Titan: A Romance
REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.
From the German of . Translated by . In Two Volumes. Boston: Ticknor and Fields.
JEAN PAUL first became one of the notabilities of German literature after he had published “ Hesperus,” a novel which contains the originals of the characters that reappear under different names in “ Titan.” His previous popularity did not penetrate far within the circle of scholars and thinkers, and never knocked at the charmed threshold of the Weimar set, whose taste was controlled by Goethe and Schiller. But “ Hesperus ” made a great noise, and these warders of the German Valhalla were obliged to open the door just a crack, in order to reconnoitre the pretentious arrival. Goethe first called the attention of Schiller to the book, sending him a copy while he was at Jena, in 1795; Schiller recognized at once its power and geniality, but was disposed to regard it as a literary oddity, whose grotesque build and want of finish rather depreciated the rich cargo,— at least, did not bring it handsomely into port. The first book of “ Wilhelm Meister ” had appeared the year before, and that was more acceptable to Schiller, who had cooled off after writing his “ Robbers,” and was looking out for the true theory of poetry and art. He and Goethe concluded that “Hesperus” was worth liking, though it was a great pity the author had not better taste ; he ought to come up and live with them, in an æsthetic atmosphere, where he could find and admire his superiors, and have his great crude gems ground down to brilliant facets. Schiller said it was the book of a lonely and isolated man. It was, indeed.
But it was a book which represented, far more profoundly and healthily than Schiller’s “ Robbers,” that revolt of men of genius against every species of finical prescription, in literature and society, which ushered in the new age of Germany. And it expresses with uncalculating sincerity all the natural emotions which a century of pedantry and Gallic affectation had been crowding out of books and men. It was a charge at the point of the pen upon the dapper flunkeys who were keeping the door of the German future ; the brawny breast, breathing deep with the struggle, and pouring out great volumes of feeling, burst through the restraints of the time. He cleared a place, and called all men to stand close to his beating heart, and almost furiously pressed them there, that they might feel what a thing friendship was and the ideal life of the soul. And as he held them, his face grew broad and deep with humor ; men looked into it and saw themselves, all the real good and the absurdly conventional which they had, and there was a great jubilation at the genial sight. And it was as if a lot of porters followed him, overloaded with quaint and curious knowledge gathered from books of travel, of medicine, of history, metaphysics, and biography, which they dumped without much concert, but just as it happened, in the very middle of a fine emotion, and all through his jovial speech. What an irruption it was!—as if by a tilt of the planet the climate had changed suddenly, and palm-trees, oranges, the sugarcane, the grotesque dragon-tree, and all the woods of rich and curious grain, stood in the temperate and meagre soil.
Schiller met Jean Paul in the spring of 1796. In writing to Goethe about their interviews, he says, — “I have told you nothing yet about Hesperus. I found him on the whole such as I expected, just as odd as if be had fallen from the moon, full of good-will, and very eager to see things that are outside of him, but he lacks the organ by which one sees ”; and in a letter of a later date he doubts whether Richter will ever sympathize with their way of handling the great subjects of Man and Nature.
The reader can find the first interviews which Richter had with Goethe and Schiller in Lewes’s “ Life of Goethe,” Vol. II. p. 269. Of Goethe, Richter said, “ By heaven ! we shall love each other ! ” and of Schiller, “ He is full of acumen, but without love.” The German public, which loves Richter, has reversed his first impression. And indeed Richter himself, though he could not get along with Schiller, learned that Goethe’s loving capacity, which he thought he saw break out with fire while Goethe read a poem to him, was only the passion of an artistic nature which impregnates its own products.
Richter’s love was very different. It was a sympathy with men and women of all conditions, fed secretly the while that his shaggy genius was struggling with poverty and apparently unfavorable circumstances. He was always a child, yearning to feel the arms of some affection around him, very susceptible to the moods of other people, yet testing them by a humorous sincerity. All the books which he devoured in his desultory rage for knowledge turned into nourishment for an imagination that was destined chiefly to interpret a very lofty moral sense and a very democratic feeling. And whenever his humor caught an edge in the easterly moments of his mind, it was never sharpened against humanity, and made nothing tender bleed. Now and then we know he has a caustic thing or two to say about women ; but it is lunar-caustic for a wart.
