Titan: A Romance Volume I Part 1

t.i.tan: A Romance.

VOL. 1.

by Jean Paul Friedrich Richter.

PREFACE.

The "t.i.tan" is Jean Paul's longest--and the author meant it, and held it, to be his greatest and best--romance; and his public (including Mr.

Carlyle) seems, on the whole, to have sustained his opinion. He was ten years about it, and his other works, written in the interval, were preparatory and tributary to this.

As to the _general_ meaning of the t.i.tle there can hardly, on the whole, be any doubt. It does _not_ refer, as the division into Jubilees and Cycles might, to be sure, suggest to one on first approaching it, to the t.i.tanic scale and scope of the work, but to the t.i.tanic violence against which it is aimed.

It seems, indeed, from a letter of the author's, that he thought at first of calling it "Anti-t.i.tan." The only question in regard to the _application_ of the t.i.tle seems to be, whether the champion of truth and justice against the moral t.i.tans in this case was meant to be understood as represented by the hero of the story, with his friends, resisting the iniquity which moved earth and h.e.l.l to ruin him, or whether the book itself is the Anti-t.i.tan, and an age of extravagance the t.i.tan.

A French critic says of the "t.i.tan":--

"It is a poem, a romance; a psychological _resume_, 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 fact.i.tious, 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 G.o.d,--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?

"t.i.tAN!"

In giving his romance the t.i.tle of "t.i.tan," 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 antic.i.p.ated 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 n.o.ble, by the side of a reprobate, and of surrounding them both with a mult.i.tude 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 princ.i.p.al 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 n.o.ble, 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 n.o.bleness, 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 pa.s.sions, 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 "t.i.tan" while writing "Hesperus." This reminds us of a Philistine disparagement of the "t.i.tan," 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 "t.i.tan."

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 t.i.tanide, 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 "t.i.tan" 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 t.i.tle) 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 ill.u.s.trations 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 t.i.tan 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.

TO

THE FOUR LOVELY AND n.o.bLE SISTERS ON THE THRONE.[1]

_THE DREAM OF TRUTH._

Aphrodite, Aglaia, Euphrosyne, and Thalia once looked down into the clear-obscure of earth, and, weary of the ever-bright but cold Olympus, yearned to enter in beneath the clouds of our world, where the Soul loves more because it suffers more, and where it is sadder but more warm. They heard the holy tones ascend, with which Polyhymnia pa.s.ses invisibly up and down the low, anxious earth, to cheer and lift our hearts; and they mourned that their throne stood so far from the sighs of the helpless.

Then they determined to take the earthly veil, and to clothe themselves in our mortal form. They came down from Olympus; Love and little loves and genii flew playfully after them, and our nightingales fluttered to meet them out of the bosom of May.

But, as they touched the first flowers of earth, and flung only rays of light, and cast no shadows, then the earnest Queen of G.o.ds and men, Fate, raised her eternal sceptre, and said: "The immortal becomes mortal upon the earth, and every spirit becomes a human being!"

So they became human beings and sisters, and were called _Louisa_, _Charlotte_, _Theresa_, _Frederica_; the little loves and genii transformed themselves into their children, and flew into their maternal arms, and the motherly and sisterly hearts throbbed full of new love in a great embrace. And when the white banner of the blooming spring fluttered abroad, and more human thrones stood before them,--and when, blissfully softened by love, the harmonica of life, they looked upon each other and their happy children, and were speechless for love and bliss,--then did Polyhymnia, invisible, float by over them, and recognize them, and gave them the tones wherewith the heart expresses and awakens love and joy.

And the dream was ended and fulfilled; it had, as is always the case, shaped itself after waking reality. Therefore, be it consecrated to the four fair and n.o.ble sisters, and let all which is like it in _t.i.tan_ be so consecrated too!

JEAN PAUL FR. RICHTER.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The t.i.tan was published during the years 1800-1803. The four sisters were the four daughters of the Duke of Mecklenburg, viz.

the d.u.c.h.ess of Hildburghausen, the Princess von Solms, the Princess of Thun and Taxis, and the Louisa who afterward became Queen of Prussia, and was so in the Liberation War.--TR.

t.i.tAN.

FIRST JUBILEE.

Pa.s.sAGE TO ISOLA BELLA.--FIRST DAY OF JOY IN THE t.i.tAN.--THE PASQUIN-IDOLATER.--INTEGRITY OF THE EMPIRE EULOGIZED.--EFFERVESCENCE OF YOUTH.--LUXURY OF BLEEDING.--RECOGNITION OF A FATHER.--GROTESQUE TESTAMENT.--GERMAN PREDILECTION FOR POEMS AND THE ARTS.--THE FATHER OF DEATH.--GHOST-SCENE.--THE b.l.o.o.d.y DREAM.--THE SWING OF FANCY.

1. CYCLE.