It was arranged, before separating, that the party should ride to a grove of olive-trees, at no great distance from Gaza, where roast lambs stuffed with rice, raisins, and pistachio nuts, large bowls of leban and thin cakes of bread, were prepared for their refreshment. Salem and Sidney had some interesting conversation concerning the state of Syria, and the position of Mohammed Ali; and they parted with mutual expressions of esteem—Salem warning Sidney rather mysteriously against making any stay at Gaza. After Oriental greetings, and long salutations, Salem, Aali, Abdallah, Hassan and the Sheikh of Hebron rode off with their train of followers to the east; while Sidney, Lascelles Hamilton, and Achmet slowly proceeded towards Gaza, to repose after their fatigues in crossing the desert.
LIFE OF JEAN PAUL FREDERICK RICHTER.[3]
If there be a regular German of the Germans beyond the Rhine and be-north the Alps, whom, notwithstanding (perhaps partly by reason of) his faults and eccentricities, we love, and honour, and reverence, and clasp to our true British breast with a genuine feeling of brotherhood,—this man is Jean Paul Frederick Richter. True, his name to the uninitiated is a sort of offence, and a stumbling-block, almost as much as if you were to introduce the gray, leafless image of transcendental logic in the shape of philosopher Hegel, or the super-potentiated energy of transcendental volition in the shape of philosopher Fichte;—but, my dear friends and readers, consider this only,—what thing pre-eminently great and good is there in the world that has not been in its day an offence and a stumbling-block to the uninitiated? “Wo unto you, when all men speak well of you:” this is a text no less applicable to literature than to religion; and howsoever a certain school of critics—unfortunately not yet altogether extinct—may turn up their snub noses, and apply with orthodox deliberation their cool thermometer which never boils, there are occasions when this text may be quoted most appropriately against them. Even Göethe, “many-sided” Göethe, is not free from blame here—he never understood Richter; he judged according to the appearance—not a righteous judgment; his thermometer was too cold. But the great Olympian of Weimar, when with his dark brows he nodded, and from his immortal head the ambrosian locks rolled down in anger against the uprising muse of Frederick Richter, failed of his Homeric parallel in one point—“μεγαν δ' ελελιξεν Ολυμπον”—he did not shake Olympus. He did not cause the eccentric comet-genius of Richter to tame the brilliant lashings of its world-wandering tail—he did not cause Germany, he cannot cause Europe to cease admiring these brilliant coruscations, and that pure lambent play of heaven-licking light. To institute a comparison between Richter and Göethe were merely to repeat again for the millionth time that old folly of critics, by which they will allow nothing to be understood according to its own nature, but must always drag it into a forced and unnatural contrast with things most unlike itself; were merely to reverse the poles of injustice, and apply to Göethe as unequal a measure as he and men of his compact and complete external neatness, apply to Richter. We make no foolish and unprofitable comparisons; a wild wood is a wild wood, and a flower-bed is a flower-bed; which of them is best we know not, but we know that they are both good. We know that Göethe is great, and that Richter is great; which of them is the greater some god, as the Greeks said, may know; but for us mortals it is sufficient to endeavour to sympathise perfectly with the peculiar greatness of each, and appropriate what part of it we may.
