Gundibert has had its day, but in a fiction destined to a day of longer duration,—Goethe's Faust,—the Satirist is himself most effectively satirised. There he is, in that strange yet beautiful temple, pinned to the wall in a ridiculous attitude, to be laughed at as long as the temple itself is visited and admired. This doom came upon him, not so much for his campaign against the Kanteans, as for his Joys of Werter,—because he had dared to ridicule a book, which certainly offered no small temptations to the parodist. Indeed he seems to have been engaged in a series of hostilities with Fichte, Lavater, Wieland, Herder, and Goethe.
(See Mr. Hayward's excellent translation of Faust, of which I have heard a literary German say that it gave a better notion of the original than any other which he had seen.)
In the Walpurgisnacht of the Faust he thus addresses the goblin dancers:—
Ihr seyd noch immer da! Nein das ist unerhört!
Verschwindet doch! Wir haben ja aufgeklärt!
'Fly!
Vanish! Unheard of impudence! What, still there!
In this enlightened age too, when you have been
Proved not to exist?'—Shelley's Translation.
Do we not see the doughty reviewer before us magisterially waving his hand and commanding the apparitions to vanish?—then with despondent astonishment exclaiming:
Das Teufelspack es fragt nach keiner Regel.
Wir sind so klug und dennoch spukt's in Tegel.
So wise we are! yet what fantastic fooleries still stream forth from my contemporary's brains; how are we still haunted! The speech of Faust concerning him is mis-translated by Shelley, who understood the humour of the piece, as well as the poetry, but not the particular humours of it. Nothing can be more expressive of a conceited, narrow-minded reviewer. 'Oh he!—he is absolutely everywhere,—What others dance, he must decide upon. If he can't chatter about every step, 'tis as good as not made at all. Nothing provokes him so much as when we go forward. If you'd turn round and round in a circle, as he does in his old mill, he'd approve of that perhaps; especially if you'd consult him about it.'
'A man of such spirited habitudes,' says Mr. Carlyle, after affirming that Nicolai wrote against Kant's philosophy without comprehending it, and judged of poetry, as of Brunswick Mum, by its utility, 'is now by the Germans called a Philister. Nicolai earned for himself the painful pre-eminence of being Erz Philister, Arch Philistine.' 'He, an old enemy of Goethe's,' says Mr. Hill, in explanation of the title in which he appears in the Walpurgisnacht, 'had published an account of his phantasmal illusions, pointing them against Fichte's system of idealism, which he evidently confounded with what Coleridge would have called Subjective Idolism.'
Such was this wondrous disenchanter in the eyes of later critics than Klopstock: a man strong enough to maintain a long fight against genius, not wise enough to believe in it and befriend it. How many a controversialist seems a mighty giant to those who are predisposed to his opinions, while, in the eyes of others, he is but a blind floundering Polyphemus, who knows not how to direct his heavy blows; if not a menacing scarecrow, with a stake in his hand, which he has no power to drive home! I remember reading a thin volume in which all metaphysicians that had ever left their thoughts behind them were declared utterly in the wrong—all up to, but not including, the valiant author himself. The world had lain in darkness till he appeared, like a new Phoebus, on the scene. This great man despatched Kant's system—(never having read a syllable of any work of Kant's)—in a page and a quarter! and the exploit had its celebraters and admirers. Yet strange to say, the metaphysical world went on just as if nothing had happened!—after the sun was up, it went groping about, as if it had never been enlightened, and actually ever since has continued to talk as if Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, and other metaphysicians understood the nature of the things they wrote about rather more than the mass of mankind, instead of less! Verschwindet doch! might this author say, as Nicolai said to the spectres of the Brocken and the phantoms of literature,