LESSING[147]

When Burns's humor gave its last pathetic flicker in his "John, don't let

the awkward squad fire over me," was he thinking of actual

brother-volunteers, or of possible biographers? Did his words betray only

the rhythmic sensitiveness of poetic nerves, or were they a foreboding of

that helpless future, when the poet lies at the mercy of the plodder,--of

that bi-voluminous shape in which dulness overtakes and revenges itself

on genius at last? Certainly Burns has suffered as much as most

large-natured creatures from well-meaning efforts to account for him, to

explain him away, to bring him into harmony with those well-regulated

minds which, during a good part of the last century, found out a way,

through rhyme, to snatch a prosiness beyond the reach of prose. Nay, he

has been wronged also by that other want of true appreciation, which

deals in panegyric, and would put asunder those two things which God has

joined,--the poet and the man,--as if it were not the same rash

improvidence that was the happiness of the verse and the misfortune of

the gauger. But his death-bed was at least not haunted by the

unappeasable apprehension of a German for his biographer; and that the

fame of Lessing should have four times survived this cunningest assault

of oblivion is proof enough that its base is broad and deep-set.

There seems to be, in the average German mind, an inability or a

disinclination to see a thing as it really is, unless it be a matter of

science. It finds its keenest pleasure in divining a profound

significance in the most trifling things, and the number of mare's-nests

that have been stared into by the German _Gelehrter_ through his

spectacles passes calculation. They are the one object of contemplation

that makes that singular being perfectly happy, and they seem to be as

common as those of the stork. In the dark forest of aesthetics,

particularly, he finds them at every turn,--"fanno tutto il loco varo."

If the greater part of our English criticism is apt only to skim the

surface, the German, by way of being profound, too often burrows in

delighted darkness quite beneath its subject, till the reader feels the

ground hollow beneath him, and is fearful of caving into unknown depths

of stagnant metaphysic air at every step. The Commentary on Shakespeare

of Gervinus, a really superior man, reminds one of the Roman Campagna,

penetrated underground in all directions by strange winding caverns, the

work of human borers in search of we know not what. Above are the divine

poet's larks and daisies, his incommunicable skies, his broad prospects

of life and nature; and meanwhile our Teutonic _teredo_ worms his way

below, and offers to be our guide into an obscurity of his own

contriving. The reaction of language upon style, and even upon thought,

by its limitations on the one hand, and its suggestions on the other, is

so apparent to any one who has made even a slight study of comparative

literature, that we have sometimes thought the German tongue at least an

accessory before the fact, if nothing more, in the offences of German

literature. The language has such a fatal genius for going

stern-foremost, for yawing, and for not minding the helm without some ten

minutes' notice in advance, that he must be a great sailor indeed who can

safely make it the vehicle for anything but imperishable commodities.

Vischer's _Aesthetik_, the best treatise on the subject, ancient or

modern, is such a book as none but a German could write, and it is

written as none but a German could have written it. The abstracts of its

sections are sometimes nearly as long as the sections themselves, and it

is as hard to make out which head belongs to which tail, as in a knot of

snakes thawing themselves into sluggish individuality under a spring sun.

The average German professor spends his life in making lanterns fit to

guide us through the obscurest passages of all the _ologies_ and _ysics_,

and there are none in the world of such honest workmanship. They are

durable, they have intensifying glasses, reflectors of the most

scientific make, capital sockets in which to set a light, and a handsome

lump of potentially illuminating tallow is thrown in. But, in order to

_see_ by them, the explorer must make his own candle, supply his own

cohesive wick of common-sense, and light it himself. And yet the

admirable thoroughness of the German intellect! We should be ungrateful

indeed if we did not acknowledge that it has supplied the raw material in

almost every branch of science for the defter wits of other nations to

work on; yet we have a suspicion that there are certain lighter

departments of literature in which it may be misapplied, and turn into

something very like clumsiness. Delightful as Jean Paul's humor is, how

much more so would it be if he only knew when to stop! Ethereally deep as

is his sentiment, should we not feel it more if he sometimes gave us a

little less of it,--if he would only not always deal out his wine by

beer-measure? So thorough is the German mind, that might it not seem now

and then to work quite through its subject, and expatiate in cheerful

unconsciousness on the other side thereof?

With all its merits of a higher and deeper kind, it yet seems to us that

German literature has not quite satisfactorily answered that so

long-standing question of the French Abbé about _esprit_. Hard as it is

for a German to be clear, still harder to be light, he is more than ever

awkward in his attempts to produce that quality of style, so peculiarly

French, which is neither wit nor liveliness taken singly, but a mixture

of the two that must be drunk while the effervescence lasts, and will not

bear exportation into any other language. German criticism, excellent in

other respects, and immeasurably superior to that of any other nation in

its constructive faculty, in its instinct for getting at whatever

principle of life lies at the heart of a work of genius, is seldom lucid,

almost never entertaining. It may turn its light, if we have patience,

into every obscurest cranny of its subject, one after another, but it

never flashes light _out_ of the subject itself, as Sainte-Beuve, for

example, so often does, and with such unexpected charm. We should be

inclined to put Julian Schmidt at the head of living critics in all the

more essential elements of his outfit; but with him is not one conscious

at too frequent intervals of the professorial grind,--of that German

tendency to bear on too heavily, where a French critic would touch and go

with such exquisite measure? The Great Nation, as it cheerfully calls

itself, is in nothing greater than its talent for saying little things

agreeably, which is perhaps the very top of mere culture, and in

literature is the next best thing to the power of saying great things as

easily as if they were little German learning, like the elephants of

Pyrrhus, is always in danger of turning upon what it was intended to

adorn and reinforce, and trampling it ponderously to death. And yet what

do we not owe it? Mastering all languages, all records of intellectual

man, it has been able, or has enabled others, to strip away the husks of

nationality and conventionalism from the literatures of many races, and

to disengage that kernel of human truth which is the germinating

principle of them all. Nay, it has taught us to recognize also a certain

value in those very husks, whether as shelter for the unripe or food for

the fallen seed.

That the general want of style in German authors is not wholly the fault

of the language is shown by Heine (a man of mixed blood), who can be

daintily light in German; that it is not altogether a matter of race, is

clear from the graceful airiness of Erasmus and Reuchlin in Latin, and of

Grimm in French. The sense of heaviness which creeps over the reader from

so many German books is mainly due, we suspect to the language, which

seems wellnigh incapable of that aerial perspective so delightful in

first-rate French, and even English, writing. But there must also be in

the national character an insensibility to proportion, a want of that

instinctive discretion which we call tact. Nothing short of this will

account for the perpetual groping of German imaginative literature after

some foreign mould in which to cast its thought or feeling, now trying a

Louis Quatorze pattern, then something supposed to be Shakespearian, and

at last going back to ancient Greece, or even Persia. Goethe himself,

limpidly perfect as are many of his shorter poems, often fails in giving

artistic coherence to his longer works. Leaving deeper qualities wholly

out of the question, Wilhelm Meister seems a mere aggregation of episodes

if compared with such a masterpiece as Paul and Virginia, or even with a

happy improvisation like the Vicar of Wakefield. The second part of

Faust, too, is rather a reflection of Goethe's own changed view of life

and man's relation to it, than an harmonious completion of the original

conception. Full of placid wisdom and exquisite poetry it certainly is;

but if we look at it as a poem, it seems more as if the author had

striven to get in all he could, than to leave out all he might. We cannot

help asking what business have paper money and political economy and

geognosy here? We confess that Thales and the Homunculus weary us not a

little, unless, indeed, a poem be nothing, after all, but a prolonged

conundrum. Many of Schiller's lyrical poems--though the best of them find

no match in modern verse for rapid energy, the very axles of language

kindling with swiftness--seem disproportionately long in parts, and the

thought too often has the life wellnigh squeezed out of it in the

sevenfold coils of diction, dappled though it be with splendid imagery.

In German sentiment, which runs over so easily into sentimentalism, a

foreigner cannot help being struck with a certain incongruousness. What

can be odder, for example, than the mixture of sensibility and sausages

in some of Goethe's earlier notes to Frau von Stein, unless, to be sure,

the publishing them? It would appear that Germans were less sensible to

the ludicrous--and we are far from saying that this may not have its

compensatory advantages--than either the English or the French. And what

is the source of this sensibility, if it be not an instinctive perception

of the incongruous and disproportionate? Among all races, the English has

ever shown itself most keenly alive to the fear of making itself

ridiculous; and among all, none has produced so many humorists, only one

of them, indeed, so profound as Cervantes, yet all masters in their

several ways. What English-speaking man, except Boswell, could have

arrived at Weimar, as Goethe did, in that absurd _Werthermontirung_? And

where, out of Germany, could he have found a reigning Grand Duke to put

his whole court into the same sentimental livery of blue and yellow,

leather breeches, boots, and all, excepting only Herder, and that not on

account of his clerical profession, but of his age? To be sure, it might

be asked also where else in Europe was a prince to be met with capable of

manly friendship with a man whose only decoration was his genius? But the

comicality of the other fact no less remains. Certainly the German

character is in no way so little remarkable as for its humor. If we were

to trust the evidence of Herr Hub's dreary _Deutsche komische und

humoristische Dichtung_, we should believe that no German had even so

much as a suspicion of what humor meant, unless the book itself, as we

are half inclined to suspect, be a joke in three volumes, the _want_ of

fun being the real point thereof. If German patriotism can be induced to

find a grave delight in it, we congratulate Herr Hub's publishers, and

for ourselves advise any sober-minded man who may hereafter "be merry,"

not to "sing psalms," but to read Hub as the more serious amusement of

the two. There are epigrams there that make life more solemn, and, if

taken in sufficient doses, would make it more precarious. Even Jean Paul,

the greatest of German humorous authors, and never surpassed in comic

conception or in the pathetic quality of humor, is not to be named with

his master, Sterne, as a creative humorist. What are Siebenkäs, Fixlein,

Schmelzle, and Fibel, (a single lay-figure to be draped at will with

whimsical sentiment and reflection, and put in various attitudes,)

compared with the living reality of Walter Shandy and his brother Toby,

characters which we do not see merely as puppets in the author's mind,

but poetically projected from it in an independent being of their own?

Heine himself, the most graceful, sometimes the most touching, of modern

poets, and clearly the most easy of German humorists, seems to me wanting

in a refined perception of that inward propriety which is only another

name for poetic proportion, and shocks us sometimes with an

_Unfläthigkeit_, as at the end of his _Deutschland_, which, if it make

Germans laugh, as we should be sorry to believe, makes other people hold

their noses. Such things have not been possible in English since Swift,

and the _persifleur_ Heine cannot offer the same excuse of savage

cynicism that might be pleaded for the Irishman.

