Richter

“ Hear only one, and swear to every word he says.”
Richter, therefore, finding himself without rudder or compass on the wide sea of German theology, much to the grief of his honest mother, was obliged to forswear theology and become author, his genius being stimulated quite as much by poverty as by Apollo, like old Horace. ”

“ Jean Paul, inspired by Jean Jacques, was the inspirer of the whole brood of young writers of his time. To him they looked as to a Deliverer.112 Jean Paul the Only! The largest, gentlest, most generous heart in all literature! The peculiar mark of Richter's style is analogy and comparison; everything he saw reminded him of something else, and then he tells you of things of which both remind him. He leads and lures you on, and takes you far from home, but always brings you safely back. Yet comparison proves us false when we deal with Richter himself. ”

“ This one passage reveals the whole man. Can one think of Ludwig Richter living in any town except Dresden, or imagine him except in this dressing-gown, seated on a Sunday afternoon in his shady arbour with the rose-bushes, and surrounded by laughing children? That profound domestic sentiment which runs through his works with a biblical fidelity of heart is reflected in the homeliness of the artist, who has remained all his life a big, unsophisticated child; and his autobiography, in its patriarchal simplicity, is like a refreshing draught from a pure mountain spring. ”

“ The nearest English model, in the matter of style and quaint presuming on the reader's patience, is Sterne. But if one wishes to see how Richter is not sentimental, in spite of his incessant and un-American emotion, let him read Sterne, and hasten then to be embraced by Richter's unsophisticated feeling, which is none the less refreshing because it is so exuberant and has such a habit of pursuing all his characters. And where else, in any language, is Nature so worshipped, and so rapturously chased with glowing words, as some young Daphne by some fiery boy? ”

“ Richter was a wealthy rentier, living in Vienna; and a thorough Austrian by birth, education, and nature. Quiet, inoffensive, kindly; there was nothing striking about him in person or position. He never meddled with that firebrand—politics; he had never troubled the most immaculate government of the imperial and royal apostolic Kaiser with unseasonable and unreasonable comments on its virtues or defects; he had never violated that most sacred thing, the concordat; had never offended lord or prince ”

“ If there be a regular German of the Germans beyond the Rhine and be-north the Alps, whom, notwithstanding (perhaps partly by reason of) his faults and eccentricities, we love, and honour, and reverence, and clasp to our true British breast with a genuine feeling of brotherhood,—this man is Jean Paul Frederick Richter. ”

“ The immediate effect of the bright hours at Hof on Richter as a writer was wholly beneficent. Mr. Florian Fülbel's Journey and Bailiff Josuah Freudel's Complaint Bible show a new geniality in the personification of amusing foibles. And with these was a real little masterpiece, Life of the Contented Schoolmaster Maria Wuz, which alone, said the Berlin critic Moritz, might suffice to make its author immortal. In this delicious pedagogical idyl, written in December, 1790, the humor is sound, healthy, thoroughly German and characteristic of Richter at his best. ”

“ Young Richter entered Leipzig University in 1780, specially to study theology, but became one of the most eccentric and erratic of students, a veritable literary gypsy, roaming over vast fields of literature, collating and noting immense stores of scientific, artistic, historic, and philosophic facts. ”

“ Richter also published a 'Catechism of Organ-building.' Of his many compositions de circonstance the best known is the Cantata for the Schiller Festival in 1859. Other works are—an oratorio, 'Christus der Erlöser' (March 8, 1849) , masses, psalms, motets, organ-pieces, string-quartets, and sonatas for PF. He became one of the King's Professors in 1868, died at Leipzig, April 9, 1879, and was succeeded as Cantor by W. Rust. ”

“ Richter's philosophy, a matter of [Pg 55] no ordinary interest, both as it agrees with the common philosophy of Germany, and disagrees with it, must not be touched on for the present. One only observation we shall make: it is not mechanical or sceptical; it springs not from the forum or the laboratory, but from the depths of the human spirit, and yields as its fairest product a noble system of morality, and the firmest conviction of religion. An intense and continual faith in man's immortality and native grandeur accompanies him ”

“ And yet it is confidently claimed that, under all the exuberance of metaphor and simile, and learned technical illustrations and odd digressions, and gorgeous episodes and witching interludes, that characterizes Richter, every attentive and thoughtful reader will find a broad and solid ground of real good sense and good feeling, and that in this extraordinary man whom, at times, his best friends were almost tempted to call a crazy giant, will be found one whose heart (to use the homely phrase) is ever in the right place. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Richter's illustrations, on the contrary, are of a very high stamp as respects understanding of human character, with infinite playfulness and tenderness of fancy; but, as drawings, they are almost unendurably out of harmony, violent blacks in one place being continually opposed to trenchant white in another; and, as is almost sure to be the case with bad harmonists, the local colour hardly felt anywhere. All German [Pg 396] work is apt to be out of harmony, in consequence of its too frequent conditions of affectation, and its wilful refusals of fact ”

“ As for Professor Carus, he was too busy with his theorems and biological experiments to trouble himself about so trivial a matter as a youngster falling in love with his accomplished wife—here the Professor's good sense was shown.
Jean Paul Richter lighted his torch at the flame of Jean Jacques Rousseau. In a letter to Agnes Carus, Schumann has acknowledged his obligation to Richter, in a style that is truly Richteresque.
Says Robert:
Dear Lady:—I read from Jean Paul last night until I fell asleep and then I dreamed of you. ”

“ But there is a genuine noble pulse in the German heart, which beats to the rhythm of two men's heroic attachment, and can expand till all the blood that flows through Richter's style is welcomed and propelled by it. Still, we think that the unexpressed friendship may also stand justified before the ideal. ”

