[Footnote 1: His collected works, Vol. III. p. 68.]
[Footnote 2: In Faust,--Scene of the Easter Holidays.--Tr.]
[Footnote 3: A Jew once separated from his wife when she appeared with
bare arms; but it is difficult to ascribe the present frequent divorces
in Paris to that cause.]
[Footnote 4: It is amusing to hear Jean Paul call it so, but the German
diminutive, "Werk_lein_," also expresses attachment to the thing in
question. Thus children say _Väter-chen_, "Little Papa; Daddy."--Tr.]
[Footnote 5: Descriptive of Venus, or written under her
influence.--Tr.]
[Footnote 6: The stick on which a painter rests his arm.--Tr.]
[Footnote 7: Similarity of the parts to the whole.--Tr.]
[Footnote 8: _Fliegende Blätter_.--Tr.]
[Footnote 9: Of course, "Forgive us our debts."--Tr.]
[Footnote 10: A city of the Tauric Chersonesus, the modern
Crimea.--Tr.]
[Footnote 11: A Jesuit astronomer, A. D. 1598-1671, who named the
moon's spots Tycho, Plato, Hercules, St. Catharine, &c.--Tr.]
[Footnote 12: He alludes to the chimney-sweeper of his perukes.]
[Footnote 13: The name the Germans give to Death. _Hein_ would seem to
mean Hal.--Tr.]
[Footnote 14: Probably peas, which the children, as now, blew through
long tubes with great force.--Tr.]
[Footnote 15: In Upper Alsace, where every three years only the best
youth receives the crown and medal, and the jurisdiction of the
pastures.]
[Footnote 16: A sort of fire-ball, which, as it goes, emits smoke to
blind the enemy.--Tr.]
[Footnote 17: Small balls invented by him to put into a horse's ear,
and act as a spur.--Tr.]
[Footnote 18: An island of the Malay Archipelago, wooded, volcanic, and
spicy.--Tr.]
[Footnote 19: It is notorious how little I know of mining operations;
I therefore thought I had reason to apply to my superiors for a
spur which might stimulate me to do something in such a weighty
science,--and such a spur is certainly the office of mining-superintendent.]
[Footnote 20: Except the two emperors Silluck and Athnac, and the four
kings Sgolta, Sakeph-Katon, etc., I never had intercourse with any; and
that only as upper-class scholar, because we jurists, with the Devil's
help, had to learn Hebrew, wherein just the above-mentioned six
potentates appear as the names of the accents on words. Perhaps,
however, my correspondent means the great, acute, crowned accents of
nations. [_Sakeph-Katon_ is the only one the translator has not been
able to verify of these interesting names. _Kauton_ is given among the
Hebrew accents, but not Sakeph.--Tr.]]
[Footnote 21: Justus Möser, author of the "Patriotic Fantasies," one of
Germany's dearest memories, in many respects a Franklin.--Tr.]
[Footnote 22: Lane of the mine.--Tr.]
[Footnote 23: Ass's Post.--Tr.]
[Footnote 24: Instrument for taking the distance of a star north or
south from the equator.--Tr.]
[Footnote 25: Instrument for reckoning the deviation of the hour-circle
from the meridian.--Tr.]
[Footnote 26: Jean Paul seems to indulge here in an hexameter himself:
"Welches sie auch mehr bedarf, als der harmonische Gessner."--Tr.]
[Footnote 27: _Bewähren_ and _bewahren_ are the two German words.--Tr.]
[Footnote 28: E. g. their honor suffers, if their carriage does not
pass ahead of another carriage of rank.]
[Footnote 29: Such letters as David sent by Uriah to Joab. (See 2
Samuel xi. 14, 15.)--Tr.]
[Footnote 30: _Kleeblatt_ (_trefoil_) in the German.--Tr.]
[Footnote 31: After an operation for the cataract, the sensitive retina
represents everything magnified.]
[Footnote 32: A piece of charred bone or horn used by natives of the
East to absorb the blood from wounds made by the bite of a snake. See
Tennent's Natural History of Ceylon, p. 312.--Tr.]
[Footnote 33: The _Psalter_ in the ox's stomach is the _Blättermagen_
(lit. _leaf-stomach_), the third stomach of ruminant animals, the
tripe. So we speak of the _leaves_ of fat.--Tr.]
