Goethe and Schiller's Xenions

GOETHE AND SCHILLER’S
XENIONS

GOETHE AND SCHILLER’S
XENIONS

SELECTED AND TRANSLATED

BY

PAUL CARUS

SECOND EDITION

CHICAGO LONDON

THE OPEN COURT PUBLISHING CO.

1915

COPYRIGHT BY

THE OPEN COURT PUBLISHING COMPANY

1915

THE appearance of the Xenions, a collection of satirical epigrams in the Musen-Almanach of 1797, is a memorable event in the literature of Germany. With the end of the eighteenth century a new era had commenced. The idea of evolution, first clearly pronounced by Caspar Friedrich Wolff in his theory of epigenesis,[A] pointed out new aims of investigation in the realm of natural sciences; Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason propounded new problems in philosophy; and Beethoven conceived his grand sonatas, which reflected the spirit of an all-comprehensive aspiration in the soul-stirring notes of music. New ideals, religious, moral, and social, had dawned upon mankind, and the two great apostles of this movement in the domain of poetry were Goethe and Schiller.

[Pg 4]

It is well known what good friends Goethe and Schiller were. After the two great poets had become personally acquainted they inspired, criticised, and corrected each other. Their common ideal became the firm basis of their mutual friendship, and the chief monument of their alliance is the collection of satirical distichs known as the Xenions.

Great though Schiller and Goethe were, they did not find sufficient support among those who should have been their first followers and disciples. The men of literary callings, who should be the priests of the holiest interests of humanity, were too envious fully to recognize and acknowledge the merit of these two great poet-thinkers. Moreover, the men of letters were chiefly enamoured of their own traditional methods of literary production and could not appreciate the purity, the grandeur, and the holiness of the new taste. They misunderstood the progressive spirit of the time, and to their puny minds the rise of the new era appeared as a mere disturbance of their traditional habits. They looked upon the twin giants of the world of thought as[Pg 5] usurpers, who from personal vanity and ambition tyrannized over all others, and whose impositions had either to be resisted, or silenced by shrugs.

On the one side, the orthodox and narrow-minded pietists considered Goethe and Schiller irreligious and un-Christian, and accused them of paganism. On the other side we find the two great poets opposed by such men as the shallow Nicolai, a man of good common sense but without any genius, a man who preached that stale kind of rationalism which consisted in both the suppression of all higher aspiration and the denial of spirituality in any sense. He railed at Goethe and Schiller as well as at Kant, Fichte, and other great minds of his time who went beyond his depth and were incomprehensible to him. The pious are characterized in the Xenions as enthusiasts and sentimentalists (Schwärmer) while the prosaic rationalists are called by the German student term “philistines” which denotes common-place people, and the pedantic Nicolai figures as the “arch-philistine.”

Nicolai was a rich and influential publisher in Berlin; he was an author himself,[Pg 6] and a very prolific one too, but his writings are superficial and barren. On several occasions he criticised Goethe severely, and our great poets asserted that in fighting superstition he attacked poetry, and in attempting to suppress the belief in spirits he also tried to abolish spirit. So Goethe makes him say in the Walpurgisnacht:

The irritation of the literary dwarfs showed itself in malevolent reviews of Schiller’s literary enterprise, Die Horen.

Schiller wrote to Goethe June 15, 1795:

“I have thought for some time that it would be well to open a critical arena in Die Horen. Yet we should not give away our rights by formally inviting the public and the authors. The public would certainly be represented by the most miserable voices, and the authors, as we know from experience, would become very importunate.[Pg 7] My proposition is that we make the attack ourselves. In case the authors wish to defend themselves in Die Horen, they must submit to our conditions. And my advice is, not to begin with propositions, but to begin with deeds. There is no harm if we are denounced as ill-bred.”

Several letters were exchanged on this subject, and Goethe wrote in a letter of December 23, 1795, to Schiller:

“We must cultivate the idea of making epigrams upon all journals; one distich for each magazine, in the manner of Martial’s Xenia; and we must publish a collection of them in the Musen-Almanach of next year. Enclosed are some Xenions as a specimen.”

