Page:The English Review vol 7 Mar-Jun 1847 FGgaAQAAIAAJ.pdf/302

Rh his "Hesperus," or "Five-and-forty Dog-mails." The latter title has reference to the humorous mystification which the author perpetrates upon his readers, by pretending all through, that the story, which is actually in progress while he writes it, is brought to him by a dog, who carries the successive chapters suspended from his neck, as a kind of contemporary biographical mail; and at the end, to his great surprise, Jean Paul finds himself involved as an actor in the plot of the story, he turning out to be a mysterious personage which has been missing all along. This conceit, however, which is drawn round the story like a festoon, from which numberless jokes and satirical hits are playfully, suspended, has nothing whatever to do with the main design. The leading idea which is worked out through the whole of this complicated tale, full of trying moral situations, is to represent the conflict between good and evil, between the coarse and selfish passions of the common herd of mankind, and the higher and nobler aspirations of what may aptly be termed the aristocracy of the mind and heart. In this conflict the higher souls are victorious, but they can be so only by self-sacrifice: the thought that lies at the foundation, is an essentially Christian thought, but embodied in a poetic fiction: virtue is put in the place of Christ, and has both its passion and its resurrection. Hence the title "Hesperus," as signifying both the evening and the morning star; the whole being, in the wildest strains of German romance, an echo of that word of the Psalmist, "Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning."

The central character of the story, on which the whole plot hinges, appears but rarely on the stage. He is an English nobleman, Lord Horion, whose heart spent itself in early life in one ardent passion for a beloved wife: a short season of intense happiness is succeeded by a long life of cold desolation; the only object left him on which to bestow his affections, his son, being blind, and therefore a perfect cipher in the life of a man, the tendency of whose mind is essentially practical. This high-toned character, free from every earthly affection, because all he loved moulders in the tomb, independent of man's fear or favour, undertakes in a small German principality, with whose hereditary sovereign he has formed a connexion, not indeed the office of prime minister,—that is occupied by a premier of the ordinary cast,—but the function of a ruling genius, enacting a kind of providence for the good of mankind. To him, the other leading characters of the story, whose movements he directs, often unknown to them, look up with reverential awe: but the presumption of a short-sighted mortal, taking in hand the direction of human affairs, is fearfully avenged upon him; for in the end