Page:The English Review vol 7 Mar-Jun 1847 FGgaAQAAIAAJ.pdf/299

 years, into a kindlier and healthier state, in which he exchanged the character of satirist for that of novelist. The transition was marked in his literary career by the "Life of the cheerful little Schoolmaster, Maria Wuz, in Meadvale; a kind of idyl," in which, as Jean Paul says in his preface to the second edition of the "Invisible Lodge," the sweetness of the honey was still mixed with some acid; being written before the "Invisible Lodge," although published in the form of an appendage to it. Wuz, the hero of this opusculum, is a village schoolmaster, who has the happy knack of making the most of small comforts against the ills of life, and finding contentment in small enjoyments. His biography, barren of incident, is a still life humorously drawn, in which the disposition of mind which at this period appears to have been the most enviable of all in the eyes of Jean Paul, is variously displayed; a disposition which

"was not resignation, that submits to evil because it is inevitable; not callousness, that endures it without feeling; not philosophy, that digests after diluting it; not religion, that overcomes it in the hope of a reward: it was simply the recollection of his warm bed. 'This evening, at any rate,' said he to himself, 'however they may annoy and bully me all day long, I shall be lying under my snug coverlet, and poking my nose quietly into the pillow, for the space of eight hours.' And when at length, in the last hour of a day of crosses, he got between his sheets, he would shake himself and draw up his knees close to his body, and say to himself, 'Don't you see, Wuz, 'tis over, after all.'" —Leben des vergnügten Schulmeisterlein Maria Wuz, s. W., t. vii. p. 135.

After accompanying the possessor of this happy temperament through the different stages of his life, among which his courtship and marriage hold a conspicuous place, Jean Paul adds "seven last words to the reader," from which we extract the following, as the moral which by it he intended to convey:

"O ye good men! how is it possible that we can grieve each other even for a short half-hour! Alas! in this dangerous winter night of life; in this chaotic multitude of unknown beings separated from us, some by depth and some by height, in this world of mysteries, this tremulous twilight which enwraps our little ball of flying dust,—how is it possible that lone man should not embrace the only warm breast which bolds a heart like his own, and to which he can say, 'Thou art as I am, my brother; thou sufferest as I suffer, and we may love each other?' Incomprehensible man! rather thou wouldst gather daggers, and force them in thy midnight existence into the breast of thy fellow, which a gracious Heaven designed to afford warmth and defence to thine own! Alas! I look out over the shaded flower-meads, and remind myself that over them six thousand years have passed with their high