Page:The English Review vol 7 Mar-Jun 1847 FGgaAQAAIAAJ.pdf/317

300 traces of which, in his Hesperus, we have before noticed. Moreover, the perusal of Titan is rendered interesting and instructive by many profound and cute remarks on subjects of art; the cultivation of his taste being made a prominent part of Albano's education by Don Gaspard, who for this purpose engages, along with the philosophical Schoppe, a Greek artist, to bear him company in his travels. The depth and truth of Jean Paul's observations on these subjects, and the beauty of his descriptions, are the more surprising, because he never visited the scenes which be depicts in such glowing and graphic language in person, but derived his information partly from books and partly from one of the four sister princesses to whom Titan is dedicated.

In Titan, Jean Paul reached the highest point of what the Germans call the "Ideal," according to his views of life and of human nature. He was himself evidently conscious that he could not exceed his Albano and his Clotilda, the Jupiter Olympius and the Venus Urania of his poetic chisel. The efforts of his genius, in producing the two fictions of Hesperus and Titan, had lifted him to the top of Parnassus; and having reached it he wisely determined not to waste his strength or to jeopardize his fame by abortive endeavours to outdo himself. Instead of straining his powerful nature, as he had hitherto done in his ascent to the cloud-capped mountain of the Muses, be was content henceforth to exercise it gently by disporting himself upon its summit. None of his subsequent works exhibit the same concentration of his varied gifts; it seems as if he had subjected his now matured mind to an analytic process, and determined to open for every faculty and tendency of it a separate channel in which it might flow forth, for the instruction and delight of a grateful and admiring public, and for his own satisfaction in the fulfilment of what he considered his calling in the moral and intellectual world of Germany. Of the writings which belong to this last period of Jean Paul's literary history, some are philosophical, a few political, and the rest divided between comic and sentimental humour. Among the comic productions we have chiefly to notice "Dr. Katzenberger's Badereise," or "Visit to the Watering-Place" of " Maulbronn," Anglicè " Mouthbourn;" the "Life of Fibel;" "Nicolaus Markgraf, or the Comet;" and the "Journey of the Military Chaplain, Attila Schmelzle to Flätz," of which Mr. Carlyle has given an admirable translation, with occasional abridgements. Of an earlier date, and more sentimental than comic in the character of its humour, is the unfinished novel entitled the "Flegeljahre," or lubber years, of which, under the title of "Walt und Vult," the names of the two heroes of the tale, the American editor of the Life of Jean Paul has just published a