W---- and myself expressed our surprise: and my friend gave his definition and notion of harmonious verse, that it consisted, (the English iambic blank verse above all,) in the apt arrangement of pauses and cadences, and the sweep of whole paragraphs,
----"with many a winding bout Of linked sweetness long drawn out,"
and not in the even flow, much less in the prominence or ant.i.thetic vigour, of single lines, which were indeed injurious to the total effect, except where they were introduced for some specific purpose.
Klopstock a.s.sented, and said that he meant to confine Glover"s superiority to single lines.[227]
[227] The "abrupt and laconic structure" of Glover"s periods appears at the very commencement of _Leonidas_, which has something military in its movement, but rather the stiff gait of the drilled soldier than the proud march of the martial hero.
The virtuous Spartan who resign"d his life To save his country at th" Oetaen straits, Thermopylae, when all the peopled east In arms with Xerxes filled the Grecian plains, O Muse record! The h.e.l.lespont they pa.s.sed O"erpowering Thrace. The dreadful tidings swift To Corinth flew. Her Isthmus was the seat Of Grecian council. Orpheus thence returns To Lacedaemon. In a.s.sembly full, &c.
Glover"s best pa.s.sages are of a soft character. This is a pleasing _Homerism_:
Lycis dies, For boist"rous war ill-chosen. He was skill"d To tune the lulling flute, and melt the heart; Or with his pipe"s awak"ning strains allure The lovely dames of Lydia to the dance.
They on the verdant level graceful mov"d In vary"d measures; while the cooling breeze Beneath their swelling garments wanton"d o"er Their snowy b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and smooth Cayster"s streams Soft-gliding murmur"d by. The hostile blade, &c. Bk. VIII.
And here is a pleasing expansion of Pindar, Olymp. II. 109:
Placid were his days, Which flow"d through blessings. As a river pure, Whose sides are flowery, and whose meadows fair, Meets in his course a subterranean void; There dips his silver head, again to rise, And, rising, glide through flow"rs and meadows new; So shall Oleus in those happier fields, Where never tempests roar, nor humid clouds In mists dissolve, nor white descending flakes Of winter violate th" eternal green; Where never gloom of trouble shades the mind, Nor gust of pa.s.sion heaves the quiet breast, Nor dews of grief are sprinkled. Bk. X. S.C.
He told us that he had read Milton, in a prose translation, when he was fourteen.[228] I understood him thus myself, and W--- interpreted Klopstock"s French as I had already construed it. He appeared to know very little of Milton or indeed of our poets in general. He spoke with great indignation of the English prose translation of his MESSIAH. All the translations had been bad, very bad--but the English was _no_ translation--there were pages on pages not in the original: and half the original was not to be found in the translation. W--- told him that I intended to translate a few of his odes as specimens of German lyrics--he then said to me in English, "I wish you would render into English some select pa.s.sages of THE MESSIAH, and _revenge_ me of your countryman!"
[228] This was accidentally confirmed to me by an old German gentleman at Helmstadt, who had been Klopstock"s school and bed-fellow. Among other boyish anecdotes, he related that the young poet set a particular value on a translation of the PARADISE LOST, and always slept with it under his pillow.
It was the liveliest thing which he produced in the whole conversation.
He told us, that his first ode was fifty years older than his last. I looked at him with much emotion--I considered him as the venerable father of German poetry; as a good man as a Christian; seventy-four years old; with legs enormously swollen; yet active, lively, cheerful, and kind, and communicative. My eyes felt as if a tear were swelling into them. In the portrait of Lessing there was a toupee periwig, which enormously injured the effect of his physiognomy--Klopstock wore the same, powdered and frizzled. By the bye, old men ought never to wear powder--the contrast between a large snow-white wig and the colour of an old man"s skin is disgusting, and wrinkles in such a neighbourhood appear only channels for dirt. It is an honour to poets and great men, that you think of them as parts of Nature; and anything of trick and fashion wounds you in them, as much as when you see venerable yews clipped into miserable peac.o.c.ks.--The author of THE MESSIAH should have worn his own grey hair.--His powder and periwig were to the eye what _Mr_. Virgil would be to the ear.
Klopstock dwelt much on the superiour power which the German language possessed of concentrating meaning. He said, he had often translated parts of Homer and Virgil, line by line, and a German line proved always sufficient for a Greek or Latin one. In English you cannot do this. I answered, that in English we could commonly render one Greek heroic line in a line and a half of our common heroic metre, and I conjectured that this line and a half would be found to contain no more syllables than one German or Greek hexameter. He did not understand me:[229] and I, who wished to hear his opinions, not to correct them, was glad that he did not.
