The Works of Thomas Carlyle/Volume 22/Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER
Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, one of the chosen men of Germany and of the World, whom I hoped, in my vanity, perhaps to gratify by this introduction of him to a people whom he knew and valued, has been called from his earthly sojourn since the commencement of my little task, and no voice, either of love or censure, shall any more reach his ear.
The circle of his existence is thus complete: his works and himself have assumed their final shape and combination, and lie ready for a judgment, which, when it is just, must now be unalterable. To satisfy a natural and rational curiosity respecting such a character, materials are not wanting; but to us in the mean time they are inaccessible. I have inquired in his own country, but without effect; having learned only that two Biographies of Richter are in the press, but that nothing on the subject has hitherto been published. For the present, therefore, I must content myself with such meagre and transitory hints as were in circulation in his lifetime, and compress into a few sentences a history which might be written in volumes.
Richter was born at Wunsiedel in Bayreuth, on the 21st of March 1763. His father was clergyman of the place, and afterwards of Schwarzbach on the Saale. The young man also was destined for the clerical profession; with a view to which, having finished his school-studies in the Hof Gymnasium, he in 1780 proceeded to the University of Leipzig, with the highest testimonials from his former masters. Theology as a profession, however, he could not relish; poetry, philosophy and general literature were his chief pursuits while at Leipzig; from which, apparently after no long stay, he returned to Schwarzbach to his parents, uncertain what he should betake him to. In a little while, he attempted authorship; publishing various short miscellaneous pieces, distinguished by intellectual vigour, copious fancy, the wildest yet truest humour, the whole concocted in a style entirely his own, which, if it betrayed the writer's inexperience, could not hide the existence in him of a highly-gifted, strong and extraordinary mind. The reception of his first performances, or the inward felicity of writing, encouraged him to proceed: in the midst of an unsettled and changeful life, his pen was never idle, its productions never otherwise than new, fantastic and powerful: he lived successively in Hof, in Weimar, Berlin, Meiningen, Coburg, 'raying forth, wherever he might be stationed, the wild light of his genius over all Germany.' At last he settled in Bayreuth, having here, in testimony of his literary merit, been honoured with the title of Legations-Rath, and presented with a pension from his native Prince. In Bayreuth his chief works were written; he had married, and been blessed with two children; his intellectual labours had gained him esteem and love from all ranks of his countrymen, and chiefly from those whose suffrage was of most value; a frank and original, yet modest, good and kind deportment seems to have transferred these sentiments to his private circle: with a heart at once of the most earnest and most sportful cast; affectionate, and encompassed with the objects of his affection; diligent in the highest of all earthly tasks, the acquisition and the diffusion of Truth; and witnessing from his sequestered home the working of his own mind on thousands of fellow-minds, Richter seemed happy and at peace; and his distant reader loved to fancy him as in his calm privacy enjoying the fruit of past toils, or amid the highest and mildest meditations, looking forward to long honourable years of future toil. For his thoughts were manifold; thoughts of a moralist and a sage, no less than of a poet and a wit. The last work of his I saw advertised was a little volume entitled On the Evergreen of our Feelings; and in November (1825), news came that Richter was dead; and a heart which we had figured as one of the truest, deepest and gentlest that ever lived in this world, was to beat no more.
Of Richter's private character I have learned little; but that little was all favourable, and accordant with the indications in his works. Of his public and intellectual character much might be said and thought; for the secret of it is by no means floating on the surface, and it will reward some study. The most cursory inspection, even an external one, will satisfy us that he neither was, nor wished to be considered as, a man who wrote or thought in the track of other men, to whom common practices of law, and whose excellences and defects the common formulas of criticism will easily represent. The very titles of his works are startling. One of his earliest performances is named Selection from the Papers of the Devil; another is Biographical Recreations under the Cranium of a Giantess. His novels are almost uniformly introduced by some fantastic narrative accounting for his publication and obtainment of the story. Hesperus, his chief novel, bears the secondary title of Dog-post-days, and the chapters are named Dog-posts, as having been conveyed to him in a letter-bag, round the neck of a little nimble Shock, from some unknown Island in the South Sea.
