Hesperus or Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days Volume I Part 1

Hesperus or Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days.

Vol. I.

by Jean Paul Friedrich Richter.

PREFACE.

A work which has three prefaces by its author may be thought by some to need, and by others not to permit, a very long one from its translator.

This is the first of Richter's romances which took hold of the German public. After he had long tried in vain, by a variety of literary devices, to entice or provoke the people's attention, and win or force a way to their hearts for his wit and his wisdom, his odd fancies and his n.o.ble sentiments, on the appearance of Hesperus, the siege, as Carlyle says, ("the ten-years'-siege of a poverty-stricken existence"

Jean Paul himself calls it,) may be said to have terminated by storm.

It was the Hesperus that brought Richter to Weimar. It was in Hesperus, and as Hesperus, that this singular genius rose on the horizon of Goethe and Schiller,--the latter of whom (as will be well remembered) tells his great friend that he has met "Hesperus," a strange being, like a man who has dropped from the moon. English readers may have different opinions on the question whether he "came down too soon" or too late. The Translator seems to see signs that Jean Paul is to be better and better understood and appreciated among us in this free and forming Western world, and he concludes his introduction of this second great labor to the public with the benediction upon the book which, in the closing paragraph of _his_ second Preface, the author so touchingly p.r.o.nounces on this evening and morning star of his heart.

The Translator is exceedingly indebted to his friend, Professor Knorr of Philadelphia, and to his former teacher, Dr. Beck of Cambridge, for their kind and patient a.s.sistance in correcting the proof-sheets of his work; and from the keen and practised eye of Mr. George Nichols he also received for some time valuable aid.

Newport, R. I.

PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION.

Two long Prefaces follow on the heels of this third,--the first that of the second edition, and the next that of the first. Now, if I make this third again a long one,--and perhaps also, in fact, the many remaining ones of future editions,--I do not see how a reader of these latter can get through the lane of antechambers to the historical picture-gallery: he will die on his way to the book.

I report, then, briefly. In this edition such amendments have been made as were most needed and easiest. In the first place, I have frequently translated myself into German out of the Greek, Latin, French, and Italian, and in fact in every instance where the speech-cleanser, with proper respect for the subject itself, demanded it. Once for all, we writers must all accommodate ourselves to the verbal-alien-bill, or decree for exiling foreigners, of Campe, Kolbe, and others; and even our beloved Goethe, however much he too "emergiert" and "eminiert,"

will at last, in some future edition or other, have, for example, to throw both of these very words, which in the latest[1] he brings forward in the same line, out of the book. Is it not time, now that we have ejected the foreign peoples which had been long enough encamped in Germany, that we should send after them what has still longer remained behind,--their echo, or words?

Only let Kolbe, or any other Purist, be a reasonable man, and not exhort us to change the technical words which are the common property of cultivated Europe--e. g. of music, of philosophy--into vernacular ones which will not be understood, especially in cases where the hand of the interpreter would s.n.a.t.c.h and pluck away the b.u.t.terfly-dust of variegated allusions. For example, the name Purist itself may serve as an example. Supposing one should call Arndt a _political Purist_ of Germany, and Kolbe should subst.i.tute political _speech-purifier_, or pure of speech, this small conceit would give up in the translation the little bit of ghost that it haply possessed.

Even if the author, however, has not turned out such things,--as some philological anchorites do, who, like the windpipe, eject all foreign matter with disagreeable coughing and spitting, and only retain their native air,--still he has at least sought to imitate the glaciers, which from year to year gradually shove down foreign bodies, such as stone and wood, from their sides. How diligently I have done this in the present edition of Hesperus, on every side, may be seen by the old printed copy interlined with the new emendations, and I could well wish Herr Kolbe would just travel to Berlin and inspect the copy. At least I will beseech the German Society there, which some years ago made me a member, to go to the bookstore and see for themselves what their colleague has done, what erasions and subst.i.tutions he has made.

The ones who have properly sinned the most against the German language, and against those who understand no other, are the natural-historians, who--e. g. Alexander von Humboldt--import thee whole Latin Linnaeus into the midst of our language, without any other German signs of distinction than the final flourishes of German terminations, or tail-feathers, wherewith, however, they are as little intelligible to the mere speaker of German as a man would be to a stranger behind him through his mere queue. Has not our inexhaustible language already shown its capability of creating a German Linnaeus when we read a Wilhelmi, and still more that true German in heart and speech, Oken?

For the rest, the German language will, in general, never shrink up and grow impoverished, even by the greatest hospitality towards strangers.

