Schiller met Jean Paul in the spring of 1796.  In writing to Goethe about their interviews, he says,—­“I have told you nothing yet about Hesperus.  I found him on the whole such as I expected, just as odd as if he had fallen from the moon, full of good-will, and very eager to see things that are outside of him, but he lacks the organ by which one sees”; and in a letter of a later date he doubts whether Richter will ever sympathize with their way of handling the great subjects of Man and Nature.

The reader can find the first interviews which Richter had with Goethe and Schiller in Lewes’s “Life of Goethe,” Vol.  II. p. 269.  Of Goethe, Richter said, “By heaven! we shall love each other!” and of Schiller, “He is full of acumen, but without love.”  The German public, which loves Richter, has reversed his first impression.  And indeed Richter himself, though he could not get along with Schiller, learned that Goethe’s loving capacity, which he thought he saw break out with fire while Goethe read a poem to him, was only the passion of an artistic nature which impregnates its own products.

Richter’s love was very different.  It was a sympathy with men and women of all conditions, fed secretly the while that his shaggy genius was struggling with poverty and apparently unfavorable circumstances.  He was always a child, yearning to feel the arms of some affection around him, very susceptible to the moods of other people, yet testing them by a humorous sincerity.  All the books which he devoured in his desultory rage for knowledge turned into nourishment for an imagination that was destined chiefly to interpret a very lofty moral sense and a very democratic feeling.  And whenever his humor caught an edge in the easterly moments of his mind, it was never sharpened against humanity, and made nothing tender bleed.  Now and then we know he has a caustic thing or two to say about women; but it is lunar-caustic for a wart.

Goethe did not like this indiscriminate and democratic temper.  The sly remarks of Richter upon the Transparencies and Well-born and Excellencies of his time, with their faded taste and dreary mandarin-life varied by loose morals and contempt for the invisible, could not have suited the man whose best friend was a real Duke, as it happened, one of Nature’s noblemen, one whose wife, the Duchess Sophia, afterwards held Bonaparte so tranquilly at bay upon her palace-steps.  Goethe had, too, a bureaucratic vein in him; he spoke well of dignities, and carefully stepped through the cumbrous minuet of court-life without impinging upon a single Serene or Well-born bunyon.  Mirabeau himself would have elbowed his way through furbelows and court-rapiers more forbearingly than Richter.  It was not possible to make this genius plastic, in the aesthetic sense which legislated at Weimar.  Besides, Goethe could not look at Nature as Richter did.  To such a grand observer Richter must have appeared like a sunset-smitten girl.