7. Jean Paul

Jean Paul's personality

There are works of the mind that lead such an independent existence that one can devote oneself to them without thinking for a moment of their author. One can follow the Iliad, Hamlet and Othello, Iphigenia from beginning to end without being reminded of the personality of Homer, Shakespeare or Goethe. These works stand before the viewer like beings with a life all their own, like developed human beings that we accept for themselves without asking about their father. In them, not only the spirit of creation but also that of the creator is constantly before us. Agamemnon, Achilles, Othello, Iago, Iphigenia appear before us as individuals who act and speak for themselves. Jean Paul's characters, these Siebenkäs and Leibgeber, these Albano and Schoppe, Walt and Vult always have a companion who speaks with them, who looks over their shoulders. It is Jean Paul himself. The poet himself also speaks in Goethe's Faust. But he does so in a completely different way to Jean Paul. What has flowed from Goethe's nature into the figure of Faust has completely detached itself from the poet; it has become Faust's own being and the poet steps off the stage after he has placed his double on it. Jean Paul always remains standing next to his figures. When immersing ourselves in one of his works, our feelings, our thoughts always jump away from the work and towards the creator. Something similar is also the case with his satirical, philosophical and pedagogical writings. Today we are no longer able to look at a philosophical doctrine in isolation, without reference to its author. We look through the philosophical thoughts to the philosophical personalities. In the writings of Plato, Aristotle and Leibniz, we no longer remain within the logical web of thought. We look for the image of the philosopher. Behind the works we look for the human being struggling with the highest tasks and watch how he has come to terms with the mysteries and riddles of the world in his own way. But this idiosyncrasy has been fully expressed in the works. A personality speaks to us through the works. Jean Paul, on the other hand, always presents himself to us in two forms in his philosophical writings. We believe that he speaks to us from the book; but there is also a person next to us who tells us something that we can never guess from the book. And this second person always has something to say to us that never falls short of the significance of his creations.

One may regard this peculiarity of Jean Paul's as a shortcoming of his nature. For those who are inclined to do so, I would like to counter Jean Paul's own words with some modification: Every nature is good as soon as it remains a solitary one and does not become a general one; for even the natures of a Homer, Plato, Goethe must not become general and unique and fill with their works "all the halls of books, from the old world down to the new, or we would starve and emaciate from oversaturation; as well as a human race, whose peoples and times consisted of nothing but pious Herrnhutters and Speners or Antonines or Lutherans, would at last present something of dull boredom and sluggish advancement."

It is true: Jean Paul's idiosyncrasy never allowed him to create works that have the character of perfection through the unity and roundness of their form, through the natural, objective development of the characters and the plot, through the idealistic representation of his views. He never found the perfect stylistic form for his great spiritual content. But he penetrated the depths and abysses of the human soul and scaled the heights of thought like few others.

Jean Paul was predisposed to a life of the greatest style. Nothing is inaccessible to his fine powers of observation, his high flight of thought. It is conceivable that he would have reached the pinnacle of mastery if he had studied the secrets of art forms like Goethe; or that he would have become one of the greatest philosophers of all time if he had developed his decisive ability to live in the realm of ideas to greater perfection. An unlimited urge for freedom in all his work prevents Jean Paul from submitting to any formal fetters. His bold imagination does not want to be determined in the continuation of a story by the art form it has created for itself at the beginning. Nor does it have the selflessness to suppress inflowing feelings and thoughts if they do not fit into the framework of the work to be created. Jean Paul appears as a sovereign ruler who plays freely with his imaginative creations, unconcerned about artistic principles, unconcerned about logical concerns. If the course of a narrative, a sequence of thoughts, flows on for a while, Jean Paul's creative genius always reclaims his freedom and leads the reader down side paths, occupying him with things that have nothing to do with the main thing, but only join it in the mind of the creator. At every moment, Jean Paul says what he wants to say, even if the objective course of events demands something completely different. Jean Paul's great style lies in this free play. But there is a difference between playing with complete mastery of the field in which one moves, or whether the whim of the player creates formations which give the impression to those who look at things according to their own laws that one part of the formation does not correspond to the other. With regard to the Greek works of art, Goethe bursts out with the words: "I have the suspicion that the Greeks proceeded according to the very laws according to which nature proceeds and which I am on the track of", and: "These high works of art are at the same time the highest works of nature, which have been produced by men according to true and natural laws. Everything arbitrary and imaginary collapses; there is necessity, there is God." One would like to say of Jean Paul's creations: here nature has created an isolated area in which it shows that it can defy its own laws and still be great. Goethe seeks to achieve freedom of creation by incorporating the laws of nature into his own being. He wants to create as nature itself creates. Jean Paul wants to preserve his freedom by not paying attention to the laws of things and imagining the laws of his own personality into his world.

If Jean Paul's nature were not very cozy, his free play with things and feelings would have a repulsive effect. But his interest in nature and people is no less than Goethe's and his love for all beings has no limits. And it is attractive to see how he immerses himself in things with his feelings, with his rapturous imagination, with his lofty flight of thought, without, however, seeing through the essence inherent in these things. essence itself. One would like to apply the saying "love is blind" to the sensuality with which Jean Paul describes nature and people.