Goethe did not like this indiscriminate and democratic temper. The sly remarks of Richter upon the Transparencies and Well-born and Excellencies of his time, with their faded taste and dreary mandarin-life varied by loose morals and contempt for the invisible, could not have suited the man whose best friend was a real Duke, as it happened, one of Nature’s noblemen, one whose wife, the Duchess Sophia, afterwards held Bonaparte so tranquilly at bay upon her palace-steps. Goethe had, too, a bureaucratic vein in him ; he spoke well of dignities, and carefully stepped through the cumbrous minuet of courtlife without impinging upon a single Serene or Well-born bunyon. Mirabiau himself would have elbowed his way through furbelows and court-rapiers more forbearingly than Richter. It was not possible to make this genius plastic, in the æsthetic sense which legislated at Weimar. Besides, Goethe could not look at Nature as Richter did. To such a grand observer Richter must have appeared like a sunsetsmitten girl.
An American ought to value Richter’s books for the causes which made them repulsive to all social and literary cliques. The exquisite art, and the wise, clear mind of Goethe need not come into contrast, to disable us from giving Richter the reception which alone he would value or command. Nor is it necessary to deny that the frequent intercalations and suspensions of his narrative, racy and suggestive as they are, and overflowing with feeling, will fret a modern reader who is always “ on time,” like an express-man, and is quite as regardless of what may be expressed.
“ Titan ” is not a novel in the way that Charles Reade’s, or Eugene Sue’s, or Victor Hugo’s books are novels. The nearest English model, in the matter of style and quaint presuming on the reader’s patience, is Sterne. But if one wishes to see how Richter is not sentimental, in spite of his incessant and un-American emotion, let him read Sterne, and hasten then to be embraced by Richter’s unsophisticated feeling, which is none the less refreshing because it is so exuberant and has such a habit of pursuing all his characters. And where else, in any language, is Nature so worshipped, and so rapturously chased with glowing words, as some young Daphne by some fiery boy ?
Neither are there any characters in this novel, in the sense of marked idiosyncrasies, or of the subtile development of an individual. Sometimes Richter’s men and women are only the lay-figures upon which he piles and adjusts his gorgeous cloth-ofgold and figured damask. But Siebenkäs and his wife, in “ Flower-, Fruit-, and Thorn-Pieces,” are characters, quite as much as any of Balzac’s nice genre men and women, and on a higher plane. Richter rises his persons of both sexes principally to express the conditions of his feeling ; they are cockles, alternately dry and sparkling, underneath his mighty ebb and flow.
On one point we doubt if the American mind will understand Richter. He believed in a love that one man might have for another man, which as little corresponds to the average idea of friendship as the anti-slavery sentiment of the “People’s party ” corresponds to Mr. Garrison’s. In this respect Richter creates an ideal and interfuses it with all his natural ardor, which a German can understand better than the men of any other nation, for in him is the tendency that Richter seeks to set forth by his passionate imagination. Orestes and Pylades, David and Jonathan, and the other famous loves of men, are suspected by the calculating breeds of people. Brother Jonathan seldom finds his David, and he doubtless thinks the Canon ought to have transferred that Scriptural friendship into the Apocrypha. We shall sniff at the highly colored intercourse of Richter’s men, for it is often more than we can do to really love a woman. We shall pronounce the relation affected, and the expression of it turgid, even nauseous. But there is a genuine noble pulse in the German heart, which heats to the rhythm of two men’s heroic attachment, and can expand till all the blood that flows through Richter’s style is welcomed and propelled by it. Still, we think that the unexpressed friendship may also stand justified before the ideal.