[229] Klopstock"s observation was partly true and partly erroneous. In the literal sense of his words, and, if we confine the comparison to the average of s.p.a.ce required for the expression of the same thought in the two languages, it is erroneous. I have translated some German hexameters into English hexameters, and find, that on the average three English lines will express four lines German. The reason is evident: our language abounds in monosyllables and dissyllables. The German, not less than the Greek, is a polysyllable language. But in another point of view the remark was not without foundation. For the German possessing the same unlimited privilege of forming compounds, both with prepositions and with epithets, as the Greek, it can express the richest single Greek word in a single German one, and is thus freed from the necessity of weak or ungraceful paraphrases. I will content myself with one example at present, viz. the use of the prefixed participles _ver_, _zer_, _ent_, and _weg_: thus _reissen_ to rend, _verreissen_ to rend away, _zerreissen_ to rend to pieces, _entreissen_ to rend off or out of a thing, in the active sense: or _schmelzen_ to melt--_ver_, _zer_, _ent_, _schmelzen_--and in like manner through all the verbs neuter and active.
If you consider only how much we should feel the loss of the prefix _be_, as in bedropt, besprinkle, besot, especially in our poetical language, and then think that this same mode of composition is carried through all their simple and compound prepositions, and many of their adverbs; and that with most of these the Germans have the same privilege as we have of dividing them from the verb and placing them at the end of the sentence; you will have no difficulty in comprehending the reality and the cause of this superior power in the German of condensing meaning, in which its great poet exulted. It is impossible to read half a dozen pages of Wieland without perceiving that in this respect the German has no rival but the Greek. And yet I feel, that concentration or condensation is not the happiest mode of expressing this excellence, which seems to consist not so much in the less time required for conveying an impression, as in the unity and simultaneousness with which the impression is conveyed. It tends to make their language more picturesque: it _depictures_ images better. We have obtained this power in part by our compound verbs derived from the Latin: and the sense of its great effect no doubt induced our Milton both to the use and the abuse of Latin derivatives. But still these prefixed particles, conveying no separate or separable meaning to the mere English reader, cannot possibly act on the mind with the force or liveliness of an original and h.o.m.ogeneous language such as the German is, and besides are confined to certain words.
We now took our leave. At the beginning of the French Revolution Klopstock wrote odes of congratulation. He received some honorary presents from the French Republic, (a golden crown I believe,) and, like our Priestley, was invited to a seat in the legislature, which he declined. But when French liberty metamorphosed herself into a fury, he sent back these presents with a _palinodia_, declaring his abhorrence of their proceedings: and since then he has been perhaps more than enough an Anti-Gallican. I mean, that in his just contempt and detestation of the crimes and follies of the Revolutionists, he suffers himself to forget that the revolution itself is a process of the Divine Providence; and that as the folly of men is the wisdom of G.o.d, so are their iniquities instruments of his goodness. From Klopstock"s house we walked to the ramparts, discoursing together on the poet and his conversation, till our attention was diverted to the beauty and singularity of the sunset and its effects on the objects around us. There were woods in the distance. A rich sandy light, (nay, of a much deeper colour than sandy,) lay over these woods that blackened in the blaze. Over that part of the woods which lay immediately under the intenser light, a bra.s.sy mist floated. The trees on the ramparts, and the people moving to and fro between them, were cut or divided into equal segments of deep shade and bra.s.sy light. Had the trees, and the bodies of the men and women, been divided into equal segments by a rule or pair of compa.s.ses, the portions could not have been more regular. All else was obscure. It was a fairy scene!--and to increase its romantic character, among the moving objects, thus divided into alternate shade and brightness, was a beautiful child, dressed with the elegant simplicity of an English child, riding on a stately goat, the saddle, bridle, and other accoutrements of which were in a high degree costly and splendid. Before I quit the subject of Hamburg, let me say, that I remained a day or two longer than I otherwise should have done, in order to be present at the feast of St. Michael, the patron saint of Hamburg, expecting to see the civic pomp of this commercial Republic. I was however disappointed.
There were no processions, two or three sermons were preached to two or three old women in two or three churches, and St. Michael and his patronage wished elsewhere by the higher cla.s.ses, all places of entertainment, theatre, &c. being shut up on this day. In Hamburg, there seems to be no religion at all; in Lubec it is confined to the women.