And it is not because Jean Paul plays too little, but because he is too serious. The 'dream that his imagination dreams of the world is so majestic that what the senses really perceive seems small and insignificant compared to it. This tempts him to embody the contradiction between his dreams and reality. Reality does not seem serious enough for him to waste his seriousness on it. He makes fun of the smallness of reality, but he never does so without feeling the bitterness of not being able to enjoy this reality more. Jean Paul's humor springs from this basic mood of his character. It allowed him to see things and characters that he would not have seen in a different mood. There is a way to rise above the contradictions of reality and to feel the great harmony of all world events. Goethe sought to rise to this height. Jean Paul lived more in the regions in which nature contradicts itself and becomes unfaithful in detail to what speaks from its whole as truth and naturalness. Appear therefore

Jean Paul's creations, measured against the whole of nature, appear to be imaginary, arbitrary, one cannot say to them: "there is necessity, there is God"; to the individual, to the individual, his sensations appear to be quite true. He has not been able to describe the harmony of the whole, because he has never seen it in clear outline before his imagination; but he has dreamed of this harmony and wonderfully felt and described the contradiction of the individual with it. If his mind had been able to vividly shape the inner unity of all events, he would have become a pathetic poet. But since he only felt the contradictory, petty aspects of reality, he gave vent to them through humorous descriptions.

Jean Paul does not ask: what is reality capable of? He doesn't even get to that. For this question is immediately drowned out by the other: how little this reality corresponds to the ideal. But ideals that are so unable to tolerate the marriage with harsh reality have something soft about them. They lack the strength to live fully and freshly. Those who are dominated by them become sentimental. And sentimentality is one of Jean Paul's character traits. If he is of the opinion that true love dies with the first kiss, or at least with the second, this is proof that his sentimental ideal of love was not created to win flesh and blood. It always retains something ethereal. Thus Jean Paul hovers between a shadowy ideal world, to which his rapturous longing is attached, and a reality that seems foolish and foolish in comparison with that ideal world. Thinking of himself, he says of humor: "Humor, as the inverted sublime, does not destroy the individual, but the finite through the contrast with the idea. For it there is no single folly, no fools, but only folly and a great world; unlike the common joker with his side-swipes, it does not single out individual folly, but humiliates the great, but unlike parody - in order to elevate the small, and elevates the small, but unlike irony - in order to set the great alongside it and thus destroy both, because before infinity everything is equal and nothing is equal." Jean Paul was unable to reconcile the contradictions of the world, which is why he was also helpless in the face of those in his own personality. He could not find the harmony of the forces of the soul that were at work in him. But these forces of the soul have such a powerful effect that one must say that Jean Paul's imperfection is greater than many a perfection of a lower order. Jean Paul's ability may lag behind his will, but this will appears so clearly before one's soul that one feels one is looking into unknown realms when one reads his writings.

Boyhood and grammar school

Jean Paul spent his childhood, from the age of two to twelve, in Joditz an der Saale, not far from Hof. He was born in Wunsiedel on March 21, 1763 as the son of the tertius and organist Johann Christian Christoph Richter, who had married Sophia Rosina Kuhn, the daughter of the cloth maker Johann Paul Kuhn in Hof, on October 16, 1761. Our poet was given the name Johann Paul Friedrich at his baptism. He later formed his literary name Jean Paul by Frenching his first two first names. On i. August 1765, the parents moved to Joditz. The father was appointed pastor there. The family had grown in Wunsiedel with the addition of a son, Adam. Two girls, who died young, and two sons, Gottlieb and Heinrich, were added in Joditz. A last son, Samuel, was born later, when the family was already in Schwarzenbach. Jean Paul describes his childhood in a captivating way in his autobiography, which unfortunately only goes up to 1779. All the traits that later emerged in the man were already evident in the boy. The rapturous fantasy, which is directed towards an ideal realm and which values reality less than this realm, manifested itself at an early age in the form of a fear of ghosts that often tormented him. He slept with his father in a parlor of the Joditz rectory, separated from the rest of the family. The children had to go to bed at nine o'clock. But the hard-working father only came to Jean Paul in the parlor two hours later, after he had finished his night's reading. Those were two difficult hours for the boy. "I lay with my head under the comforter in the sweat of ghostly fear and saw in the darkness the weather light of the cloudy ghostly sky, and I felt as if man himself were being spun by ghostly caterpillars. So I suffered helplessly for two hours at night, until finally my father came up and, like a morning sun, chased away ghosts like dreams." The autobiographer gives an excellent interpretation of this peculiarity of his childhood. "Many a child full of physical fear nevertheless shows courage of mind, but merely for lack of imagination; another, however - like me - trembles before the invisible world, because imagination makes it visible and shapes it, and is easily frightened by the visible, because it never reaches the depths and dimensions of the invisible. Thus, even a quick physical danger -- for example, a running horse, a clap of thunder, a war, the noise of a fire -- only makes me calm and composed, because I fear only with my imagination, not with my senses." And the other side of Jean Paul's nature can also be seen in the boy; that loving devotion to the little things of reality. He had "always had a predilection for the domestic, for still life, for making spiritual nests. He is a domestic shellfish that pushes itself quite comfortably back into the narrowest coils of the shell and falls in love, only that each time it wants to have the snail shell wide open so that it can then raise its four tentacles not as far as four butterfly wings into the air, but ten times further up to the sky; at least with each tentacle to one of the four satellites of Jupiter." He calls this peculiarity of his a "foolish alliance between searching far and searching near - similar to binoculars, which double the proximity or the distance by merely turning around". The boy's attitude towards Christmas is particularly significant for Jean Paul's character. The joys that the near reality offered him could not fill his soul, however great the extent to which they materialized. "For when Paul stood before the tree of lights and the table of lights on Christmas morning and the new world full of splendor and gold and gifts lay uncovered before him and he found and received new things and new and rich things: so the first thing that arose in him was not a tear - namely of joy - but a sigh - namely about life - in a word, even to the boy the crossing or leap or flight from the surging, playful, immeasurable sea of the imagination to the limited and confining solid shore was characterized by a sigh for a greater, more beautiful land. But before this sigh was breathed and before the happy reality showed its powers, Paul felt out of gratitude that he must show himself in the highest degree joyful before his mother; - and this glow he accepted at once, and for a short time too, because immediately afterwards the dawning rays of reality extinguished and removed the moonlight of imagination." Not as a child, nor in later life, could Jean Paul find the bridge between the land of his longing, which his imagination presented to him in unlimited perfection, and the reality that he loved, but which never satisfied him because he could not see it as a whole, but only in detail, in the individual, in the imperfect.

