Titan: A Romance. v. 1 (of 2)

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.

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?...