I have hinted that Herr Stahr's Life of Lessing is not precisely the kind

of biography that would have been most pleasing to the man who could not

conceive that an author should be satisfied with anything more than truth

in praise, or anything less in criticism. My respect for what Lessing

was, and for what he did, is profound. In the history of literature it

would be hard to find a man so stalwart, so kindly, so sincere,[148] so

capable of great ideas, whether in their influence on the intellect or

the life, so unswervingly true to the truth, so free from the common

weaknesses of his class. Since Luther, Germany has given birth to no such

intellectual athlete,--to no son so German to the core. Greater poets she

has had, but no greater writer; no nature more finely tempered. Nay, may

we not say that great character is as rare a thing as great genius, if it

be not even a nobler form of it? For surely it is easier to embody fine

thinking, or delicate sentiment, or lofty aspiration, in a book than in a

life. The written leaf, if it be, as some few are, a safe-keeper and

conductor of celestial fire, is secure. Poverty cannot pinch, passion

swerve, or trial shake it. But the man Lessing, harassed and striving

life-long, always poor and always hopeful, with no patron but his own

right-hand, the very shuttlecock of fortune, who saw ruin's ploughshare

drive through the hearth on which his first home-fire was hardly kindled,

and who, through all, was faithful to himself, to his friend, to his

duty, and to his ideal, is something more inspiring for us than the most

glorious utterance of merely intellectual power. The figure of Goethe is

grand, it is rightfully pre-eminent, it has something of the calm, and

something of the coldness, of the immortals; but the Valhalla of German

letters can show one form, in its simple manhood, statelier even than

his.

Manliness and simplicity, if they are not necessary coefficients in

producing character of the purest tone, were certainly leading elements

in the Lessing who is still so noteworthy and lovable to us when

eighty-six years have passed since his bodily presence vanished from

among men. He loved clearness, he hated exaggeration in all its forms. He

was the first German who had any conception of style, and who could be

full without spilling over on all sides. Herr Stahr, we think, is not

just the biographer he would have chosen for himself. His book is rather

a panegyric than a biography. There is sometimes an almost comic

disproportion between the matter and the manner, especially in the epic

details of Lessing's onslaughts on the nameless herd of German authors.

It is as if Sophocles should have given a strophe to every bullock slain

by Ajax in his mad foray upon the Grecian commissary stores. He is too

fond of striking an attitude, and his tone rises unpleasantly near a

scream, as he calls the personal attention of heaven and earth to

something which Lessing himself would have thought a very

matter-of-course affair. He who lays it down as an axiom, that "genius

loves simplicity," would hardly have been pleased to hear the "Letters on

Literature" called the "burning thunderbolts of his annihilating

criticism," or the Anti-Götze pamphlets, "the hurtling arrows that sped

from the bow of the immortal hero." Nor would he with whom accuracy was a

matter of conscience have heard patiently that the Letters "appeared in a

period distinguished for its lofty tone of mind, and in their own

towering boldness they are a true picture of the intrepid character of

the age."[149] If the age was what Herr Stahr represents it to have been,

where is the great merit of Lessing? He would have smiled, we suspect, a

little contemptuously, at Herr Stahr's repeatedly quoting a certificate

from the "historian of the proud Britons," that he was "the first critic

in Europe." Whether we admit or not Lord Macaulay's competence in the

matter, we are sure that Lessing would not have thanked his biographer

for this soup-ticket to a ladleful of fame. If ever a man stood firmly on

his own feet, and asked help of none, that man was Gotthold Ephraim

Lessing.

Herr Stahr's desire to _make_ a hero of his subject, and his love for

sonorous sentences like those we have quoted above, are apt to stand

somewhat in the way of our chance at taking a fair measure of the man,

and seeing in what his heroism really lay. He furnishes little material

for a comparative estimate of Lessing, or for judging of the foreign

influences which helped from time to time in making him what he was.

Nothing is harder than to worry out a date from Herr Stahr's haystacks of

praise and quotation. Yet dates are of special value in tracing the

progress of an intellect like Lessing's, which, little actuated by an

inward creative energy, was commonly stirred to motion by the impulse of

other minds, and struck out its brightest flashes by collision with them.

He himself tells us that a critic should "first seek out some one with

whom he can contend," and quotes in justification from one of Aristotle's

commentators, _Solet Aristoteles quaerere pugnam in suis libris_. This

Lessing was always wont to do. He could only feel his own strength, and

make others feel it,--could only call it into full play in an

intellectual wrestling-bout. He was always anointed and ready for the

ring, but with this distinction, that he was no mere prize-fighter, or

bully for the side that would pay him best, nor even a contender for mere

sentiment, but a self-forgetful champion for the truth as he saw it. Nor

is this true of him only as a critic. His more purely imaginative

works--his Minna, his Emilia, his Nathan--were all written, not to

satisfy the craving of a poetic instinct, nor to rid head and heart of

troublous guests by building them a lodging outside himself, as Goethe

used to do, but to prove some thesis of criticism or morals by which

Truth could be served. His zeal for her was perfectly unselfish. "Does

one write, then, for the sake of being always in the right? I think I

have been as serviceable to Truth," he says, "when I miss her, and my

failure is the occasion of another's discovering her, as if I had

discovered her myself."[150] One would almost be inclined to think, from

Herr Stahr's account of the matter, that Lessing had been an

autochthonous birth of the German soil, without intellectual ancestry or

helpful kindred. That this is the sufficient natural history of no

original mind we need hardly say, since originality consists quite as

much in the power of using to purpose what it finds ready to its hand, as

in that of producing what is absolutely new. Perhaps we might say that it

was nothing more than the faculty of combining the separate, and

therefore ineffectual, conceptions of others, and making them into living

thought by the breath of its own organizing spirit. A great man without a

past, if he be not an impossibility, will certainly have no future. He

would be like those conjectural Miltons and Cromwells of Gray's imaginary

Hamlet. The only privilege of the original man is, that, like other

sovereign princes, he has the right to call in the current coin and

reissue it stamped with his own image, as was the practice of Lessing.

Herr Stahr's over-intensity of phrase is less offensive than amusing when

applied to Lessing's early efforts in criticism. Speaking of poor old

Gottsched, he says: "Lessing assailed him sometimes with cutting

criticism, and again with exquisite humor. In the notice of Gottsched's

poems, he says, among other things, 'The exterior of the volume is so

handsome that it will do great credit to the bookstores, and it is to be

hoped that it will continue to do so for a long time. But to give a

satisfactory idea of the interior surpasses our powers.' And in

conclusion he adds, 'These poems cost two thalers and four groschen. The

two thalers pay for the ridiculous, and the four groschen pretty much for

the useful.'" Again, he tells us that Lessing concludes his notice of

Klopstock's Ode to God "with these inimitably roguish words: 'What

presumption to beg thus earnestly for a woman!' Does not a whole book of

criticism lie in these nine words?" For a young man of twenty-two,

Lessing's criticisms show a great deal of independence and maturity of

thought; but humor he never had, and his wit was always of the

bluntest,--crushing rather than cutting. The mace, and not the scymitar,

was his weapon. Let Herr Stahr put all Lessing's "inimitably roguish

words" together, and compare them with these few intranslatable lines

from Voltaire's letter to Rousseau, thanking him for his _Discours sur

l'Inégalite_: "On n'a jamais employé tant d'esprit à vouloir nous rendre

bêtes; il prend enviede marcher à quatre pattes quand on lit votre

ouvrage." Lessing from the first was something far better than a wit.

Force was always much more characteristic of him than cleverness.

Sometimes Herr Stahr's hero-worship leads him into positive misstatement.

For example, speaking of Lessing's Preface to the "Contributions to the

History and Reform of the Theatre," he tells us that "his eye was

directed chiefly to the English theatre and Shakespeare." Lessing at that

time (1749) was only twenty, and knew little more than the names of any

foreign dramatists except the French. In this very Preface his English

list skips from Shakespeare to Dryden, and in the Spanish he omits

Calderon, Tirso de Molina, and Alarcon. Accordingly, we suspect that the

date is wrongly assigned to Lessing's translation of _Toda la Vida es

Sueño_. His mind was hardly yet ready to feel the strange charm of this

most imaginative of Calderon's dramas.

Even where Herr Stahr undertakes to give us light on the _sources_ of

Lessing, it is something of the dimmest. He attributes "Miss Sara

Sampson" to the influence of the "Merchant of London," as Mr. Evans

translates it literally from the German, meaning our old friend, "George

Barnwell." But we are strongly inclined to suspect from internal evidence

that Moore's more recent "Gamester" gave the prevailing impulse. And if

Herr Stahr must needs tell us anything of the Tragedy of Middle-Class

Life, he ought to have known that on the English stage it preceded Lillo

by more than a century,--witness the "Yorkshire Tragedy,"--and that

something very like it was even much older in France. We are inclined to

complain, also, that he does not bring out more clearly how much Lessing

owed to Diderot both as dramatist and critic, nor give us so much as a

hint of what already existing English criticism did for him in the way of

suggestion and guidance. But though we feel it to be our duty to say so

much of Herr Stahr's positive faults and negative short-comings, yet we

leave him in very good humor. While he is altogether too full upon

certain points of merely transitory importance,--such as the quarrel with

Klotz,--yet we are bound to thank him both for the abundance of his

extracts from Lessing, and for the judgment he has shown in the choice of

them. Any one not familiar with his writings will be able to get a very

good notion of the quality of his mind, and the amount of his literary

performance, from these volumes; and that, after all, is the chief

matter. As to the absolute merit of his works other than critical, Herr

Stahr's judgment is too much at the mercy of his partiality to be of

great value.

Of Mr. Evans's translation we can speak for the most part with high

commendation. There are great difficulties in translating German prose;

and whatever other good things Herr Stahr may have learned from Lessing,

terseness and clearness are not among them. We have seldom seen a

translation which read more easily, or was generally more faithful. That

Mr. Evans should nod now and then we do not wonder, nor that he should

sometimes choose the wrong word. We have only compared him with the

original where we saw reason for suspecting a slip; but, though we have

not found much to complain of, we have found enough to satisfy us that

his book will gain by a careful revision. We select a few oversights,

mainly from the first volume, as examples. On page 34, comparing Lessing

with Goethe on arriving at the University, Mr. Evans, we think, obscures,

if he does not wholly lose the meaning, when he translates _Leben_ by

"social relations," and is altogether wrong in rendering _Patrizier_ by

"aristocrat." At the top of the next page, too, "suspicious" is not the

word for _bedenklich_. Had he been writing English, he would surely have

said "questionable." On page 47, "overtrodden shoes" is hardly so good as

the idiomatic "down at the heel." On page 104, "A very humorous

representation" is oddly made to "confirm the documentary evidence." The

reverse is meant. On page 115, the sentence beginning "the tendency in

both" needs revising. On page 138, Mr. Evans speaks of the "Poetical

Village-younker of Destouches." This, we think, is hardly the English of

_Le Poète Campagnard_, and almost recalls Lieberkühn's theory of

translation, toward which Lessing was so unrelenting,--"When I do not

understand a passage, why, I translate it word for word." On page 149,

"Miss Sara Sampson" is called "the first social tragedy of the German

Drama." All tragedies surely are _social_, except the "Prometheus."