On behalf of his mother, Jean Paul often visited his grandparents in Hof. One summer's day on his way home, as he looked at the sunny, glistening mountain slopes and the drifting clouds at around two o'clock, he was overcome by an "objectless longing, which was a mixture of more pain and less pleasure and a desire without memory. Alas, it was the whole man who longed for the heavenly goods of life, which still lay unmarked and colorless in the deep darkness of the heart and which were fleetingly illuminated by the incident rays of the sun." This longing accompanied Jean Paul throughout his life; he was never granted the favor of seeing the objects of his longing in reality.

There were times when Jean Paul wavered as to whether he was born to be a philosopher or a poet. In any case, there is a distinctly philosophical streak in his personality. Above all else, the philosopher needs to reflect on himself. The philosophical fruits ripen in the most intimate inner being of man. The philosopher must be able to withdraw to this. From here he must be able to find the connection to world events, to the secrets of existence. The young Jean Paul also shows a budding tendency towards self-reflection. He tells us: "I have never forgotten the phenomenon within me, which I have never told anyone about, where I stood at the birth of my self-consciousness, of which I know exactly where and when. One morning, as a very young child, I was standing under the front door and looking to the left at the wood, when suddenly the inner face, I am an I, came before me like a flash of lightning from the sky, and remained shining ever since: then my I had seen itself for the first time and forever." All the peculiarities of Jean Paul's character and those of his creations are already to be found in the earliest traits of his nature. It would be wrong to look for the cause of the physiognomy of his spiritual personality in his growth out of the limited conditions of his upbringing. He himself considers it a happy coincidence that the poet spent his childhood not in a big city but in the village. This generalization is certainly daring. For Jean Paul, because of his individual nature, it was fortunate that he received his first impressions in the idyll of Jodice. For other natures, another is certainly the natural one. Jean Paul said: "Let no poet be born and educated in a capital, but where possible in a village, at most in a small town. The overabundance and overstimulation of a big city are for the excitable child's soul like eating dessert, drinking distilled water and bathing in mulled wine. Life exhausts itself in him in boyhood, and he now has nothing more to wish for than at most the smaller things, the villages. If I think of the most important thing for the poet, of love, he must see in the city, around the warm earthy belt of his parental friends and acquaintances, the larger cold turning and icy zones of unloved people, whom he encounters unknown to him and for whom he can kindle or warm himself as little as a ship's people sailing past another strange ship's people. But in the village they love the whole village, and no infant is buried there without everyone knowing its name and illness and sorrow; - and this glorious sympathy for everyone who looks like a human being, which therefore extends even to the stranger and the beggar, breeds a concentrated love of humanity and the right strength of heart."

There was a real rage for knowledge in the boy Jean Paul. "All learning was my life, and I would have been happy to be taught like a prince by half a dozen teachers at once, but I hardly had the right one." Of course, the father who provided the elementary lessons was not the right man to satisfy this desire. Johann Christoph Christian Richter was an outstanding personality. He inspired his small parish, whose members were connected to him like a large family, with his sermons. He was an excellent musician and even a popular composer of sacred music. Benevolence towards everyone was one of his outstanding character traits. He did some of the work in his field and garden with his own hands. The lessons he gave his son consisted of letting him "merely learn by heart, sayings, catechism, Latin words and Langen's grammar". This was of little avail to the boy, who was thirsting for real spiritual nourishment. Even then, he sought to acquire on his own what was not available to him from outside. He created a box for himself in which he set up a "case library" "made entirely of his own little sedes, which he sewed together and cut out of the wide paper cuttings from his father's octave sermons".

On January 9, 1776, Jean Paul moved to Schwarzenbach with his parents. His father was appointed pastor there by a patron, Baroness von Plotho. Jean Paul now went to a public school. The lessons there did not meet his intellectual needs any more than those of his father. The principal, Karl August Werner, taught the pupils to read in a way that lacked all thoroughness and immersion in the spirit of the writers. The chaplain Völkel, who gave him private lessons in geography and philosophy, provided a substitute for those in need of knowledge. Jean Paul received a great deal of inspiration from philosophy in particular. However, it was precisely this man to whom the young mind's firmly pronounced, rigid individuality came to the fore in a brusque manner. Völkel had promised to play a game of chess with him one day and then forgot about it. Jean Paul was so angry about this that he ignored his beloved philosophical lessons and never went to see his teacher again. At Easter 1779, Jean Paul came to Hof to attend grammar school. His entrance examination revealed an unusual maturity of mind. He was immediately placed in the middle section of the Prima. Soon afterwards, on April 135, his father died. Jean Paul had no real luck with his teachers in Hof either. Neither principal Kirsch nor deputy principal Remebaum, the primary school teachers, made any particular impression on Jean Paul. And once again he felt compelled to satisfy his mind on his own. Fortunately, his relationship with the enlightened Pastor Vogel in Rehau gave him the opportunity to do so. He placed his entire library at his disposal and Jean Paul was able to immerse himself in the works of Helvetius, Hippel, Goethe, Lavater and Lessing. He already felt the urge to assimilate what he had read and make it useful for his own life. He filled entire volumes with excerpts of what he had read. And a series of essays emerged from this reading. The grammar school pupil set about important things. What our concept of God is like; about the religions of the world; the comparison of the fool and the wise, the fool and the genius; about the value of studying philosophy at an early age; about the importance of inventing new truths: these were the tasks he set himself. And he already had a lot to say about these things. He was already dealing independently with the nature of God, with the questions of Christianity, with the spiritual progress of mankind. We encounter boldness and maturity of judgment in these works. He also ventured to write a poem, the novel "Abelard and Heloise". Here he appears in style and content as an imitator of Miller, the Sigwart poet. His longing for a perfect world that transcended all reality brought him into the path of this poet, for whom there were only tears on earth over broken hearts and dried up hopes and for whom happiness only lies beyond death. The motto of Jean Paul's novel already shows that he was seized by this mood: "The sensitive man is too good for this earth, where there are cold mockers - in that world only, which bears weeping angels, does he find reward for his tears."