Schiller answered at once, December 23, 1795:

“The idea of the Xenions is splendid and must be carried out.... What a wealth of material is offered by the Stolbergs, by Racknitz, Ramdohr, the metaphysical world with its Me’s and Not-Me’s, friend Nicolai, our sworn enemy, the Leipsic taste-mongers, Thümmel, with Göschen as his horsegroom, and others.”

[Pg 8]

Thus the two poets decided to wage a destructive war against their common enemies, and to come down upon them in a literary thunderstorm. The poets planned a “poetical deviltry,” as they called it, and named their satirical poetry “Xenions.”

The word Xenion originally meant a gift presented by a host to a stranger who enjoys his hospitality. The Roman poet Martial called his book of satirical epigrams Xenia; and, as Goethe and Schiller intended to make similar epigrammatical thrusts at Nicolai and other offenders, they adopted Martial’s expression and called their verses Xenions.[B] They agreed to publish all their Xenions together, and to regard them as their common property.

The first Xenions were very aggressive, but by and by they became more general and lost their personal character. There are among them many which are lofty and full of deep thought. It happened now and then that the authors of the Xenions hit the wrong man; but this, although to[Pg 9] be regretted, was more excusable than the abuse with which their adversaries retorted.

The Xenions raised a storm of indignation, as was to be expected, and Anti-Xenions were written by many of those who had been attacked. But while the tenor of the Xenions is lofty in spite of their personal character, and while we feel the high aims of Goethe and Schiller in their attempts to purify literature, the Anti-Xenions are wholly personal. They are rude, malicious and mean. They insinuate that the Xenions were prompted by vile motives; that Goethe and Schiller wanted more praise and flattery; that they were envious of the laurels of others and wanted to be the sole usurpers of Mount Parnassus. Schiller was called Kant’s ape, and Goethe was reproached with his family relations.

The history of the Xenions is their justification. The Anti-Xenions are, in themselves alone, a wholesale condemnation of the opposition made to Goethe and Schiller.

Goethe wrote to Schiller concerning the reception which the Xenions found, on December 5, 1796:

“It is real fun to observe what has been[Pg 10] offensive to this kind of people, and also what they think has been offensive to us. How trivial, empty, and mean they consider the life of others, and how they direct their arrows against the outside of the works! How little do they know that a man who takes life seriously lives in an impregnable castle!”

Goethe and Schiller had wielded a vigorous and two-edged weapon in the Xenions. They had severely chastised their antagonists for incompetency; but now it devolved upon themselves to prove the right of their censorship, and they were conscious of this duty. Goethe wrote, November 15, 1806:

“After the bold venture of the Xenions, we must confine our labors strictly to great and worthy works of art. We must shame our adversaries by transmuting our Protean nature henceforth into noble and good forms.”

Events proved that both Goethe and Schiller were not only willing but able to fulfil these intentions. Their antagonists have disappeared. Some of them would[Pg 11] now be entirely forgotten had not the two poets immortalized them in the Xenions.

Some Xenions are of mere transitory importance, especially such as contain allusions and criticisms that are lost to those who are not thoroughly versed in the history of the times, while others are gems of permanent value, reflecting in a few words flashes of the deepest wisdom, and they ought to be better known among English-speaking people. We have therefore extracted and translated those which we deem worthy of preservation for all time.

Goethe and Schiller’s distichs, we are sorry to add, are not always very elegant, and sometimes lack in smoothness and correctness. The first half of their pentameters is often very weak, and many of the second parts are extremely awkward, as for instance in the distich on page 163, where we read:

This excited the anger of Voss, the translator of Homer in the original meter of dactylic hexameters. Voss ridiculed Goethe and Schiller for their bad versification[Pg 12] in a distich, which he intentionally made even worse than the worst of theirs, using the words with a wrong accentuation:

In spite of some awkwardness and lack of elegance in diction, the Xenions became very popular in Germany on account of the profound ideas embodied in many of them. The shortcomings of their form have been forgotten on account of their intrinsic value, and there is perhaps no poetry quoted more frequently than these pithy aphorisms. They have become household words in Germany and deserve a place of honor in the literature of the world.