For it steadily produces (as all dictionaries show) out of its ever fresh stems a hundred times as many children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren as the foreign birth it adopts in the place of children; so that after centuries the thicket that has sprung from our prolific radical words must overshadow and choke up the strange words which have shot up only as flying seed, and finally rear itself into a true banian forest, whose twigs grow down to roots, and whose upward-planted roots strike out into summits. How entangled and wild with foreign growth will, on the contrary, after some centuries, the English language be, for instance, with its native but powerless stem full of engrafted word-shrubbery, capable only of inoculation, and fetching back from its duplicate, America, more new words than wares!

The second, but easier thing which has been done for this third, improved edition of Hesperus, of course is, that I have gone slowly through the whole Evening Star with weeder in hand, and carefully eradicated all the fungous weeds of genitives, or _Es_'s, in compound words, wherever I found them, which on the very t.i.tle-page of the _Dog's_-Post-days was unfortunately the case. I had, however, much to endure in this work. Of the old actions of our over-rich language against itself, too many are attachments upon its real estate, and I was compelled, therefore, to leave many a nested crew of Es's where it had too long been settled, and appealed to witnesses and ear-witnesses for right of possession.

Even up to the hour of this Preface, the author of the "_Morgen-Blatt_ letters on compound words" has been waiting, not so much for a thorough-going _examination_, (it were, perhaps, too soon for that,) but first of all for a comprehensive _reading_ of them, which, to be sure, the scattering archipelago of sheets, like islands lying apart from one another, will make difficult so long as the periodical has not yet run through its circle of numbers. But then I shall hope from the speech-investigator, when he has them complete in his house and hands before his judgment-seat, a thorough refutation or approbation.

Finally, in the third place, after the double amendment of two editions, (for the first received great improvements, and in fact _before_ it was printed,) a third was undertaken which had for its object to let fly at harshnesses, obscurities, mistakes, and other over-lengthenings and overshortenings of dress.

But, heavens! how often must not a writing-man have to improve upon himself, who is hardly over half a century old! Were he to live, in fact, into a Methusalem's millennium, and continue to write, the Methusalem would have to append so many volumes of emendations that the work itself would have to be annexed to them as mere preliminary matter, appendix, or supplementary sheet.

For several years the author has found in his earlier works, in a high degree, a fault which he has met with in Ernst Wagner, Fouque, and others, frequently repeated or imitated, namely, the pa.s.sion for enacting, in his authorial person, the trumpeter, or usher, of the emotions, which the subject himself should have and show, but not the poet. E. g. "With sublime calmness Dah.o.r.e replied." Why add _sublime_, when it is superfluous, presumptuous, and premature, provided the answer really exalts, or, if it does not so, the result is still more pitiful? The poet who, in this way, is the _fore-echo_ of his personages, takes for his model certain modern tragic poets, like Werner, Mullner, &c., who prefix to every speech for the actor the bookbinder's directions: "With touching emotion,"--"with a sigh of painful remembrance out of the depths of sorrow,"--mere sentences of intensity, or rather of impotence, which only a pantomimic dance needs or can follow, but which no piece of Shakespeare's, of Schiller's, or of Goethe's needs, because, indeed, the speech itself teaches how to speak it.

For the rest, I have not the courage, now that I am a quarter of a century older and more aged, to give the first youthful outstreamings of the heart a different channel, and a weaker fall and course. Man in later life too easily regards every change in his junior as an improvement; but as no man can take the place of another, so, too, cannot the same man act as his own subst.i.tute in his different periods of life, least of all the poet.

The best _wedded_ love is not what the _maidenly_ was; and so, too, is there in inspiration and delineation a maiden muse. Ah, all first things in poesy, as in life, whatever else may be wanting to them, are so innocent and good; and all _blossoms_ come so _pure-white_ into the world, in which by and by,--as Goethe says,[2] even of material colors, "The sun tolerates no white." Therefore shall all the ardent words of my inspiration for Emanuel's dying and Victor's loving and weeping, and for Clotilda's sorrow and silence, stand evermore in Hesperus uncooled and unchanged. Even the Now shall take nothing from the Once. For although during these twenty-five years I have been made, by some imitations and echoes of the book, actually sick of myself, nevertheless I overcome the disgust of this self-surfeit by the hope that the youth who wrote will again, by and by, find young men and young women to read him, and that hereafter, even for older readers, more will survive of the thing imitated than of the imitations.

And so, then, may this Evening Star--which was once the morning star of my whole soul--run its _third_ circuit around the reading world in the fuller light of a better position toward the sun and the earth!

JEAN PAUL FR. RICHTER.

Baireuth, January 1, 1819.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION.

