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Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1863, by
CROSBY AND NICHOLS,

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

UNIVERSITY PRESS:
WELCH, BIGELOW, AND COMPANY,

CAMBRIDGE.

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NORTH AMERICAN AMERICAN REVIEW.

No. CC.

JULY, 1863.

ART. I. Titan: a Romance. From the German of JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER. Translated by CHARLES T. BROOKS. Boston: Ticknor and Fields. 2 vols. 1862.

SINCE Carlyle first introduced Jean Paul to English readers, now nearly forty years ago, this endeared author, so unique in richness of fancy, tenderness of feeling, and grotesqueness of style, has been steadily becoming better known and more worthily appreciated among us. Still this growing appreciation has been mostly limited to that small class of literary students who, combining insight with catholicity, are patient of difficulties and tolerant of faults when these are but the investiture and accompaniment of rare merits. Many persons of the best talent, and also of the utmost refinement and elevation of character, give Jean Paul the highest place in their affections; but popularity, in any large sense of the word, he cannot be said to have as yet achieved, although he is fast achieving it. His name and a multitude of choice sentences from his works are familiar as household words with scholars and thinkers. Carrying his fame, his thoughts and sentiments, along with them, they are diffusing them thence among the people at large, and will inevitably secure for him at last. the permanent fief of a broad and pure renown. As an important aid in enhancing the rapidity of this process, we gratefully welcome the admirable translation, from the facile and practised pen of Mr. Brooks, of one of his amplest and ripest VOL. XCVII.—NO. 200. 1

works, now placed before us by the publishers in a most attractive form. To the task of transplanting the "Titan ” out of the German language into the English, Mr. Brooks has brought shining qualifications of many sorts. He has overcome innumerable difficulties with consummate skill. His translation reads like an original composition. We congratulate him on the brilliant accomplishment of a great feat. We trust he will be rewarded for his long and loving labor by the concordant praises of the critics, and by the benefactions the work itself will bestow on the new students it will win in its new clime and presentment.

We are acquainted with no eminent literary artist who more sorely needs, or better deserves, or will more richly repay, every help to popular intelligibility and circulation than Jean Paul; for the human and the literary idiosyncrasies which his natural admirers find the most fascinating, are fatal barriers to his immediate reception into the regards of the average reader. His flooding sensibility, titanic imagination, resilient whimsicality, endless entanglement of remote allusions, bewildering superabundance of metaphor, unfailing supplies of humor and irony, require, as conditions of relishable reaction, greater resources of spirit, learning, and experience than most readers have at their command. His repulsiveness never arises from meagreness of matter, or sloth of faculty, or vulgarity of mind, or viciousness of temper, but from his extraordinary fertility, his half-chaotic exuberance, -the transcendent richness and energy of his genius presenting drafts upon the intellects and hearts of his readers which only a few have the spiritual funds to honor. Such obstacles as these to the appreciation and enjoyment of the works of an author are a measure of the value and charm he will have to those who overcome them. In grappling with them, their own powers are stimulated and developed, and the results enrich them with knowledge and feeling they did not possess before. But most readers do not think of this. They do not seek discipline and instruction. They simply seek to while away the time in the most agreeable manner; and the cheapest, tawdriest sensational tale will, in many cases, effect this better than the noblest philosophical or

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