_Bürgerliche Tragödie_ means a tragedy in which the protagonist is taken

from common life, and perhaps cannot be translated clearly into English

except by "tragedy of middle-class life." So on page 170 we find Emilia

Galotti called a "Virginia _bourgeoise_," and on page 172 a hospital

becomes a _lazaretto_. On page 190 we have a sentence ending in this

strange fashion: "in an episode of the English original, which Wieland

omitted entirely, one of its characters nevertheless appeared in the

German tragedy." On page 205 we have the Seven Years' War called "a

bloody _process_." This is mere carelessness, for Mr. Evans, in the

second volume, translates it rightly "_lawsuit_." What English reader

would know what "You are intriguing me" means, on page 228? On page 264,

Vol. II., we find a passage inaccurately rendered, which we consider of

more consequence, because it is a quotation from Lessing. "O, out upon

the man who claims, Almighty God, to be a preacher of Thy word, and yet

so impudently asserts that, in order to attain Thy purposes, there was

only one way in which it pleased _Thee_ to make _Thyself_ known to him!"

This is very far from _nur den einzigen Weg gehabt den Du Dir gefallen

lassen ihm kund zu machen!_ The _ihm_ is scornfully emphatic. We hope

Professor Evans will go over his version for a second edition much more

carefully than we have had any occasion to do. He has done an excellent

service to our literature, for which we heartily thank him, in choosing a

book of this kind to translate, and translating it so well. We would not

look such a gift horse too narrowly in the mouth.

Let us now endeavor to sum up the result of Lessing's life and labor with

what success we may.

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was born (January 22, 1729) at Camenz, in Upper

Lusatia, the second child and eldest son of John Gottfried Lessing, a

Lutheran clergyman. Those who believe in the persistent qualities of

race, or the cumulative property of culture, will find something to their

purpose in his Saxon blood and his clerical and juristic ancestry. It is

worth mentioning, that his grandfather, in the thesis for his doctor's

degree, defended the right to entire freedom of religious belief. The

name first comes to the surface in Parson Clement Lessigk, nearly three

centuries ago, and survives to the present day in a painter of some

distinction. It has almost passed into a proverb, that the mothers of

remarkable children have been something beyond the common. If there be

any truth in the theory, the case of Lessing was an exception, as might

have been inferred, perhaps, from the peculiarly masculine type of his

character and intellect. His mother was in no wise superior, but his

father seems to have been a man somewhat above the pedantic average of

the provincial clergymen of his day, and to have been a scholar in the

ampler meaning of the word. Besides the classics, he had possessed

himself of French and English, and was somewhat versed in the Oriental

languages. The temper of his theology may be guessed from his having

been, as his son tells us with some pride, one of "the earliest

translators of Tillotson." We can only conjecture him from the letters

which Lessing wrote to him, from which we should fancy him as on the

whole a decided and even choleric old gentleman, in whom the wig, though

not a predominant, was yet a notable feature, and who was, like many

other fathers, permanently astonished at the fruit of his loins. He would

have preferred one of the so-called learned professions for his

son,--theology above all,--and would seem to have never quite reconciled

himself to his son's distinction, as being in none of the three careers

which alone were legitimate. Lessing's bearing towards him, always

independent, is really beautiful in its union of respectful tenderness

with unswerving self-assertion. When he wished to evade the maternal eye,

Gotthold used in his letters to set up a screen of Latin between himself

and her; and we conjecture the worthy Pastor Primarius playing over again

in his study at Camenz, with some scruples of conscience, the old trick

of Chaucer's fox:--

"Mulier est hominis confusio;

Madam, the sentence of this Latin is.

Woman is mannës joy and mannës bliss."

He appears to have snatched a fearful and but ill-concealed joy from the

sight of the first collected edition of his son's works, unlike Tillotson

as they certainly were. Ah, had they only been _Opera_! Yet were they not

volumes, after all, and able to stand on their own edges beside the

immortals, if nothing more?

After grinding with private-tutor Mylius the requisite time, Lessing

entered the school of Camenz, and in his thirteenth year was sent to the

higher institution at Meissen. We learn little of his career there,

except that Theophrastus, Plautus, and Terence were already his favorite

authors, that he once characteristically distinguished himself by a

courageous truthfulness, and that he wrote a Latin poem on the valor of

the Saxon soldiers, which his father very sensibly advised him to

shorten. In 1750, four years after leaving the school, he writes to his

father: "I believed even when I was at Meissen that one must learn much

there which he cannot make the least use of in real life (_der Welt_),

and I now [after trying Leipzig and Wittenberg] see it all the more

clearly,"--a melancholy observation which many other young men have made

under similar circumstances. Sent to Leipzig in his seventeenth year, he

finds himself an awkward, ungainly lad, and sets diligently to perfecting

himself in the somewhat unscholastic accomplishments of riding, dancing,

and fencing. He also sedulously frequents the theatre, and wrote a play,

"The Young Scholar," which attained the honor of representation.

Meanwhile his most intimate companion was a younger brother of his

old tutor Mylius, a young man of more than questionable morals,

and who had even written a satire on the elders of Camenz, for

which--over-confidently trusting himself in the outraged city--he had

been fined and imprisoned; so little could the German Muse, celebrated by

Klopstock for her swiftness of foot, protect her son. With this

scandalous person and with play-actors, more than probably of both sexes,

did the young Lessing share a Christmas cake sent him by his mother. Such

news was not long in reaching Camenz, and we can easily fancy how tragic

it seemed in the little parsonage there, to what cabinet councils it gave

rise in the paternal study, to what ominous shaking of the clerical wig

in that domestic Olympus. A pious fraud is practised on the boy, who

hurries home thinly clad through the winter weather, his ill-eaten

Christmas cake wringing him with remorseful indigestion, to receive the

last blessing, if such a prodigal might hope for it, of a broken-hearted

mother. He finds the good dame in excellent health, and softened toward

him by a cold he has taken on his pious journey. He remains at home

several months, now writing Anacreontics of such warmth that his sister

(as volunteer representative of the common hangman) burns them in the

family stove; now composing sermons to convince his mother that "he could

be a preacher any day,"--a theory of that sacred office unhappily not yet

extinct. At Easter, 1747, he gets back to Leipzig again, with some scant

supply of money in his pocket, but is obliged to make his escape thence

between two days somewhere toward the middle of the next year, leaving

behind him some histrionic debts (chiefly, we fear, of a certain

Mademoiselle Lorenz) for which he had confidingly made himself security.

Stranded, by want of floating or other capital, at Wittenberg, he enters

himself, with help from home, as a student there, but soon migrates again

to Berlin, which had been his goal when making his hegira from Leipzig.

In Berlin he remained three years, applying himself to his chosen calling

of author at all work, by doing whatever honest job offered

itself,--verse, criticism, or translation,--and profitably studious in a

very wide range of languages and their literature. Above all, he learned

the great secret, which his stalwart English contemporary, Johnson, also

acquired, of being able to "dine heartily" for threepence.

Meanwhile he continues in a kind of colonial dependence on the parsonage

at Camenz, the bonds gradually slackening, sometimes shaken a little

rudely, and always giving alarming hints of approaching and inevitable

autonomy. From the few home letters of Lessing which remain, (covering

the period before 1753, there are only eight in all,) we are able to

surmise that a pretty constant maternal cluck and shrill paternal warning

were kept up from the home coop. We find Lessing defending the morality

of the stage and his own private morals against charges and suspicions of

his parents, and even making the awful confession that he does not

consider the Christian religion itself as a thing "to be taken on trust,"

nor a Christian by mere tradition so valuable a member of society as "one

who has _prudently_ doubted, and by the way of examination has arrived at

conviction, or at least striven to arrive." Boyish scepticism of the

superficial sort is a common phenomenon enough, but the Lessing variety

of it seems to us sufficiently rare in a youth of twenty. What strikes us

mainly in the letters of these years is not merely the maturity they

show, though that is remarkable, but the tone. We see already in them the

cheerful and never overweening self-confidence which always so pleasantly

distinguished Lessing, and that strength of tackle, so seldom found in

literary men, which brings the mind well home to its anchor, enabling it

to find holding ground and secure riding in any sea. "What care I to live

in plenty," he asks gayly, "if I only live?" Indeed, Lessing learned

early, and never forgot, that whoever would be life's master, and not its

drudge, must make it a means, and never allow it to become an end. He

could say more truly than Goethe, _Mein Acker ist die Zeit_, since he not

only sowed in it the seed of thought for other men and other times, but

cropped it for his daily bread. Above all, we find Lessing even thus

early endowed with the power of keeping his eyes wide open to what he was

after, to what would help or hinder him,--a much more singular gift than

is commonly supposed. Among other jobs of this first Berlin period, he

had undertaken to arrange the library of a certain Herr Rüdiger, getting

therefor his meals and "other receipts," whatever they may have been. His

father seems to have heard with anxiety that this arrangement had ceased,

and Lessing writes to him: "I never wished to have anything to do with

this old man longer than _until I had made myself thoroughly acquainted

with his great library_. This is now accomplished, and we have

accordingly parted." This was in his twenty-first year, and we have no

doubt, from the _range_ of scholarship which Lessing had at command so

young, that it was perfectly true. All through his life he was thoroughly

German in this respect also, that he never _quite_ smelted his knowledge

clear from some slag of learning.

In the early part of the first Berlin residence, Pastor Primarius

Lessing, hearing that his son meditated a movement on Vienna, was much

exercised with fears of the temptation to Popery he would be exposed to

in that capital. We suspect that the attraction thitherward had its

source in a perhaps equally catholic, but less theological magnet,--the

Mademoiselle Lorenz above mentioned. Let us remember the perfectly

innocent passion of Mozart for an actress, and be comforted. There is not

the slightest evidence that Lessing's life at this time, or any other,

though careless, was in any way debauched. No scandal was ever coupled

with his name, nor is any biographic chemistry needed to bleach spots out

of his reputation. What cannot be said of Wieland, of Goethe, of

Schiller, of Jean Paul, may be safely affirmed of this busy and

single-minded man. The parental fear of Popery brought him a seasonable

supply of money from home, which enabled him to clothe himself decently

enough to push his literary fortunes, and put on a bold front with

publishers. Poor enough he often was, but never in so shabby a pass that

he was forced to write behind a screen, like Johnson.

It was during this first stay in Berlin that Lessing was brought into

personal relations with Voltaire. Through an acquaintance with the great

man's secretary, Richier, he was employed as translator in the scandalous

Hirschel lawsuit, so dramatically set forth by Carlyle in his Life of

Frederick, though Lessing's share in it seems to have been unknown to

him. The service could hardly have been other than distasteful to him;

but it must have been with some thrill of the _anche io!_ kind that the

poor youth, just fleshing his maiden pen in criticism, stood face to face

with the famous author, with whose name all Europe rang from side to

side. This was in February, 1751. Young as he was, we fancy those cool

eyes of his making some strange discoveries as to the real nature of that

lean nightmare of Jesuits and dunces. Afterwards the same secretary lent

him the manuscript of the _Siècle de Louis XIV._, and Lessing

thoughtlessly taking it into the country with him, it was not forthcoming

when called for by the author. Voltaire naturally enough danced with

rage, screamed all manner of unpleasant things about robbery and the

like, cashiered the secretary, and was, we see no reason to doubt, really

afraid of a pirated edition. _This_ time his cry of wolf must have had a

quaver of sincerity in it. Herr Stahr, who can never keep separate the

Lessing as he then was and the Lessing as he afterwards became, takes

fire at what he chooses to consider an unworthy suspicion of the

Frenchman, and treats himself to some rather cheap indignation on the

subject. For ourselves, we think Voltaire altogether in the right, and we

respect Lessing's honesty too much to suppose, with his biographer, that

it was this which led him, years afterwards, to do such severe justice to

_Merope_, and other tragedies of the same author. The affair happened in

December, 1751, and a year later Lessing calls Voltaire a "great man,"

and says of his _Amalie_, that "it has not only beautiful passages, it is

beautiful throughout, and the tears of a reader of feeling will justify

our judgment." Surely there is no resentment here. Our only wonder would

be at its being written after the Hirschel business. At any rate, we

cannot allow Herr Stahr to shake our faith in the sincerity of Lessing's

motives in criticism,--he could not in the soundness of the criticism

itself,--by tracing it up to a spring at once so petty and so personal.