I have as yet completed nothing of this Preface beyond a tolerable sketch, which shall here be given to the leader unadorned. I may perhaps, by the gift of this sketch, also raise the curtain which continues to hang down before my literary workshop, and which hides from posterity how I labor therein as my own serving brother and as master of the Scottish chair. A plan is with me, however, no outline of a sermon in Hamburg, which the head pastor gives out on Sat.u.r.day and fills out on Sunday. It is no automaton, no lay figure, no canon, after which I work; it is no skeleton for future flesh, but a plan is a leaf or sheet on which I make myself more comfortable and move more at ease, while I shake out upon it my whole brain-tree, in order afterwards to pick over and plant the windfalls, and cover--the paper with organic globules and layers of ph[oe]nix ashes, that whole brilliant pheasantries may rise out of it. In such a sketch I keep the most unlike and antagonistic things apart by mere dashes. In such sketches I address myself, and _thou_ myself like a Quaker, and order myself about a great deal; nay, I frequently introduce therein conceits which I do not have printed at all, either because no connection can be contrived for them, or because they are of themselves good for nothing.

And now it will be time that I should really present the reader such a sketch, which happens to be this time the plan of the present Preface.

It is headed:--

ARCHITECTURAL PLAN AND BUILDING MATERIAL FOR THE PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION OF HESPERUS.

"But make it short, because, as it is, the world will find it a long way through two antechambers into the pa.s.sengers'-room of the Book.--Joke in the beginning.--Seldom does a man bowl all the Nine Muses on the literary ninepin-alley.--The conclusion from the reflection.--Bring out many resemblances between the t.i.tle Hesperus and the Evening Star, or Venus, of which the following must be specimens: That mine, like the latter, is full of high, sharp mountains, and that both owe their greater splendor to their unevenness; further, that the one as well as the other, in its transit across the sun (of Apollo), appears only as a black spot.--(In your copy-book of letters you must have made numbers of such allusions.)--The world expects that the Evening Star in the second edition will come up from below, as Lucifer, or Morning Star, and that the glorified body of the paper will tabernacle a glorified soul: let it pa.s.s, and bring the world to its right bearings.--Regard pedants, who sustain and fodder themselves on words, not on things, as like the after-moths, which devour and digest wax cakes, but no honeycomb.--No one so very much resembles as pedants do the magpies, which are at once thievish and _garrulous_: they dilute and filch.--Into the critical h.e.l.l precisely those cla.s.ses of persons are not cast, which the Talmud also exempts from the Jewish, namely, the poor, those who cannot count, and those who are carried off by the diarrh[oe]a.--Be a fox, and cajole the critical billiard-markers who announce loss and gain."----

This last I do not understand myself, because this sketch was written as long ago as the winter. I can rather confess, without irony, that the critical quarter-judges, or country-judges, have spared my life, and have not thrown over me either a Spanish mantle, or a cloak of humility, or a b.l.o.o.d.y shirt and hair-shirt. This indulgence of the critics for a writer of books, who, like a Catholic, performs more good works than he needs for salvation, is certainly not their worst characteristic, as they thereby exert such a beneficial influence on our empty days. For one must now be very glad if only four or five new similes are sent to the Easter fair, and if at Michaelmas only a few flowers, which are novelties, are offered for sale. Our literary kitchen-servants know how to play off on the table-cloth and into our mouths the same _goutee_ over and over again, under the appearance of six different dishes, and entertain us twice a year with an imitation of the celebrated potato-banquet in Paris. At first came on merely a potato-soup; then potatoes again in another preparation; the third course, on the contrary, consisted of potatoes rehashed; so, too, the fourth. For the fifth, now, one could serve up potatoes again, when one had only announced for the sixth, potatoes cut into the novel form of brilliants,--and so it went on through fourteen dishes, of which, fortunately, one could still say, that at least bread, confectionery, and liquor comforted the stomach, and consisted of potatoes.----

Censure is an agreeable lemon-juice in praise; hence both are always bestowed by the world together, as if in the form of an oxymel; just as, according to the Talmud, a few fingerfuls of a.s.saf[oe]tida were thrown with the other things upon the altar of burnt-offerings. The only thing, accordingly, which I will expose about the reviewers after the foregoing praise, and with which they really offend, is this, that they seldom (their heart is good) understand much of the subject or writing on which they pa.s.s judgment; and even this blame applies only to the greater part of them.----

