Page:The English Review vol 7 Mar-Jun 1847 FGgaAQAAIAAJ.pdf/311

294 wretchedness, would in all probability, if left a widow per hypothesin, marry Stiefel. A romantic acquaintance which, at this very time, while on a visit to Leibgeber, he forms with a young lady of great beauty and high mental attainments, the intimate friend of his friend, Natalia by name, adds a new interest to his life and to the story; though she is no further concerned in the present affair than that, being penniless and dependent on a rich relation, who wants to marry her to a worthless character, she consents, in ignorance, of course, of the entire scheme, to accept a pension secured for her in a life-insurance office, upon the decease of her admirer; a "fraud," as we should call it in plain English, upon the office aforesaid, for which, as well as for the purchase of a widow's pension for Lenette, Leibgeber furnishes the funds; the dishonesty of the transaction being somewhat palliated by an intention to indemnify the office out of the profits of the bailiwick. All the preliminaries of the plan being settled, Siebenkäs returns home, and is soon after followed by Leibgeber, when the pseudo-tragedy of his death and burial is enacted, and he proceeds to his bailiwick. After the lapse of two years, curiosity induces him to revisit incog. the scene of his former life, when he finds that his relict, Lenette, who had, according to his own wish, expressed upon his supposed death-bed, married the Schulrath, has lately died in her first childbed. This intelligence induces him, during the night, to seek her grave in the churchyard; and there he meets Natalia, who, believing him dead, had come on a similar errand to visit his cenotaph. She takes him at first for his ghost, and is well-nigh killed by fright; but a recognition and explanation afterwards takes place, which ends in their espousals, and so justifies the quaint order of events in the title-page of the work.

It may easily be conceived what ample opportunities the story of which we have now given our readers a brief abstract, omitting all the minor details, and all the subordinate characters, would afford to Jean Paul's inexhaustible humour to display itself. But the sport which he makes, though not uncongenial to the German mind, accustomed to speak and think on the highest and the most serious subjects with an alarming degree of freedom, is hardly suited to our English taste, or justifiable in the abstract; and Jean Paul himself was carried by the impulse which he had given to himself, so for beyond all the bounds within which poetic fancy should be restrained by religious awe, as to introduce Christ proclaiming from the summit of the universe the non-existence of a God. It is true, the whole vision forms part of a dream, and its object is not to inculcate atheism, but to combat it, by showing the utter desolation of heart and mind which atheism involves;