The first aspect of these peculiarities cannot prepossess us in his favour; we are too forcibly reminded of theatrical clap-traps and literary quackery; nor on opening one of the works themselves is the case much mended. Piercing gleams of thought do not escape us; singular truths conveyed in a form as singular; grotesque and often truly ludicrous delineations; pathetic, magnificent, far-sounding passages; effusions full of wit, knowledge and imagination, but difficult to bring under any rubric whatever; all the elements, in short, of a glorious intellect, but dashed together In such wild arrangement, that their order seems the very ideal of confusion. The style and structure of the book appear alike incomprehensible. The narrative is every now and then suspended to make way for some "Extra-leaf," some wild digression upon any subject but the one in hand; the language groans with indescribable metaphors and allusions to all things human and divine; flowing onward, not like a river, but like an inundation; circling in complex eddies, chafing and gurgling now this way, now that, till the proper current sinks out of view amid the boundless uproar. We close the work with a mingled feeling of astonishment, oppression and perplexity; and Richter stands before us in brilliant cloudy vagueness, a giant mass of intellect, but without form, beauty or intelligible purpose.
To readers who believe that intrinsic is inseparable from superficial excellence, and that nothing can be good or beautiful which is not to be seen through in a moment, Richter can occasion little difficulty. They admit him to be a man of vast natural endowments, but he is utterly uncultivated, and without command of them; full of monstrous affectation, the very high-priest of bad taste: knows not the art of writing, scarcely that there is such an art; an insane visionary floating forever among baseless dreams, which hide the firm Earth from his view; an intellectual Polyphemus; in short, a monstrum horrendum, informe, ingens, (carefully adding) cui lumen ademptum; and they close their verdict reflectively, with his own praiseworthy maxim: "Providence has given to the English the empire of the sea, to the French that of the land, to the Germans that of—the air."
In this way the matter is adjusted; briefly, comfortably and wrong. The casket was difficult to open; did we know by its very shape that there was nothing in it, that so we should cast it into the sea? Affectation is often singularity, but singularity is not always affectation. If the nature and condition of a man be really and truly, not conceitedly and untruly, singular, so also will his manner be, so also ought it to be. Affectation is the product of Falsehood, a heavy sin, and the parent of numerous heavy sins; let it be severely punished, but not too lightly imputed. Scarcely any mortal is absolutely free from it, neither most probably is Richter; but it is in minds of another substance than his that it grows to be the ruling product. Moreover, he is actually not a visionary, but, with all his visions, will be found to see the firm Earth in its whole figures and relations much more clearly than thousands of such critics, who too probably can see nothing else. Far from being untrained or uncultivated, it will surprise these persons to discover that few men have studied the art of writing, and many other arts besides, more carefully than he; that his Vorschule der Æsthetik (Introduction to Æsthetics) abounds with deep and sound maxims of criticism; in the course of which, many complex works, his own among others, are rigidly and justly tried, and even the graces and minutest qualities of style are by no means overlooked or unwisely handled.
Withal, there is something in Richter that incites us to a second, to a third perusal. His works are hard to understand, but they always have a meaning, and often a true and deep one. In our closer, more comprehensive glance, their truth steps forth with new distinctness; their error dissipates and recedes, passes into venality, often even into beauty; and at last the thick haze which encircled the form of the writer melts away, and he stands revealed to us in his own steadfast features, a colossal spirit, a lofty and original thinker, a genuine poet, a high-minded, true and most amiable man.