In Hof, Jean Paul already found what his heart needed most, participating friends: Christian Otto, the son of a wealthy merchant, who later became the confidant of his literary works; Johann Richard Hermann, the son of a toolmaker, a brilliant man full of energy and knowledge, who unfortunately succumbed to the efforts of a life rich in deprivation and hardship as early as 1790. Furthermore, Adolf Lorenz von Oerthel, the eldest son of a wealthy merchant from Töpen near Hof. In contrast to Hermann, the latter was a soft, sentimentalist full of sentimentality and enthusiasm. Hermann was realistically inclined and combined practical wisdom with a scientific sense. In these two characters, Jean Paul already encountered the types that he later embodied in his poems in manifold variations, as the idealistic Siebenkäs compared to the realistic Leibgeber; as Walt compared to Vult. On May 19, 1781, Jean Paul was enrolled as a student of theology in Leipzig.

University life

Conflicting thoughts and feelings waged a fierce battle in Jean Paul's soul when he entered the classrooms of the high school. He had absorbed opinions and views through avid reading; but neither his artistic nor his philosophical imagination wanted to unfold in such a way that what he had absorbed from outside would have taken on a fixed, individual structure. The basic forces of his personality were strong but indeterminate; the energy was great, the creative power sluggish. The impressions he received aroused powerful feelings in him, drove him to make decisive value judgments; but they did not want to form themselves into vivid images and thoughts in his imagination.

At university, Jean Paul only sought all-round stimulation. As the eldest son of a clergyman, it was part of the family tradition for him to study theology. If the intention of becoming a theologian ever played a role in his life, it did not last long. He wrote to his friend Vogel: "I have made it a rule in my studies to do only what is most pleasant to me, what I am least unskilled at and what I already find useful and consider useful. I have often deceived myself by following this rule, but I have never regretted this mistake. - To study what one does not love is to struggle with disgust, boredom and weariness in order to obtain a good that one does not desire; it is to waste one's powers, which one feels are made for something else, in vain on a thing where one can make no progress, and to withdraw them from the thing in which one would make progress." He lives at the university as a man of spiritual enjoyment who seeks only that which develops his dormant powers. He listens to lectures on St. John by Magister Weber, on the Acts of the Apostles by Morus; on logic, metaphysics and aesthetics by Platner, on morals by Wieland, on mathematics by Gehler; on Latin philology by Rogler. He also read Voltaire, Rousseau, Helvetius, Pope, Swift, Young, Cicero, Horace, Ovid and Seneca. The diary pages and studies in which he collects and processes what he has heard and read grow into thick volumes. He developed an almost superhuman capacity for work and a desire to work. He set down his views in essays that reflect his struggle for a free world view, independent of religious and scholarly prejudices.

The insecurity of his mind, which prevented Jean Paul from finding his own way in the face of the contemplation and appropriation of the foreign, would probably have held him back for a long time from appearing before the public with his attempts at writing if the bitterest poverty had not driven him to the decision: "To write books in order to be able to buy books." Jean Paul did not have time to wait until the bitterness he felt as a Leipzig student about the deplorable state of life and culture had turned into a cheerful, superior sense of humor. Early mature works emerged, satires in which the grumbling, criticizing man and not the poet and philosopher speaks out of Jean Paul. Inspired by Erasmus' "Encomium moriae", he wrote his "Praise of Stupidity" in 1782, for which he was unable to find a publisher, and in the same year the "Greenland Trials", with which he first appeared in public in 1783. When one reads these writings, one has the feeling that here is a man who not only vents his resentment on what he encounters that is wrong, but who painstakingly collects all the weaknesses and dark sides, all the stupidities and foolishness, all the mendacity and cowardice of life in order to pursue them with his wit. The roots through which Jean Paul connected with reality were short and thin. Once he had gained a foothold somewhere, he could easily loosen it again and transplant his roots into other soil. His life was broad, but not deep. This is most evident in his relationship with women. He did not love with the full elemental force of his heart. His love was a game with the sensations of love. He did not love women. He loved love. In 1783 he had a love affair with a beautiful country girl, Sophie Ellrodt in Helmbrechts. One day he wrote to her that her love made him happy; he assured her that her kisses had satisfied the longing that his eyes had aroused in him. But he also writes soon afterwards that he only stayed a little longer in Hof because he wanted to be happy in this place for some time before he would be happy in Leipzig (cf. Paul Nerrlich, Jean Paul, p. 138 £.). As soon as he is in Leipzig, the whole love dream has faded. His later relationships with women were just as playful with the feelings of love, including those with his wife. His love had something ghostly about it; the addition of sensuality and passion had too little elective affinity to the ideal element of his love.