The men seem determined to be divorced from their wives in the other world, if they cannot in this. You will not easily conceive a more singular sight, than is presented by the vast aisle of the princ.i.p.al church at Lubec seen from the organ-loft: for, being filled with female servants and persons in the same cla.s.s of life, and all their caps having gold and silver cauls, it appears like a rich pavement of gold and silver.
I will conclude this letter with the mere transcription of notes, which my friend W---- made of his conversations with Klopstock, during the interviews that took place after my departure. On these I shall make but one remark at present, and that will appear a presumptuous one, namely, that Klopstock"s remarks on the venerable sage of Konigsburg are to my own knowledge injurious and mistaken; and so far is it from being true, that his system is now given up, that throughout the Universities of Germany there is not a single professor who is not either a Kantean or a disciple of Fichte, whose system is built on the Kantean, and presupposes its truth; or lastly who, though an antagonist of Kant, as to his theoretical work, has not embraced wholly or in part his moral system, and adopted part of his nomenclature. "Klopstock having wished to see the CALVARY of c.u.mberland, and asked what was thought of it in England, I went to Remnant"s (the English bookseller) where I procured the a.n.a.lytical Review, in which is contained the review of c.u.mberland"s CALVARY. I remembered to have read there some specimens of a blank verse translation of THE MESSIAH. I had mentioned this to Klopstock, and he had a great desire to see them. I walked over to his house and put the book into his hands. On adverting to his own poem, he told me he began THE MESSIAH when he was seventeen: he devoted three entire years to the plan without composing a single line. He was greatly at a loss in what manner to execute his work. There were no successful specimens of versification in the German language before this time. The first three cantos he wrote in a species of measured or numerous prose. This, though done with much labour and some success, was far from satisfying him. He had composed hexameters both Latin and Greek as a school exercise, and there had been also in the German language attempts in that style of versification. These were only of very moderate merit.--One day he was struck with the idea of what could be done in this way--he kept his room a whole day, even went without his dinner, and found that in the evening he had written twenty-three hexameters, versifying a part of what he had before written in prose. From that time, pleased with his efforts, he composed no more in prose. To-day he informed me that he had finished his plan before he read Milton. He was enchanted to see an author who before him had trod the same path. This is a contradiction of what he said before. He did not wish to speak of his poem to any one till it was finished: but some of his friends who had seen what he had finished, tormented him till he had consented to publish a few books in a journal.
He was then, I believe, very young, about twenty-five. The rest was printed at different periods, four books at a time. The reception given to the first specimens was highly flattering. He was nearly thirty years in finishing the whole poem, but of these thirty years not more than two were employed in the composition. He only composed in favourable moments; besides he had other occupations. He values himself upon the plan of his odes, and accuses the modern lyrical writers of gross deficiency in this respect. I laid the same accusation against Horace: he would not hear of it--but waived the discussion. He called Rousseau"s ODE TO FORTUNE a moral dissertation in stanzas.[230] I spoke of Dryden"s ST. CECILIA; but be did not seem familiar with our writers.
He wished to know the distinctions between our dramatic and epic blank verse.
[230] (A la Fortune. Liv. II. Ode vi. Oeuvres de Jean Baptiste Rousseau, p.121, edit. 1820. One of the latter strophes of this ode concludes with two lines, which, as the editor observes, have become a proverb, and of which the thought and expression are borrowed from Lucretius: _cripitur persona, manet res:_ III. v. 58.
Montrez nous, guerriers magnanimes, Votre vertu dans tout son jour: Voyons comment vos coeurs sublimes Du sort soutiendront le retour.
Tant que sa faveur vous seconde, Vous etes les maitres du monde, Votre gloire nous eblouit: Mais au moindre revers funeste, _Le masque tombe, l"homme reste, Et le heros s"evanouit_.
Horace, says the Editor, en traitant ce meme sujet, liv. X. ode x.x.xV. et Pindare en l"esquissant a grands traits, au commencement de sa douzieme Olympique, n"avoient laisse a leurs successeurs que son cote moral a envisager, et c"est le parti que prit Rousseau. The general sentiment of the ode is handled with great dignity in Paradise Regained. Bk. III. l.
43--157--a pa.s.sage which, as Thyer says, contains the quintessence of the subject. Dante has some n.o.ble lines on Fortune in the viith canto of the _Inferno_,--lines worthy of a great mystic poet. After referring to the vain complaints and maledictions of men against this Power, he beautifully concludes:
Ma ella s"e beata e ci non ode: Con l"altre prime creature lieta _Volve sua spera, e beata si G.o.de_.