I have called him a colossal spirit, for this impression continues with us: to the last we figure him as something gigantic; for all the elements of his structure are vast, and combined together in living and life-giving, rather than in beautiful or symmetrical order. His Intellect is keen, impetuous, far-grasping, fit to rend in pieces the stubbornest materials, and extort from them their most hidden and refractory truth. In his Humour he sports with the highest and the lowest, he can play at bowls with the sun and moon. His Imagination opens for us the Land of Dreams; we sail with him through the boundless abyss, and the secrets of Space, and Time, and Life, and Annihilation hover round us in dim cloudy forms, and darkness and immensity and dread encompass and overshadow us. Nay, in handling the smallest matter, he works it with the tools of a giant. A common truth is wrenched from its old combinations, and presented us in new, impassable, abyssmal contrast with its opposite error. A trifle, some slender character, some weakling humorist, some jest, or quip, or spiritual toy, is shaped into most quaint, yet often truly living form; but shaped somehow as with the hammer of Vulcan, with three strokes that might have helped to forge an Ægis. The treasures of his mind are of a similar description with the mind itself; his knowledge is gathered from all the kingdoms of Art and Science and Nature, and lies round him in huge unwieldy heaps. His very language is Titanian; deep, strong, tumultuous, shining with a thousand hues, fused from a thousand elements, and winding in labyrinthic mazes.
Among Richter's gifts, perhaps the first that strikes us as truly great is his Imagination; for he loves to dwell in the loftiest and most solemn provinces of thought; his works abound with mysterious allegories, visions and typical adumbrations; his Dreams, in particular, have a gloomy vastness, broken here and there by wild far-darting splendour, and shadowy forms of meaning rise dimly from the bosom of the void Infinite. Yet, if I mistake not, Humour is his ruling quality, the quality which lives most deeply in his inward nature, and most strongly influences his manner of being. In this rare gift,—for none is rarer than true humour,—he stands unrivalled in his own country; and among late writers, in every other. To describe humour is difficult at all times, and would perhaps be still more difficult in Richter's case. Like all his other qualities, it is vast, rude, irregular; often perhaps overstrained and extravagant; yet fundamentally it is genuine humour, the humour of Cervantes and Sterne, the product not of Contempt but of Love, not of superficial distortion of natural forms, but of deep though playful sympathy with all forms of Nature. It springs not less from the heart than from the head; its result is not laughter, but something far kindlier and better; as it were, the balm which a generous spirit pours over the wounds of life, and which none but a generous spirit can give forth. Such humour is compatible with tenderest and sublimest feelings, or rather, it is incompatible with the want of them. In Richter, accordingly, we find a true sensibility; a softness, sometimes a simple humble pathos, which works its way into every heart. Some slight incident is carelessly thrown before us: we smile at it perhaps, but with a smile more sad than tears; and the unpretending passage in its meagre brevity sinks deeper into the soul than sentimental volumes.
It is on the strength of this and its accompanying endowments that his main success as an artist depends. His favourite characters have always a dash of the ridiculous in their circumstances or their composition, perhaps in both: they are often men of no account; vain, poor, ignorant, feeble; and we scarcely know how it is that we love them; for the author all along has been laughing no less heartily than we at their ineptitudes; yet so it is, his Fibel, his Fixlein, his Siebenkas, even his Schmelzle, insinuate themselves into our affections; and their ultimate place is closer to our hearts than that of many more splendid heroes. This is the test of true humour; no wit, no sarcasm, no knowledge will suffice; not talent but genius will accomplish the result. It is in studying these characters that we first convince ourselves of Richter's claim to the title of a poet, of a true creator. For with all his wild vagueness, this highest intellectual honour cannot be refused him. The figures and scenes which he lays before us, distorted, entangled, indescribable as they seem, have a true poetic existence; for we not only hear of them, but we see them, afar off, by the wondrous light, which none but the Poet, in the strictest meaning of that word, can shed over them.
