Part 1

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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.

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 _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.

TO

THE FOUR LOVELY AND NOBLE 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 passes 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 gods 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 noble sisters, and let all which is like it in _Titan_ be so consecrated too!

JEAN PAUL FR. RICHTER.

FOOTNOTES:

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

CONTENTS OF VOL. I.

FIRST JUBILEE. PAGE

PASSAGE TO ISOLA BELLA.--FIRST DAY OF JOY IN THE TITAN.--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 BLOODY DREAM.--THE SWING OF FANCY 1

SECOND JUBILEE.

THE TWO BIOGRAPHICAL COURTS.--THE HERDSMAN'S HUT.--THE FLYING.--THE SALE OF HAIR.--THE DANGEROUS BIRD-POLE.--A STORM LOCKED UP IN A COACH.--LOW MOUNTAIN-MUSIC.--THE LOVING CHILD.--MR. VON FALTERLE FROM VIENNA.--THE TORTURE SOUPÉ.--THE SHATTERED HEART.--WERTHER WITHOUT BEARD, BUT WITH A SHOT.--THE RECONCILIATION 70

THIRD JUBILEE.

METHODS OF THE TWO PROFESSIONAL GARDENERS IN THEIR PEDAGOGICAL GRAFTING-SCHOOL.--VINDICATION OF VANITY.--DAWN OF FRIENDSHIP.--MORNING STAR OF LOVE. 110

FOURTH JUBILEE.

HIGH STYLE OF LOVE.--THE GOTHA POCKET-ALMANAC.--DREAMS ON THE TOWER.--THE SACRAMENT AND THE THUNDER-STORM.--THE NIGHT-JOURNEY INTO ELYSIUM.--NEW ACTORS AND STAGES, AND THE ULTIMATUM OF THE SCHOOL-YEARS 128

FIFTH JUBILEE.

GRAND-ENTRY.--DR. SPHEX.--THE DRUMMING CORPSE.--THE LETTER OF THE KNIGHT.--RETROGRADATION OF THE DYING-DAY.--JULIENNE.--THE STILL GOOD-FRIDAY OF OLD AGE.--THE HEALTHY AND BASHFUL HEREDITARY PRINCE.--ROQUAIROL.--THE BLINDNESS.--SPHEX'S PREDILECTION FOR TEARS.--THE FATAL BANQUET.--THE DOLOROSO OF LOVE 161

SIXTH JUBILEE.

THE TEN PERSECUTIONS OF THE READER.--LIANA'S EASTERN ROOM.--DISPUTATION UPON PATIENCE.--THE PICTURESQUE CURE 197

SEVENTH JUBILEE.

ALBANO'S PECULIARITY.--THE INTRICATE INTERLACINGS OF POLITICS.--THE HEROSTRATUS OF GAMING-TABLES.--PATERNAL "MANDATUM SINE CLAUSULA."--GOOD SOCIETY.--MR. VON BOUVEROT.--LIANA'S SPIRITUAL AND BODILY PRESENCE 215

EIGHTH JUBILEE.

LE PETIT LEVER OF DR. SPHEX.--PATH TO LILAR.--WOODLAND-BRIDGE.--THE MORNING IN ARCADIA.--CHARITON.--LIANA'S LETTER AND PSALM OF GRATITUDE.--SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY THROUGH A GARDEN.--THE FLUTE-DELL.--CONCERNING THE REALITY OF THE IDEAL 238

NINTH JUBILEE.

PLEASURE OF COURT-MOURNING.--THE BURIAL.--ROQUAIROL.--LETTER TO HIM.--THE SEVEN LAST WORDS IN THE WATER.--THE SWEARING OF ALLEGIANCE.--MASQUERADE.--PUPPET MASQUERADE.--THE HEAD IN THE AIR, TARTARUS, THE SPIRIT-VOICE, THE FRIEND, THE CATACOMB, AND THE TWO UNITED MEN 268

TENTH JUBILEE.

