He who reflects carefully upon even these short extracts from Jean Paul's huge four-volume novel will see how here again a connecting line is drawn between life and art. Without premeditation, but very significantly, Roquairol takes the nature of the productive artist as an image of his own, and the expressions "charred by fantastic fire" and "the idealism of the heart" are as accurate as scientific definitions. There was no doubt in the author's mind as to what it was he wished to delineate. Roquairol, after committing his last and most abominable crime, namely, visiting Linda by night, disguised as his friend and her lover, Albano, is made to die by his own hand on the stage. He is playing a part which ends in suicide, and he shoots himself dead. He lives to the last moment in a world of appearances and make-believe, confusing or blending the real with the imaginary. And this determination to make reality fantastic or poetical is the distinguishing feature of the succeeding generation, the task to which it set itself, the problem which all its productions were attempts to solve. To understand this is to understand and excuse the blunders it makes in its schemes for the remoulding of reality, such a scheme, for instance, as we find in Friedrich Schlegel's _Lucinde_. The great question of the relation of poetry to life, despair over the deep, bitter discord between them, the unwearied struggle to bring about a reconciliation--this is what lies at the foundation of the whole of German literature from the _Sturm und Drang_ period to the death of Romanticism. In order, therefore, to understand _Lucinde_, as well as _Lovell_, it is necessary to look back. We understand both better by the help of Jean Paul's _Titan_. Lovell's predecessor is the Titan Roquairol, Lucinde's the Titaness Linda. [1] "Welcome, sublime thought, that makes of me a god! Things are, because we have thought them.--In the dim distance lies the world; into its dark caverns falls a ray of light, which we brought with us. Why does this world not fall into atoms? Because the power of our will holds it together!--Glad at heart because I have escaped from my chains, I now go boldly forward in the path of life, absolved from those irksome duties which were the invention of cowardly fools. Virtue is, because I am; it is but the reflection of my inner self.--What care I for forms which borrow their dim splendour from myself? Let virtue wed with vice! They are but shadows in the mist. The light that illumines the dark night comes from me. Virtue is, because I have thought it." [2] Tieck: _William Lovell_, i. 49, 52, 172, 178, 212; ii. 110. V SOCIAL ENDEAVOURS OF THE ROMANTICISTS: LUCINDE