Page:The English Review vol 7 Mar-Jun 1847 FGgaAQAAIAAJ.pdf/296

Rh him on the day on which he was bereaved of his only son, a hopeful youth of nineteen, whose premature end was accelerated by spiritual struggles surpassing his bodily strength. This latter work especially, which was left incomplete, when, five years after, death overtook the author in the blindness occasioned by the sorrow of his bereavement, is a touching attestation of the flame of hope and faith which was glimmering in his soul, and which longed for the heavenly oil that. would have kindled it into dazzling brightness. As we behold the unfinished manuscript of that work laid upon Jean Paul's bier by his mourning friends and admirers, we seem to see the soul, which in its flight from its earthly tenement left behind these fragments of its inward workings, passing over the threshold of the unseen world with that mighty question on its lips, there to receive a full and an eternal answer.

As is not unfrequently the case with men, whom their high gifts and their singular energy or character mark as chosen instruments for the accomplishment of great moral and intellectual reforms, Jean Paul's literary and social career commenced with opposition against the existing state of things. For it is the manner, the instinct, so to speak, of men of that stamp to chant forth into the world, forcibly and without disguise, whatever is for the time being the key-note of their inner life; whence it happens that what in after years of moral and intellectual maturity proves a sweet and salutary fruit of wisdom, is in earlier years not unfrequently obtruded upon the public with all the sourness and asperity which belongs to an unripe state. In few instances has this truth been more strikingly illustrated than in that of our author; the gentle mellowness of whose later works forms the most extraordinary contrast with the uncouth crabbedness of his youthful productions; while the position in which he found himself at the commencement of his literary career, at the age of nineteen, "at hand-grips with actual want," was one which to an ordinary mind would have suggested any course in preference to that of provoking the world's hostility by a series of keen and bitter satires. Such, nevertheless, were the first-fruits of Jean Paul's genius; and in the preface to them in the edition of his collected works, which he began to prepare after he had been an author for forty years, he frankly condemns them on this very account. He appears almost reluctant to reproduce them, yielding in fact to the curiosity of the public as to the first lucubrations of a favourite author; but even with this excuse he cannot make up his mind to republish them in their original form: he says he found it indispensably necessary to "reduce the coarse-grained gray salt" of his wit "to a finer state," or "to exchange it for white salt altogether." He chides his former self in good earnest, for that "in