Goethe and Schiller's Xenions · Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
THE HISTORY AND POETICAL FORM OF THE XENIONS.
The History of the Xenions. 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_: “Ich sag’s Euch _Geistern_ in’s Gesicht, Den _Geistes_-Despotismus leid ich nicht; Mein Geist kann ihn nicht exerciren.” [I tell you, spirits, to your face, I give to spirit-despotism no place; My spirit cannot practise it at all.] _Tr. by Bayard Taylor._ 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.
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: ....“Und warum kei′ne?” Aus Re′ligion′. 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′ Weimar und′ in Jena′ macht man′ Hexa′meter wie′ der; A′ber die Pen′tameter′ sind′ doch noch ex′cellenter′!” [In′ Weimar and′ in Jena′ they make′ hexame′ters such as′ this; But′ the Pen′tameters′ are′ even more′ excellent′.] 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 Elegiac Distich. 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 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 (̲◡). [C] The name “dactyl” or “finger” (Greek δάκτυλος) indicates that, like a finger, it consists of one long and two short members. 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 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 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 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, 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 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.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.