So long as humour will avail him, his management even of higher and stronger characters may still be pronounced successful; but whenever humour ceases to be applicable, his success is more or less imperfect. In the treatment of heroes proper he is seldom completely happy. They shoot into rugged exaggeration in his hands, their sensibility becomes too copious and tearful, their magnanimity too fierce, abrupt and thoroughgoing. In some few instances they verge towards absolute failure: compared with their less ambitious brethren, they are almost of a vulgar cast; with all their brilliancy and vigour, too like that positive, determinate, choleric, volcanic class of personages whom we meet with so frequently in novels; they call themselves Men, and do their utmost to prove the assertion, but they cannot make us believe it; for after all their vapouring and storming, we see well enough that they are but Engines, with no more life than the Freethinkers' model in Martinus Scriblerus, the Nuremberg Man, who operated by a combination of pipes and levers, and though he could breathe and digest perfectly, and even reason as well as most country parsons, was made of wood and leather. In the general conduct of such histories and delineations, Richter seldom appears to advantage: the incidents are often startling and extravagant; the whole structure of the story has a rugged, broken, huge, artificial aspect, and will not assume the air of truth. Yet its chasms are strangely filled up with the costhest materials; a world, a universe of wit and knowledge and fancy and imagination has sent its fairest products to adorn the edifice; the rude and rent cyclopean walls are resplendent with jewels and beaten gold; rich stately foliage screens it, the balmiest odours encircle it; we stand astonished if not captivated, delighted if not charmed, by the artist and his art.
By a critic of his own country Richter has been named a Western Oriental, an epithet which Goethe himself is at the pains to reproduce and illustrate in his West-östlichter Divan. The mildness, the warm all-comprehending love attributed to Oriental poets may in fact be discovered in Richter; not less their fantastic exaggeration, their brilliant extravagance; above all, their overflowing abundance, their lyrical diffuseness, as if writing for readers who were altogether passive, to whom no sentiment could be intelligible unless it were expounded and dissected, and presented under all its thousand aspects. In this last point Richter is too much an Oriental: his passionate outpourings would often be more effective were they far briefer. Withal, however, he is a Western Oriental: he lives in the midst of cultivated Europe in the nineteenth century; he has looked with a patient and piercing eye on its motley aspect; and it is this Europe, it is the changes of its many-coloured life, that are held up to us in his works. His subject is Life; his chosen study has been Man. Few have known the world better, or taken at once a clearer and a kindlier view of its concerns. For Richter's mind is at peace with itself: a mild, humane, beneficent spirit breathes through his works. His very contempt, of which he is by no means incapable or sparing, is placid and tolerant; his affection is warm, tender, comprehensive, not dwelling among the high places of the world, not blind to its objects when found among the poor and lowly. Nature in all her scenes and manifestations he loves with a deep, almost passionate love; from the solemn phases of the starry heaven to the simple floweret of the meadow, his eye and his heart are open for her charms and her mystic meanings. From early years, he tells us, he may be said to have almost lived under the open sky: here he could recreate himself, here he studied, here he often wrote. It is not with the feeling of a mere painter and viewhunter that he looks on Nature: but he dwells amid her beauties and solemnities as in the mansion of a Mother; he finds peace in her majestic peace; he worships, in this boundless Temple, the great original of Peace, to whom the Earth and the fulness thereof belongs. For Richter does not hide from us that he looks to the Maker of the Universe as to his Father; that in his belief of man's Immortality lies the sanctuary of his spirit, the solace of all suffering, the solution of all that is mysterious in human destiny. The wild freedom with which he treats the dogmas of religion must not mislead us to suppose that he himself is irreligious or unbelieving. It is Religion, it is Belief, in whatever dogmas expressed, or whether expressed in any, that has reconciled for him the contradictions of existence, that has overspread his path with light, and chastened the fiery elements of his spirit by mingling with them Mercy and Humility. To many of my readers it may be surprising, that in this respect Richter is almost solitary among the great minds of his country. These men too, with few exceptions, seem to have arrived at spiritual peace, at full harmonious development of being; but their path to it has been different. In Richter alone, among the great (and even sometimes truly moral) writers of his day,[1] do we find the Immortality of the Soul expressly insisted on, nay, so much as incidentally alluded to. This is a fact well meriting investigation and reflection; but here is not the place for treating it.
