Page:The English Review vol 7 Mar-Jun 1847 FGgaAQAAIAAJ.pdf/310

Rh in which the writings of Jean Paul abound. It is, indeed, no disparagement, even to a first-rate German scholar, to say, that he is not qualified to translate that author; for among his own countrymen there are but few capable of appreciating all his beauties, and following him through the boundless variety and the vast expanse of that world of thought in which he moves with such astounding ease and agility. His mind resembles a complicated prismatic apparatus in which the rays of light, and the colours into which they resolve themselves, are perpetually scattered, variously reflected, and gathered up again into one focus; or better, it is like a kaleidoscope, which at every turn and shake produces a new combination, and presents to the eye, as if by mere chance, an endless variety of the most regular and beautiful designs.

But to return to the story of Siebenkäs. The poor counsellor, who, like other briefless barristers, is obliged to betake himself to authorship, has the misfortune of possessing a wife whose mind is as narrow as his circumstances, who, while he labours hard at the literary lathe, interrupts and irritates him perpetually with household questions and household operations; and, while he strives to escape from the closeness and misery of real life to the regions of higher thought and feeling, is for ever harping on his poverty, and taking occasion, from every little incident of daily life, to keep the remembrance of his troubles keen and fresh before his mind. The desolation of his life is yet increased by the evident preference which his wife, Lenette, to whom he was in the first instance tenderly attached, feels for a friend and daily visitor at his house, one Schulrath, i.e. "school-councillor," Stiefel, whose common-place mind harmonizes better with her own than that of her eccentric husband, while her conscience is effectually prevented from taking the alarm, because her unconscious predilection for him is set down to the account of her admiration for his pious and orthodox discourses from the pulpit, with which it must be confessed that the free-thinking remarks of Siebenkäs must have formed to a religious female mind a somewhat uncomfortable contrast. The unpropitious nature of his friend's financial and domestic position does not escape the notice of Leibgeber, who, happening to get the offer of a bailiwick on the estates of the Count of Vaduz, conceives the strange plan of extricating his double from all his difficulties by letting him personate himself in the bailiwick, after passing previously through a sham death and burial at his own home. This plan he accordingly presses upon his friend, who, after some hesitation, is persuaded to agree to the proposal, being moved thereto in no small degree by the consideration that Lenette, who, as his wife, leads a life of great