ROQUAIROL'S ADVOCATUS DIABOLI.--THE FESTIVAL DAY OF FRIENDSHIP 310

ELEVENTH JUBILEE.

EMBROIDERY.--ANGLAISE.--CEREUS SERPENS.--MUSICAL FANTASIES 334

TWELFTH JUBILEE.

FROULAY'S BIRTHDAY AND PROJECTS.--EXTRA-LEAF.--RABETTE.--THE HARMONICA.--NIGHT.--THE PIOUS FATHER.--THE WONDROUS STAIRWAY.--THE APPARITION 351

THIRTEENTH JUBILEE.

ROQUAIROL'S LOVE.--PHILIPPIC AGAINST LOVERS.--THE PICTURES.--ALBANO ALBANI.--THE HARMONIC TÊTE-À-TÊTE.--THE RIDE TO BLUMENBÜHL 384

FOURTEENTH JUBILEE.

ALBANO AND LIANA 405

FIFTEENTH JUBILEE.

MAN AND WOMAN 432

SIXTEENTH JUBILEE.

THE SORROWS OF A DAUGHTER 481

TITAN.

FIRST JUBILEE.

PASSAGE TO ISOLA BELLA.--FIRST DAY OF JOY IN THE TITAN.--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 BLOODY DREAM.--THE SWING OF FANCY.

1. CYCLE.

On a fine spring evening, the young Spanish Count Cesara came, with his companions, Schoppe and Dian, to Sesto, in order the next morning to cross over to the Borromæan island, Isola Bella, in Lago Maggiore. The proudly blooming youth glowed with the excitement of travelling, and with thoughts of the coming morrow, when he should see the isle, that gayly decorated throne of Spring, and on it a man who had been promised him for twenty years. This twofold glow exalted my picturesque hero to the form of an angry god of the Muses. His beauty made a more triumphal entry into Italian eyes than into the narrow Northern ones from the midst of which he had come; in Milan many had wished he were of marble, and stood with elder gods of stone, either in the Farnese Palace or in the Clementine Museum, or in the Villa of Albani; nay, had not the Bishop of Novara, with his sword at his side, a few hours before, asked Schoppe (riding behind) who he was? And had not the latter, with a droll squaring of the wrinkle-circle round his lips, made this copious answer (by way of enlightening his spiritual lordship): "It's my Telemachus, and I am the Mentor. I am the milling-machine and the die which coins him,--the wolf's tooth and flattening mill which polishes him down,--the man, in short, that regulates him"?

The glowing form of the youthful Cesara was still more ennobled by the earnestness of an eye always buried in the future, and of a firmly shut, manly mouth, and by the daring decision of young, fresh faculties; he seemed as yet to be a burning-glass in the moonlight, or a dark precious stone of too much color, which the world, as in the case of other jewels, can brighten and improve only by cutting _hollow_.

As he drew nearer and nearer, the island attracted him, as one world does another, more and more intensely. His internal restlessness rose as the outward tranquillity deepened. Beside all this, Dian, a Greek by birth and an artist, who had often circumnavigated and sketched Isola Bella and Isola Madre, brought these obelisks of Nature still nearer to his soul in glowing pictures; and Schoppe often spoke of the great man whom the youth was to see to-morrow for the first time. As the people were carrying by, down below in the street, an old man fast asleep, into whose strongly marked face the setting sun cast fire and life, and who was, in short, a corpse borne uncovered, after the Italian custom, suddenly, in a wild and hurried tone, he asked his friends, "Does my father look thus?"

But what impels him with such intense emotions towards the island is this: He had, on Isola Bella, with his sister, who afterward went to Spain, and by the side of his mother, who had since passed to the shadowy land, sweetly toyed and dreamed away the first three years of his life, lying in the bosom of the high flowers of Nature; the island had been, to the morning slumber of life, to his childhood's hours, a Raphael's painted sleeping-chamber. But he had retained nothing of it all in his head and heart, save in the one a deep, sadly sweet emotion at the name, and in the other the squirrel, which, as the family scutcheon of the Borromæans, stands on the upper terrace of the island.