[Footnote 34:
"My spirit flew in feathers then,
That is so heavy now."--Hood.]
[Footnote 35: Joint-reporter.--Tr.]
[Footnote 36: A kind that heads in the form of a capuchin's hood.--Tr.]
[Footnote 37: When one's five numbers are all drawn in their order, it
is a quinterne.--Tr.]
[Footnote 38: _Aufgebunden_ may mean either tied up or untied.--Tr.]
[Footnote 39: Burlesque and serious operas.--Tr.]
[Footnote 40: Or, figure in history.--Tr.]
[Footnote 41: The ideal of the beautiful.]
[Footnote 42: As the Rabbins believe, according to Eisenmenger's
Judaism, Part II. 7.]
[Footnote 43: _Usance_ means the month's grace allowed for the
payment of a bill of exchange; double usance, of course, allows two
months.--Tr.]
[Footnote 44: Petrarch, like German reviewers, avoided nightingales,
and sought frogs.]
[Footnote 45: "Schatten_riss_ oder Schatten_schnitt_" is the
German.--Tr.]
[Footnote 46: The literal rendering would be "_cut out of the eyes_,
or, rather, out of the face." The phrase in Italics is a German idiom
for expressing an exact likeness.--Tr.]
[Footnote 47: The readers of Boswell's Johnson will remember that
interesting native of the South-Sea Islands.--Tr.]
[Footnote 48: Matthieu being the French for _Matthew_.--Tr.]
[Footnote 49: _Zeusel_ was a court-apothecary, mentioned on page 7, of
whom we shall hear more.--Tr.]
[Footnote 50: An Italian word, meaning literally gallant, applied to
those Platonic lovers who, with the connivance of the husbands,
attended married ladies, and were everywhere seen in confidential chat
with them.--Tr.]
[Footnote 51: La Mettrie was a noted medical man and materialist in his
day, b. 1709.--Tr.]
[Footnote 52: Remember the beautiful passage in Bede's History, where
the Northumbrian prince compares man's life to the flight of the
swallow through the lighted hall out of darkness into darkness.--Tr.]
[Footnote 53: An allusion, perhaps, to the legend, so lovely to the
fancy, that a crucifix in Naples, when Alphonso was besieged there, in
1439, bowed its head before a cannon-ball, which consequently took off
only the crown of thorns!--_Voyage d'un François_, Tom. VI. p. 303.]
[Footnote 54: This clover insures him who accidentally finds it against
future deception. Hitherto it has been found only by--princes and
philosophers.]
[Footnote 55: _Matz_, in German, means also both a starling and a
blockhead.--Tr.]
[Footnote 56: Elegant paper for the upper classes.--Tr.]
[Footnote 57: In the original, "hang hares' tails on us," i. e. "make
fools of us."--Tr.]
[Footnote 58: Literally, spit-devils,--a sort of firework.--Tr.]
[Footnote 59: I. e. Birthday-festival.--Tr.]
[Footnote 60: Not one of the commonplace souls that jog steadily on
like the hexameter.--Tr.]
[Footnote 61: This was a common practice of our old New England Puritan
parsons.--Tr.]
[Footnote 62: Disciples of Kennicott, the well-known English verifier
of the general accuracy of the Sacred Text.--Tr.]
[Footnote 63: A trap extemporized by setting up a heavy book obliquely,
with one end resting on a stick, and the cheese attached.--Tr.]
[Footnote 64: Christina, daughter of Charles XII., abdicated in May,
1654, at the age of twenty-eight.--Tr.]
[Footnote 65: A famous and popular old volume delineating the world of
nature and life in pictures, with numbers referring to the different
parts of each picture.--Tr.]
[Footnote 66: That is, threw into them, as into scrap-baskets, the bits
of paper on which he had written his thoughts.--Tr.]
[Footnote 67: Allusion to Ezekiel.--Tr.]
[Footnote 68: Literally, _God's-box_.--Tr.]
[Footnote 69: _Gesprungen_ seems to mean both _vibrated_ and
_snapped_.]
[Footnote 70: _Haupt_- und _Staat-actionen_, the phrase used by Faust in
his first dialogue with Wagner. Schlegel says the title was affixed to
dramas designed for marionettes when they treated heroic and historical
subjects.--Tr.]
[Footnote 71: Epiglottis.--Tr.]