THE form of the Xenions is, like their Roman prototype, the elegiac distich.

The elegiac distich has rarely, if ever, been used in English poetry, although there is much classical beauty in its rhythm. It consists of alternate dactylic hexameters and pentameters which in ancient Greece were recited to the accompaniment of the flute, and went by the name of “elegies,” the etymology of which has nothing to do (as has been assumed) with lamentations, but probably means flute-songs.

A meter in Greek prosody is comparable to the musical bar, while a foot is a rhythmic figure. Some meters, such as the iambic (◡ – ◡ –) and trochaic (– ◡ – ◡), consist of two feet, but the dactylic meters(– ◡ ◡) consist of one foot only.[C] Accordingly a[Pg 14] trochaic trimeter consists of three meters or six feet; while six dactyls, the last one of which is always catalectic, are called a dactylic hexameter. Catalectic means “ending” or “terminating,” signifying that every line is mutilated at the end. A catalectic meter lacks the last syllable, which, musically considered, is to be regarded as a pause so as to make a musical halt between the lines. According to another rule, the last syllable is always indifferent, i. e., it may be either long or short (⏓).

The dactylic (or, as it is also called, the heroic) hexameter is too long to be read in one breathing, so it is divided into two, sometimes into three parts, and the division is called a caesura, i. e., a cut or incision. This division of the line is irregular and we do not hesitate to say that to its irregularity the hexameter owes a peculiar charm, for it breaks the monotony of the dactylic rhythm.

The new start after the caesura will never be dactylic (– ◡ ◡) like the beginning of the line; it may be anapaestic (◡ ◡ –) or iambic (◡ –); but not dactylic. The break should occur either after[Pg 15] an arsis (–) or after a trochee (– ◡) so as to change the character of the latter part of the hexameter from a descending into an ascending meter. The former, the descending meter which begins with a long syllable, is halting and possesses an attitude of holding back, of dignity, of assertion, while the descending meter rushes forward from a short syllable to a long one; it is progressive, it rises. The latter indicates struggle while the former shows strength and the calmness of victory.

Every caesura has its own name in Greek and the most common caesura cuts the verse in the third meter between the arsis, the long accented syllable, and the thesis, i. e., the two short syllables or the one long unaccented syllable. Since in prosody two short syllables are equivalent to one long syllable, they are regarded as half a meter, and so this caesura is called penthemimeres πενθημιμερὴς which means the one after the fifth half-meter. It runs thus:

– ◡ ◡ - ◡ ◡ – || ◡ ◡ – ◡ ◡ – ◡ ◡ – ◡

There is another caesura after the seventh[Pg 16] half-meter. It is called in Greek hephthemimeres (ἑφθημιμερὴς) and runs thus:

– ◡ ◡ – ◡ ◡ – ◡ ◡ – || ◡ ◡ – ◡ ◡ – ◡

Caesuras after the third and after the ninth half-meter are rarely used; they occur sometimes in Latin but the latter is regarded as inadmissible in Greek.

Almost as common as the penthemimeres is the caesura between the two short syllables in the third meter; and because it cuts off from the meter a trochee (thus – ◡ || ◡) it is called κατὰ τρίτον τροχαῖον, i. e., the caesura “after the third trochee.” It runs thus:

– ◡ ◡ – ◡ ◡ – ◡ || ◡ – ◡ ◡ – ◡ ◡ – ◡

Caesuras after the second trochee are rare and after the fourth are strictly forbidden in Greek metrics.

