More than to any other German writer De Quincey felt himself attracted to Jean Paul. He had read him. early in Wales; twenty years later he was studying Comet, which had just appeared (1820—22). That he felt himself perfectly familiar with Richter is certain, for he promised to draw up a classification of his writings. This, however, never appeared; his only contributions were an article, John Paul Frederick Richter, a series of short translations, Analects from Richter, and two other longer ones, Dream of the Universe and Last Will and Testament The House of Weeping. De Quincey knew certainly the following works of Jean Paul: Hesperus, Titan, Comet, Flegeljahre, Siebenkäs, Vorschule der Aesthetik, Brief an meinen Sohn Hans Paul über

1

The

1 London Magazine, Dec. 1821; Feb. and March 1823. Happy Life of a Parish Priest in Sweden and The Last Will and Testament etc. appeared in connection with the article on Richter in Dec. 1821. The second of these was not reprinted by De Quincey. He apologizes later for his translation of the first, executed, he says, before he had a complete knowledge of German. (cf. Works XI, 273, note). The other Analects appeared in Feb. 1824, with the exception of the Dream of the Universe, which appeared in March. They were reprinted by De Quincey with the exception of a few fragments. cf. Works XI, 259 ff.

Philosophie. Wahrheit aus Jean Pauls, Leben.1 His longer translations are: Last Will and Testament. The House

of Weeping. (Chapter I of the Flegeljahre, Jean Paul's Werke XX, 3ff.) 2. The Happy Life of a Parish Priest in Sweden, ib. 22 ff. The Dream of the Universe. (Comet, Vol. XXVIII, 148 ff.) 3

3

From his translations alone one might see what attracted De Quincey towards Jean Paul. They show for the most part tender feeling, symbolism and allegory, the vague or the grand, meditative sentiment or fantastic humor.

De Quincey's criticism of Jean Paul may be summed up as follows: Until the appearance of Schiller, Jean Paul was the first mind in Germany fitted to command the respect of foreign peoples, He is the most original writer in Germany; his mind "unless moving from an impulse self-derived, cannot move at all". In equal mastery of pathos and humor, he is much the superior of Sterne, indeed, the most remarkable since Shakespeare. "John Paul's intellect, his faculty of catching at a glance all the relations of objects, both the grand, the lovely, the ludicrous, and the fantastic is painfully and almost morbidly active". Here again he is like Shakespeare, if in a far less degree. In this lies the difficulty of Jean Paul's style, not in his language. He is elliptical because his mind sees simultaneonsly points.

1 For the last cf. Froude, Thomas Carlyle, The First Forty Years of his Life I, 415.

2 Jean Paul's sämmtliche Werke, 33 Bände. Berlin 1841-42. 3 For other translations from Richter see Appendix I.

4 For the most part taken from the article John Paul Frederick Richter. cf. Works XI, 259 ff.

5 Ib. IV, 431.

of thought far remote. He seems obscure because "the vast expansion and discursiveness in his range of notice and observation carries him into every department and nook of human life, of science, of art and of literature"; because the fineness and evanescent brilliancy of his oblique glances and surface-skimmering allusions, often fling but half a meaning on the mind". No book is so full of wit as the Vorschule der Aesthetik. Jean Paul is the Rousseau and Sterne of Germany.' He is the greatest of all subjective writers, of those whose qualities consist in "the absorption of the universal into the concrete, of the pure intellect into the human nature of the author". As mere rhetorician in the grand sonorous style Jean Paul occasionally reaches the level of Jeremy Taylor and Sir Thomas Browne, a balance of the two opposite forces of eloquent passion and rhetorical fancy."

4

3

De Quincey himself says that reverence for Jean Paul as a man was one of the chief causes of his admiration. Goethe is "a mere corrupted pigmy" in comparison. De Quincey quotes approvingly the estimate of Herder, “I willingly pardon him his want of ordonnance and of metre in consideration of high-toned virtue, his living world, his profound heart, his creative and plastic intellect”. In the benignity of his disposition he is again like Shakespeare.

In many respects this criticism of Jean Paul is equally true of De Quincey. His own mind springs from thought to thought with marvelous rapidity. He too, has in

1 Works IV, 389.

2 Ib. V, 218.

3 Works X, 104.

4 So Carlyle describes De Quincey's opinion of the two men. cf. Froude I, 396.

his own words, "the power of seeing and connecting things. naturally far remote." Every allusion calls up a host of facts, poetic ideas, or humorous suggestions. This was a matter of pride to De Quincey; but it is often nothing more than a leaping from point to point; often he seems the slave of allusion; and it leads him sometimes into mere pedantry or heavy wit. He too loves the grand and vague; imaginative passion and rhetorical fancy are likewise the chief qualities of his style. De Quincey found in Jean Paul more than a similarity of taste and style; he found a thoroughly congenial nature.

2

One might get the impression from part of this paper that De Quincey was a man of narrow, perhaps pedantic interests, endowed at best with a purely intellectual faculty. But such an idea would be far from the whole truth. As a matter of fact De Quincey had a lively interest in all the affairs of the time, political and social as well as literary and philosophical. He was a recluse, but from his windows he had watched the life on the streets. His sympathies were given without reserve; there was the deepest tenderness in him; he never lost his caprices, his vanities, the feelings of frank delight, of sympathy, of awe, of wonder. Events and impressions lived in his imagination with the vividness of childhood; they grew in the memory; the thoughts and feelings of years gathered about them till they floated before him as a visionary world. 3

4

Such is The Daughter of Lebanon, in which the figure of

1 See e. g. the discussion of a point raised by Kant, Works VIII, 99 ff.

2 e. g. ib. XI, 269, note.

3 See Posth. Works I, 27 or Autobiographic Sketches.

4 Works III, 450 ff. cf. for other examples: The Vision of Sudden

the girl Ann, whom he had known long before in the London streets, becomes a symbol of things beyond his power to express. Whatever he has of fancy, poetry or style, here unite. De Quincey was no logical machine. His dream fancies all sprang from the heart. Their soil was his own experience. Their subject is always one of passion or awfulness; he realizes certain great phenom ena and feelings, such as death, sorrow, the spaces between the stars, the limits of the finite, as definite presences; these abstractions become tangible and visible. Nothing is so remarkable in him as this strange, cumulative imagination. What an impression the single word "pariah" made upon De Quincey! He read eagerly of the Cagots in the Pyrenees, of lepers, of all that concerned the Pariah class, till it became an actuality to him. That word conjured up as by witchcraft a thousand pictures, not statistics or ideas, but things that he had seen, in the actual world or that of the imagination; Ann again on the streets; then, with a widening of his thoughts, not her alone, but the whole street with other cities, other lands, till whole classes, castes and tribes, the outcast and wronged of the world, in all time past and to come, rose up in living multitudes before him. So too on the mail-coach; he feels himself borne onward; the fancy rises with the roll of the wheels. In his mind he sees the city, the vast unknown towards which they go. He thinks of other highways, of other coaches here and there hastening to and from the city through the length and breadth of England, of the net-work of roads, the coaches like great shuttles of trade flying to and fro, till

Death XIII, 300 ff.; Levana and our Ladies of Sorrow XIII, 362 ff.; Suspiria de Profundis, Posth. Works I, 16 ff.