The insecurity of the mind, the little connection of his being with the real conditions of life made Jean Paul a self-tormentor at times. He just flitted about reality; that is why he often had to go astray and reflect on his own personality. We read of a self-torture that went as far as asceticism in Jean Paul's devotional booklet, which he wrote in 1784. But even this asceticism has something playful about it. It remains stuck in ideal reverie. However profound the individual remarks he writes down about pain, virtue, glory-seeking, anger: one always has the impression that Jean Paul merely wanted to intoxicate himself with the beauty of his rules of life. It was refreshing for him to write down thoughts such as the following: "Hatred is not based on moral ugliness, but on your mood, sensitivity, health; but is it the other's fault that you are ill? ... The offending man, not the offending stone, annoys you; so think of every evil as the effect of a physical cause or as coming from the Creator, who also allowed this concatenation." Who can believe that he is serious about such thoughts, who almost at the same time wrote the "Greenland Trials", in which he wielded his scourge against writing, against clericalism, against ancestral pride in a way that does not betray the fact that he regards the wrongs of life as the effect of a physical cause?

The bitterest need caused Jean Paul to leave Leipzig like a fugitive on October 27, 1784. He had to secretly evade his creditors. On November 16, he arrived in Hof with his mother, who was also completely impoverished.

Educator and years of travel

Jean Paul spent two years in Hof surrounded by a housebound mother and the most oppressive family circumstances. Alongside the noisy bustle of his mother, the washing and scrubbing, the cooking and flattening, the whirring of the spinning wheel, he dreamed of his ideals. Only the New Year of 1787 brought partial redemption. He became a tutor to the younger brother of his friend Oerthel in Töpen near Hof. There was at least one person in Chamber Councillor Oerthel's house who was sympathetic to the idealistic dreamer, who had a slight tendency towards sentimentality. It was the woman of the house. Jean Paul remembered her with gratitude throughout his life. Her loving nature made up for some of the things that her husband's rigidity and roughness spoiled for Jean Paul. And even if the boy he had to educate caused the teacher many a worry due to his suspicious character, the latter seems to have clung to his pupil with a certain love, for he later said of the early departed that he had had the most beautiful heart and that the best seeds of virtue and knowledge lay in his head and heart. After two years, Jean Paul left Oerthel's house. We are not informed of the reasons for this departure. Necessity soon forced him to exchange the old schoolmaster's office for a new one. He moved to Schwarzenbach to give elementary lessons to the children of his old friends, the pastor Völkel, the district administrator Clöter and the commissioner Vogel.

During his time in Hof and Töpen, Jean Paul's need for friendship bore the most beautiful fruit. If Jean Paul lacked the endurance of passion for devoted love, he was made for friendship that lived more in the spiritual element. His friendship with Oerthel and Hermann deepened during this time. And when they were taken from him by death in quick succession, in 1789 and 1790, he erected monuments to them in his soul, the sight of which spurred him on to ever new work throughout his life. The deep glimpses that Jean Paul was granted into the souls of his friends were a powerful stimulus for his poetic creativity. Jean Paul needed to lean on people who were attached to him with all their soul. The urge to transfer his feelings and ideas directly into another human soul was great. He could consider it fortunate that shortly after Oerthel and Hermann had passed away, another friend surrendered to him in loyal love. It was Christian Otto who, from 1790 until Jean Paul's death, lived through his intellectual life with selfless sympathy.

Jean Paul himself describes how he spent the period from 1783 to 1790. "I enjoyed the most beautiful things in life, autumn, summer and spring with their landscapes on earth and in the sky, but I had nothing to eat or wear and remained anemic and little respected in Hof im Voigtlande." It was during this time that his "Auswahl aus des Teufels Papieren nebst einem notwendigen Aviso vom Juden Mendel" was written. In this book, the creative satirist appears alongside the polemicist. The criticism has partly been transformed into narrative. People appear instead of the earlier abstract ideas. But what is still laboriously struggling for embodiment here emerges in a more perfect form in the three stories written in 1790: "Des Amtsvogts Freudel Klaglibell gegen seinen verfluchten Dämon"; "Des Rektors Fälbel und seiner Primaner Reise nach dem Fichtelberg" and in the "Leben des vergnügten Schulmeisterleins Maria Wuz in Auenthal". In these three poems, Jean Paul succeeds in drawing characters in which humanity becomes caricature. Freudel, Fälbel and Wuz appear as if Jean Paul were looking at his ideal image of man in mirrors, which make all the features appear diminished and distorted. But in doing so, he creates afterimages of reality. Freudel depicts the t'ypus of man, who at moments when he needs the greatest seriousness and solemn dignity becomes ridiculous through the trickery of his absent-mindedness or chance. Another kind of human caricature, which judges the whole world from the narrowest perspective of its own profession, is characterized in Fälbel. A schoolmaster who believes that the great French social upheaval would have been impossible if the revolutionary heroes had commented on the old classics instead of reading the evil philosophers. The Auenthal schoolmaster Maria Wuz is a wonderful picture of stunted humanity. In his village idyll, he lives human life on a microscopic scale, but he is as happy and content as none of the greatest sages can be.

It is difficult to decide whether Jean Paul was a good schoolmaster. If he was able to follow the principles he wrote in his diaries, then he certainly turned his pupils into what they were capable of becoming. But schoolmastering was certainly more fruitful for him than for his pupils. For he gained deep insights into young human nature, which led him to the great pedagogical ideas that he later developed in his "Levana". However, he would hardly have been able to endure the confines of the office for three years if he had not found in his visits to Hof a conductor that was entirely in keeping with his nature. He was a connoisseur of the intellectual pleasures that arise from relationships with talented and excitable people. In Hof, he was always surrounded by a crowd of young girls who swarmed around him and stimulated his imagination. He regarded them as his "erotic academy". He fell in love, as far as he could love, with each of the academy girls, and the intoxication of one love affair had not yet faded when another began.