J.B. Rousseau was born in 1669, began his career at the close of the age of Louis Quatorze, died at Brussels, March 17, 1741. He had been banished from France, by an intrigue, on a false charge, as now seems clear, of having composed and distributed defamatory verses, in 1712; and it was engraved upon his tomb that he was "thirty years an object of envy and thirty of compa.s.sion." Belonging to the cla.s.sical school of the 17th century, of which he was the last survivor, he came somewhat into conflict with the spirit of the 18th, which was preparing a new vintage, and would have none but new wine in new bottles. Rousseau, however, was a very finished writer in his way, and has been compared to Pindar, Horace, Anacreon and Malherbe. His ode to _M. le Comte du Luc_ is as fine an example as I know of the modern cla.s.sical style. This is quite different from that which is exemplified in Wordsworth"s Laodamia and Serjeant Talfourd"s Ion; for in them the subjects only are ancient, while both the form and spirit are modern; whereas in the odes of Rousseau a modern subject is treated, as far as difference of times and language will allow, in the manner and tone of the Ancients. Samson Agonistes and Goethe"s Iphigenia in Tauris are conformed to ancient modes of thought, but in them the subject also is taken from antiquity.
Rousseau"s works consist of Odes, Epistles in verse, Cantatas, Epigrams, &c. &c. He wrote for the stage at the beginning of his literary life, but with no great success. S.C.)
He recommended me to read his HERMANN before I read either THE MESSIAH or the odes. He flattered himself that some time or other his dramatic poems would be known in England. He had not heard of Cowper. He thought that Voss in his translation of THE ILIAD had done violence to the idiom of the Germans, and had sacrificed it to the Greeks, not remembering sufficiently that each language has its particular spirit and genius.[231] He said Lessing was the first of their dramatic writers. I complained of NATHAN as tedious. He said there was not enough of action in it; but that Lessing was the most chaste of their writers. He spoke favourably of Goethe; but said that his SORROWS OF WERTER was his best work, better than any of his dramas: he preferred the first written to the rest of Goethe"s dramas. Schiller"s ROBBERS he found so extravagant, that he could not read it. I spoke of the scene of the setting sun.[232]
He did not know it. He said Schiller could not live. He thought DON CARLOS the best of his dramas; but said that the plot was inextricable.--It was evident he knew little of Schiller"s works: indeed, he said, he could not read them. Burger, he said, was a true poet, and would live; that Schiller, on the contrary, must soon be forgotten; that he gave himself up to the imitation of Shakespeare, who often was extravagant, but that Schiller was ten thousand times more so.[233]
[231] Voss, who lived from Feb. 20, 1751, to March, 1826, was author of the Luise, "a rural epopaea of simple structure divided into three idyls, which relate the betrothment and marriage of the heroine." This is a pleasing and very peculiar poem, composed in hexameter verse. "The charm of the narrative," says Mr. T., "consists in the minute description of the local domestic manners of the personages." The charm consists, I think, in the blending of these manners with the beauty of Nature, and the ease and suitability of the versification. Voss"s translation of the Odyssey is praised for being so perfect an imitation of the original. The Greek has been rendered, "with a fidelity and imitative harmony so admirable, that it suggests to the scholar the original wording, and reflects, as from a mirror, every beauty and every blemish of the ancient poem." Hist. Survey, pp. 61-68. S. C.
[232] Act III. Sc. 2. The night scene, which is the 5th of Act iv, is fine too in a frantic way. The songs it contains are very spirited. That sung by the Robbers is worthy of a Thug; it goes beyond our notions of any European bandit, and transports us to the land of Jaggernat. S. C.
