Jean Paul Frederic Richter - Paperback

JEAN PAUL FREDERIC RICHTER, COMPILED FROM VARIOUS SOURCES. PRECEDED BY HIS AUTOBIOGRAPHY. BY ELIZA BUCKMINSTER LEE. I would gladly, after my death, have that, which has never yet happened to any author, all my thoughts given to the world, not one should be con cealed. JEAN PAUL. THIRD EDITION. BOSTON TICKNOR AND FIELDS. 1864. Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1864, by TICKNOR AND FIELDS, in the Clerks Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts. H eta ren o UNIVERSITY PRESS WELCH, BIGELOW, AND COMPANY, x7 CAMBRI u, To The beloved and ever-present memory of her whose last gift of a German Bible first led to the study of the German tongue, I dedicate this imperfect proof of that study and inadequate expres sion of that love. PREFACE TQ THE THIRD EDITION, T is now twenty-two years since the First Edition of the Life of Jean Pad was published, and in the altered condition of our country it seems almost an intrusion and an impertinence to expect such a book to be received with favor for what is nearest touches us most, and our hearts beat more painfully at domestic tragedies, of which we have had so many, than at the crowded anguish of distant, though kindred cities. But in giving our hearts to the great, to the altogether absorbing and tremendous interests of the passing time, we may not neglect the way side flowers, the little gems of nature which are scattered in such profusion at our feet. Carlyle says of Jean Paul To old English, alike with new, such a man as this, in such days as these, cannot be too generally known. Let who vi PREFACE. ever lias a sense for hini worship him as he will, without fear of excess in that direction Amid the clang of oursteam-machinery and money-get ting, in our toiling and slaving great, but dumb and deaf, most tragic English industrial world, Jean Paul, wherever found, will be a blessed element like a little pot of violets in the window-sill of some huge workhouse and cyclops-smithy, reminding this man and that of many sweet forgotten things and very well worth its room there. BOSTON, March 17, 1864. PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. HE following pages are presented to the reader as containing an authentic life of Jean Paul, although, they are not a literal translation of any one of the biographies of the great German Poet. It is well known that he was the most frank and unreserved of authors, and that he has inter woven, in all his romances, much of his personal experience. When, in the latter part of his life, he began his great comic romance of Nicholas Mar graf, or Poetry from the Life of an Apothecary, he undertook, at the same time, as a parallel or companion piece, his Autobiography or Truth from my own Life, intending to interweave the two, as the romance and reality of one life. Hence re sults the comic tone, and the apparent affectation of speaking in the third person in his Autobiogra viii PREFACE. phy, which was continued only to his thirteenth year. He found, perhaps, that it was only in childhood he could idealize his own life, and do that better in his fictitious heroes than when he was avowedly his own. The first part of the following Life is as literal and as accurate a translation of Eichters own bi ography as I am able to make the mystification, already mentioned, has added obscurity to the be wildering conceits with which he usually illus trates his wit and his wisdom. My desire topreserve, as much as possible, the peculiarity of the original has perhkps given to the English a German dress, which, I trust, is thrown off in the remaining parts of the work. The Life is continued from Wahrlieit aus Jean Pauls Lelen, Truth from the Life of Jean Paul Spaziers Biographical Commentary and Pauls correspondence with his friends...