Richter, JOHANN PAUL FRIEDRICH, usually known by his pen-name of JEAN PAUL (with the French pronunciation), Germany's greatest humorist, was born on the first day of spring (21st March) 1763, at Wunsiedel, a little town of the sequestered pine-clad Fichtelgebirge in North Bavaria. The imaginative boy was brought up in the idyllic sabbath-life of the mountain villages in which his father was pastor, went to school at the town of Hof, and in 1781 was sent to Leipzig University to study theology. But, like Lessing, he did not study theology; Rousseau and Voltaire, Swift and Sterne, Pope and Young, had much stronger attractions for him, and he too resolved to write books. He asserted his independence of custom by discarding the periwig and stiff necktie, wore his hair long, his shirt and vest open at the throat, and dressed him as he pleased. But he found it harder work to get bread than to write and assert his position as an 'emancipated' youth. Being poor, he got into debt all round, and in November 1784 fled secretly from Leipzig, to go and hide his head in the poverty-stricken home of his mother (a penniless widow since 1779) at Hof. His first literary 'children' were satires; but he could get no publisher to introduce them to the world, until in 1783 Voss of Berlin gave him forty louis d'or for The Greenland Law-suits. The book was a failure. For three years Jean Paul struggled on at home, his mother spinning hard for bread, he helping with the few florins he earned by his pen. He read enormously, omnivorously, and sat hours making excerpts from the books he devoured—a practice he kept up from early boyhood to old age. These many folios of closely-written pages were the storehouses upon which he drew for materials when he came to write his romances. He took long rambles amongst the hills and forests, his hair flying in the wind, a book in his hand or a song on his lips, and a favourite dog at his heels. In the beginning of 1787 he began to teach the children of different families in the district, and of course taught by original methods. All this time he still went on writing, and during his nine years of tutorship produced, amongst other things, the satirical Extracts from the Devil's Papers (1789), Fälbel's Journey (1796), and Freudel's Complaint (1796), the last two amongst the best examples of his satirico-humorous writings; the beautiful idylls Dominie Wuz (1793), Quintus Fixlein (1796; Eng. trans. by Carlyle, 1827), the Parson's Jubilee (1797), the first two perhaps the most finished things Jean Paul ever wrote; the grand romances The Invisible Lodge (1793), Hesperus (1795; Eng. trans. 1865), and Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces, or Siebenkärs (1796-97; Eng. trans. by Noel 1844 and 1871, by Ewing 1877); Campanerthal (1797; Eng. trans. 1857), a series of reflections on the immortality of the soul, an undigestible book; and the prose lyrical idyll, My Prospective Autobiography (1799). The Invisible Lodge was his first literary success; Hesperus made him famous. In 1796 Charlotte von Kalb, perhaps the most remarkable, certainly the most advanced, woman of her age in Germany, wrote to express her admiration of the book; and a few months later, at her invitation, Jean Paul visited Weimar. There Goethe received him politely, but with cool reserve; that, too, was Schiller's attitude, when Jean Paul went on to Jena to see him. The antagonism between them was deep and fundamental, and lasted till death, being at times but ill concealed by all three. Herder and his wife, on the other hand, greeted the young romance-writer with overflowing admiration, and gave him their friendship, which also endured till death. As for Charlotte von Kalb, she did not stop at friendship: in spite of having a husband already, she exercised her sex's fabled privilege of leap-year—her first letter to him was dated 29th February—and gave him unasked the love of her vehement heart.
From this time for a few years Jean Paul's life was rich in incident and full of excitement—an Odyssey of love adventures, in which he was the object of extravagant idolatry on the part of the women of Germany, especially of aristocratic dames who dabbled in literature. They gave him their love whether or no, and would have deserted husband and children for his sake; for, though not personally handsome, Jean Paul had a wonderful fascination of manner, particularly towards women. He found all women charming, he was a delightful talker and a good listener, and had a sweet and sympathetic smile—qualities that explain a good deal. In 1801 he married a Berlin lady, and three years later settled down at Bayreuth, attracted by its beauties of hill and valley, and by its beer. There he spent the rest of his days, leading a simple, busy life, writing his books, playing with his children, tending his pet animals, and taking short summer journeys to different towns of Germany; the present of a flower filled him with perfect joy. His last years were clouded by the death of his only son, a promising student, in 1821, and by his own blindness. From 1799 he enjoyed a pension from the Prince-primate Dalberg, and then from the king of Bavaria. He died on 14th November 1825. The principal works of his married life were the two grand romances, Titan (1800-3; Eng. trans. 1862) and Wild Oats (1804-5; Eng. trans. as Walt and Vult, 1849), the former accounted by himself and by most German critics his masterpiece, though Englishmen would generally prefer the latter, as they would certainly prefer Siebenkäs to Hesperus; Schneltzle's Journey to Flütz (1809; Eng. trans. by Carlyle, 1827) and Dr Katzenberger's Trip to the Spa (1809), the best two of his satirico-humorous writings; the idyll Fibel's Life (1812); the fragment of another grand romance, Nicholas Markgraf, or The Comet (1820-22); a series of reflections on Literature (Vorschule der Aesthetik; improved ed. 1812), containing many excellent things about poetry, humour, wit, style; another series on Education (Levana, 1807; Eng. trans. 1848, 1876, and 1887), a book that ranks with Rousseau's Emile as a standard work on training the young, and is full of evergreen wisdom; various patriotic writings (1808-12); and an unfinished Autobiography (1826), the finest of all his idylls.