We should wish to make this a very long article, and to run a little wild, like Richter himself, if the inspiration would only sustain us; but it may not be. Biographies, even the best, of literary men possess a complete and satisfactory interest only to those who are acquainted in some degree with the works of the author; and Madame de Stael has told us with an authoritative voice that, however great the powers of Richter were, “nothing that he has published can ever extend beyond the limits of Germany.”[4] Now, though this has more the air of a narrow last-century judgment than one of the present day, and is, perhaps, more French than English; yet the fact is, that Richter has not hitherto extended his literary influence, except in the case of a few stray individuals, beyond his native country; and his biography can, of course, not expect to meet with the same extensive welcome from a British public that was given to that of Schiller, and Mrs Austin’s Characteristics of Göethe. Nevertheless, the work from which we shall presently make a few extracts is a most valuable addition to those links that are daily uniting us with more endearing bonds to the Saxon brotherhood beyond the Rhine; it is a step, and a bold one, in advance. We have now almost to satiety made a survey of the neat classical Weimar, and we are plunging at once, with bold fearless swoop, into the very centre of the Fatherland, into the midst of the untrodden fir forests of the Fichtelgebirge, where many great hearts billow out sublime thoughts—hearts that never saw that which is most kindred to them in nature—the sea. So it was with Richter literally. Born at the little mountain town of Wunsiedel, between Bayreuth and Bohemia, and shifting about with a migratory elasticity from Bayreuth to Berlin, from Berlin to Coburg, from Coburg to Heidelberg, he died without having ever feasted his eyes (what a feast to a man like him!) on the glowing blue of the Mediterranean, or drunk in with his ears the “ανηριθμον γελασμα” the multitudinous laughter of the Baltic wave. A genuine German!—in this respect certainly, and in how many others! A German in imagination—Oh, Heaven! he literally strikes you blind with skyrockets and sunbeams (almost as madly at times as our own Shelley), and circumnavigates your brain with a dance of nebulous Brocken phantoms, till you seriously doubt whether you are not a phantom yourself: a German for kindliness and simplicity and true-heartedness—a man having his heart always in his hand, and his arms ready to be thrown round every body’s neck; greeting every man with a blessing, and cursing only the devil, and—like Robert Burns—scarcely him heartily: a German for devoutness of heart, and purity of unadulterated evangelic feeling, without the least notion, at the same time, of what in Scotland we call orthodoxy, much less of what in England they call church; a rare Christian; a man whom you cannot read and relish thoroughly unless you are a Christian yourself, any more than you can the gospel of John. For Richter also is a preacher in his own way—a smiling, sporting, nay a jesting preacher at time, but with a deep background of earnestness: his jests being the jests not of rude men, but of innocent children; his earnestness the earnestness not of a sour Presbyterian theologian, but of a strong-sighted seraph that looks the sun in the face, and becomes intensely bright. A German further is Richter, and better than a German, in the profoundness of his philosophy and the subtlety of his speculation: a speculation profound, but not dark; a subtlety nice without being finical, and delicate without being meagre. A German further, and specially, is this man, in his vast and various erudition, and in that quality without which learning was never achieved, hard laboriousness and indefatigable perseverance. It is incredible what books he read: not merely literary books, but also and principally scientific books; natural history especially in all its branches from the star to the star-fish; quarto upon quarto of piously gathered extracts were the well-quarried materials, out of which his most light and fantastic, as well as his most solid and architectural fabrics were raised: a merit of the highest order in our estimation; an offence and a scandal to many; for nothing offends conceited and shallow readers so much as to find in an imaginative work allusions to grave scientific facts, of which their butterfly-spirits are incapable. Then, over and above all this, Richter possesses a virtue which only a few Germans possess: he is a man of infinite humour: humour, too, of the best kind; sportive, sunny, and genial, rather than cutting and sarcastic; broad without being gross, refined without being affected. Then his faults, also—and their name is legion—how German are they! His want of taste, his mingled homeliness and sublimity, his unpruned luxuriance, his sentimental wantonness! But let these pass; he who notices them seriously is not fit to read Richter. It requires a certain delicate tact of finger to pluck the rose on this rich bush without being pricked by the thorn; John Bull especially, with his stone and lime church, his statutable religion, and his direct railroad understanding, is very apt to be exasperated by the capricious jerking electric points of such a genuine German genius as Richter. On the pediment of this strange temple we would place in large letters the cry of the Cumæan Sibyl in Virgil— “Procul, O procul este, profani!”
Let no mere mathematician, no mere Benthamite, no mere mechanist, no mere “botanist,” no mere man of taste, and trim man of measured syllables, enter here. Procul, O procul este, profani! It is enchanted ground. We have no quarrel with you; we quarrel with nobody: only keep your own ground, in God’s name, and don’t quarrel with us and our German friend Paul.