The reader must he content to meet this stout and fervent man as he is, not expecting that his genius will consult our tastes or prejudices, or that his head will stoop at all for the sake of our company. Then beneath his dense paragraphs and through his rambling pages his humility will greet us, and fraternal regards draw us irresistibly to him. He is a man for a people’s reading, notwithstanding all the involutions of style and thought which might suggest a different judgment. He certainly does not write like Cobbett or Franklin, nor has he the thin, clear polish of the popular historian. Yet his shrewdness and tenderness will touch all simple-minded men ; and twenty Cobbetts, or people’s writers, sharply rubbed together, could never light the flame of his imperial imagination, for it is a kind of sunshine, sometimes hot enough, but broad, impartial, and quickening, wherever there is something that waits to grow.
And scarcely one man in a century appears so highly gifted with that wonderful quality for which we have no better name than Humor. His humor is the conciliation that takes place between love and knowledge. The two tendencies create the bold and graceful orbit on which his well-balanced hooks revolve. With one alone, his impetuosity would hasten to quench itself in the molten centre; and with the other alone, he would fly cynically beyond the reach of heat. This reconciling humor sometimes shakes his book with Olympic laughter, as if the postprandial nectar circulated in pools of cups, into which all incompatibilities fall and are drowned. You drink this recasting of the planet’s joys and sorrows, contempt and contradictions, while it is yet fluent and bubbling to the lip. There are all the selfish men, and petulant, intriguing women in it, all their weaknesses, and the ill-humor of their times. But the draught lights up the brain with an anticipation of some future solution of these discords, or perhaps we may say, intoxicates us with the serene tolerance which the Creative Mind must have for all his little ones. Is not humor a finite mood of that Impartiality whose sun rises upon the evil and the good, whose smile becomes the laughter of these denser skies?
It is plain from what we have said that the task of translating this novel must be full of difficulties. There are strange words, allusions drawn from foreign books that are now a hundred years old or more and never seen in libraries ; the figurative style makes half the sentences in a page seem strange at first, they invite consideration, and do not feebly surrender to a smooth consecutive English. Just as you think you are at the bottom of a paragraph and are on the point of stepping on the floor, he stops you with another stair, or lets you through : in other words, you are never safe from a whimsical allusion or a twist in the thought. The narrative extends no thread which you may take in one hand as you poke along : it frequently disappears altogether, and it seems as if you had another book with its vocabulary and style.
It is not too high praise to say that Mr. Brooks has overcome all these difficulties without the sacrifice of a single characteristic of Richter’s genius. We have the sense and passion unmutiiated. The translation is accurate, and also bold. By the comparison of a few test-passages with the original, Mr. Brooks’s adroit and patient labor appears clearly. We desire to pay him the meed of our respect and gratitude. Few readers of “ Titan ” will appreciate the toil which has secured them this new sensation of becoming intimate with “ Jean Paul the Only.” It is new, because, notwithstanding several books of Jean Paul have been already translated, “ Titan ” is the most vigorous and exhaustive book he wrote. He poured his whole fiery and romantic soul into it. It may be said that all the fine and humane elements of the revolutionary period in which he lived appear in this book,—the religious feeling, the horror of sensuality, the hatred of every kind of cant, the struggle for definite knowledge out of a confusing whirl of man’s generous sentiments all broken loose, the tendency to worship duty and justice, and the Titanic extravagance of a “ lustihood,” both of youth and emotion, which threatens, in Alexander’s temper, to appropriate the world. All this is admirably expressed in the Promethean title of the book. We do not think that it can be profitably read, or with an intelligent respect for its great author, unless we recall the period, the state of politics, religion, domestic life, the new German age of thought which was rising, with ferment, amid uncouth gambolling shapes of jovial horn-blowing fellows, from the waves. He is the divinity who owns a whole herd of them. As we sit to read, let the same light fall on the page in which it was composed, and there will appear upon it the genius which is confined to no age or clime, and addresses every heart.