Jean Paul stands apart entirely by himself in German literature, a humorist of the first water, a Titan, 'a colossal spirit, a lofty and original thinker, a genuine poet [in prose], a high-minded, true, and most amiable man. . . . 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, irresistible. He is not airy, sparkling, and precise, but deep, billowy, and vast' (Carlyle). Two irreconcilable tendencies strive for mastery in him and his works—a dreamy, lachrymose sentimentality, that shrank from the rough buffetings of life, and sought refuge in emotional dissipation, luxuriating in tears, caressing sorrow, coquetting with love, melting in melan- choly longings for the world beyond the grave; and a sharp-eyed, wide-awake common sense, that saw workaday realities with the utmost clearness and discrimination. All his great qualities of imagination and intellect were, however, made ministers to his humour, which had the widest range, moving from the petty follies of individual men and the absurdities of social custom up to the paradoxes that are rooted in the permanent ordinances of the universe. He turns his irony—a tender, reverent, playful irony—upon all the relations of human life, even upon the holiest beliefs of his own heart. And, in spite of the egotism of genius that often shows itself so strongly in him, Jean Paul had the heart of a truly great and good man. Börne calls him the author par excellence of the lowly born, the poverty-stricken, the neglected, and the despised; to this class belong some of his finest characters, as Wuz, Fixlein, Siebenkäs, Vult. As a master of pathos he is put by De Quincey above Sterne. Few, if any, have written with such tender love and such delicate feeling of the idyllic joys of the country and the happiness of simple domestic life, particularly in the schoolhouse and parsonage. He had a wonderfully deep and sympathetic insight into the nature of woman, but has not created more than one lifelike woman (Lenette). Yet the male characters of his books, in so far as they are humorous, are generally living beings, or else, if secondary characters, well-drawn pencil sketches in outline. Jean Paul is the classic author of friendships (Siebenkäs and Leibgeber, Walt and Vult); he matched them with his own friendship for Hermann and Oertel, and for Otto and the Jew Emmanuel Osmund. Nature was to him a living and divine presence: he loved her reverently, from the solemn stars to the tiniest flower, and his descriptions of nature embrace some of the loftiest hymns the spirit of man has chanted to the beauty and sublimity of created things—e.g. several passages in Hesperus and Wild Oats, the Dream of the Universe in Siebenkäs. God and the immortality of the soul were the great facts ever present to his mind, influencing all his thoughts. An enduring sense of the ethic worth of human action, 'a noble reverence for the spirit of all goodness forms the crown and glory of his culture' (Carlyle). The reason why he is so little known, except by name, is that of all great writers he is one of the most difficult to read, and it may be added to understand. No reader who has not the strongest constitution can struggle through the tangled thickets of encyclopedic learning, the tortuous wit, the dreary wastes of digestion and dullness, the hothouses of tropical sentimentality, amid which the gem-like gardens of his creative art are hidden. His prose is harder to translate than Heine's verse. For literary form, for order, harmony, or restraint he has not the slightest respect. The principal idea in his (often) long sentences is too frequently lost amid a labyrinth of subordinate clauses. The story is chiefly a peg for Jean Paul to hang Jean Paul's self-communings and reflections upon, a point d'appui for the play of his wit and humour. The wildest improbabilities, the wildest extravagances of fancy, are indulged in without check. Sentence follows sentence teeming with allusions, analogies, images, metaphors, similes, tumbling one over another in inextricable confusion. A Cretus of idioms, he is the greatest and most prolific word-coiner in the language: he compels words to adapt themselves to his ideas. Often enough his diction is inflated and bombastic, and his literary taste execrable; yet when he is at his best his language marches with a majesty, a dignity, a natural beauty that are seldom matched in German literature. Carlyle's
Sartor Resartus and French Revolution are steeped in the spirit of Jean Paul, and show how greatly he fascinated the imagination of the rugged Scotsman.
The best editions of Jean Paul's Werke are the editions of 1860-62 (34 vols.), 1879 (60 parts), and 1882 et seq. (Kürschner's Deutsche National-Literatur series). The best complete Life, that by Nerrlich (Berlin, 1889), is marred to some extent by the Hegelian speculations of the writer. The more important biographical sources are Wahrheit aus Jean Paul's Leben, his Autobiography (1826), continued by Otto and Förster (1827-33); Spazier's Biographischer Kommentar zu Jean Paul's Werken (5 vols. 1833); Förster's Denkwürdigkeiten (4 vols. 1863); Correspondence between Jean Paul and Otto (4 vols. 1829-33), Charlotte von Kalb (1882), Jacobi (1828), and Voss (1833); and Fr. Vischer's Kritische Gänge (new series, vol. vi. 1875). In English the best accounts are contained in Carlyle's Miscellaneous Essays (vols. i. and iii.); De Quincey's Analecta of specimen passages translated (vol. xi. of Collected Works); and Life of Jean Paul F. Richter (1845). Lady Chatterton published a collection of translated extracts in 1859.