"It is a poem, a romance; a psychological _résumé_, a satire, an elegy,
a drama, a fantasy; having for theme and text the enigma of civilization
in the eighteenth century.
"How is it to end, this civilization which exaggerates alike
intellectual and industrial power at the expense of the life of the
soul,--wholly factitious, theatrical,--intoxicating, consuming itself
with pleasure, seeking everywhere new enjoyments,--exploring all the
secrets of nature, without being able to penetrate the first causes, the
secrets of God,--what will be the fate of these generations
supersaturated with romances, dramas, journals, with science, ambition,
with vehement aspirations after the unknown and impossible?...
"In augmenting the sum of its desires, will it augment the sum of its
happiness? Is it not going to increase immensely its capacity of
suffering?
"Will it not be the giant that scales heaven--
"And that falls crushed to death?
"TITAN!"
In giving his romance the title of "Titan," says the same writer, "it is
not Albano de Cesara the author has in view, but his antipode, Captain
Roquairol,--that romantic being, that insatiable lover of pleasure, that
anticipated Byron, that scaler of heaven,--who, after having piled
mountain upon mountain to attain his object, ends in finding himself
buried under the ruins....
"Even while at work upon 'Hesperus,' he had formed the resolution of
placing a pure man, great and noble, by the side of a reprobate, and of
surrounding them both with a multitude of beings corresponding to them.
He wished to concentrate in a single work all the ideas of high
philosophy which he had disseminated in his other creations, and to show
them followed by their natural consequences. So strong a mind could not
stop there: he resolved to show the absurdity of exaggeration, whether
in good or in evil, in virtue or in vice.
"Hence those reproductions of the same types, those satellites
gravitating around their respective planets; in fine, those parodies of
the principal personages of the drama.
"By the side of the coldness and the vast plans of Don Gaspard de
Cesara, we have the no less dangerous intrigues, though upon a less
elevated scale, of the Minister von Froulay; by the side of the
ventriloquist Uncle, the lying Roquairol; the Princess Isabelle is
opposed to Linda de Romeiro, the aerial Liana to her physical
counterpart, the Princess Idoine; the comic vulgarity of Dr. Sphex
contrasts with the more elevated buffoonery of Schoppe; and if we have
Bouverot, we have also Dion, that Greek so elegant and so noble, happy
mixture of the antique and the modern, that artist so sensible and so
true....
"The history of Albano, opposed to Roquairol, is the history, taken from
his tenderest childhood to the epoch of his greatest development, of a
being who, as the strictest consequence of a quite special education,
goes through life, wounding himself with all its griefs, drinking at the
source of all its lawful pleasures; suffering with nobleness, tasting of
happiness, but only the purest kind; exposed every instant to see
himself drawn away by fallacious principles, and nevertheless moving on
with a steady step towards the end which his reason has marked out for
him; sacrificing to the fulfilment of his duties all the delights that a
debauched court can offer a young man entering into the world. While all
the personages who gravitate around him, and who represent each a
different aberration from the fundamental principle of the work, fall
successively at his side, victims of the natural consequences of their
passions, he, strengthening himself by every fall of which he is
witness, ends by attaining the loftiest position which the ambition of
man can desire,--a position which he could not have expected, and for
which, consequently, he had not been able to make the sacrifices that,
in the course of the work, he does not cease to achieve."
The author whom we have thus copiously quoted alludes to Jean Paul's
having had the idea of "Titan" while writing "Hesperus." This reminds us
of a Philistine disparagement of the "Titan," that so many of the
characters of the other work reappear here under new names. There are
some critics who ought to object to the full moon, that she is only the
same old moon that we had, in her first quarter or half, several nights
ago. However, as we have not yet had "Hesperus" in English, nor are
likely to for some time, this kind of objection will not trouble English
readers of "Titan."
Jean Paul has been justly praised for his success in drawing and shading
female characters. Our French critic says: "Richter has the rare merit
of placing on the stage in the same work six female personages, who have
not a shadow of resemblance to each other, and who, from the moment of
their appearance on the scene to that of their quitting it, never
deviate a single minute from the character the author has given them."
The fate of his Titanide, Linda, created a loud remonstrance in Germany;
and one can hardly, indeed, help feeling as if poetic justice had been a
little caricatured, at least, in Richter's disposal of that half
strong-headed and half headstrong woman. Painful, however, as her end
is, the Translator could not listen an instant to the suggestion of
omitting a line of the scenes in which that terrible tragedy is brought
to a close.
When the "Titan" first appeared, complaint was made by some that there
was too much of drollery, by others that there was not enough; some
found too much sentimentality, others too much philosophy; the
Translator has found it full, if not of that brevity which is the soul
of _wit_ (not, however, of humor), yet of that variety which is the
spice of life.
The Translator (or Transplanter, for he aspires to the title) of this
huge production, in his solicitude to preserve the true German aroma of
its native earth, may have brought away some part of the soil, and even
stones, clinging to the roots (_stones of offence_ they may prove to
many, stones of stumbling to many more). He can only say, that if he had
made Jean Paul always talk in ordinary, conventional, straightforward,
instantly intelligible prose, the reader would not have had _Jean Paul
the Only_.
And yet it is confidently claimed that, under all the exuberance of
metaphor and simile, and learned technical illustrations and odd
digressions, and gorgeous episodes and witching interludes, that
characterizes Richter, every attentive and thoughtful reader will find a
broad and solid ground of real good sense and good feeling, and that in
this extraordinary man whom, at times, his best friends were almost
tempted to call a crazy giant, will be found one whose _heart_ (to use
the homely phrase) is ever _in the right place_.
It has seemed necessary to give a few notes, and only a few. Properly to
furnish such a work with annotations would require Jean Paul's own
voluminous un-commonplace-books of all out-of-the-way knowledge, and
that _Dictionary to Jean Paul_ which one of his countrymen began, but
unfortunately carried only through one of his works, the work on
Education, _Levana_.
The Translator desires emphatically to express his obligations to his
friend, Rev. Dr. Furness, of Philadelphia, and to _his_ friend, the
accomplished scholar, Mr. Knorr, to whose kind and patient care whatever
of accuracy or felicity there may be in his version of the first Jubilee
is largely due; also, to Rev. Dr. Hedge, and all the friends who have
helped him with suggestion and encouragement in this large and difficult
undertaking, he makes his warmest acknowledgments;--and he closes by
commending the Titan to all lovers of the humanities, confident (in the
words of Mrs. Lee, in her Life of Jean Paul) that "the more it is read,
the more it will be acknowledged a work of exalted genius, pure
morality, and perennial beauty."
C. T. B.
NEWPORT, R. I.