Most of the puppet personages who pop up in this curious little piece, and explain their own significance in a stanza, may be presumed to be sufficiently familiar to all readers capable of appreciating the mind of a poetical thinker such as Goethe. I confine myself to the few following notes:—
Embryo-Spirit.—German “Geist der sich erst bildet.” A quiz upon young versifiers,—poetlings with whom rhyme and reason are opposite poles.
Orthodox.—We are indebted to the Fathers of the Church for the pious imagination that the heathen gods were devils. Milton follows the same unfounded idea. The gods of Greece were bad enough; but we need not make them worse than they were. They had their good side too. Vide Schiller’s beautiful poem, “The Gods of Greece,” which, by the by, Frantz Horn calls “Ein unendlicher Irrthum,”—an infinite error. But a man may admire an Apollo or a Minerva without meaning to be a heathen.
Purists.—There are “purists” among the German grammarians; but the allusion here must be to something else—prigs and precisians, I fancy.
Xenien.—Epigrammatic poems published by Goethe and Schiller, which were very severe on the half-poets of the day.
Hennings.—I know nothing of this character. Hayward says he was one of the victims of the Xenien, and editor of two periodicals, “The Genius of the Age,” and the “Musaget.”
The stiff man is Nicolai; he of the “old mill,” supra, p. 251. Nicolai was a great zealot against Catholics and Jesuits; but, as Frantz Horn hints, his zeal was not always according to knowledge.—Geschichte der Deutschen Poesie, vol. iii.
The Crane, I believe, is Lavater.
My mother, the wanton,