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TITAN:

A ROMANCE.

FROM THE GERMAN OF

_JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER._

TRANSLATED BY

CHARLES T. BROOKS.

IN TWO VOLUMES.

VOL. I.

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BOSTON:
TICKNOR AND FIELDS.
1864.


Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1862, by

TICKNOR AND FIELDS,

in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of
Massachusetts.

THIRD EDITION.


_UNIVERSITY PRESS:_
WELCH, BIGELOW, AND COMPANY,
_CAMBRIDGE._




TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE.


The "Titan" 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 title 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
titanic scale and scope of the work, but to the titanic 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-Titan." The only question in regard to the
_application_ of the title seems to be, whether the champion of truth
and justice against the moral Titans 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 hell to ruin him, or
whether the book itself is the Anti-Titan, and an age of extravagance
the Titan.

A French critic says of the "Titan":--

"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 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