of Richter at his best.  It seems as though one of the great Dutch painters were guiding the pen, revealing the beauty of common things and showing the true charm of quiet domesticity.  Richter’s Contented Schoolmaster lacked much in grace of form, but it revealed unguessed resources in the German language, it showed democratic sympathies more genuine than Rousseau’s, it gave the promise of a new pedagogy and a fruitful esthetic; above all it bore the unmistakable mint-mark of genius.

Wuz won cordial recognition from the critics.  With the general public it was for the time overshadowed by the success of a more ambitious effort, Richter’s first novel, The Invisible Lodge.  This fanciful tale of an idealized freemasonry is a study of the effects in after life of a secluded education.  Though written in the year of the storming of the Tuileries it shows the prose-poet of the Fichtelgebirge as yet untouched by the political convulsions of the time.  The Lodge, though involved in plot and reaching an empty conclusion, yet appealed very strongly to the Germans of 1793 by its descriptions of nature and its sentimentalized emotion.  It was truly of its time.  Men and especially women liked then, better than they do now, to read how “the angel who loves the earth brought the most holy lips of the pair together in an inextinguishable kiss, and a seraph entered into their beating hearts and gave them the flames of a supernal love.”  Of greater present interest than the heartbeats of hero or heroine are the minor characters of the story, presenting genially the various types of humor or studies from life made in the “erotic academy” or in the families of Richter’s pupils.  The despotic spendthrift, the Margrave of Bayreuth, has also his niche, or rather pillory, in the story.  Notable, too, is the tendency, later more marked, to contrast the inconsiderate harshness of men with the patient humility of women.  Encouraged by Moritz, who declared the book “better than Goethe,” Richter for the first time signed his work “Jean Paul.”  He was well paid for it and had no further serious financial cares.

Before the Lodge was out of press Jean Paul had begun Hesperus, or 45 Dog-post-days, which magnified the merits of the earlier novel but also exaggerated its defects.  Wanton eccentricity was given fuller play, formlessness seemed cultivated as an art.  Digressions interrupt the narrative with slender excuse, or with none; there is, as with the English Sterne, an obtrusion of the author’s personality; the style seems as wilfully crude as the mastery in word-building and word-painting is astonishing.  On the other hand there is both greater variety and greater distinction in the characters, a more developed fabulation and a wonderful deepening and refinement of emotional description. Werther was not yet out of fashion and lovers of his “Sorrows” found in Hesperus a book after their hearts.