Finally we must mention the caesura after the end of the fourth measure, which is not uncommon in bucolic poetry, picturing the peaceful life of the ancient Greek cowboys, so different from the cowboys of the American Wild West, and it has therefore received the name, “bucolic[Pg 17] caesura.” It is rare in heroic poems; nevertheless it occurs sometimes and its occasional appearance is effective, for the combination of one dactyl with one trochee (– ◡ ◡ – ◡) gives a euphonious ring to the verse.

The heroic hexameter is best known to the English-reading public from Longfellow’s Evangeline. It has not been a favorite with them mainly because of the awkwardness with which it has been handled and the boldness with which short syllables are frequently used to serve as long syllables. We may say that at present the German language has proved itself most apt in reproducing this classical measure, in which, however, the long syllable (arsis) is to be replaced by a decidedly accented syllable, while the place of a short syllable (thesis) is taken by an unaccented syllable. This makes it possible that the same word may, according to position, in one place serve as a short, in another as a long, syllable, while the prosody of the classical languages is more severe. There a syllable is either long or short, and a short syllable can only become long through subsequent consonants,[Pg 18] which is called “length through position.”

We have to recognize the fact that Teutonic languages are qualitative while the classic languages are quantitative. This means that in the former the accent of the word is predominant and wrong accents render a word positively unintelligible, while in the latter the word-accent is of less account. It is of little consequence in English whether we pronounce “ĕgg” or “aigg,” but it makes a decided difference whether we say “in′fidel” or “infi′del.” In modern French however, we may pronounce with propriety either “la mai′son” or “la maison′”. And this character of the Teutonic languages which renders quality of accent so prominent in speech is the reason why they tend to brevity, for they contract words more and more until, as is the case in English, most of their forms are reduced to monosyllables. Thus the Gothic word habededian is contracted in Middle German into habete, (viz., haben—tat = “I did have”), in modern German into hatte, and in English into “had.” The Teutonic languages neglect the unimportant and unaccented[Pg 19] portions of the word, and wherever they can be disposed of drop them entirely or fuse them into the main syllable.

Another reason why the hexameter is not liked in English is on account of the length of the verse. If the reader has first to search for the caesura, for the place where he can take breath, he feels discouraged at the long line that stretches before him like a road through the desert, and for this reason we deem it an improvement to print dactylic verses so as to begin a new line with the caesura. It renders the reading of the line easier in the measure, as the break in the verse is thus most easily taken in by the eye.

***

Since we have been discussing metrical details at some length, we may be permitted to add a few comments on the iambic trimeter which in English is really nothing else but what is commonly known as blank verse. This verse is very generally misunderstood and we have nowhere seen it properly explained in English books on prosody.

[Pg 20]

The blank verse is the most common and best adapted form for dignified speech in both the dialogue and the monologue of the drama. We quote as a typical verse the first line of Hamlet’s soliloquy:

The meter is a catalectic iambic trimeter and there is only one rule of importance, viz., that at the beginning and after caesuras an iambus ◡ – can be replaced by a trochee metric: – ◡. A scheme of the meter runs thus:

◡ – ◡ – | ◡ – ◡ – | ◡ – ◡ ||

Or in musical script thus:

The last long syllable, sometimes even the whole last foot, is omitted or, more correctly, is replaced by a pause. We may write it thus:

This latter case, originally merely allowable, has become very frequent in English, because the English language is rich in[Pg 21] monosyllables so as to make it sometimes difficult to end the verse with an unaccented (i. e., a short) syllable, but this custom has produced the impression that the verse consists of five iambi, and among people but little versed in the rules of classical poetry who forget that an iambic meter consists of two feet, has given rise to the error that blank verse is an iambic pentameter. Strange to say this mistake is now perpetuated in almost all our text-books.

***

After this digression on the iambic trimeter we shall make, in conclusion, a few comments on the dactylic pentameter.

The pentameter, i. e., “a five-measure,” is so called because it consists of twice two and a half dactylic meters thus:

– ◡ ◡ – ◡ ◡ –

In reality the pentameter is a repetition of a penthemimeres.

