Page:The English Review vol 7 Mar-Jun 1847 FGgaAQAAIAAJ.pdf/308

Rh Siebenkäs is founded, and as a sample of the exuberance of thought which constantly heaps figure upon figure, and compresses the most grotesque contrasts and the most striking analogies within the briefest compass of speech. This of itself renders it extremely difficult, both to understand Jean Paul in the original, and to translate him into any other language; and the latter difficulty is much increased by his frequent intercalation of parenthetical thoughts, by his copious use—copious with all German writers, but more copious with Jean Paul than with any other,—of compound words of his own manufacture, and by the extraordinary manner in which the different significations of one and the same word, however widely apart they may lie, are pressed close together into the service of the author's versatile wit. Of this there is a remarkable instance in the passage just quoted. The opposite character of the temperaments of the two friends, the one being more inclined to mildness, the other to severity, is assigned as one of the causes of the attachment which they felt for each other; and to the same mutual attachment the author refers the striking similarity of their outward persons. Upon these two simple ideas the author contrives to engraft, first, the image of the mutual attraction of opposite magnetic poles; secondly, the antithesis between "Horatian satire" and "Aristophanic pasquils;" thirdly, the punning criticism of describing the latter as "full of unpoetic and poetic harshnesses;" fourthly, the trope of representing the body as the "undress and morning-suit of life," carried out into the details of "trim colour, button-holes, lining, and cut," on the one hand, and eyes, colour of the face, stature, and make, on the other hand; fifthly, the girlish notion of adopting similarity in dress as a badge of friendship; sixthly, the general observation that personal likenesses are more common than is generally thought, and pass unobserved only because the persons themselves in which they occur do not fall under observation. And while all these incongruous materials are welded together into two thoughts and two sentences, the connexion between the two is formed by the double signification of the German word Anziehen, which means both "attraction"' and "attire." Availing himself of this, Jean Paul runs down his first conglomeration of thoughts upon the sense "attraction," and then upon the strength of the sense "attire," hooks on to it, so to speak, his second cluster of ideas. This nice point, at which the two sets of images are riveted together, and which we have endeavoured to render in English by the double sense attached to the word "suited," being overlooked, the coherence, and with it the artistic beauty, of the whole passage is destroyed; and that which is in reality a most skilful and witty combination, assumes the appearance of a mere negligent jumble,