction to aristocracy. Its chief
interest is in the enthusiastic welcome it extends to the French
Revolution. Intrinsically more important is the _Flower, Fruit and
Thorn Pieces_ which crowded the other subject from his mind and tells
with much idyllic charm of "the marriage, life, death and wedding of
F. H. Siebenkaes, Advocate of the Poor" (1796-7).

In 1796, at the suggestion of the gifted, emancipated and ill-starred
Charlotte von Kalb, Jean Paul visited Weimar, already a Mecca of
literary pilgrimage and the centre of neo-classicism. There, those
who, like Herder, were jealous of Goethe, and those who, like Frau von
Stein, were estranged from him, received the new light with
enthusiasm--others with some reserve. Goethe and Schiller, who were
seeking to blend the classical with the German spirit, demurred to the
vagaries of Jean Paul's unquestioned genius. His own account of his
visit to "the rock-bound Schiller" and to Goethe's "palatial hall" are
precious commonplaces of the histories of literature. There were sides
of Goethe's universal genius to which Richter felt akin, but he was
quite ready to listen to Herder's warning against his townsman's
"unrouged" infidelity, which had become socially more objectionable
since Goethe's union with Christiane Vulpius, and Jean Paul presently
returned to Hof, carrying with him the heart of Charlotte von Kalb, an
unprized and somewhat embarrassing possession. He wished no heroine;
for he was no hero, as he remarked dryly, somewhat later, when
Charlotte had become the first of many "beautiful souls" in confusion
of spirit about their heart's desire.

In 1797 the death of Jean Paul's mother dissolved home bonds and he
soon left Hof forever, though still for a time maintaining diligent
correspondence with the "erotic academy" as well as with new and more
aristocratic "daughters of the Storm and Stress." The writings of this
period are unimportant, some of them unworthy. Jean Paul was for a
time in Leipzig and in Dresden. In October, 1798, he was again in
Weimar, which, in the sunshine of Herder's praise, seemed at first his
"Canaan," though he soon felt himself out of tune with Duchess
Amalia's literary court. To this time belongs a curious _Conjectural
Biography_, a pretty idyl of an ideal courtship and marriage as his
fancy now painted it for himself. Presently he was moved to essay the
realization of this ideal and was for a time betrothed to Karoline von
Feuchtersleben, her aristocratic connections being partially reconciled
to the _mesalliance_ by Richter's appointment as Legationsrat. He
begins already to look forward, a little ruefully, to the time when his
heart shall be "an extinct marriage-crater," and after a visit to
Berlin, where he basked in the smiles of Queen Luise, he was again
betrothed, this time to the less intellectually gifted, but as devoted
and better dowered Karoline Mayer, whom he married in 1801. He was then
in his thirty-eighth year.

Richter's marriage is cardinal in his career. Some imaginative work he
was still to do, but the dominant interests were hereafter to be in
education and in political action. In his own picturesque language,
hitherto his quest had been for the golden fleece of womanhood,
hereafter it was to be for a crusade of men. The change had been
already foreshadowed in 1799 by his stirring paper _On Charlotte
Corday_ (published in 1801).