[233] The works of Burger, who was born on the first day of 1748, died June 8, 1794, consist of Poems (2 vols.), Macbeth altered from Shakespeare, (p.r.o.nounced by Taylor,--no good judge of _Shakespeare_,--in some respects superiour to the original,) Munchausen"s Travels; Translations; (of the six first books of the Iliad, and some others); Papers philological and political. His fame rests chiefly on three ballads, The Wild Hunter, The Parson"s Daughter, and Lenore. The powerful diction and admirable harmony,--rhythm, sound, rhyme of these compositions Mr. Taylor describes as the result of laborious art; it strikes me, from the outline which he has given of Burger"s history, that the violent feelings, the life-like expression of which const.i.tutes their power and value, may have been partly the reflex of the poet"s own mind. His seems to have been a life of mismanagement from youth till middle age. Like Milton, he lost a beloved second wife by childbed in the first year of marriage: like him, he married a third time, but without his special necessity--blindness and unkind daughters. He wedded a lady who had fallen in love with his poetry, or perhaps his poetical reputation: an union founded, as it appears, in vanity, ended in vexation of spirit: and as Death, which had deprived him of two wives, did not release him from a third, he obtained his freedom, at the end of little more than three years, from a court of justice. Why did Klopstock undervalue, by preference of such a poet, the lofty-minded Schiller--the dearest to England of all German bards; perhaps because the author of Wallenstein was a philosopher, and had many things in his philosophy which the author of The Messiah could not find in _his_ heaven and earth. S.C.
He spoke very slightingly of Kotzebue, as an immoral author in the first place, and next, as deficient in power. At Vienna, said he, they are transported with him; but we do not reckon the people of Vienna either the wisest or the wittiest people of Germany. He said Wieland was a charming author, and a sovereign master of his own language: that in this respect Goethe could not be compared to him, nor indeed could any body else. He said that his fault was to be fertile to exuberance. I told him the OBERON had just been translated into English. He asked me if I was not delighted with the poem. I answered, that I thought the story began to flag about the seventh or eighth book; and observed, that it was unworthy of a man of genius to make the interest of a long poem turn entirely upon animal gratification. He seemed at first disposed to excuse this by saying, that there are different subjects for poetry, and that poets are not willing to be restricted in their choice. I answered, that I thought the _pa.s.sion_ of love as well suited to the purposes of poetry as any other pa.s.sion; but that it was a cheap way of pleasing to fix the attention of the reader through a long poem on the mere _appet.i.te_. Well! but, said he, you see, that such poems please every body. I answered, that it was the province of a great poet to raise people up to his own level, not to descend to theirs. He agreed, and confessed, that on no account whatsoever would he have written a work like the OBERON. He spoke in raptures of Wieland"s style, and pointed out the pa.s.sage where Retzia is delivered of her child, as exquisitely beautiful.[234]
[234] Oberon, Canto viii. stanzas 69-80. The little touch about the new born babe"s returning its mother"s kiss is very romantic: though put modestly in the form of a query:
--Und scheint nicht jeden Kuss Sein kleiner mund dem ihren zu entsaugen?
The word _entsaugen (suck off)_ is expressive--it very naturally characterises the kiss of an infant five minutes of age. Wieland had great nursery experience. "My sweetest hours," says he, in a letter quoted in the Survey," are those in which I see about me, in all their glee of childhood, my whole posse of little half-way things between apes and angels."
Mr. Sotheby"s translation of the Oberon made the poem popular in this country. The original first appeared in 1780. S. C.
I said that I did not perceive any very striking pa.s.sages; but that I made allowance for the imperfections of a translation. Of the thefts of Wieland, he said, they were so exquisitely managed, that the greatest writers might be proud to steal as he did. He considered the books and fables of old romance writers in the light of the ancient mythology, as a sort of common property, from which a man was free to take whatever he could make a good use of. An Englishman had presented him with the odes of Collins, which he had read with pleasure. He knew little or nothing of Gray, except his ELEGY written in a country CHURCH-YARD. He complained of the fool in LEAR. I observed that he seemed to give a terrible wildness to the distress; but still he complained. He asked whether it was not allowed, that Pope had written rhymed poetry with more skill than any of our writers--I said I preferred Dryden, because his couplets had greater variety in their movement. He thought my reason a good one; but asked whether the rhyme of Pope were not more exact.
This question I understood as applying to the final terminations, and observed to him that I believed it was the case; but that I thought it was easy to excuse some inaccuracy in the final sounds, if the general sweep of the verse was superiour. I told him that we were not so exact with regard to the final endings of lines as the French. He did not seem to know that we made no distinction between masculine and feminine (i.e.
single or double,) rhymes: at least he put inquiries to me on this subject. He seemed to think, that no language could be so far formed as that it might not be enriched by idioms borrowed from another tongue. I said this was a very dangerous practice; and added, that I thought Milton had often injured both his prose and verse by taking this liberty too frequently. I recommended to him the prose works of Dryden as models of pure and native English. I was treading upon tender ground, as I have reason to suppose that he has himself liberally indulged in the practice.
