Page:The English Review vol 7 Mar-Jun 1847 FGgaAQAAIAAJ.pdf/303

286 all his plans, cherished for years, are in the most imminent danger of being altogether frustrated: he appears once more as the Deus ex machinâ, to set all right again; and having done so, and secured the perpetuity of his arrangements by an oath, which was to be binding till his return, he, like another Lycurgus, disappears for ever, not only from the country for the benefit of which he has been labouring, and from the prince whose government he has found the means of controlling for good, but from life itself: he retires to the tomb of his early love, and there dies by his own hand.

Of the other characters of Hesperus, the principal, and by far the most brilliant, is Clotilda, Jean Paul's ideal of the female character. She is related to Lord Horion by her mother's side, and becomes during a period of blindness, when he requires her aid to carry on his correspondence, the depositary of all his secrets, under the guarantee of an oath, which places it out of her power to reveal them even to save the life of her own brother. The loftiness of her spirit, united to the meekest gentleness of heart; the exquisite delicacy with which she avoids all contact with the low intrigues and the base passions by which she is surrounded on all sides; the heroic firmness and consistency of her conduct, sustained by a deep religious faith, under the severest trials; her self-denying, self-sacrificing spirit, which in her case does not, degenerate into suicidal enthusiasm; the holy resignation with which she surrenders her dearest affections at the call of duty; the high poetry of her soul, combined with a clear and calm judgment, place her, as a perfectly faultless character, on a superhuman eminence, high above the other characters, not of Hesperus only, but of all the works of Jean Paul. In its delineation he attained a point or perfection, which even his own pen could not afterwards exceed. In Titan he painted a man of much higher cast than the male hero of his Hesperus, but Clotilda stands unequalled and unrivalled among all his heroines.

The other two characters in Hesperus which rise above the crowd, are Victor and Emmanuel. The former, the putative son of Lord Horion, having been exchanged in infancy for his blind child by the father himself, is by him placed in the office of physician to the prince, in which he is not only to minister to the bodily health of the court, but to watch and to influence its contending tides and currents, in the interest of the philanthropic plans of his supposed father. He, too, is the depositary of Lord Horion's secrets, except as to his own birth, and under the same guarantee; and partly by the intricacies of his position, partly by the almost feminine softness of his feelings, and the too great pliancy and versatility of his character, he becomes entangled in