“ Then comes my joy, that I have conquered two of my faults—my disposition to be angry in conversation, and to lose my cheerfulness through a long day of dust and musquitoes. Nothing makes one so indifferent to the pin and musquito thrusts of life, as the consciousness of growing better.’”
Richter belonged now to Germany, and should have been transferred immediately, you will think, like Göethe, Schiller, Wieland, Herder, and the other Dii majorum gentium, to Weimar, the one literary capital of Deutschland ”

“ Among these was "Hesperus," published in 1794, which made him one of the most famous of German writers. Fanciful and extravagant as the work is, and written without any regard to the laws of composition, it is nevertheless stamped with genius. In all Richter's stories the plot goes for nothing; it is on the thoughts that he strikes out by the way that his fame depends.
I.--Friendship
"Victor," said Flamin, to the young Englishman, "give me this night thy friendship for ever, and swear to me that thou wilt never disturb me in my love to thee. ”

“ But Comenius believed in moderation in all things. ↑ “Play,” observes Jean Paul Richter, “is the working off at once of the overflow of both mental and physical powers; afterwards when the school scepter has carried off the mental source of all fire, even till rain comes, the limbs only throw off the fullness of life by running, throwing, carrying. Play is the first poetry of the human being.” ”

“ I notice that the gentlemen of the Right have never been quite able to get over the ‘Falsities of Socialism,’ by the departed member, Eugene Richter. [2] It is only to be regretted that these gentlemen did not suffer themselves to be converted from their errors, so that they could now with unclouded vision see the connection that all matters of national and international economy have with each other. ”

“ He received about this time from Prince Dalberg a pension, afterward continued by the King of Bavaria. In 1804 the family settled in Bayreuth, which was to remain Richter's not always happy home till his death in 1825.
The move to Bayreuth was marked by the appearance of Introduction to Esthetics, a book that, even in remaining a fragment, shows the parting of the ways. Under its frolicsome exuberance there is keen analysis, a fine nobility of temper, and abundant subtle observation. The philosophy was Herder's, and a glowing eulogy of him closes the study. ”

“ Richter’s meritorious attempt to paint for us a picture of the Socialist future supplies an omission which the socialists do not attempt to repair, and his little book may arrest attention and suggest difficulties in quarters which cannot be reached by more weighty and philosophical criticism. ”

“ The bridal pair's visit to the graves of by-gone loves is a gem of fantasy. But behind all the humor and satire must not be forgotten, in view of what was to follow, the undercurrent of courageous democratic protest which finds its keenest expression in the "Free Note" to Chapter Six. Fixlein appeared in 1796.
Richter's next story, the unfinished Biographical Recreations under the Cranium of a Giantess, sprang immediately from a visit to Bayreuth in 1794 and his first introduction to aristocracy. Its chief interest is in the enthusiastic welcome it extends to the French Revolution. ”

“ To those in gaol there was, at least, the possibility of an act of pardon, which might some day open a path to liberty, even to those who had been condemned to life-long imprisonment. But those who are handed over to your socialistic prison are sentenced for life without [116] hope of escape; the only escape thence is suicide. (Sensation.)
“Your explanation of all this is, that we are at present in a state of transition. Nothing of the sort. Things will get worse and worse the longer the present system lasts. Hitherto you have only descended the topmost steps of those which lead to the abyss. ”

“ Detachments of police, some on foot and some mounted, are continually hurrying with all possible speed towards the centre of the city. From all appearance the whole of the armed force available is being drawn together in the neighbourhood of the palace and unter den Linden. ”

“ My cypress alley is not open, and discloses no heaven. Human blood paints the fluid figure called man on the monument, as oil on marble forms forests; Death wipes away the man, and leaves the stone. Gione! I would have some consolation, if thou wert but far away from us all, on a clouded forest, in a cave of the Earth, or on the most distant world in space. But thou art gone, thy soul is dead, not only thy life and thy body.
See, Nadine, on the judgment-seat of Time lies the crushed angel, with the death color of the spirit-world. ”

“ Countess Ottilia was standing at the window in her mourning weeds, as the news-bringer for the last time gave his breathless horse the spur, to hasten it up the steep Castle-path. Her sharp eye recognised him in the distance; and he too being nothing of a blinkard,—a class of persons very rare in the days of the Crusades,—recognised the Countess also, raised the letter-bag aloft over his head, and waved it like a standard in token of good news ”

“ Why weep ye, tender children, that your parents, after the same sufferings, should now have the same joys? that now, after their winter of life, an ever-lasting May has dawned on their souls? Does the painted spring-house under the earth trouble you, or the black boundary-hill on the earth, or the dread hand of decay, which extinguishes earthly scars and wounds and the whole body? ”

“ That when man stands upright and exalted, a beautiful demi-god, even amid the ruins of his old body temple, the club of Death may annihilate the demi-god forever? And on the eternal sea, on which the least drop throws immeasurable rings, on this sea a life-long rising and a life-long falling of the soul should have the same termination, namely, the end of all things,—annihilation? ”

“ I cannot tell you how this glance, turned from the vast whole on to a beautiful small portion, gave a warmer glow to our hearts and to nature. Instead of the hand, we could only hold, like children, the fingers of the great mother of life, and reverently kiss them. By the creation, God became human for men, as therefore for angels an angel,—like the sun whose bright immensity the painter gently divides into the beauties of a human face. ”

“ These tidings cut the lovely Princess to the heart, for she had never dreamed that it was sickness which prevented her Bostangi from appearing at his post. She immediately returned to her palace, where her women saw, with consternation, that the serene brow of their mistress was overcast, as when the moist breath of the south wind has dimmed the mirror of the sky, and the hovering vapours have collected into clouds. ”