heart with bitterness. But the artists of those days did not cultivate their melancholy; and Kuhnau seems never to have lost his bantering geniality in respect of hostile men and things. He knew the world, and was not in the least surprised that charlatans should have precedence over honest men. "People behave, as regards the artists who have newly arrived in a town, as they do in respect of fresh herring; everybody wants to eat them, and spends on them much more money than on the better and choicer dishes which he is accustomed to see on his table." But as he was a believer, not only in religion, but in art, he had no misgivings as to the eventual triumph of his cause; and in the meantime he cheerfully avenged himself upon stupidity and ignorance by exhibiting them in a satirical novel entitled Der Musicalische Quack-Salber (The Musical Charlatan).[1]
This curious book, published in Dresden in the year 1700, and very well known in the eighteenth century, was preserved for us by only two examples, one in the Royal Library of Berlin and the other in the City Library of Leipzig, when Herr Kurt Benndorf conceived the idea of republishing it in Herr Sauer's collections of Deutsche Literaturdenkmaeler.[2]
Written before its time, in lively, lucid German, under French influence, full of short, vigorous phrases, intermingled with French and Italian words, this little volume can still be read with pleasure. It is full of good nature and sparkling with
- ↑ Der Musicalische Quack-Salber, nicht alleine denen vorstaendigen Liebhabern der Music, sondern auch allen andern welche in dieser Kunst keine sonderbahre Wissenschaft haben, in einen kurtzweiligen und angenehmen Historie zur Lust und Ergetzligkeit beschrieben, von Johann Kuhnau.—Dresden, Anno 1700.
- ↑ Berlin, Behr, 1900.
