(Vol. vi., p. 434.).
Had M. M. E. gone to the fountain-head, and consulted Göthe's own statement
in his autobiography, he would have seen in the _Werke_, vol. xxvi. {20} p.
229., that Mr. Hayward's note was not written with that writer's usual
care. Göthe does not say that his reply to Nicolai's _Joys of Werter_,
though circulated only in MS., destroyed N.'s literary reputation: on the
contrary, he says that his squib (for it was no more) consisted of an
epigram, not fit for communication, and a dialogue between Charlotte and
Werter, which was never copied, and long lost; but that this dialogue,
exposing N.'s impertinence, was written with a foreboding of his sad habit,
afterwards developed, of treating of subjects out of his depth, which
habit, notwithstanding his indisputable merits of another kind, utterly
destroyed his reputation. This was most true: and yet all such assertions
must be taken in a qualified sense. Nearly thirty years after this was
written I partook of the hospitality of N. at Berlin. It was in 1803, when
he was at the head, not of the Berlin literati, but of the book-manufactory
of Prussia. He was then what, afterwards and elsewhere, the Longmans,
Murrays, Constables, Cottas, and Brockhauses were,--the great publisher of
his age and country. The _entrepreneur_ of the _Neue Deutsche Bibliothek_
may be compared with the publishers of our and the French great
Cyclopædias, and our Quarterly Reviews.
It was unfortunate for the posthumous reputation of the great bibliopolist
that he, patronising a school that was dying out, made war on the athletes
of the rising school. He assailed nearly every great man, philosopher or
poet, from Kant and Göthe downwards, especially of the schools of Saxony,
Swabia, and the free imperial cities. No wonder that he became afterwards
what Macfleckno and Colly Cibber had been to Dryden and Pope. In some dozen
of the _Xenien_ of Göthe and Schiller, in 1797, he was treated as the
Arch-Philistine.
M. M. E. characterises him as the "friend" and "fellow-labourer" of
Lessing. Now Lessing was incomparably the most eminent _littérateur_ of the
earlier part of that age,--the man who was the forerunner of the
philosophers, and whose criticisms supplied the place of poetry. The
satirists of the _Xenien_ affect to compassionate Lessing, in having to
endure a companion so forced on him as Nicolai was, whom they speak of as a
"thorn in the crown of the martyr." The few who care for the literary
controversies of the age of Göthe in Germany will be greatly assisted by an
edition of the _Xenien_, with notes, published at Dantzig, 1833.