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 noble 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
pronounces 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 assistance 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 snatch and pluck away the butterfly-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 substitute 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 substitutions 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 the whole Latin Linnæus 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 Linnæus 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 title-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, Fouqué, and
others, frequently repeated or imitated, namely, the passion 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 Dahore 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, Müllner, &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 substitute 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!