"Weave it in (the sketch goes on) that you cannot make out what the unveiling and unsh.e.l.ling of women's arms,[3] bosoms, and backs at the present day can mean, just as, formerly, peac.o.c.ks were served up on the game-dish with precisely the corresponding parts, necks, wings, and heads, unpicked.--It will be well, therefore, if you conjecture that the sh.e.l.l-less ladies are female Jesuits and Freemasons in disguise, because in both orders the mysteries and veilings begin with denudation; or lay these unfeathered limbs at the door of some starvation or other, as a chicken creeps forth from an egg, out of which one has only drawn off a few drops of the white, with featherless spots.--Threaten, at least, that ladies and crabs are best when caught and boiled in the moulting-season."----

This is one of the cases of which I said above, that in them I was obliged to give up and throw away conceits of the sketch, for want of connection with the main subject: for really the whole matter of the moulting of the limbs has nothing in common with the Preface, except the year of birth.

"You must deviate from other authors," the plan goes on, "and glide silently over the approbation you have reaped, so that the world may see just what you are.--One expects from the Preface to a second edition a little map of products, or a harvest register of all the after-bloom which exalts the second above the first: give them the register!--

With pleasure!--First, I have corrected all typographical errors,--then all slips of the pen,--then many cacophonies of language,--moreover, verbal and real blunders enough; but the conceits and the poetical tulips I have seldom rooted out. I saw that if I did so there would be left in the world not much more of the book (because I should strike out the whole style) than the binding and the list of errata. The theologian hates juristic allusions,--the jurist, theological ones,--the physician, both,--the mathematician, all of them. I love them all. What shall one leave out or retain?--The woman is displeased with satire, the man with softening warmth, (for _coldness_ in _books_, as in _cakes of chocolate_, he holds to be proof of excellence,) and the public itself has forty-five opinions upon a chapter, as Cromwell dictated four contradictory letters to the same correspondent, merely for the sake of concealing from his scribes the purport of the one which he really despatched.----To which opinion shall an author adhere in such a disagreement?--Most properly to his own, as the world to its own.--

For the rest, my little[4] work can hardly see so many _printed_ editions as I have arranged of _written_ and improved ones in my study; and therefore great alterations in it are, if not less indispensable, at least more difficult. In the plan of the story itself, therefore,--even supposing I had forgotten that it is a true one,--there is little to change for the better, because the work is like my breeches, which were not made by a tailor, but by a stocking-loom, and in which the breaking of a single st.i.tch of the right shank unravels the whole fabric of the left. For it is an essential, but undeniable, fault of the book,--which I easily explain by the want of episodes,--that the moment I take out from the first story (or volume) any defective stone whatever, immediately in the third all totters, and at last comes down. Of course I thereby fall far in the rear of the best new romances, where one can break out or build in considerable pieces without the least injury to the composition and fire-proof quality, simply because they resemble, not, like my book, a mere house, but a whole toy-city from Nuremberg, whose loose, unhitched houses the child piles away in his play-house, and whose mosaic of huts the dear little one easily puts together for his amus.e.m.e.nt, streetwise, just as he fancies. A true story always has the annoying thing about it, that in its case this cannot be done.

However, I sufficiently excuse my work on the score of artistic _changes_ and _improvements_ by true _enlargements_ of it through historical additions. As I fortunately have for some years myself lived and been housed among the persons whom I have portrayed, accordingly I am perfectly in a position, as fly-wheel of this fair family circle, to supply, from the depositions of living witnesses, a thousand corrections and explanations which otherwise no man could learn, which however throw light on the somewhat dark history. Let the critic simply turn over the two nearest chapters of the book, or the remotest, or any others.

My critics would complacently persuade me that I should have avoided in the additions what they call superfluous wit, and skilfully watered the gleaming naphtha-soil of my Evening Star, which was neither to be quenched nor sunk, with fresh history.----Heaven grant it! I have slim hope of it; but I should be glad if the reviewers would a.s.sure me that I had--although not sold at auction or covered up the crowded images in my Pantheon-Pandemonium--still, however, at least hung them farther apart.

"On the whole," continues the sketch, "take in hand the historical _grafting-knife_ rather than the _weeder_!"

I just said that I have done so.

"But as touching those dried-up, withered men, in whose eyes nothing is great but their own image, and whose stomach at the sight of a fairer movement of the exalted heart is taken with a _reverse_ movement,--in short, whom everything nauseates (except what is nauseous),--make believe as if you did not perceive them; and so much more as they resemble patients who are gnawed by the tape-worm, and who, according to medical observations, sicken and vomit at all music, especially organs, think rather of the good souls whom thou knowest and lovest, and of the good ones whom thou only lovest,----and therefore at the end of the Preface be earnest and grateful and rejoice!"----