Who's the foole now?"
Edward F. Rimbault.
GÖTHE'S REPLY TO NICOLAI.
(Vol. vi., p. 434.).
Had M. M. E. gone to the fountain-head, and consulted Göthe's own statement in his autobiography, he would have seen in the Werke, vol. xxvi.
p. 229., that Mr. Hayward's note was not written with that writer's usual care. Göthe does not say that his reply to Nicolai's Joys of Werter, though circulated only in MS., destroyed N.'s literary reputation: on the contrary, he says that his squib (for it was no more) consisted of an epigram, not fit for communication, and a dialogue between Charlotte and Werter, which was never copied, and long lost; but that this dialogue, exposing N.'s impertinence, was written with a foreboding of his sad habit, afterwards developed, of treating of subjects out of his depth, which habit, notwithstanding his indisputable merits of another kind, utterly destroyed his reputation. This was most true: and yet all such assertions must be taken in a qualified sense. Nearly thirty years after this was written I partook of the hospitality of N. at Berlin. It was in 1803, when he was at the head, not of the Berlin literati, but of the book-manufactory of Prussia. He was then what, afterwards and elsewhere, the Longmans, Murrays, Constables, Cottas, and Brockhauses were,—the great publisher of his age and country. The entrepreneur of the Neue Deutsche Bibliothek may be compared with the publishers of our and the French great Cyclopædias, and our Quarterly Reviews.
It was unfortunate for the posthumous reputation of the great bibliopolist that he, patronising a school that was dying out, made war on the athletes of the rising school. He assailed nearly every great man, philosopher or poet, from Kant and Göthe downwards, especially of the schools of Saxony, Swabia, and the free imperial cities. No wonder that he became afterwards what Macfleckno and Colly Cibber had been to Dryden and Pope. In some dozen of the Xenien of Göthe and Schiller, in 1797, he was treated as the Arch-Philistine.
M. M. E. characterises him as the "friend" and "fellow-labourer" of Lessing. Now Lessing was incomparably the most eminent littérateur of the earlier part of that age,—the man who was the forerunner of the philosophers, and whose criticisms supplied the place of poetry. The satirists of the Xenien affect to compassionate Lessing, in having to endure a companion so forced on him as Nicolai was, whom they speak of as a "thorn in the crown of the martyr." The few who care for the literary controversies of the age of Göthe in Germany will be greatly assisted by an edition of the Xenien, with notes, published at Dantzig, 1833.
H. C. R.