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.
[A] His Theoria Generationis appeared in 1759.
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 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, 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. 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.”
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.
[B] We prefer the Saxon form of the plural (Xenions) to the Latin form (Xenia), which is appropriate only as a name of Latin poetry.
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 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 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 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 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.