During a part of 1752,[151] Lessing was at Wittenberg again as student of

medicine, the parental notion of a strictly professional career of some

kind not having yet been abandoned. We must give his father the credit of

having done his best, in a well-meaning paternal fashion, to make his son

over again in his own image, and to thwart the design of nature by

coaxing or driving him into the pinfold of a prosperous obscurity. But

Gotthold, with all his gifts, had no talent whatever for contented

routine. His was a mind always in solution, which the divine order of

things, as it is called, could not precipitate into any of the

traditional forms of crystallization, and in which the time to come was

already fermenting. The principle of growth was in the young literary

hack, and he must obey it or die. His was to the last a _natura

naturans_, never a _naturata_. Lessing seems to have done what he could

to be a dutiful failure. But there was something in him stronger and more

sacred than even filial piety; and the good old pastor is remembered now

only as the father of a son who would have shared the benign oblivion of

his own theological works, if he could only have had his wise way with

him. Even after never so many biographies and review articles, genius

continues to be a marvellous and inspiring thing. At the same time,

considering the then condition of what was pleasantly called literature

in Germany, there was not a little to be said on the paternal side of the

question, though it may not seem now a very heavy mulct to give up one

son out of ten to immortality,--at least the Fates seldom decimate in

_this_ way. Lessing had now, if we accept the common standard in such

matters, "completed his education," and the result may be summed up in

his own words to Michaelis, 16th October, 1754: "I have studied at the

Fürstenschule at Meissen, and after that at Leipzig and Wittenberg. But I

should be greatly embarrassed if I were asked to tell _what_." As early

as his twentieth year he had arrived at some singular notions as to the

uses of learning. On the 20th of January, 1749, he writes to his mother:

"I found out that books, indeed, would make me learned, _but never make

me a man_." Like most men of great knowledge, as distinguished from mere

scholars, he seems to have been always a rather indiscriminate reader,

and to have been fond, as Johnson was, of "browsing" in libraries.

Johnson neither in amplitude of literature nor exactness of scholarship

could be deemed a match for Lessing; but they were alike in the power of

readily applying whatever they had learned, whether for purposes of

illustration or argument. They resemble each other, also, in a kind of

absolute common-sense, and in the force with which they could plant a

direct blow with the whole weight both of their training and their

temperament behind it. As a critic, Johnson ends where Lessing begins.

The one is happy in the lower region of the understanding: the other can

breathe freely in the ampler air of reason alone. Johnson acquired

learning, and stopped short from indolence at a certain point. Lessing

assimilated it, and accordingly his education ceased only with his life.

Both had something of the intellectual sluggishness that is apt to go

with great strength; and both had to be baited by the antagonism of

circumstances or opinions, not only into the exhibition, but into the

possession of their entire force. Both may be more properly called

original men than, in the highest sense, original writers.

From 1752 to 1760, with an interval of something over two years spent in

Leipzig to be near a good theatre, Lessing was settled in Berlin, and

gave himself wholly and earnestly to the life of a man of letters. A

thoroughly healthy, cheerful nature he most surely had, with something at

first of the careless light-heartedness of youth. Healthy he was not

always to be, not always cheerful, often very far from light-hearted, but

manly from first to last he eminently was. Downcast he could never be,

for his strongest instinct, invaluable to him also as a critic, was to

see things as they really are. And this not in the sense of a cynic, but

of one who measures himself as well as his circumstances,--who loves

truth as the most beautiful of all things and the only permanent

possession, as being of one substance with the soul. In a man like

Lessing, whose character is even more interesting than his works, the

tone and turn of thought are what we like to get glimpses of. And for

this his letters are more helpful than those of most authors, as might be

expected of one who said of himself, that, in his more serious work, "he

must profit by his first heat to accomplish anything." He began, we say,

light-heartedly. He did not believe that "one should thank God only for

good things." "He who is only in good health, and is willing to work, has

nothing to fear in the world." "What another man would call want, I call

comfort." "Must not one often act thoughtlessly, if one would provoke

Fortune to do something for him?" In his first inexperience, the life of

"the sparrow on the house-top" (which we find oddly translated "roof")

was the one he would choose for himself. Later in life, when he wished to

marry, he was of another mind, and perhaps discovered that there was

something in the old father's notion of a fixed position. "The life of

the sparrow on the house-top is only right good if one need not expect

any end to it. If it cannot always last, every day it lasts too

long,"--he writes to Ebert in 1770. Yet even then he takes the manly

view. "Everything in the world has its time, everything may be overlived

and overlooked, if one only have health." Nor let any one suppose that

Lessing, full of courage as he was, found professional authorship a

garden of Alcinoüs. From creative literature he continually sought

refuge, and even repose, in the driest drudgery of mere scholarship. On

the 26th of April, 1768, he writes to his brother with something of his

old gayety: "Thank God, the time will soon come when I cannot call a

penny in the world my own but I must first earn it. I am unhappy if it

must be by writing." And again in May, 1771: "Among all the wretched, I

think him the most wretched who must work with his head, even if he is

not conscious of having one. But what is the good of complaining?"

Lessing's life, if it is a noble example, so far as it concerned himself

alone, is also a warning when another is to be asked to share it. He too

would have profited had he earlier learned and more constantly borne in

mind the profound wisdom of that old saying, _Si sit prudentia_. Let the

young poet, however he may believe of his art that "all other pleasures

are not worth its pains," consider well what it is to call down fire from

heaven to keep the pot boiling, before he commit himself to a life of

authorship as something fine and easy. That fire will not condescend to

such office, though it come without asking on ceremonial days to the free

service of the altar.

Lessing, however, never would, even if he could, have so desecrated his

better powers. For a bare livelihood, he always went sturdily to the

market of hack-work, where his learning would fetch him a price. But it

was only in extremest need that he would claim that benefit of clergy. "I

am worried," he writes to his brother Karl, 8th April, 1773, "and work

because working is the only means to cease being so. But you and Vess are

very much mistaken if you think that it could ever be indifferent to me,

under such circumstances, on what I work. Nothing less true, whether as

respects the work itself or the principal object wherefor I work. I have

been in my life before now in very wretched circumstances, yet never in

such that I would have written for bread in the true meaning of the word.

I have begun my 'Contributions' because this work helps me ... to live

from one day to another." It is plain that he does not call this kind of

thing in any high sense writing. Of that he had far other notions; for

though he honestly disclaimed the title, yet his dream was always to be a

poet. But he _was_ willing to work, as he claimed to be, because he had

one ideal higher than that of being a poet, namely, to be thoroughly a

man. To Nicolai he writes in 1758: "All ways of earning his bread are

alike becoming to an honest man, whether to split wood or to sit at the

helm of state. It does not concern his conscience how useful he is, but

how useful he would be." Goethe's poetic sense was the Minotaur to which

he sacrificed everything. To make a study, he would soil the maiden

petals of a woman's soul; to get the delicious sensation of a reflex

sorrow, he would wring a heart. All that saves his egoism from being

hateful is, that, with its immense reaches, it cheats the sense into a

feeling of something like sublimity. A patch of sand is unpleasing; a

desert has all the awe of ocean. Lessing also felt the duty of

self-culture; but it was not so much for the sake of feeding fat this or

that faculty as of strengthening character,--the only soil in which real

mental power can root itself and find sustenance. His advice to his

brother Karl, who was beginning to write for the stage, is two parts

moral to one literary. "Study ethics diligently, learn to express

yourself well and correctly, and cultivate your own character. Without

that I cannot conceive a good dramatic author." Marvellous counsel this

will seem to those who think that wisdom is only to be found in the

fool's paradise of Bohemia!

We said that Lessing's dream was to be a poet. In comparison with success

as a dramatist, he looked on all other achievement as inferior in kind.

In. 1767 he writes to Gleim (speaking of his call to Hamburg): "Such

circumstances were needed to rekindle in me an almost extinguished love

for the theatre. I was just beginning to lose myself in other studies

which would have made me unfit for any work of genius. My _Laocoon_ is

now a secondary labor." And yet he never fell into the mistake of

overvaluing what he valued so highly. His unflinching common-sense would

have saved him from that, as it afterwards enabled him to see that

something was wanting in him which must enter into the making of true

poetry, whose distinction from prose is an inward one of nature, and not

an outward one of form. While yet under thirty, he assures Mendelssohn

that he was quite right in neglecting poetry for philosophy, because

"only a part of our youth should be given up to the arts of the

beautiful. We must practise ourselves in weightier things before we die.

An old man, who lifelong has done nothing but rhyme, and an old man who

lifelong has done nothing but pass his breath through a stick with holes

in it,--I doubt much whether such an old man has arrived at what he was

meant for."

This period of Lessing's life was a productive one, though none of its

printed results can be counted of permanent value, except his share in

the "Letters on German Literature." And even these must be reckoned as

belonging to the years of his apprenticeship and training for the

master-workman he afterwards became. The small fry of authors and

translators were hardly fitted to call out his full strength, but his

vivisection of them taught him the value of certain structural

principles. "To one dissection of the fore quarter of an ass," says

Haydon in his diary, "I owe my information." Yet even in his earliest

criticisms we are struck with the same penetration and steadiness of

judgment, the same firm grasp of the essential and permanent, that were

afterwards to make his opinions law in the courts of taste. For example,

he says of Thomson, that, "as a dramatic poet, he had the fault of never

knowing when to leave off; he lets every character talk so long as

anything can be said; accordingly, during these prolonged conversations,

the action stands still, and the story becomes tedious." Of "Roderick

Random," he says that "its author is neither a Richardson nor a Fielding;

he is one of those writers of whom there are plenty among the Germans and

French." We cite these merely because their firmness of tone seems to us

uncommon in a youth of twenty-four. In the "Letters," the range is much

wider, and the application of principles more consequent. He had already

secured for himself a position among the literary men of that day, and

was beginning to be feared for the inexorable justice of his criticisms.

His "Fables" and his "Miss Sara Sampson" had been translated into French,

and had attracted the attention of Grimm, who says of them (December,

1754): "These Fables commonly contain in a few lines a new and profound

moral meaning. M. Lessing has much wit, genius, and invention; the

dissertations which follow the Fables prove moreover that he is an

excellent critic." In Berlin, Lessing made friendships, especially with

Mendelssohn, Von Kleist, Nicolai, Gleim, and Ramler. For Mendelssohn and

Von Kleist he seems to have felt a real love; for the others at most a

liking, as the best material that could be had. It certainly was not of

the juiciest. He seems to have worked hard and played hard, equally at

home in his study and Baumann's wine-cellar. He was busy, poor, and

happy.