Two short syllables may always be replaced in elegiac distichs by one long syllable, with the exception of the fifth meter of the hexameter and the latter half of the[Pg 22] pentameter. The schedule of a distich, accordingly, is thus:

 —    —   —     —   —    —  
– ◡ ◡ – ◡ ◡ – ◡ ◡ – ◡ ◡ – ◡ ◡ – ◡ ◡ – ◡

—    — 
– ◡ ◡ – ◡ ◡ – || – ◡ ◡ – ◡ ◡ –

Considering the fact that the measures of Greek prosody are comparable to musical bars in which time and not accent is the decisive element, we readily understand that the name “pentameter” is a misnomer, for the pentameter consists as much as the hexameter of six full dactylic bars, only that there is a pause of one-half meter after each two and a half meters. Expressed in musical characters, the distich reads as follows:

Vorsatz

Das Mittel.

Das Distichon.

Uebermüthig.

Das gemeinsame Schicksal.

Der letzte Märtyrer.

Das eigne Ideal.

Schöne Individualität.

Der Schlüssel.

Das Werthe und Würdige.

Der Genius.

Schönheit.

Die verschiedene Bestimmung.

Das Unwandelbare.

Das Naturgesetz.

Zeus zu Herkules.

Aberwitz und Wahnwitz.

Inneres und Aeusseres.

Baalspfaffen.

Die idealische Freiheit.

Menschliches Wirken.

Unsterblichkeit.

Unsterblich.

Gott, Welt und Mensch.

An die Muse.

Die Unberufenen.

Der Wolfische Homer.

Geistige Aristokratie.

Böse Zeiten.

Auf zwei Sudler, die einander loben.

Dilettant.

An ⁕.

An ⁕⁕.

Sachen so gesucht werden.

Der Kunstgriff.

Das philosophische Gespräch.

Der Zeitpunkt.

An die Herren H. J. K.

Das Verbindungsmittel.

Jetzige Generation.

An die Oberen.

Kritische Studien.

Der Geist und der Buchstabe.

Gelehrte Gesellschaft.

Gesundbrunnen zu ⁕⁕⁕.

Probe moderner Kritik.

Nikolai’s Buch über die Quellen der Donau.

Formalphilosophie.

Das grobe Organ.

Das Motto.

Verleger von P** Schriften.

Sokrates.

An die Herren N. O. P.

Guter Rathschlag.

Der Ersatz.

Der Kenner.

H. S.

Der Prophet.

Der Halbvogel.

Parteigeist.

Philosophen.

Aristoteles.

Dringend.

Descartes.

Ich.

Spinoza.

Berkeley.

Leibniz.

Kant.

David Hume.

Fichte.

Reinhold.

Ich.

K. Ch. F. Schmidt.

Ich.

Die Philosophien.

Auction.

Die Möglichkeit.

Empiriker.

Theoretiker.

Letzte Zuflucht.

Naturforscher und Transcendental-Philosophen.

An die voreiligen Verbindungsstifter.

Kant und seine Ausleger.

Der Teleolog.

Rechtsfrage.

Puffendorf.

Gewissensscrupel.

Decisum.

Menschliches Wissen.

[Pg 125]

Die Systeme.

Wissenschaftliches Genie.

Mittheilung.

Der Nachahmer.

Wissenschaft.

An die Astronomen.

Poet, Erdichtung und Wahrheit.

Die Uebereinstimmung.

Kolumbus.

[Pg 137]

Weisheit und Klugheit.

Das Höchste.

Natur und Vernunft.

Fratzen.

Der Philosoph und der Schwärmer.

Theophagen.

Freund und Feind.

Unterschied der Stände.

Aufgabe.

Güte and Grösse.

Die Hauptsache.

Pflicht für Jeden.

Wahrheit.

Wiederholung.

Was nutzt.

Was schadet.

Zucht.

Trost.

Analytiker.

Schlechte Münze.

Ceremoniendienst.

An die Mystiker.

Licht und Farbe.

Mein Glaube.

Der Vater.

[Pg 168]

[Pg 169]

[Pg 173]