This mood gave rise to the two novels "The Invisible Lodge" and "Hesperus". Gustav, the main character of the "Invisible Lodge", is a nature like Wuz, who only outgrows Wuz's existence and is forced to allow his tender heart, which could be content in a narrowly defined circle, to be tortured by harsh reality. The contrast between ideal sensuality and what is really valid in life forms the basic motif of the novel. And this motif becomes Jean Paul's great problem in life. It appears in ever new forms in his creations. In "The Invisible Lodge", the ideal sensuality has the character of a deep emotionalism that tends towards sentimentalism; in "Hesperus" it takes on a more rational form. The protagonist, Viktor, no longer merely raves with his heart like Gustav, but also with his mind and reason. Viktor actively intervenes in the circumstances of life, while Gustav passively allows them to affect him. The feeling that runs through both novels is this: the world is not made for good and great people. They have to retreat to an ideal island within themselves and lead an existence outside and above the world in order to make do with its wretchedness. The great man with a noble nature, a brilliant mind and an energetic will, who weeps or laughs at the world, but never draws a sense of satisfaction from it, is one of the extremes between which all Jean Paul's characters are to be placed. The other is the small, narrow-minded person with a subaltern attitude, who is content with the world because his empty mind does not conjure up dreams of a greater one. The figure of Quintus Fixlein in the 1794 story "Life of Quintus Fixlein drawn from fifteen boxes of notes" approaches the latter extreme; the following poem "Jean Paul's biographical amusements under the brainpan of a giantess", written in the same year, approaches the former. Fixlein is happy with modest plans for the future and the most petty scholarly work; Lismore, the main character of the "Amusements", suffers from the disharmony of his energetic will and weaker ability and from the other between his idealistically lofty ideas of human nature and those of his fellow human beings. The struggle that arises when a strong will that transcends the boundaries of reality and a human attitude that grows out of the limited conditions of a petty existence collide was depicted by Jean Paul in the book "Blumen-, Frucht- und Dornenstücke oder Ehestand, Tod und Hochzeit des Armenadvokaten F. St. Siebenkäs im Reichsmarktflecken Kuhschnappel" (Pieces of Flowers, Fruit and Thorns or the Marriage, Death and Wedding of the Poor Lawyer F. St. Siebenkäs in the Imperial Market Town of Kuhschnappel), published at Easter 1795. There are two people here who, because of their higher nature, do not know how to come to terms with the world. One, Siebenkäs, believes in a higher existence and suffers from the fact that this cannot be found in the world; the other, Leibgeber, sees through the nothingness of the world, but does not believe in the possibility of any kind of better. He is a humorist who thinks nothing of life and laughs at reality; but at the same time he is a cynic who cares nothing for higher things and considers all idealistic dreams to be bubbles of foam that rise from the muck of vulgarity as a haze to the scorn of humanity. Siebenkäs suffers at the hands of his wife Lenette, in whom philistine, narrow-minded reality is embodied; and Leibgeber suffers from his faithlessness and hopelessness. But he always rises above it with humor. He demands nothing extraordinary from life; that is why his disappointments are not great and why he does not consider it necessary to make higher demands of himself.

Even before finishing "Hesperus", Jean Paul had swapped his teaching and educational work in Schwarzenbach for one in Hof. In the summer of 1796, he undertook a trip to Weimar. Like the heroes of his novels in the midst of a reality that did not satisfy them, Jean Paul felt at home in the city of muses. In his opinion, everything that reality could contain in terms of grandeur and sublimity should have been crowded together in this small town. He had hoped to meet giants and titans of spirit and imagination, as he had imagined them in his dreams to the point of superhumanity. And he did find geniuses, but only human beings. He was not attracted to either Goethe or Schiller. Both had already made their peace with the world at that time; both had realized the great world harmony that allows man to make peace with reality after a long struggle. Jean Paul was not allowed to find this peace. His soul was made for the lust of the struggle between ideal and reality. Goethe seemed to him stiff, cold, proud, frozen against all men; Schiller rock-faced and hard, so that foreign enthusiasm bounced off him. Only with Herder did a beautiful bond of friendship develop. The theologian, who sought salvation beyond the real world, could be a comrade to Jean Paul, but not the worldlings Goethe and Schiller, the idolizers of the real. Jean Paul felt the same way about Jacobi, the philosophical fisherman in the murky waters, as he did about Herder. Understanding and reason penetrate reality and illuminate it with the light of the idea; feeling clings to the dark, the unrecognizable, to the world of faith. And Jacobi reveled in the world of faith, as did Jean Paul. This trait of his spirit won him the hearts of women. Karoline Herder raved about the poet of sentimentality, and Charlotte von Kalb admired in him the ideal of a man.