Of Richter's Works I have left myself no room for speaking individually; nor, except with large details, could the criticism of them be attempted with any profit. His Novels, published in what order I have not accurately learned, are the Unsichtbare Loge (Invisible Lodge); Flegeljahre (Wild Oats); Leben Fibels, Verfassers der Beinrodschen Fibel (Life of Fibel; or to translate the spirit of it: Life of Primer, Author of the Christ-church Primer); Leben des Quintus Fixlein, and Schmezle's Reise, here presented to the English reader: Katzenberger's Badereise, and the Jubelsenior; with two of much larger and more ambitious structure, Hesperus and Titan, each of which I have in its turn seen rated as his masterpiece: the former only is known to me. His work on Criticism has been mentioned already: he has also written on Education, a volume named Levana; the Campanerthal (Campanian Vale) I understand to turn upon the Immortality of the Soul. His miscellaneous and fugitive writings were long to enumerate. Essays, fantasies, apologues, dreams, have appeared in various periodicals: the best of these performances, collected and revised by himself, were published some years ago, under the title of Herbst-Blumine (Autumnal Flora). There is also a Chrestomathie (what we should call Beauties) of Richter, in four volumes.
To characterise these works would be difficult after the fullest inspection: to describe them to English readers would be next to impossible. Whether poetical, philosophical, didactic, or fantastic, they seem all to be emblems, more or less complete, of the singular mind where they originated. As a whole, the first perusal of them, more particularly to a foreigner, is almost infallibly offensive; and neither their meaning, nor their no-meaning, is to be discerned without long and sedulous study. They are a tropical wilderness, full of endless tortuosities; but with the fairest flowers, and the coolest fountains; now overarching us with high umbrageous gloom, now opening in long gorgeous vistas. We wander through them enjoying their wild grandeur; and by degrees our half-contemptuous wonder at the Author passes into reverence and love. His face was long hid from us: but we see him at length in the firm shape of spiritual manhood; a vast and most singular nature, but vindicating his singular nature by the force, the beauty and benignity which pervade it. In fine, we joyfully accept him for what he is, and was meant to be. The graces, the polish, the sprightly elegances which belong to men of lighter make, we cannot look for or demand from him. His movement is essentially slow and cumbrous, for he advances not with one faculty, but with a whole mind; with intellect, and pathos, and wit, and humour, and imagination, moving onward like a mighty host, motley, ponderous, irregular, and irresistible. He is not airy, sparkling and precise, but deep, billowy and vast. The melody of his nature is not expressed in common note-marks, or written down by the critical gamut; for it is wild and manifold; its voice is like the voice of cataracts and the sounding of primeval forests. To feeble ears it is discord, but to ears that understand it deep majestic music.
In his own country, we are told,[2] 'Richter has been in fashion, then out of fashion, then in it again; till at last he has been raised far above all fashion,' which indeed is his proper place. What his fate will be in England is now to be decided. Could much-respected counsels from admirers of Richter have availed with me, he had not at present been put upon his trial. Predictions are unanimous that here he will be condemned or even neglected. Of my countrymen, in this small instance, I have ventured to think otherwise. To those, it is true, 'the space of whose Heaven does not extend more than three ells,' and who understand and perceive that with these three ells the Canopy of the Universe terminates, Richter will justly enough appear a monster, from without the verge of warm three-ell Creation; and their duty, with regard to him, will limit itself to chasing him forth of the habitable World, back again into his native Chaos. If we judge of works of art, as the French do of language, with a Cela ne se dit pas, Richter will not escape his doom; for it is too true that he respects not the majesty of Use and Wont, and has said and thought much which is by no means usually said and thought. In England, however, such principles of literary jurisprudence are rarer. To many, I may hope, even this dim glimpse of a spirit like Richter's will be gratifying; and if it can hardly be expected that their first judgment of him will be favourable, curiosity may be awakened, and a second and a truer judgment, on ampler grounds and maturer reflection, may follow. His larger works must ultimately become known to us; they deserve it better than thousands which have had that honour.