After the death of his mother his father transplanted him from the garden-mould of Italy--some of which, however, still adhered to the tap-roots--into the royal forest of Germany; namely, to Blumenbühl, in the principality of Hohenfliess, which is as good as unknown to the Germans; there he had him educated in the house of a worthy nobleman, or, to speak more meaningly and allegorically, he caused the pedagogical professional gardeners to run round him with their water-pots, grafting-knives, and pruning-shears, till the tall, slender palm-tree, full of sago-pith and protecting thorns, outgrew them, and could no longer be reached by their pots and shears.

And now, when he shall have returned from the island, he is to pass from the field-bed of the country to the tanvat and hot-bed of the city, and to the trellises of the court garden; in a word, to Pestitz, the university and chief city of Hohenfliess, even the sight of which, until this time, his father had strictly forbidden him.

And to-morrow he sees that father for the first time! He must have burned with desire, since his whole life had been one preparation for this meeting, and his foster-parents and teachers had been a sort of chalcographic company, who had engraved in copper a portrait of the author of his life-book so magnificently opposite the title-page. His father, Gaspard de Cesara, Knight of the Golden Fleece (whether Spanish or Austrian I should be glad to be precisely informed myself), a spirit naturally three-edged, sharp, and brightly polished, had in his youth wild energies, for whose play only a battle-field or a kingdom would have been roomy enough, and which in high life had as little power of motion as a sea-monster in a harbor. He satisfied them by playing star-parts with all ranks in comedies and tragedies, by the prosecution of all sciences, and by an eternal tour: he was intimate and often involved with great and small men and courts, yet always marched along as a stream with its own waves through the sea of the world. And now, after having completed his travels by land and sea round the whole circumference of life, round its joys and capacities and systems, he still continues (especially since the Present, that ape of the Past, is always running after him) to pursue his studies and geographical journeyings; but always for scientific purposes, just as he visits now the European battle-fields. As for the rest, he is not at all gloomy, still less gay, but composed and calm; he does not even hate and love, blame and praise other men any more than he does himself, but values every one in his kind, the dove in hers and the tiger in his. What often seems vengeance is merely the determined, soldier-like tread wherewith a man, who can never flee and fear, but only knows how to advance and stand his ground, tramples down larks'-eggs and ears of corn.

I think that the corner which I have thus snipped off from the Whistonian chart of this comet, for the benefit of mankind, is broad enough. I will, before I discourse further, reserve the privilege to myself, of sometimes calling Don Gaspard _the Knight_, without appending to him the Golden Fleece; and, secondly, of not being obliged by courtesy towards the short memory of readers to steal from his son Cesara (under which designation the old man will never appear) his Christian name, which, to be sure, is _Albano_.

As Don Gaspard was about leaving Italy for Spain, he had, through Schoppe, caused our Albano, or Cesara, to be brought hither without any one's knowing why he did it at so late a period. Was it his pleasure, perhaps, to gaze into the full spring-time of the young twigs? Did he wish to unfold to the youth some rules for rustics in the century-almanac of court life? Would he imitate the old Gauls, or the modern inhabitants of the Cape, who never suffered their sons in their presence till they were grown up and capable of bearing arms? Was nothing less than that his idea? This much only I comprehend, that I should be a very good-natured fool if I were, in the very fore-court of the work, to suffer myself to be burdened with the task of drawing and dotting out from the few data that I now have, in the case of a man so remarkable, and whose magnetic needle declines so many degrees,--a Wilkes's magnetic table of inclinations;--he, not I, is the father of his son, to be sure, and he knows of course why he did not send for him till his beard was grown.