After his return from Weimar, Jean Paul's poetry lost itself completely in the vagueness of emotional indulgence and in an unworldly way of thinking and attitude in "Jubelsenior" and "Kampanerthal oder über die Unsterblichkeit der Seele" (1797). If the journey to Weimar had not strengthened his eyes for an unbiased contemplation of life, the varied wanderings that lasted from 1797 to 1804 did even less. He now lived successively in Leipzig, Weimar, Berlin, Meiningen and Koburg. Everywhere he established relationships with people, especially with women; everywhere he was welcomed with open arms. People were intoxicated by his ideas, which flowed from the depths of the emotional world. But the attraction they exerted on him soon wore off. He wrapped thick tentacles around the people he got to know, but soon drew these arms in again. In Weimar, Jean Paul spent happy days in the company of Frau von Kalb, Duchess Amalia, Knebel, Böttiger and others; in Hildburghausen, he carried his love game so far that he became engaged to Caroline von Feuchtersleben, only to part with her again soon afterwards. From Berlin he fetched the woman who really became his wife, Karoline, the second daughter of the senior tribunal councillor Maier. He entered into a marriage with her, which initially lifted him to the highest heights of happiness that a man can climb, and from which all happiness then disappeared to such an extent that Jean Paul only held on to her out of duty and Karoline endured it with submission and self-emptying. On her union with Jean Paul, this woman wrote to her father: "I never thought I would be as happy as I am. It will sound strange to you when I tell you that the high enthusiasm which carried me away when I met Richter, but which subsequently faded away as I descended into a more real life, is revived anew every day." And in July 1820, she confessed that she no longer had any right to his heart, that she felt poor and miserable in comparison to him.

In Meiningen and Koburg, Jean Paul was able to get to know the peaks from which the world is ruled. The dukes in both places were on the most friendly terms with him. He was not to be missed at any court festival. Anyone seeking intellectual entertainment and stimulation joined him.

Jean Paul's two most important poems, "Titan" and "Flegeljahre", were written during his years of wandering. His poetic power appears heightened, his imagination works in sharper outlines in these works. The characters are similar to those we encounter in his earlier works, but the artist has gained greater confidence in drawing and more vivid colors. He has also descended from depicting the outside of people into the depths of their souls. While Siebenkäs, Wuz and Fälbel appear like silhouettes, the Albano and Schoppe of the "Titan", the Walt and Vult of the "Flegeljahre" appear as perfectly painted figures. Albano is the man of strong will. He wants great things without asking where the strength to achieve them will come from. He has an addiction to breaking all the shackles of humanity. Unfortunately, it is precisely this humanity that is confined within narrow limits. A soft heart, an over-sensitive sensibility blunt the power of his imagination. He is unable to truly love either the rapturous Liana, with her fine nerves and boundless selflessness, or the ingenious, free-spirited Linda. He cannot love at all because his ideals make him demand more from love than it can offer. Linda wants devotion and nothing but devotion from Albano; but he thinks that he must first win her love through great deeds, through participation in the great war of freedom. He first wants to acquire what he could easily have. Reality in itself is nothing to him; only when he can combine an ideal with it does it become something to him. In view of the great works of art in Rome, it is not the secrets of art that open up to him, but his thirst for action awakens. "How in Rome a person can only enjoy and melt softly in the fire of art, instead of being ashamed and struggling for strength and action," he does not understand. But in the end this 'thirst for action only finds nourishment in the fact that it turns out that Albano is a prince's son and that the throne is his by inheritance. And his need for love is satisfied by the narrow-minded Idoine, who is devoid of any higher impetus. Opposite Albano is Schoppe, who is a body giver in a heightened form. He gives no thought to the nothingness of the world, for he knows that it cannot be otherwise. Life seems worthless to him; nothing has value for him but personal freedom and boundless independence. Only one struggle could have value for him, that for the unconditional freedom of the individual. He derides all other activities. Nothing frightens him more than his own ego. Everything else does not seem worth thinking about to him, not worth enthusiasm and not worth hatred; but he fears his ego. It is the only great mystery that haunts him. In the end, it drives him mad because it haunts him as a single being in the midst of an eerie void.

Something of this fear of the ego lived in Jean Paul himself. It was an uncanny thought for him to descend into the depths of the mind and see how the human ego is at work to produce all that springs forth from the personality. That is why he hated the philosopher who had shown this ego in its nakedness, Fichte. He mocked him in his "Clavis Fichtiana seu Leibgeberiana" (1801).

And Jean Paul had reason to shy away from looking into his innermost self. For in it, two egos engaged in a dialog that sometimes drove him to despair. There was the ego with the golden dreams of a higher world order, which mourned over the mean reality and consumed itself in sentimental devotion to an indefinite beyond; and there was the second ego, which mocked the first for its rapture, knowing full well that the indefinite ideal world could never be reached by any reality. The first ego lifted Jean Paul above reality into the world of his ideals; the second was his practical advisor, reminding him again and again that he who wants to live must come to terms with the conditions of life. He divided these two natures in his own personality between two people, the twin brothers Walt and Vult, and portrayed their mutual relationship in the "Flegeljahre". How little Jean Paul's idealism is rooted in reality is best shown in the introduction to the novel. It is not the concatenations of life that are supposed to make the enthusiast Walt a useful person for reality, but the arbitrariness of an eccentric who has bequeathed his entire fortune to the imaginative youth, but on condition that various practical obligations are imposed on him. Any failure to fulfill these practical obligations immediately results in the loss of part of the inheritance. Walt is only able to find his way through life's tasks with the help of his brother Vult. Vult attacks everything he starts with rough hands and a strong sense of reality. The two brothers' natures first complement each other for a while in a beautifully harmonious endeavor, only to separate later on. This conclusion again points to Jean Paul's own nature. Only temporarily did his two natures create a harmonious whole; time and again he suffered from their divergence, from their irreconcilable opposition.

Never again did Jean Paul succeed in expressing with such perfection what moved him most deeply in poetry as in the "Flegeljahre". In 1803, he began to record the philosophical thoughts he had formed about art over the course of his life. This gave rise to his "Preliminary School of Aesthetics". These thoughts are bold and shed a bright light on the nature of art and artistic creation. They are the intuitions of a man who had experienced all the secrets of this creation in his own production. What the enjoyer draws from the work of art, what the creator puts into it: it is said here with infinite beauty. The psychology of humor is revealed in the most profound way: the hovering of the humorist in the spheres of the sublime, his laughter at reality, which has so little of this sublime, and the seriousness of this laughter, which only does not weep at the imperfections of life because it stems from human greatness.

