Page:The English Review vol 7 Mar-Jun 1847 FGgaAQAAIAAJ.pdf/316

Rh the far more commanding charms of Linda. But that bond, too, is broken by the moral fall of Linda, whose romantic notions of love, spurning matrimony as a vulgar bondage, are abused by a villain, the former friend of Albano and his rival for the hand of Linda, for the purpose of robbing her of her innocence; the similarity of his voice to that of Albano, and her debility of sight after sunset, even to actual blindness, favouring his diabolical design. Ultimately, after the discovery of Albano's real birth, and his accession to his ancestral dominions, he forms an alliance with a princess, named Idoina, who bears a striking resemblance to the departed Liana, but who is kept too much in the background during the whole progress of the story, to give scope for a development of her character sufficient to interest the reader in her.

To exhibit a highly gifted and morally powerful nature, brought to maturity by the discipline of heart and mind which Albano undergoes during the course of these transactions, surrounded by the most opposite influences, and by a variety of persons whose characters are not less discordant than the aims which they pursue, and which are all more or less connected with himself, is the main object which the author of Titan had in view. The dream of human greatness and goodness is realized in the character of the hero; and whatever objections may be raised to the truth of the moral, as involving the fallacious doctrine of human perfectibility, it must be confessed that few of those who have attempted to embody that doctrine in fiction, have taken a loftier aim, or handled their pencil with greater boldness and effect, than Jean Paul in this, which, after all, stands out pre-eminent among all his writings as the master-work of his genius. Subordinate to this leading idea, and interwoven with it, there are other and kindred thoughts of high moral truth; such as the victory which, under the most crushing circumstances, the feeblest may achieve by the triumphant power of an invincible endurance, exemplified in the touching fate of Liana; the certain and fearful danger resulting from presumptuous disregard of the unalterable rules of moral order, in the terrible fate of Linda; and the desperate termination of a career of reckless self-indulgence in that of her seducer, Roquairol, who, after strutting on life's stage in all the eccentricity of a highly talented roué, blows out his brains in the last act of a tragedy of his own composition, in which he has reserved to himself the part of the suicide. In addition to these high lessons, Titan contains a vast abundance of keen and graphic satire upon court life and the corruptions of government, which shows that Jean Paul had not yet escaped from the infection of the liberalism of the revolutionary propaganda, the