Page:The English Review vol 7 Mar-Jun 1847 FGgaAQAAIAAJ.pdf/295

278 Jean Paul, of which as much as can be compressed into a brief sketch has already been told, and well told, by Mr. Carlyle. The history of genius working out its powers under the pressure of worldly disadvantages, and struggling into greatness and fame through a long continuance or overwhelming adversity, is indeed an interesting and a highly-instructive theme: But still more interesting, and replete with instruction of a yet deeper sort, is the history of a mind groping through the darkness of human systems after the light of heaven's truth; endued with an instinct of truth too powerful to be deceived by the false lights by which philosophic thought and poetic enthusiasm are endeavouring among our German neighbours to supply the absence of the torch of God's truth, and yet kept back from seeking the light of that truth where alone it can be found, by prejudices, the existence of which is to be laid in a very great measure at the door of those who announce themselves to the world as its depositaries and heralds.

Such a mind was that of Jean Paul. In his earliest year's, on the verge of boyhood, a deep touch of religious sentiment accompanied his first communion; but when the luxuriant growth of his mind and heart in youth, and the full ripe power of all his faculties in manhood, would have required the strong meat of Christian grace and truth to sustain them, the leanness and dryness of Lutheran orthodoxy failed to satisfy the cravings of his mind, while the cold and barren forms of Lutheran worship acted like the negative pole of the magnet upon his warm heart and his deeply poetic soul. Thus became he an easy prey to the seductions of that idolatry of genius which was at its height in Germany when Jean Paul's mind awoke to the great questions of life; and which, when afterwards by his own literary productions he rose into notice, placed himself also among the idols in the temple of literary fame. But although both a worshipper and an idol in that temple, neither its worship nor the faith on which it was founded could quench his soul's deep thirst for a higher and more heavenly life; and we find him who had become a free-thinker as soon as he began to think at all, in the ripeness of his manhood, and when he was full of years, before the gates of death and the portals of the invisible world, struggling to give to that world reality within his breast. One of his most interesting works, written in the very acme of his literary strength and fame, treats of the great question of the immortality of the soul; and a second and still maturer work on the same subject was commenced by