ABSTRACT
Robinson, the first English writer to discover Jean Paul, and subsequently a valuable source of information for both Coleridge and Carlyle, provides a shrewd general comparison between the writing of Sterne and Jean Paul, which indirectly helps to illuminate some of the peculiarities of Jean Paul's theory. Jean Paul's full elaboration of this point would certainly have interested Coleridge, whose priority it was in his lectures on Shakespeare to point out that judgment and genius are coextensive, that the bard did not conform to the prevalent stereotype of an untutored warbler of wood-notes wild. Passively cultivating sensitive feelings in solitude, as Coleridge imagines Sterne's readers doing, leads not to moral improvement but to a selfishness that is the very opposite of sympathy. The chapter suggests that in writing his own 'life and opinions', Coleridge attempted in a principled fashion to preserve the best of Shandean narrative while dispensing with what he regarded as its overly risque bagatelle.
