Page:The English Review vol 7 Mar-Jun 1847 FGgaAQAAIAAJ.pdf/301

 under the accompaniment of music, to heighten the excitement of his soul. From the preparatory communications which his tutor had made to him, he is led to imagine that this passage out of the subterraneous world is death, and the upper world into which he enters, heaven, where he meets his parents and other persons whom hitherto he had known only by hearsay. The further progress of his education is conducted by Jean Paul in person, who quaintly enough introduces his real self, every now and then, into his own fictions, and in due time he is launched into a military academy, the "Sandhurst" of the imaginary principality of "Scheerau," which might be rendered "Clipfield," and seems to derive its name from the continual clipping which its loyal subjects have to undergo for the benefit of the princely exchequer.

What might have been the ultimate moral which Jean Paul intended to work out from these strange beginnings, it is impossible to tell: as it is, the hero, educated under the earth by his first, and in the clouds by his second tutor, descends, more naturally than surprisingly, by an Icarian fall, into a considerable moral quagmire, from which it appears that the author intended afterwards to extricate him; but probably he found that be had, with more truth than he himself suspected in his tale, marred his own theory of life, of which the subterraneous training was the first chapter, and had no heart to resume a fiction which required throughout magic lights to sustain it, and the enchantment of which was effectually broken. That he never quite relinquished the thought of rescuing his Gustavus from the black hole in which he so mysteriously lodged him, and pouring the balm of happier hours into the heart of a somewhat imaginative young lady, who is dying with love for him,—a favour which, it must be confessed, he little deserves,—is evident from the "apology" which he prefixed to this tale in the edition of his collected works:—

"Notwithstanding," he says, "my intentions and promises, it remains after all a ruin born. Thirty years ago I might have put the end to it with all the fire with which I commenced it; but old age cannot finish, it can only patch up, the bold structures of youth. For supposing even that all the creative powers were unimpaired, yet the events, intricacies, and sentiments of a former period seem no longer worthy of being continued."—Die Unsichtbare Loge, Entschuldigung, s. W., t. v. pp. 7, 8.

A far more highly finished performance was that which followed within three years after "The Invisible Lodge," and which placed Jean Paul at once on the lofty eminence which he ever after maintained, in the very first rank of literary genius; viz.