y
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 court-life without
impinging upon a single Serene or Well-born bunyon. Mirabeau 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 aesthetic 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 sunset-smitten 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-of-gold and figured damask. But
Siebenkaes and his wife, in "Flower-, Fruit-, and Thorn-Pieces," are
characters, quite as much as any o