But he was restless. We suspect that the necessity of forever picking up

crumbs, and their occasional scarcity, made the life of the sparrow on

the house-top less agreeable than he had expected. The imagined freedom

was not quite so free after all, for necessity is as short a tether as

dependence, or official duty, or what not, and the regular occupation of

grub-hunting is as tame and wearisome as another. Moreover, Lessing had

probably by this time sucked his friends dry of any intellectual stimulus

they could yield him; and when friendship reaches that pass, it is apt to

be anything but inspiring. Except Mendelssohn and Von Kleist, they were

not men capable of rating him at his true value; and Lessing was one of

those who always burn up the fuel of life at a fearful rate. Admirably

dry as the supplies of Ramler and the rest no doubt were, they had not

substance enough to keep his mind at the high temperature it needed, and

he would soon be driven to the cutting of green stuff from his own

wood-lot, more rich in smoke than fire. Besides this, he could hardly

have been at ease among intimates most of whom could not even conceive of

that intellectual honesty, that total disregard of all personal interests

where truth was concerned, which was an innate quality of Lessing's mind.

Their theory of criticism was, Truth, or even worse if possible, for all

who do not belong to our set; for us, that delicious falsehood which is

no doubt a slow poison, but then so _very_ slow. Their nerves were

unbraced by that fierce democracy of thought, trampling on all

prescription, all tradition, in which Lessing loved to shoulder his way

and advance his insupportable foot. "What is called a heretic," he says

in his Preface to _Berengarius_, "has a very good side. It is a man who

at least _wishes_ to see with his own eyes." And again, "I know not if it

be a duty to offer up fortune and life to the truth; ... but I know it

_is_ a duty, if one undertake to teach the truth, to teach the whole of

it, or none at all." Such men as Gleim and Ramler were mere _dilettanti_,

and could have no notion how sacred his convictions are to a militant

thinker like Lessing. His creed as to the rights of friendship in

criticism might be put in the words of Selden, the firm tread of whose

mind was like his own: "Opinion and affection extremely differ. Opinion

is something wherein I go about to give reason why all the world should

think as I think. Affection is a thing wherein I look after the pleasing

of myself." How little his friends were capable of appreciating this view

of the matter is plain from a letter of Ramler to Gleim, cited by Herr

Stahr. Lessing had shown up the weaknesses of a certain work by the Abbé

Batteux (long ago gathered to his literary fathers as conclusively as

poor old Ramler himself), without regard to the important fact that the

Abbé's book had been translated by a friend. Horrible to think of at

best, thrice horrible when the friend's name was Ramler! The impression

thereby made on the friendly heart may be conceived. A ray of light

penetrated the rather opaque substance of Herr Ramler's mind, and

revealed to him the dangerous character of Lessing. "I know well," he

says, "that Herr Lessing means to speak his own opinion, and"--what is

the dreadful inference?--"and, by suppressing others, to gain air, and

make room for himself. This disposition is not to be overcome."[152]

Fortunately not, for Lessing's opinion always meant something, and was

worth having. Gleim no doubt sympathized deeply with the sufferer by this

treason, for he too had been shocked at some disrespect for La Fontaine,

as a disciple of whom he had announced himself.

Berlin was hardly the place for Lessing, if he could not take a step in

any direction without risk of treading on somebody's gouty foot. This was

not the last time that he was to have experience of the fact that the

critic's pen, the more it has of truth's celestial temper, the more it is

apt to reverse the miracle of the archangel's spear, and to bring out

whatever is toadlike in the nature of him it touches. We can well

understand the sadness with which he said,

"Der Blick des Forscher's fand

Nicht selten mehr als er zu finden wünschte."

Here, better than anywhere, we may cite something which he wrote of

himself to a friend of Klotz. Lessing, it will be remembered, had

literally "suppressed" Klotz. "What do you apprehend, then, from me? The

more faults and errors you point out to me, so much the more I shall

learn of you; the more I learn of you, the more thankful shall I be....I

wish you knew me more thoroughly. If the opinion you have of my learning

and genius (_Geist_) should perhaps suffer thereby, yet I am sure the

idea I would like you to form of my character would gain. I am not the

insufferable, unmannerly, proud, slanderous man Herr Klotz proclaims me.

It cost me a great deal of trouble and compulsion to be a little bitter

against him."[153] Ramler and the rest had contrived a nice little

society for mutual admiration, much like that described by Goldsmith, if,

indeed, he did not convey it from the French, as was not uncommon with

him. "'What, have you never heard of the admirable Brandellius or the

ingenious Mogusius, one the eye and the other the heart of our

University, known all over the world?' 'Never,' cried the traveller; 'but

pray inform me what Brandellius is particularly remarkable for.' 'You

must be little acquainted with the republic of letters,' said the other,

'to ask such a question. Brandellius has written a most sublime panegyric

on Mogusius.' 'And, prithee, what has Mogusius done to deserve so great a

favor?' 'He has written an excellent poem in praise of Brandellius.'"

Lessing was not the man who could narrow himself to the proportions of a

clique; lifelong he was the terror of the Brandellii and Mogusii, and, at

the signal given by him,

"They, but now who seemed

In bigness to surpass Earth's giant sons,

Now less than smallest dwarfs in narrow room

Throng numberless."

Besides whatever other reasons Leasing may have had for leaving Berlin,

we fancy that his having exhausted whatever means it had of helping his

spiritual growth was the chief. Nine years later, he gave as a reason for

not wishing to stay long in Brunswick, "Not that I do not like Brunswick,

but because nothing comes of being long in a place which one likes."[154]

Whatever the reason, Leasing, in 1760, left Berlin for Breslau, where the

post of secretary had been offered him under Frederick's tough old

General Tauentzien. "I will spin myself in for a while like an ugly worm,

that I may be able to come to light again as a brilliant winged

creature," says his diary. Shortly after his leaving Berlin, he was

chosen a member of the Academy of Sciences there. Herr Stahr, who has no

little fondness for the foot-light style of phrase, says, "It may easily

be imagined that he himself regarded his appointment as an insult rather

than as an honor." Lessing himself merely says that it was a matter of

indifference to him, which is much more in keeping with his character and

with the value of the intended honor.

The Seven Years' War began four years before Lessing took up his abode in

Breslau, and it may be asked how he, as a Saxon, was affected by it. We

might answer, hardly at all. His position was that of armed neutrality.

Long ago at Leipzig he had been accused of Prussian leanings; now in

Berlin he was thought too Saxon. Though he disclaimed any such sentiment

as patriotism, and called himself a cosmopolite, it is plain enough that

his position was simply that of a German. Love of country, except in a

very narrow parochial way, was as impossible in Germany then as in

America during the Colonial period. Lessing himself, in the latter years

of his life, was librarian of one of those petty princelets who sold

their subjects to be shot at in America,--creatures strong enough to

oppress, too weak to protect their people. Whoever would have found a

Germany to love must have pieced it together as painfully as Isis did the

scattered bits of Osiris. Yet he says that "the true patriot is by no

means extinguished" in him. It was the noisy ones that he could not

abide; and, writing to Gleim about his "Grenadier" verses, he advises him

to soften the tone of them a little, he himself being a "declared enemy

of imprecations," which he would leave altogether to the clergy. We think

Herr Stahr makes too much of these anti-patriot flings of Lessing, which,

with a single exception, occur in his letters to Gleim, and with

reference to a kind of verse that could not but be distasteful to him, as

needing no more brains than a drum, nor other inspiration than serves a

trumpet. Lessing undoubtedly had better uses for his breath than to spend

it in shouting for either side in this "bloody lawsuit," as he called it,

in which he was not concerned. He showed himself German enough, and in

the right way, in his persistent warfare against the tyranny of French

taste.

He remained in Breslau the better part of five years, studying life in

new phases, gathering a library, which, as commonly happens, he

afterwards sold at great loss, and writing his _Minna_ and his _Laocoön_.

He accompanied Tauentzien to the siege of Schweidnitz, where Frederick

was present in person. He seems to have lived a rather free-and-easy life

during his term of office, kept shockingly late hours, and learned, among

other things, to gamble,--a fact for which Herr Stahr thinks it needful

to account in a high philosophical fashion. We prefer to think that there

are _some_ motives to which remarkable men are liable in common with the

rest of mankind, and that they may occasionally do a thing merely because

it is pleasant, without forethought of medicinal benefit to the mind.

Lessing's friends (whose names were _not_, as the reader might be tempted

to suppose, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar) expected him to make something

handsome out of his office; but the pitiful result of those five years of

opportunity was nothing more than an immortal book. Unthrifty Lessing, to

have been so nice about your fingers, (and so near the mint, too,) when

your general was wise enough to make his fortune! As if ink-stains were

the only ones that would wash out, and no others had ever been covered

with white kid from the sight of all reasonable men! In July, 1764, he

had a violent fever, which he turned to account in his usual cheerful

way: "The serious epoch of my life is drawing nigh. I am beginning to

become a man, and flatter myself that in this burning fever I have raved

away the last remains of my youthful follies. Fortunate illness!" He had

never intended to bind himself to an official career. To his father he

writes: "I have more than once declared that my present engagement could

not continue long, that I have not given up my old plan of living, and

that I am more than ever resolved to withdraw from any service that is

not wholly to my mind. I have passed the middle of my life, and can think

of nothing that could compel me to make myself a slave for the poor

remainder of it. I write you this, dearest father, and must write you

this, in order that you may not be astonished if, before long, you should

see me once more very far removed from all hopes of, or claims to, a

settled prosperity, as it is called." Before the middle of the next year

he was back in Berlin again.

There he remained for nearly two years, trying the house-top way of life

again, but with indifferent success, as we have reason to think. Indeed,

when the metaphor resolves itself into the plain fact of living just on

the other side of the roof,--in the garret, namely,--and that from hand

to mouth, as was Lessing's case, we need not be surprised to find him

gradually beginning to see something more agreeable in a _fixirtes Glück_

than he had once been willing to allow. At any rate, he was willing, and

even heartily desirous, that his friends should succeed in getting for

him the place of royal librarian. But Frederick, for some unexplained

reason, would not appoint him. Herr Stahr thinks it had something to do

with the old _Siècle_ manuscript business. But this seems improbable, for

Voltaire's wrath was not directed against Lessing; and even if it had

been, the great king could hardly have carried the name of an obscure

German author in his memory through all those anxious and war-like years.

Whatever the cause, Lessing early in 1767 accepts the position of

Theatrical Manager at Hamburg, as usual not too much vexed with

disappointment, but quoting gayly

"Quod non dant proceres, dabit histrio."

Like Burns, he was always "contented wi' little and canty wi' mair." In

connection with his place as Manager he was to write a series of dramatic

essays and criticisms. It is to this we owe the _Dramaturgie_,--next to

the _Laocoön_ the most valuable of his works. But Lessing--though it is

plain that he made his hand as light as he could, and wrapped his lash in

velvet--soon found that actors had no more taste for truth than authors.

