The sweep of tender emotion that murmurs and rustles through the writing of Jean Paul is like the echo of a lullaby heard in a dream. Perhaps it came from that long partnership when mother and son held the siege against poverty, and the kitchen-table served them as a writing-desk, and the patient old mother was his sole reviewer, critic, reader and public.
For shams, hypocrisy and pretense Jean Paul had a cyclone of sarcasm, and the blows he struck were such as only a son of Anak could give; but in his heart there was no hate. He could despise a man's bad habits and still love the man behind the veneer of folly. So his arms seem ever extended, welcoming the wanderer home.
Dear Jean Paul, big and homely, what an insight you had into the heart of things, and what a flying-machine your imagination was! Room for many passengers? Yes, and children especially, for these you loved most of all, because you were ever only just a big overgrown boy yourself. You cried your eyes out before your hair grew white, and then a child or a woman led you about; and thus did you supply Victor Hugo a saying that can not die: "To be blind and to be loved—what happier fate!"
Yes, Jean Paul used to cry at his work when he wrote well, and I do, too. I always know when I write particularly well, for at such times I mop furiously. However, I seldom mop.
Robert Schumann began to write little essays, and the essays were as near like Jean Paul's as he could make them. He read them to his mother, just as Jean Paul used to write for his mother and call her "my Gentle Reader"—he had but one.
Robert's mother believed in her boy—what mother does not? But her love was not tempered by reason, and in it there was a sentimental flavor akin to the maudlin.
The father wanted the lad to take up his own business, as German fathers do, but the mother filled the lad's head with the thought that he was fit for something higher and better. She was not willing to let the seed ripen in Nature's way—she thought hothouse methods were an improvement.
Such a mother's ambition centers in her son. She wants him to do the thing she has never been able to do. She thirsts for honors, applause, publicity, and all those things that bring trouble and distress and make men old before their time.
So we find the boy at eighteen packed off to Heidelberg to study law, with no special preparation in knowledge of the world, of men or books. But old father antic, the law, was not to his taste. Robert liked music and poetry better. His fine, sensitive, emotional spirit found its best exercise in music; and at the house of Professor Carus he used to sing with the professor's wife. This Professor Carus, by the way, is, I believe, directly related to our own Doctor Paul Carus, of whom all thinking people in America have reason to be proud. I am told that when a boy of eighteen or nineteen mingles his voice several evenings a week with that of a married lady aged, say, thirty-five, and they also play "four hands" an hour or so a day, that the boy is apt to surprise the married lady by falling very much in love with her. Boys are quite given to this thing, anyway, of falling in love with women old enough to be their mothers—I don't know why it is. Sometimes I am rather inclined to commend the scheme, since it often brings good results. The fact that the woman's emotions are well tempered with a sort of maternal regard for her charge holds folly in check, dispels that tired feeling, promotes digestion, and stimulates the action of the ganglionic cells.
It was surely so in this instance, for Madame Carus taught the youth how to compose, and fired his mind to excel as a pianist. He wrote and dedicated small songs to her, and their relationship added cubits to the boy's stature.