Page:The English Review vol 7 Mar-Jun 1847 FGgaAQAAIAAJ.pdf/297

280 two entire tomes no room was found for even a single line of gentle love;" and he sets his wit to work to account for a phenomenon so inconsistent with the tone of his later writings.

"The Juvenilia of Satire are like the iambics of Stolberg-mostly Juvenalia. Hence there are in this youthful little work no other flowers than humble violets, which, like other violets in the spring season, have drastic properties; for, in fact, all spring flowers are dark coloured and poisonous. Let it be remembered, then, that it is the reader himself that calls for these violets, the juvenile relics of a novelist whom he has never known otherwise than gentle, even as love itself. After all, however, this book of satires will represent nothing worse than the relic of a Petrarcan cat, especially since it has the electric skin, and the sparkling eyes, and the sharp claws of the feline race; precisely as at Padua they still show the skeleton of a cat with which the love-sick Petrarca was wont to play."-Jean Paul, sämmtliche Werke, t. i. p. xiii.

The first objects of Jean Paul's satire were authors and reviewers. As regards the former, he puts the question, "How can one manage to write a great deal?" to which he makes answer:

"Whoever wishes to endue his fist with necessary fruitfulness, let him proceed thus: Let all the ideas which embellished his first productions be brought out in later productions in new characters and under a new disguise, putting upon them, like upon old hats, a new gloss. Whatever ideas chance may throw up in his brain,-those which rise at the first moment of waking; those which form the vanguard of nightly dreams; those which shoot up in the heat of conversation; those which he picks up in familiar chit-chat, or snatches accidentally from some torn scrap of paper; those which turn up in idle moments; or those which, scarcely emerged from darkness, are trying to escape from memory's gripe, as young partridges run from the nest as soon as they are hatched,—all these ideas let him invest with a paper-body, quicken them with ink, scrape them on a heap, and carry them to market in any cart he can get. By thus listening for the light step of each idea, and forthwith shutting it up with others in a book,—by scraping from the brain every shooting crystal of thought, and inflating with words every dumb frog, the driest matter will swell into an octavo volume; every stone will be turned into an intellectual child, and into bread in the bargain; every head will become the patriarch of a sister-library, and fill its own book-case by its own fertility. At last such an author will be unable to help laughing at the writers who produce so little, and who have to rub their foreheads so hard till their ideas begin to flow….

"Piracy is the soul of copious writing. In the republic of letters, as at Sparta, those thieves are in high esteem who know how to hide their long fingers in a glove; and the journals tie around their temples wreaths and bands very different from those which the criminal code of