No one knew what was the chief impulse which led Schumann to write these “Papillons.” Those who corresponded with him alone knew that he was thinking of the “Flegeljahre”[128] of Jean Paul. From Jean Paul he received his spiritual nourishment, and those to whom his letters came could tell that he hardly sent off one without including in them a rhapsody for the Bayreuth poet. In this intermediate world between the highest earnestness and endless laughter he preferred to live in ironic love and loving irony. To reflect deeply on immortality, and at the same time to drink in comfortably the sweet odour of the girdle cake which the goodwife is cooking in the kitchen--it is in this mixed light that the poet stands, who has so characterised himself. The fantastic boundaries of the real and the imaginary world, of the most insipid flatness of the animal nature and of the most ethereal heavenly flights, alike attract him. His delicate soul flies to Nature, and Nature is to him--so he writes to his mother--the great outspread handkerchief of God, embroidered with His eternal name, on which man can wipe away all his tears of sorrow. But the tears of joy too--and when every tear falls into a rapture of weeping--whence came these tones in the soul of a musician? The world had never yet understood them. It knew them in literary circles, which busied themselves with romantic new creations, where unknown regions seemed suddenly to open themselves between the everyday and the legendary, and which demanded new, painfully twisted words for the wild tumult of their representations. Where pure music had long wandered alone, the poets and the æsthetics had now penetrated; and was now a musician to give them a hand to speak in their tongue? This was a surprising turn. Upon the musical poet came the literary musician. The one could only gain; had the other anything to lose? No; Schumann seemed musician enough to prove that nothing was lost. None of his friends, to whom he recommended the perusal of the conclusion of the “Flegeljahre”--whose masked dance, he said, the Papillons were intended to transform into tones--would have expected this pure and genuine music from him. I imagine they all puzzled their heads to know what the wild Jean Paul had to do with these dainty musical butterflies. And it is to-day even harder for us.