He was obliged to drop his remarks on the special merits or demerits of

players, and to confine himself to those of the pieces represented. By

this his work gained in value; and the latter part of it, written without

reference to a particular stage, and devoted to the discussion of those

general principles of dramatic art on which he had meditated long and

deeply, is far weightier than the rest. There are few men who can put

forth all their muscle in a losing race, and it is characteristic of

Lessing that what he wrote under the dispiritment of failure should be

the most lively and vigorous. Circumstances might be against him, but he

was incapable of believing that a cause could be lost which had once

enlisted his conviction.

The theatrical enterprise did not prosper long; but Lessing had meanwhile

involved himself as partner in a publishing business which harassed him

while it lasted, and when it failed, as was inevitable, left him hampered

with debt. Help came in his appointment (1770) to take charge of the Duke

of Brunswick's library at Wolfenbüttel, with a salary of six hundred

thalers a year. This was the more welcome, as he soon after was betrothed

with Eva König, widow of a rich manufacturer.[155] Her husband's affairs,

however, had been left in confusion, and this, with Lessing's own

embarrassments, prevented their being married till October, 1776. Eva

König was every way worthy of him. Clever, womanly, discreet, with just

enough coyness of the will to be charming when it is joined with

sweetness and good sense, she was the true helpmate of such a man,--the

serious companion of his mind and the playfellow of his affections. There

is something infinitely refreshing to me in the love-letters of these two

persons. Without wanting sentiment, there is such a bracing air about

them as breathes from the higher levels and strong-holds of the soul.

They show that self-possession which can alone reserve to love the power

of new self-surrender,--of never cloying, because never wholly possessed.

Here is no invasion and conquest of the weaker nature by the stronger,

but an equal league of souls, each in its own realm still sovereign. Turn

from such letters as these to those of St. Preux and Julie, and you are

stifled with the heavy perfume of a demirep's boudoir,--to those of

Herder to his Caroline, and you sniff no doubtful odor of professional

unction from the sermon-case. Manly old Dr. Johnson, who could be tender

and true to a plain woman, knew very well what he meant when he wrote

that single poetic sentence of his,--"The shepherd in Virgil grew at last

acquainted with Love, and found him to be a native of the rocks."

In January, 1778, Lessing's wife died from the effects of a difficult

childbirth. The child, a boy, hardly survived its birth. The few words

wrung out of Lessing by this double sorrow are to me as deeply moving as

anything in tragedy. "I wished for once to be as happy (_es so gut

haben_) as other men. But it has gone ill with me!" "And I was so loath

to lose him, this son!" "My wife is dead; and I have had this experience

also. I rejoice that I have not many more such experiences left to make,

and am quite cheerful." "If you had known her! But they say that to

praise one's wife is self-praise. Well, then, I say no more of her! But

if you had known her!" _Quite cheerful!_ On the 10th of August he writes

to Elise Reimarus,--he is writing to a woman now, an old friend of his

and his wife, and will be less restrained: "I am left here all alone. I

have not a single friend to whom I can wholly confide myself.... How

often must I curse my ever wishing to be for once as happy as other men!

How often have I wished myself back again in my old, isolated

condition,--to be nothing, to wish nothing, to do nothing, but what the

present moment brings with it!... Yet I am too proud to think myself

unhappy. I just grind my teeth, and let the boat go as pleases wind and

waves. Enough that I will not overset it myself." It is plain from this

letter that suicide had been in his mind, and, with his antique way of

thinking on many subjects, he would hardly have looked on it as a crime.

But he was too brave a man to throw up the sponge to fate, and had work

to do yet. Within a few days of his wife's death he wrote to Eschenburg:

"I am right heartily ashamed if my letter betrayed the least despair.

Despair is not nearly so much my failing as levity, which often expresses

itself with a little bitterness and misanthropy." A stoic, not from

insensibility or cowardice, as so many are, but from stoutness of heart,

he blushes at a moment's abdication of self-command. And he will not roil

the clear memory of his love with any tinge of the sentimentality so much

the fashion, and to be had so cheap, in that generation. There is a

moderation of sincerity peculiar to Lessing in the epithet of the

following sentence: "How dearly must I pay for the single year I have

lived with a _sensible_ wife!" Werther had then been published four

years. Lessing's grief has that pathos which he praised in sculpture,--he

may writhe, but he must not scream. Nor is this a new thing with him. On

the death of a younger brother, he wrote to his father, fourteen years

before: "Why should those who grieve communicate their grief to each

other purposely to increase it?... Many mourn in death what they loved

not living. I will love in life what nature bids me love, and after death

strive to bewail it as little as I can."

We think Herr Stahr is on his stilts again when he speaks of Lessing's

position at Wolfenbüttel. He calls it an "assuming the chains of feudal

service, being buried in a corner, a martyrdom that consumed the best

powers of his mind and crushed him in body and spirit forever." To crush

_forever_ is rather a strong phrase, Herr Stahr, to apply to the spirit,

if one must ever give heed to the sense as well as the sound of what one

is writing. But eloquence has no bowels for its victims. We have no doubt

the Duke of Brunswick meant well by Lessing, and the salary he paid him

was as large as he would have got from the frugal Frederick. But one

whose trade it was to be a Duke could hardly have had much sympathy with

his librarian after he had once found out what he really was. For even if

he was not, as Herr Stahr affirms, a republican, and we doubt very much

if he was, yet he was not a man who could play with ideas in the light

French fashion. At the ardent touch of his sincerity, they took fire, and

grew dangerous to what is called the social fabric. The logic of wit,

with its momentary flash, is a very different thing from that consequent

logic of thought, pushing forward its deliberate sap day and night with a

fixed object, which belonged to Lessing. The men who attack abuses are

not so much to be dreaded by the reigning house of Superstition as those

who, as Dante says, syllogize hateful truths. As for "the chains of

feudal service," they might serve a Fenian Head-Centre on a pinch, but

are wholly out of place here. The slavery that Lessing had really taken

on him was that of a great library, an Alcina that could always too

easily witch him away from the more serious duty of his genius. That a

mind like his could be buried in a corner is mere twaddle, and of a kind

that has done great wrong to the dignity of letters. Where-ever Lessing

sat, was the head of the table. That he suffered at Wolfenbüttel is true;

but was it nothing to be in love and in debt at the same time, and to

feel that his fruition of the one must be postponed for uncertain years

by his own folly in incurring the other? If the sparrow-life must end,

surely a wee bush is better than nae beild. One cause of Lessing's

occasional restlessness and discontent Herr Stahr has failed to notice.

It is evident from many passages in his letters that he had his share of

the hypochondria which goes with an imaginative temperament. But in him

it only serves to bring out in stronger relief his deep-rooted manliness.

He spent no breath in that melodious whining which, beginning with

Rousseau, has hardly yet gone out of fashion. Work of some kind was his

medicine for the blues,--if not always of the kind he would have chosen,

then the best that was to be had; for the useful, too, had for him a

sweetness of its own. Sometimes he found a congenial labor in rescuing,

as he called it, the memory of some dead scholar or thinker from the

wrongs of ignorance or prejudice or falsehood; sometimes in fishing a

manuscript out of the ooze of oblivion, and giving it, after a critical

cleansing, to the world. Now and then he warmed himself and kept his

muscle in trim with buffeting soundly the champions of that shallow

artificiality and unctuous wordiness, one of which passed for orthodox in

literature, and the other in theology. True religion and creative genius

were both so beautiful to him that he could never abide the mediocre

counterfeit of either, and he who put so much of his own life into all he

wrote could not but hold all scripture sacred in which a divine soul had

recorded itself. It would be doing Lessing great wrong to confound his

controversial writing with the paltry quarrels of authors. His own

personal relations enter into them surprisingly little, for his quarrel

was never with men, but with falsehood, cant, and misleading tradition,

in whomsoever incarnated. Save for this, they were no longer readable,

and might be relegated to that herbarium of Billingsgate gathered by the

elder Disraeli.

So far from being "crushed in spirit" at Wolfenbüttel, the years he spent

there were among the most productive of his life. "Emilia Galotti," begun

in 1758, was finished there and published in 1771. The controversy with

Götze, by far the most important he was engaged in, and the one in which

he put forth his maturest powers, was carried on thence. His "Nathan the

Wise" (1779), by which almost alone he is known as a poet outside of

Germany, was conceived and composed there. The last few years of his life

were darkened by ill-health and the depression which it brings. His

Nathan had not the success he hoped. It is sad to see the strong,

self-sufficing man casting about for a little sympathy, even for a little

praise. "It is really needful to me that you should have some small good

opinion of it [Nathan], in order to make me once more contented with

myself," he writes to Elise Reimarus in May, 1779. That he was weary of

polemics, and dissatisfied with himself for letting them distract him

from better things, appears from his last pathetic letter to the old

friend he loved and valued most,--Mendelssohn. "And in truth, dear

friend, I sorely need a letter like yours from time to time, if I am not

to become wholly out of humor. I think you do not know me as a man that

has a very hot hunger for praise. But the coldness with which the world

is wont to convince certain people that they do not suit it, if not

deadly, yet stiffens one with chill. I am not astonished that _all_ I

have written lately does not please _you_.... At best, a passage here and

there may have cheated you by recalling our better days. I, too, was then

a sound, slim sapling, and am now such a rotten, gnarled trunk!" This was

written on the 19th of December, 1780; and on the 15th of February, 1781,

Lessing died, not quite fifty-two years old. Goethe was then in his

thirty-second year, and Schiller ten years younger.

* * * * *

Of Lessing's relation to metaphysics the reader will find ample

discussion in Herr Stahr's volumes. We are not particularly concerned

with them, because his interest in such questions was purely speculative,

and because he was more concerned to exercise the powers of his mind than

to analyze them. His chief business, his master impulse always, was to be

a man of letters in the narrower sense of the term. Even into theology he

only made occasional raids across the border, as it were, and that not so

much with a purpose of reform as in defence of principles which applied

equally to the whole domain of thought. He had even less sympathy with

heterodoxy than with orthodoxy, and, so far from joining a party or

wishing to form one, would have left belief a matter of choice to the

individual conscience. "From the bottom of my heart I hate all those

people who wish to found sects. For it is not error, but sectarian error,

yes, even sectarian truth, that makes men unhappy, or would do so if

truth would found a sect."[156] Again he says, that in his theological

controversies he is "much less concerned about theology than about sound

common-sense, and only therefore prefer the old orthodox (at bottom

_tolerant_) theology to the new (at bottom _intolerant_), because the

former openly conflicts with sound common-sense, while the latter would

fain corrupt it. I reconcile myself with my open enemies in order the

better to be on my guard against my secret ones."[157] At another time he

tells his brother that he has a wholly false notion of his (Lessing's)

relation to orthodoxy. "Do you suppose I grudge the world that anybody

should seek to enlighten it?--that I do not heartily wish that every one

should think rationally about religion? I should loathe myself if even in

my scribblings I had any other end than to help forward those great

views. But let me choose my own way, which I think best for this purpose.