[Footnote 72: What has come into the world feet foremost.--Tr.]
[Footnote 73: Basselisse (French).--Tr.]
[Footnote 74: _Ladenhüter_ (shop-keeper) is the German word,
meaning goods that keep the store as a sick man keeps his
bed,--_shop-ridden_.--Tr.]
[Footnote 75: A court that decided matters in dispute among the
sovereigns of the German Confederation.--Tr.]
[Footnote 76: A selection of choice learning.--Tr.]
[Footnote 77: Midsummer-day.--Tr.]
[Footnote 78: A name given by the Greeks to the Hebrew word Jehovah,
which consists, in the original, of _four letters_.--Tr.]
[Footnote 79: The thumb of a hanged thief was considered as a
lucky-bone.--Tr.]
[Footnote 80: Full.--Tr.]
[Footnote 81: Or it _went a begging_, as we say.--Tr.]
[Footnote 82: "Rara avis."--Tr.]
[Footnote 83: See page 67.--Tr.]
[Footnote 84: It is precisely the possession of _heterogeneous_
faculties in _similar_ degree that makes one inconsequent and
inconsistent; men with one predominant faculty act by it with more
equableness. In despotisms there is more quiet than in republics; at
the hot equator there is a more even rate of the barometer than in the
zones of four seasons.]
[Footnote 85: One of Burns's words.--Tr.]
[Footnote 86: The bust of the Vatican Apollo, by which he would learn
to model no other figure than his own.]
[Footnote 87: There is something in the use and application of the word
_Wissenschaft_ which requires for its appreciation an understanding of
the peculiar genius of the German mind.--Tr.]
[Footnote 88: Bacon's remark will recur to the reader.--Tr.]
[Footnote 89: A solar system is only a dotted profile of the genius of
the world, but a human eye is his miniature. The _mechanics_ of the
bodies of the universe the mathematical masters of reckoning may
calculate, but the _dioptrics_ of the eye, growing bright amidst
nothing but dull moistures, transcends our algebraic audit-offices,
which therefore cannot reckon away from the imitated eyes (the glasses)
the space of diffusion and the narrow field.]
[Footnote 90: Jean Paul would probably have said Rubicon if he had not
been going to say it elsewhere,--e. g. p. 199.]
[Footnote 91: Hieronym. cont. Jov. L 2.]
[Footnote 92: _Hof_ means in German _both_ court--and yard.--Tr.]
[Footnote 93: Bayle's Dictionary, Art. _François d'Assise_, Note C.]
[Footnote 94: A half-way house.--Tr.]
[Footnote 95: Jean Paul probably means, that such noble hearts as
Victor's Le Baut might shut up into silence, but could not with his
Chamberlain's master-key open and find out their secrets.--Tr.]
[Footnote 96: In a later edition Jean Paul substitutes for _Schein-tod_
(sham death) a half French word, _Postiche-tod_ (supposititious
death).--Tr.]
[Footnote 97: "On whose board he had a _stone_," literally,--a proverb
for being in one's good graces.--Tr.]
[Footnote 98: There is an inconsistency in date of month here with p.
135.--Tr.]
[Footnote 99: The dog as well as myself know what island that is, but
no more.]
[Footnote 100: "Burning-chambers," a name originally given to the place
for judging criminals of state belonging to illustrious families. The
room was lined with black, and lighted with flambeaux. Originated with
Francis I. in 1535, in his persecution of heretics.--Tr.]
[Footnote 101: Plebeian.--Tr.]
[Footnote 102: One at hearing from Emanuel, the other at seeing
Clotilda.--Tr.]
[Footnote 103: Red drops fall from butterflies in their last
transformation, which they used to call bloody rain.]
[Footnote 104: When one looks a long time into the blue of heaven, it
begins to undulate, and these waves in the air one imagines in
childhood to be angels at play.]
[Footnote 105: This monologue is a fragment from an earlier dark hour,
such as every heart of sensibility once suffers.]
[Footnote 106: _Noth-münzen_ means originally coin containing alloy,
struck off in hard times.--Tr.]
[Footnote 107: The Hebrew language has but three vowels
("vowel-points") which, from the assistance they gave in enunciating a
vast variety of words, were called _matres lectionis_, or mothers of
the reading.--Tr.]
[Footnote 108: I. e. bowing so low.--Tr.]
