Page:Goethe and Schiller's Xenions (IA goetheschillersx00goetiala).pdf/23

 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,