And what is simpler than this way? I would not have the impure water,

which has long been unfit to use, preserved; but I would not have it

thrown away before we know whence to get purer.... Orthodoxy, thank God,

we were pretty well done with; a partition-wall had been built between it

and Philosophy, behind which each could go her own way without troubling

the other. But what are they doing now? They are tearing down this wall,

and, under the pretext of making us rational Christians, are making us

very irrational philosophers.... We are agreed that our old religious

system is false; but I cannot say with you that it is a patchwork of

bunglers and half-philosophers. I know nothing in the world in which

human acuteness has been more displayed or exercised than in that."[158]

Lessing was always for freedom, never for looseness, of thought, still

less for laxity of principle. But it must be a real freedom, and not that

vain struggle to become a majority, which, if it succeed, escapes from

heresy only to make heretics of the other side. _Abire ad plures_ would

with him have meant, not bodily but spiritual death. He did not love the

fanaticism of innovation a whit better than that of conservatism. To his

sane understanding, both were equally hateful, as different masks of the

same selfish bully. Coleridge said that toleration was impossible till

indifference made it worthless. Lessing did not wish for toleration,

because that implies authority, nor could his earnest temper have

conceived of indifference. But he thought it as absurd to regulate

opinion as the color of the hair. Here, too, he would have agreed with

Selden, that "it is a vain thing to talk of an heretic, for a man for his

heart cannot think any otherwise than he does think." Herr Stahr's

chapters on this point, bating a little exaltation of tone, are very

satisfactory; though, in his desire to make a leader of Lessing, he

almost represents him as being what he shunned,--the founder of a sect.

The fact is, that Lessing only formulated in his own way a general

movement of thought, and what mainly interests us is that in him we see a

layman, alike indifferent to clerisy and heresy, giving energetic and

pointed utterance to those opinions of his class which the clergy are

content to ignore so long as they remain esoteric. At present the world

has advanced to where Lessing stood, while the Church has done its best

to stand stock-still; and it would be a curious were it not a melancholy

spectacle, to see the indifference with which the laity look on while

theologians thrash their wheatless straw, utterly unconscious that there

is no longer any common term possible that could bring their creeds again

to any point of bearing on the practical life of men. Fielding never made

a profounder stroke of satire than in Squire Western's indignant "Art not

in the pulpit now! When art got up there, I never mind what dost say."

As an author, Lessing began his career at a period when we cannot say

that German literature was at its lowest ebb, only because there had not

yet been any flood-tide. That may be said to have begun with him. When we

say German literature, we mean so much of it as has any interest outside

of Germany. That part of the literary histories which treats of the dead

waste and middle of the eighteenth century reads like a collection of

obituaries, and were better reduced to the conciseness of epitaph, though

the authors of them seem to find a melancholy pleasure, much like that of

undertakers, in the task by which they live. Gottsched reigned supreme on

the legitimate throne of dulness. In Switzerland, Bodmer essayed a more

republican form of the same authority. At that time a traveller reports

eight hundred authors in Zürich alone! Young aspirant for lettered fame,

in imagination clear away the lichens from their forgotten headstones,

and read humbly the "As I am, so thou must be," on all! Everybody

remembers how Goethe, in the seventh book of his autobiography, tells the

story of his visit to Gottsched. He enters by mistake an inner room at

the moment when a frightened servant brings the discrowned potentate a

periwig large enough to reach to the elbows. That awful emblem of

pretentious sham seems to be the best type of the literature then

predominant. We always fancy it set upon a pole, like Gessler's hat, with

nothing in it that was not wooden, for all men to bow down before. The

periwig style had its natural place in the age of Louis XIV., and there

were certainly brains under it. But it had run out in France, as the

tie-wig style of Pope had in England. In Germany it was the mere

imitation of an imitation. Will it be believed that Gottsched recommends

his Art of Poetry to beginners, in preference to Breitinger's, because it

"_will enable them to produce every species of poem in a correct style_,

while out of that no one can learn to make an ode or a cantata"?

"Whoever," he says, "buys Breitinger's book _in order to learn how to

make poems_, will too late regret his money."[159] Gottsched, perhaps,

did some service even by his advocacy of French models, by calling

attention to the fact that there _was_ such a thing as style, and that it

was of some consequence. But not one of the authors of that time can be

said to survive, nor to be known even by name except to Germans, unless

it be Klopstock, Herder, Wieland, and Gellert. And the latter's

immortality, such as it is, reminds us somewhat of that Lady Gosling's,

whose obituary stated that she was "mentioned by Mrs. Barbauld in her

Life of Richardson 'under the name of Miss M., afterwards Lady G.'"

Klopstock himself is rather remembered for what he was than what he

is,--an immortality of unreadableness; and we much doubt if many Germans

put the "Oberon" in their trunks when they start on a journey. Herder

alone survives, if not as a contributor to literature, strictly so

called, yet as a thinker and as part of the intellectual impulse of the

day. But at the time, though there were two parties, yet within the lines

of each there was a loyal reciprocity of what is called on such occasions

appreciation. Wig ducked to wig, each blockhead had a brother, and there

was a universal apotheosis of the mediocrity of our set. If the greatest

happiness of the greatest number be the true theory, this was all that

could be desired. Even Lessing at one time looked up to Hagedorn as the

German Horace. If Hagedorn were pleased, what mattered it to Horace?

Worse almost than this was the universal pedantry. The solemn bray of one

pedagogue was taken up and prolonged in a thousand echoes. There was not

only no originality, but no desire for it,--perhaps even a dread of it,

as something that would break the _entente cordiale_ of placid mutual

assurance. No great writer had given that tone of good-breeding to the

language which would gain it entrance to the society of European

literature. No man of genius had made it a necessity of polite culture.

It was still as rudely provincial as the Scotch of Allan Ramsay.

Frederick the Great was to be forgiven if, with his practical turn, he

gave himself wholly to French, which had replaced Latin as a cosmopolitan

tongue. It had lightness, ease, fluency, elegance,--in short, all the

good qualities that German lacked. The study of French models was perhaps

the best thing for German literature before it got out of long-clothes.

It was bad only when it became a tradition and a tyranny. Lessing did

more than any other man to overthrow this foreign usurpation when it had

done its work.

The same battle had to be fought on English soil also, and indeed is

hardly over yet. For the renewed outbreak of the old quarrel between

Classical and Romantic grew out of nothing more than an attempt of the

modern spirit to free itself from laws of taste laid down by the _Grand

Siècle_. But we must not forget the debt which all modern prose

literature owes to France. It is true that Machiavelli was the first to

write with classic pith and point in a living language; but he is, for

all that, properly an ancient. Montaigne is really the first modern

writer,--the first who assimilated his Greek and Latin, and showed that

an author might be original and charming, even classical, if he did not

try too hard. He is also the first modern critic, and his judgments of

the writers of antiquity are those of an equal. He made the ancients his

servants, to help him think in Gascon French; and, in spite of his

endless quotations, began the crusade against pedantry. It was not,

however, till a century later, that the reform became complete in France,

and then crossed the Channel. Milton is still a pedant in his prose, and

not seldom even in his great poem. Dryden was the first Englishman who

wrote perfectly easy prose, and he owed his style and turn of thought to

his French reading. His learning sits easily on him, and has a modern

cut. So far, the French influence was one of unmixed good, for it rescued

us from pedantry. It must have done something for Germany in the same

direction. For its effect on poetry we cannot say as much; and its

traditions had themselves become pedantry in another shape when Lessing

made an end of it. He himself certainly learned to write prose of

Diderot; and whatever Herr Stahr may think of it, his share in the

"Letters on German Literature" got its chief inspiration from France.

It is in the _Dramaturgie_ that Lessing first properly enters as an

influence into European literature. He may be said to have begun the

revolt from pseudo-classicism in poetry, and to have been thus

unconsciously the founder of romanticism. Wieland's translation of

Shakespeare had, it is true, appeared in 1762; but Lessing was the first

critic whose profound knowledge of the Greek drama and apprehension of

its principles gave weight to his judgment, who recognized in what the

true greatness of the poet consisted, and found him to be really nearer

the Greeks than any other modern. This was because Lessing looked always

more to the life than the form,--because he knew the classics, and did

not merely cant about them. But if the authority of Lessing, by making

people feel easy in their admiration for Shakespeare, perhaps increased

the influence of his works, and if his discussions of Aristotle have

given a new starting-point to modern criticism, it may be doubted whether

the immediate effect on literature of his own critical essays was so

great as Herr Stahr supposes. Surely "Götz" and "The Robbers" are nothing

like what he would have called Shakespearian, and the whole _Sturm und

Drang_ tendency would have roused in him nothing but antipathy. Fixed

principles in criticism are useful in helping us to form a judgment of

works already produced, but it is questionable whether they are not

rather a hindrance than a help to living production. Ben Jonson was a

fine critic, intimate with the classics as few men have either the

leisure or the strength of mind to be in this age of many books, and

built regular plays long before they were heard of in France. But he

continually trips and falls flat over his metewand of classical

propriety, his personages are abstractions, and fortunately neither his

precepts nor his practice influenced any one of his greater coevals.[160]

In breadth of understanding, and the gravity of purpose that comes of it,

he was far above Fletcher or Webster, but how far below either in the

subtler, the incalculable, qualities of a dramatic poet! Yet Ben, with

his principles off, could soar and sing with the best of them; and there

are strains in his lyrics which Herrick, the most Catullian of poets

since Catullus, could imitate, but never match. A constant reference to

the statutes which taste has codified would only bewilder the creative

instinct. Criticism can at best teach writers without genius what is to

be avoided or imitated. It cannot communicate life; and its effect, when

reduced to rules, has commonly been to produce that correctness which is

so praiseworthy and so intolerable. It cannot give taste, it can only

demonstrate who has had it. Lessing's essays in this kind were of service

to German literature by their manliness of style, whose example was worth

a hundred treatises, and by the stimulus there is in all original

thinking. Could he have written such a poem as he was capable of

conceiving, his influence would have been far greater. It is the living

soul, and not the metaphysical abstraction of it, that is genetic in

literature. If to do were as easy as to know what were good to be done!

It was out of his own failures to reach the ideal he saw so clearly, that

Lessing drew the wisdom which made him so admirable a critic. Even here,

too, genius can profit by no experience but its own.

For, in spite of Herr Stahr's protest, we must acknowledge the truth of

Lessing's own characteristic confession, that he was no poet. A man of

genius he unquestionably was, if genius may be claimed no less for force

than fineness of mind,--for the intensity of conviction that inspires the

understanding as much as for that apprehension of beauty which gives

energy of will to imagination,--but a poetic genius he was not. His mind

kindled by friction in the process of thinking, not in the flash of

conception, and its delight is in demonstration, not in bodying forth.

His prose can leap and run, his verse is always thinking of its feet. Yet

in his "Minna" and his "Emilia"[161] he shows one faculty of the

dramatist, that of construction, in a higher degree than any other

German.[162] Here his critical deductions served him to some purpose. The

action moves rapidly, there is no speechifying, and the parts are

coherent. Both plays act better than anything of Goethe or Schiller. But

it is the story that interests us, and not the characters. These are not,

it is true, the incorporation of certain ideas, or, still worse, of

certain dogmas, but they certainly seem something like machines by which

the motive of the play is carried on; and there is nothing of that

interplay of plot and character which makes Shakespeare more real in the

closet than other dramatists with all the helps of the theatre. It is a

striking illustration at once of the futility of mere critical insight

and of Lessing's want of imagination, that in the Emilia he should have

thought a Roman motive consistent with modern habits of thought, and that

in Nathan he should have been guilty of anachronisms which violate not

only the accidental truth of fact, but the essential truth of character.