Of the two Works here offered to the reader little special explanation is required. Schmelzle's Journey I have not found noticed by any of his German critics; and must give it on my own responsibility, as one of the most finished, as it is at least one of the simplest, among his smaller humorous performances. The Life of Fixlein no stepchild in its own country, seems nevertheless a much more immature, as it is a much earlier composition. I select it not without reluctance; rather from necessity than preference. Its faults, I am too sure, will strike us much sooner than its beauties; and even by the friendliest and most patient critic it must be admitted that among the latter, many of our Author's highest qualities are by no means exhibited in full concentration, nay, that some of them are wanting altogether, or at best, indicated rather than evinced. Let the reader accept it with such allowances; not as Richter's best novel, which it is far from being, but simply as his shortest complete one; not as a full impress of him, but as a faint outline, intended rather to excite curiosity than to satisfy it. On the whole, Richter's is a mind peculiarly difficult to represent by specimen; for its elements are complex and various, and it is not more by quality than by quantity that it impresses us.
Both Works I have endeavoured to present in their full dimensions, with all their appurtenances, strange as some of these may appear. If the language seem rugged, heterogeneous, perplexed, the blame is not wholly mine. Richter's style may be pronounced the most untranslateable, not in German only, but in any other modern literature.[3] Let the English reader fancy a Burton writing, not an Anatomy of Melancholy, but a foreign romance, through the scriptory organs of a Jeremy Bentham! Richter exhausts all the powers of his own most ductile language: what in him was over-strained and rude would naturally become not less but more so in the hands of his translator.
For this, and many other offences of my Author, apologies might be attempted; but much as I wish for a favourable sentence, it is not meet that Richter, in the Literary-Judgment-hall, should appear as a culprit; or solicit suffrages, which, if he cannot claim them, are unavailing. With the hundred real, and the ten thousand seeming weaknesses of his cause, a fair trial is a thing he will court rather than dread. 
Jean Paul Richter.
- ↑ The two venerable Jacobis belong, in character, if scarcely in date, to an older school; so also does Herder, from whom Richter learned much, both morally and intellectually, and whom he seems to have loved and reverenced beyond any other. Wieland is intelligible enough; a sceptic in the style of Bolingbroke and Shaftesbury, what we call a French or Scotch sceptic, a rather shallow species. Lessing also is a sceptic, but of a much nobler sort; a doubter who deserved to believe.
- ↑ Franz Horn's Poesie und Beredsamktit der Deutschen (Poetry and Eloquence of the Germans, from Luther's time to the present); a work which I am bound to recommend to all students of German literature, as a valuable guide and indicator. Bating a certain not altogether erroneous sectarianism in regard to religion, and a certain janty priggishness of style, nay, it must be owned, a corresponding priggishness of character, they will find in Horn a lively, fair, well-read and on the whole interesting and instructive critic. The work is in three volumes; to which a prior publication, entitled Umrisse (Outlines), forms a fourth; bringing down the History, or rather Sketch, to the border? of the year 1819.
- ↑ The following long title of a little German Book I may quote by way of premunition: "K. Reinhold's Lexicon for Jean Paul's Works, or Explanation of all the foreign Words and unusual Modes of Speech which occur in his Writings; with short Notices of the historical Persons and Facts therein alluded to; and plain German Versions of the most difficult Passages in the Context. A necessary Assistant for all who would read those Works-with profit. First Volume, containing Levana. Leipzig, 1808." Unhappily, with this First Volume K. Reinhold seems to have stopped short. More than once, in the following pages, have I longed for his help; and been forced at last to rest satisfied with a meaning, and too imperfect a conviction that it was the right one.