The climax of Jean Paul Richter’s inspiration, and of his obscurity, was reached in “Titan,” published during 1801-3.  He meant it to be his greatest romance, and posterity has confirmed his judgement.  Of all his works, it is the most characteristic of its author.  It has all the peculiarities of his style, peculiarities that are reflected in the prose of Thomas Carlyle, his most eminent British admirer and interpreter.  The book itself took ten years to write, and according to his correspondence, Richter intended to call it “Anti-Titan,” having in view his attacks on the material selfishness of the age which, to gain its own ends, would move mountains.  The motive—­a comparison between a man of moral grandeur and one of grandiose immorality—­came to Richter while he was engaged on “Hesperus,” a fact that explains why certain characters from the earlier romance reappear in “Titan.”

I.—­Liana

For many years Albano, the young Spanish Count Cesara, had lived within sight of the capital city of the state of Hohenfliess; yet he had never entered it—­his mother, so his father told him, had shut it against him, desiring that he should be reared in the Carthusian monastery of rural life, not sullied in his youth by mingling with courtiers and men of the world.

And now the gates of Pestitz were open to him.  Contemplate the heated face of my hero, who at last is riding into the streets, built up in his fancy of temples of the sun, where who knows but that at every long window, on every balcony, his beloved Liana may be standing?

Gaspard, Count Cesara, Knight of the Fleece, had met his son, for the first time in Albano’s memory, at Lake Maggiore, and Albano had come away from the meeting with a feeling of chill that poisoned his heart, eager as it was to love and be loved, and a vague, discomposing sense that in his birth there was a mystery.  But the thought of his father’s coldness, all thoughts that troubled and confused, were forgotten on his entry into Pestitz, in the eager hope of seeing Liana, his beloved, and his friend, her brother, Charles Roquairol; for neither his beloved nor her brother had he ever yet in his life beheld.

The love and the friendship were of the imagination, and the imagination was begotten of the accounts given by Von Falterle, the accomplishments-master of Albano in the village of Bluemenbuhl, and of his former pupil Liana, daughter of the Minister von Froulay.  It was his wont to paste up long altar-pieces of Liana’s charms, charms which her father had sought to enhance by means of delicate and almost meagre fare, by shutting up his orangery, whose window he seldom lifted off from this flower of a milder clime—­until she had become a tender creature of pastil-dust, which the gusts of fate and monsoons of climate could almost blow to pieces.  In Albano’s silent heart, therefore, there was to be seen a saintly image of Liana, the ascending Raphael’s Mary, but, like the pictures of the saints in Passion-week, hanging behind a veil.