[Footnote 109: Herkommen, as a common noun, means _tradition_ or
_custom_.--Tr.]
[Footnote 110: An infusorial or minute animal, called in natural
history _rotifera_ (wheel-bearer).--Tr.]
[Footnote 111: _Famulus_ is the Latin name in the German. Wagner was
one in Faust.--Tr.]
[Footnote 112: So called in allusion to the _shaking_ they were giving
it.--Tr.]
[Footnote 113: _Kopfstück_ (lit. _head-piece_), a coin bearing the head
of the regent.--Tr.]
[Footnote 114: The billiard-pockets (like the contribution-bags) used
to have bells to them.--Tr.]
[Footnote 115: Who felt himself to be "a child picking up pebbles on
the shore of the great ocean of truth."--Tr.]
[Footnote 116: A conventual term,--a six.--Tr.]
[Footnote 117: God bless you!--Tr.]
[Footnote 118: Many thanks!--Tr.]
[Footnote 119: Of course a parody on "Verbum sat _sapienti_,"--"A word
for the _fool_," &c.--Tr.]
[Footnote 120: Or reading-_easel_ (the latter word seeming to be an
English corruption of the German _Esel_, ass),--any book-rest.
_Maler-esel_ means a painter's easel.--Tr.]
[Footnote 121: When they occur in actual life.--Tr.]
[Footnote 122: Eclectic or miscellaneous science, not confined to one
department.--Tr.]
[Footnote 123: A King of France once sent a vassal _illum baculum,
quo se sustentabat, in symbolum traditionis_. (Du Fresne's
Glossary.) So far as I know, there has never been made a good and
serviceable--abridgment of this _glossarium_ for ladies.]
[Footnote 124: Just as there are _listening sisters_ (_les Tourières_
or _S[oe]urs écoutés_) who go with the nuns into the conversing room,
to overhear their talk.]
[Footnote 125: Or absentee-curates.--Tr.]
[Footnote 126: Literally _looker-on_,--one admitted to behold the
secret ceremonies in the Eleusinian mysteries.--Tr.]
[Footnote 127: To know how to obey is a glory equal to that of
commanding.--Tr.]
[Footnote 128: "Slaves are accounted nobodies."--Tr.]
[Footnote 129: In real life.--Tr.]
[Footnote 130: _To make one a queue_ is a proverb for imposing on him
(like pinning a rag to one's coat-tail?).--Tr.]
[Footnote 131: _Diet_ (from _dies_) _implies_ the idea of _day_,
but the German "Reichs_tag_" makes the pun more palpable in the
original.--Tr.]
[Footnote 132: A lady's watch, as is well known, shaped like a heart,
provided on the back with a dial-gnomon and magnetic needle. The latter
points out to the ladies (who hate _cold_) the _south_ also, in fact,
and the sun-dial-index serves as a moon-dial-index.]
[Footnote 133: "Rome concealed the name of her god, and she was wrong;
I conceal the name of my goddess, and I am right."]
[Footnote 134: Or _Tensa_, the carriage on which they bore the images
of the gods in the Circensian games.--Tr.]
[Footnote 135: A shrine.--Tr.]
[Footnote 136: Properly, a pitcher, or urn.--Tr.]
[Footnote 137: Here Jean Paul inserts, after "in die Federn," "(_nicht
in die Feder_),"--i. e. _not into the pen_ (a German phrase for
_dictating_). The pun could not be kept.--Tr.]
[Footnote 138: A watch that tells only the hours.--Tr.]
[Footnote 139: The reference is to Laurence Sterne, and the snuff-box
he mentions in the early part of the "Sentimental Journey," as given
him by a monk, and carried ever after as an amulet.--Tr.]
[Footnote 140: Ignatius's-plate means probably a breastplate, or
medallion, consecrated by Ignatius Loyola.--Tr.]
[Footnote 141: I. e. to throw light upon it.--Tr.]
[Footnote 142: Like John Buncle, who went round, as was said, to
propagate his faith and his species.--Tr.]
[Footnote 143: A fourth reason would be, that now, every time be loves
another than Clotilda, he seems to earn a new claim to the gratitude of
his friend.]
[Footnote 144: Italian for everybody.--Tr.]
[Footnote 145: May there be a sly allusion--here to the possibility of
their putting their hair up in papers torn from the leaves of Jean
Paul's works?--Tr.]