Jean Paul's ideas on education, which he set down in his "Levana" (1806), are no less significant. His sense of the ideal benefits this work more than any other. Only the educator really deserves to be an idealist. He is all the more fruitful the more he believes in the unknown in human nature. Every pupil should be a riddle for the educator to solve. The real, the educated should only serve him to discover the possible, the yet-to-be-formed. What we often feel to be a shortcoming in Jean Paul the poet, that he does not succeed in finding harmony between what he wants with his characters and what they really are: in Jean Paul, the teacher of the art of education, this is a great trait. And the sense for human weaknesses, which made him a satirist and humorist, enabled him to give the educator significant hints to counteract these weaknesses.

Bayreuth

In 1804, Jean Paul moved to Bayreuth to make this town his permanent residence until the end of his life. He felt happy again to see the mountains of his homeland around him and to pursue his poetic dreams in quiet, small circumstances. He no longer created anything as perfect as the "Titan", the "Flegeljahre", the "Vorschule" and the "Levana", although his 'urge to be active took on a feverish character. Upsets about contemporary events, about the miserable state of the German Reich, an inner nervous restlessness that drove him to travel again and again, interrupted the regular course of his life. Half an hour away from Bayreuth, he had made himself a quiet home for a while in the house of Mrs. Rollwenzel, who cared for him like a mother and had made him famous. He needed the change of location in order to be able to create. While it was initially enough for him to leave his family home for hours every day and make the "Rollwenzelei" the scene of his work, this also changed later on. He traveled to various places: Erlangen (1811), Nuremberg (1812), Regensburg (1816), Heidelberg (1817), Frankfurt (1818), Stuttgart, Löbichau (1819), Munich (1820). In Nuremberg he had the pleasure of getting to know his beloved Jacobi, with whom he had previously only written, in person. In Heidelberg, his genius was celebrated by young and old alike. In Stuttgart, he became close to Duke Wilhelm von Württemberg and his talented wife. In Löbichau, he spent the most beautiful days in the house of Duchess Dorothea of Courland. He was surrounded by a society of exquisite women, so that he felt as if he were on a romantic island.

The fascinating influence that Jean Paul exerted on women, which was evident in Karoline Herder and Charlotte von Kalb and many others, led to a tragedy in 1813. Maria Lux, the daughter of a republican from Mainz who had played a role in the Charlotte Corday catastrophe, fell passionately in love with Jean Paul's writings, which soon turned into an ardent love for the poet she did not know personally. The unhappy girl was dismayed when she saw that her feeling of admiration for the genius was turning more and more stormily into a passionate affection for the man, and gave herself up to death. Sophie Paulus' affection in Heidelberg made a deeply moving impression, if not an equally shattering one. In constant vacillation between moods of fiery love and admirable renunciation and self-control, this girl consumes herself until, at the age of twenty-five and unsure of herself, she offers her hand to the old A. W. Schlegel in a union that is soon shattered by the conflicting natures.

The cheerful superiority that enabled him to create humorous images of life left Jean Paul completely in Bayreuth. What he still produces has a more serious tone. He is still unable to create characters who lead an existence appropriate to the ideal human nature he has in mind, but he does create characters who have made their peace with reality. Self-satisfied characters are Katzenberger in "Katzenbergers Badereise" (1808) and Fibel in "Leben Fibels" (1811). Fibel is happy, despite the fact that he only manages to write a modest book, and Katzenberger is happy in his study of abortions. Both are distorted images of humanity, but there is no reason to mock them, nor, as with Wuz, to look at their limited happiness with emotion. Schmelzle's "Des Feldprediger Schmelzles Reise nach Flätz", which was written before them (1807), differs from them. Fibel and Katzenberger are content in their indifferent, meaningless existence; Schmelzle is a discontented hare's foot who is afraid of imaginary dangers. But even in this poem there is nothing more of Jean Paul's great problem, of the clash between the ideal, fantastic dream world and actual reality. Nor is there any sense of a struggle between the two worlds in Jean Paul's last great poem, the "Comet", on which he worked for many years (1815 to 1820). Nikolaus Marggraf wants to make the world happy. His plans are indeed fantastic. But he never felt that they were just a dream. He believes in himself and his ideals and is happy in this belief. Essays written with reference to the political situation in Germany and those in which Jean Paul discusses general questions of science and life were written between the larger works. Some of them are collected in "Herbstblumine" (1810, 1815, 1820) and in his "Museum" (1812). The poet appears as a patriot in his "Freiheitsbüchlein" (1805), in the "Friedenspredigt" (1808) and in the "Dämmerungen für Deutschland" (1809).

During his time in Bayreuth, Jean Paul's humorous mood increasingly gave way to one that took the world and people as they were, even though he only saw imperfections and small things everywhere. He is disgruntled about reality, but he bears the disgruntlement.

The great humorist was not granted a cheerful old age. Three years before his end, he had to watch his son Max die, with whom he laid to rest a wealth of hopes for the future and most of his personal happiness. An eye ailment that afflicted the poet worsened in his last years until he became completely blind. The old man, who could no longer see the outside world, now immersed himself completely within himself. He now lived the life he thought no longer belonged to this world, even before death, and from the treasure trove of these inner experiences he drew the thoughts for his "Selina" or "On the Immortality of the Soul", in which he speaks like a transfigured person and believes he really sees what he has dreamed of all his life. Jean Paul died on November 14, 1825. "Selina" was not published until after his death.