The same day I dined at Mr. Klopstock"s, where I had the pleasure of a third interview with the poet. We talked princ.i.p.ally about indifferent things. I asked him what he thought of Kant. He said that his reputation was much on the decline in Germany. That for his own part he was not surprised to find it so, as the works of Kant were to him utterly incomprehensible--that he had often been pestered by the Kanteans; but was rarely in the practice of arguing with them. His custom was to produce the book, open it and point to a pa.s.sage, and beg they would explain it. This they ordinarily attempted to do by subst.i.tuting their own ideas. I do not want, I say, an explanation of your own ideas, but of the pa.s.sage which is before us. In this way I generally bring the dispute to an immediate conclusion. He spoke of Wolfe as the first Metaphysician they had in Germany. Wolfe had followers; but they could hardly be called a sect, and luckily till the appearance of Kant, about fifteen years ago, Germany had not been pestered by any sect of philosophers whatsoever; but that each man had separately pursued his inquiries uncontrolled by the dogmas of a master. Kant had appeared ambitious to be the founder of a sect; that he had succeeded: but that the Germans were now coming to their senses again. That Nicolai and Engel had in different ways contributed to disenchant the nation;[235]
but above all the incomprehensibility of the philosopher and his philosophy. He seemed pleased to hear, that as yet Kant"s doctrines had not met with many admirers in England--did not doubt but that we had too much wisdom to be duped by a writer who set at defiance the common sense and common understandings of men. We talked of tragedy. He seemed to rate highly the power of exciting tears--I said that nothing was more easy than to deluge an audience, that it was done every day by the meanest writers."
I must remind you, my friend, first, that these notes are not intended as specimens of Klopstock"s intellectual power, or even "_colloquial prowess_," to judge of which by an accidental conversation, and this with strangers, and those two foreigners, would be not only unreasonable, but calumnious. Secondly, I attribute little other interest to the remarks than what is derived from the celebrity of the person who made them. Lastly, if you ask me, whether I have read THE MESSIAH, and what I think of it? I answer--as yet the first four books only: and as to my opinion--(the reasons of which hereafter)--you may guess it from what I could not help muttering to myself, when the good pastor this morning told me, that Klopstock was the German Milton----"a very _German_ Milton indeed!!!"----Heaven preserve you, and S.T. COLERIDGE.
[235] These _disenchanters_ put one in mind of the ratcatchers, who are said and supposed to rid houses of rats, and yet the rats, somehow or other, continue to swarm. The Kantean rats were not aware, I believe, when Klopstock spoke thus, of the extermination that had befallen them: and even to this day those acute animals infest the old house, and steal away the daily bread of the children,--if the old notions of s.p.a.ce and Time, and the old proofs of religious verities by way of the _understanding_ and _speculative reason,_ must be called such. Whether or no these are their true spiritual sustenance, or the necessary guard and vehicle of it, is perhaps a question.
But who were Nicolai and Engel, and what did they against the famous enchanter? The former was born in 1733, at Berlin, where he carried on his father"s business of book-selling, pursued literature with marked success, and attained to old age, full of literary honours. By means of three critical journals (the _Literatur-Briefe,_ the _Bibliothek der Schonen Wissenschaftern,_ and the _Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek,_) which he conducted with the powerful cooperation of Lessing, and of his intimate friend Mendelssohn, and to which he contributed largely himself, he became very considerable in the German world of letters, and so continued for the s.p.a.ce of twenty years. Jordens, in his Lexicon, speaks highly of the effect of Nicolai"s writings in promoting freedom of thought, enlightened views in theology and philosophy, and a sound taste in fine literature--describes him as a brave battler with intolerance, hypocrisy, and confused conceptions in religion; with empty subtleties, obscurities, and terminologies, that can but issue in vain fantasies, in his controversial writings on the "so-named critical philosophy." He engaged with the _Kritik der reinen Vernunft,_ on its appearance in 1781, in the _Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek;_ first explained his objections to it in the 11th vol. of his _Reisebeschreibung_, (Description of a Journey through Germany and Switzerland in the year 1781,) and afterwards, in his romance ent.i.tled The Life and Opinions of Semp.r.o.nius Gundibert, a German Philosopher, sought to set forth the childish crotchets and abuses imputable to many disciples of this philosophy in their native absurdity. The _ratsbone_ alluded to by Klopstock, was doubtless contained in the above-named romance, which the old poet probably esteemed more than Nicolai"s more serious polemics.
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 att.i.tude, 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 unerhort!
Verschwindet doch! Wir haben ja aufgeklart!