[Footnote 146: Schickaneder was the Director of a Theatre in Vienna in
the time of Mozart, and wrote the text for the _Magic Flute_.--Tr.]
[Footnote 147: A wreath given in derision to brides who before marriage
had been unchaste.--Tr.]
[Footnote 148: And then are ready to verify the proverb: _Curses, like
chickens, come home to roost_.--Tr.]
[Footnote 149: Musical interval.--Tr.]
[Footnote 150: Old scholastic term for a _past_ eternity, in
contradiction to a coming eternity, _a parte post_.--Tr.]
[Footnote 151: The Invisible Lodge; a Biography in Two Parts. [A work
of Jean Paul's.--Tr.]]
[Footnote 152: Such was the name of his Lordship's wife, who in her
twenty-third year sank to rest in the eternal arms.]
[Footnote 153: In the original, _Semper-freie_ (always free,--eligible
to office).--Tr.]
[Footnote 154: Hence too it was, that, so long as Victor was at the
Parsonage, she avoided Flamin's society.]
[Footnote 155: The reader will remember this same remark, in so many
words, on p. 223.--Tr.]
[Footnote 156: It turned out more fortunately, and without loss of the
stones, and I had the satisfaction to find that no woman who read the
first edition of this work has, in her womanlike _castling_ or
_rotation in office_, at all interchanged the two _thats_. Nay, even
the female readers of the second edition have remained consistent with
themselves.]
[Footnote 157: Demoralization.--Tr.]
[Footnote 158: The German word _kleiden_; it has a corresponding double
meaning of _dressing_, and also of _suiting_.--Tr.]
[Footnote 159: Science,--Mathematics.--Tr.]
[Footnote 160: Step-measurers.--Tr.]
[Footnote 161: Men entitled to lecture in three branches.--Tr.]
[Footnote 162: Or disciple of the indifferential calculus.--Tr.]
[Footnote 163: Or, in prose, fiery water-wheel.--Tr.]
[Footnote 164:
"And what if all of animated nature
Be but organic harps diversely framed,
That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps,
Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,
At once the soul of each and God of all?"
Coleridge, _The Æolian Harp_.]
[Footnote 165: _Fromm_ is the German. It is time the words _religious_
and _pious_ were redeemed from the base uses of sectarianism and
bigotry.--Tr.]
[Footnote 166: _Enlightenment_ in an _empty_ heart is mere memory-work,
let it strain the faculty of acumen ever so much. Most men of our day
resemble the new houses in Potsdam, in which (according to Reichard)
Frederick the Second caused _lights_ to be placed at night, that every
one, including Reichard himself, might think they were--_occupied_.]
[Footnote 167: Most men have, perhaps, only an equal number of good
_thoughts_ and _actions_; but it is still an open question how long the
virtuous man may interrupt his good thoughts (which have less need than
good actions of the outer world) by indifferent ones.]
[Footnote 168: For the noblest leans just the most on loving souls, or
at least on his ideals of them, with which, however, he is only in so
far satisfied as he regards them as pledges of future prototypes. I do
not except either the Stoic (that Epicurean God) or the Mystic: both
love in the Creator only the sum total of his creatures; we the former
in the latter.]
[Footnote 169: The German _Vorwand_ means literally front wall (not far
from the etymological meaning of _pretext_); so that there may be a
figurative element here beyond what appears to the casual reader.--Tr.]
[Footnote 170: The reader of this letter will readily presuppose that
Clotilda, as she does not know into whose hands it may fall,--in fact,
it is actually in ours,--will have to hurry over her relations and
mysteries (e. g. respecting Flamin, Victor, &c.) with an obscurity
which to her proper reader was clear enough.]
[Footnote 171: Let the reader remember that she is master of as much of
this biography as he, if not more.]
[Footnote 172: She means Giulia, from whose corpse grief had hurried
her away.]
[Footnote 173:
"Now spring returns, but not to me returns
The vernal joy my better years have known," &c.
Michael Bruce.]
[Footnote 174: "Fly not from me, because I am always encompassed by a
great shadow, which increases till at last it shall wall me up."]
[Footnote 175: Every seven years of human life.--Tr.]
[Footnote 176:
"Or had it drizzled _needle-points of ice_
Upon a feverish head made suddenly bald."