Richter was born, as we have mentioned, in the little county town of Wunsiedel, in Franconia, and that in the year 1763—about the same time, to use his own words, as the peace of Hubertsburg, which put an end to the famous Seven Years’ War. He was thus four years the junior of Schiller, (born 1759,) and fourteen of Göethe, (born 1749.) He was, like many other famous literary characters, the son of a clergyman, and blesses God frequently both for this, and that he was not born a cockney, (in Berlin or Vienna,) or in a coach-box, like the children of aristocratic parents, driven about over Europe in their early years, and never knowing the pleasure of having a home. A country vicarage amid mountains, forests, village schools and brawling brooks, gave to Richter’s infancy, and through that to his genius, a calm and peaceful background, over which a multiplicity of whimsical figures might, without painful dissipation, be made to play. In early youth the future prose-poet (for he never wrote a line of metre) displayed great eagerness to learn, and great aptitude for speculation; he was accordingly, by the fond ambition of a pious mother, dedicated, like so many a bookish youth, to the church. But theology, with its prickly fence of stiff dogmas, had no charms for a youth of his extreme sensibility, mercurial versatility, and sparkling freakishness; besides, speculation and questioning were already abroad in the German church, and amid the loud voices of contending doctors, it was a difficult thing for an active and honest thinker to cut the matter short by help of the devil’s recipe in Faust;
“If you will have a certain clue
To thread the theologic maze,
Hear only one, and swear to every word he says.”
Richter, therefore, finding himself without rudder or compass on the wide sea of German theology, much to the grief of his honest mother, was obliged to forswear theology and become author, his genius being stimulated quite as much by poverty as by Apollo, like old Horace.
“Philippi then dismiss’d me with my wings
Sorrily clipt, without or house or home;
And Need, that ventures all, forced me to try
The pen, and become poet.”
The Philippi which dismissed Richter was the University of Leipsic. He came back to Hof penniless, but not hopeless, to his good mother,—striving with a mind in some respects as narrow as her fortune; and here he studied, and brooded, and dreamed, and began to shoot strange coruscations: let us see how:—
“The darkest period of our hero’s life was when he fled from Leipsic and went down in disguise to Hof. The lawsuit had stripped his mother of the little property she inherited from the cloth-weaver, [her father,] and she had been obliged to part with the respectable homestead where the honest man had carried on his labours. She was now living with one or more of Paul’s brothers, in a small tenement, containing but one apartment, where cooking, washing, cleaning, spinning, and all the bee-hive labours of domestic life must go on together.
“To this small and over-crowded apartment, which henceforth must be Paul’s only study, he brought his twelve volumes of extracts, a head that in itself contained a library, a tender and sympathising heart—a true, high-minded, self-sustaining spirit. His exact situation was this: The success of the first and second volumes of his ‘Greenland Lawsuits’ had encouraged him to write a third—a volume of satires, under the singular name of ‘Selections from the Papers of the Devil;’ but for this we have seen he had strained every nerve in vain to find a publisher. This manuscript, therefore, formed part of the little luggage which his friend Oerthel had smuggled out of Leipsic. It was winter, and from his window he looked out upon the cold, empty, frozen street of the little city of Hof, or he was obliged to be a prisoner, without, as he says, ‘the prisoner’s fare of bread and water, for he had only the latter; and if a gulden found its way into the house, the jubilee was such, that the windows were nearly broken with joy.’ At the same time he was under the ban of his costume martyrdom: this he could have laughed at and reformed; but hunger and thirst were actual evils, and when of prisoner’s food he had only the thinner part, he could well exclaim, as Carlyle has said— ‘Night it must be e’er Friedland’s star will beam’
“Without was no help, no counsel, but there lay a giant force within; and so, from the depths of that sorrow and abasement, his better soul rose purified and invincible, like Hercules from his long labours.“‘What is poverty,’ he said, at this time, ‘that a man should whine under it? It is but like the pain of piercing the ears of a maiden, and you hang precious jewels in the wound.’”
The “costume martyrdom” here mentioned, is a most characteristic affair; and as a great man’s character is often revealed most strikingly in small matters, we shall give it at length.