Even if we allowed him imagination, it must be only on the lower plane of

prose; for of verse as anything more than so many metrical feet he had

not the faintest notion. Of that exquisite sympathy with the movement of

the mind, with every swifter or slower pulse of passion, which proves it

another species from prose, the very [Greek: aphroditae kai lura] of

speech, and not merely a higher one, he wanted the fineness of sense to

conceive. If we compare the prose of Dante or Milton, though both were

eloquent, with their verse, we see at once which was the most congenial

to them. Lessing has passages of freer and more harmonious utterance in

some of his most careless prose essays, than can be found in his Nathan

from the first line to the last. In the _numeris lege solutis_ he is

often snatched beyond himself, and becomes truly dithyrambic; in his

pentameters the march of the thought is comparatively hampered and

irresolute. His best things are not poetically delicate, but have the

tougher fibre of proverbs. Is it not enough, then, to be a great

prose-writer? They are as rare as great poets, and if Lessing have the

gift to stir and to dilate that something deeper than the mind which

genius only can reach, what matter if it be not done to music? Of his

minor poems we need say little. Verse was always more or less mechanical

with him, and his epigrams are almost all stiff, as if they were bad

translations from the Latin. Many of them are shockingly coarse, and in

liveliness are on a level with those of our Elizabethan period. Herr

Stahr, of course, cannot bear to give them up, even though Gervinus be

willing. The prettiest of his shorter poems (_Die Namen_)has been

appropriated by Coleridge, who has given it a grace which it wants in the

original. His Nathan, by a poor translation of which he is chiefly known

to English readers, is an Essay on Toleration in the form of a dialogue.

As a play, it has not the interest of Minna or Emilia, though the

Germans, who have a praiseworthy national stoicism where one of their

great writers is concerned, find in seeing it represented a grave

satisfaction, like that of subscribing to a monument. There is a sober

lustre of reflection in it that makes it very good reading; but it wants

the molten interfusion of thought and phrase which only imagination can

achieve.

As Lessing's mind was continually advancing,--always open to new

impressions, and capable, as very few are, of apprehending the

many-sidedness of truth,--as he had the rare quality of being honest with

himself,--his works seem fragmentary, and give at first an impression of

incompleteness. But one learns at length to recognize and value this very

incompleteness as characteristic of the man who was growing lifelong, and

to whom the selfish thought that any share of truth could be exclusively

_his_ was an impossibility. At the end of the ninety-fifth number of the

_Dramaturgie_ he says: "I remind my readers here, that these pages are by

no means intended to contain a dramatic system. I am accordingly not

bound to solve all the difficulties which I raise. I am quite willing

that my thoughts should seem to want connection,--nay, even to contradict

each other,--if only there are thoughts in which they [my readers] find

material for thinking themselves. I wish to do nothing more than scatter

the _fermenta cognitionis_." That is Lessing's great praise, and gives

its chief value to his works,--a value, indeed, imperishable, and of the

noblest kind. No writer can leave a more precious legacy to posterity

than this; and beside this shining merit, all mere literary splendors

look pale and cold. There is that life in Lessing's thought which

engenders life, and not only thinks for us, but makes us think. Not

sceptical, but forever testing and inquiring, it is out of the cloud of

his own doubt that the flash comes at last with sudden and vivid

illumination. Flashes they indeed are, his finest intuitions, and of very

different quality from the equable north-light of the artist. He felt it,

and said it of himself, "Ever so many flashes of lightning do not make

daylight." We speak now of those more rememberable passages where his

highest individuality reveals itself in what may truly be called a

passion of thought. In the "Laocoön" there is daylight of the serenest

temper, and never was there a better example of the discourse of reason,

though even that is also a fragment.

But it is as a nobly original man, even more than as an original thinker,

that Lessing is precious to us, and that he is so considerable in German

literature. In a higher sense, but in the same kind, he is to Germans

what Dr. Johnson is to us,--admirable for what he was. Like Johnson's,

too, but still from a loftier plane, a great deal of his thought has a

direct bearing on the immediate life and interests of men. His genius was

not a St. Elmo's fire, as it so often is with mere poets,--as it was in

Shelley, for example, playing in ineffectual flame about the points of

his thought,--but was interfused with his whole nature and made a part of

his very being. To the Germans, with their weak nerve of sentimentalism,

his brave common-sense is a far wholesomer tonic than the cynicism of

Heine, which is, after all, only sentimentalism soured. His jealousy for

maintaining the just boundaries whether of art or speculation may warn

them to check with timely dikes the tendency of their thought to diffuse

inundation. Their fondness in aesthetic discussion for a nomenclature

subtile enough to split a hair at which even a Thomist would have

despaired, is rebuked by the clear simplicity of his style.[163] But he

is no exclusive property of Germany. As a complete man, constant,

generous, full of honest courage, as a hardy follower of Thought wherever

she might lead him, above all, as a confessor of that Truth which is

forever revealing itself to the seeker, and is the more loved because

never wholly revealable, he is an ennobling possession of mankind. Let

his own striking words characterize him:--

"Not the truth of which any one is, or supposes himself to be, possessed,

but the upright endeavor he has made to arrive at truth, makes the worth

of the man. For not by the possession, but by the investigation, of truth

are his powers expanded, wherein alone his ever-growing perfection

consists. Possession makes us easy, indolent, proud.

"If God held all truth shut in his right hand, and in his left nothing

but the ever-restless instinct for truth, though with the condition of

for ever and ever erring, and should say to me, Choose! I should bow

humbly to his left hand, and say, Father, give! pure truth is for Thee

alone!"

It is not without reason that fame is awarded only after death. The

dust-cloud of notoriety which follows and envelopes the men who drive

with the wind bewilders contemporary judgment. Lessing, while he lived,

had little reward for his labor but the satisfaction inherent in all work

faithfully done; the highest, no doubt, of which human nature is capable,

and yet perhaps not so sweet as that sympathy of which the world's praise

is but an index. But if to perpetuate herself beyond the grave in healthy

and ennobling influences be the noblest aspiration of the mind, and its

fruition the only reward she would have deemed worthy of herself, then is

Lessing to be counted thrice fortunate. Every year since he was laid

prematurely in the earth has seen his power for good increase, and made

him more precious to the hearts and intellects of men. "Lessing," said

Goethe, "would have declined the lofty title of a Genius; but his

enduring influence testifies against himself. On the other hand, we have

in literature other and indeed important names of men who, while they

lived, were esteemed great geniuses, but whose influence ended with their

lives, and who, accordingly, were less than they and others thought. For,

as I have said, there is no genius without a productive power that

continues forever operative."[164]

Footnotes:

[147] G. E. Lessing. _Sein Leben und seine Werke_. Von Adolf Stahr.

Vermehrte und verbesserte Volks-Ausgabe. Dritte Auflage Berlin. 1864.

_The Same_. Translated by E. P. Evans, Ph. D., Professor, &c. in the

University of Michigan. Boston: W. V. Spencer. 1866. 2 vols.

G. E. Lessing's Sämmtliche Schriften, herausgegeben von Karl

Lachmann. 1853-57. 12 Bände.

[148] "If I write at all, it is not possible for me to write

otherwise than just as I think and feel."--Lessing to his father,

21st December, 1767.

[149] "I am sure that Kleist would rather have taken another wound

with him into his grave than have such stuff jabbered over him (_sich

solch Zeug nachschwatzen lassen_)." Lessing to Gleim, 6th September

1759.

[150] Letter to Klotz, 9th June, 1766.

[151] Herr Stahr heads the fifth chapter of his Second Book, "Lessing

at Wittenberg. December, 1751, to November, 1752." But we never feel

quite sure of his dates. The Richier affair puts Lessing in Berlin in

December, 1751, and he took his Master's degree at Wittenberg, 29th

April, 1752. We are told that he finally left Wittenberg "toward the

end" of that year. He himself, writing from Berlin in 1754, says that

he has been absent from that city _nur ein halbes Jahr_ since 1748.

There is only one letter for 1762, dated at Wittenberg, 9th June.

[152] "Ramler," writes Georg Forster, "ist die Ziererei, die

Eigenliebe die Eitelkeit in eigener Person."

[153] Lessing to Von Murr, 25th November, 1768. The whole letter is

well worth reading.

[154] A favorite phrase of his, which Egbert has preserved for us

with its Saxon accent, was, _Es kommt doch nischt dabey heraus_,

implying that one might do something better for a constancy than

shearing twine.

[155] I find surprisingly little about Lessing in such of the

contemporary correspondence of German literary men as I have read. A

letter of Boie to Merck (10 April, 1775) gives us a glimpse of him.

"Do you know that Lessing will probably marry Reiske's widow and come

to Dresden in place of Hagedorn? The restless spirit! How he will get

along with the artists, half of them, too, Italians, is to be

seen.... Liffert and he have met and parted good friends. He has worn

ever since on his finger the ring with the skeleton and butterfly

which Liffert gave him. He is reported to be much dissatisfied with

the theatrical filibustering of Goethe and Lenz, especially with the

remarks on the drama in which so little respect is shown for his

Aristotle, and the Leipzig folks are said to be greatly rejoiced at

getting such an ally."

[156] To his brother Karl, 20th April, 1774.

[157] To the same, 20th March, 1777.

[158] To the same, 2d February, 1774.

[159] Gervinus, IV. 62.

[160] It should be considered, by those sagacious persons who think

that the most marvellous intellect of which we have any record could

not master so much Latin and Greek as would serve a sophomore, that

Shakespeare must through conversation have possessed himself of

whatever principles of art Ben Jonson and the other university men

had been able to deduce from their study of the classics. That they

should not have discussed these matters over their sack at the

Mermaid is incredible; that Shakespeare, who left not a drop in any

orange he squeezed, could not also have got all the juice out of this

one, is even more so.

[161] In "Minna" and "Emilia" Lessing followed the lead of Diderot.

In the Preface to the second edition of Diderot's _Théâtre_, he says:

"I am very conscious that my taste, without Diderot's example and

teaching, would have taken quite another direction. Perhaps one more

my own, yet hardly one with which my understanding would in the long

run have been so well content." Diderot's choice of prose was

dictated and justified by the accentual poverty of his mother-tongue,

Lessing certainly revised his judgment on this point (for it was not

equally applicable to German), and wrote his maturer "Nathan" in what

he took for blank verse. There was much kindred between the minds of

the two men. Diderot always seems to us a kind of deboshed Lessing.

Lessing was also indebted to Burke, Hume, the two Wartons, and Hurd,

among other English writers. Not that he borrowed anything of them

but the quickening of his own thought. It should be remembered that

Rousseau was seventeen, Diderot and Sterne sixteen, and Winckelmann

twelve years older than Lessing. Wieland was four years younger.

[162] Goethe's appreciation of Lessing grew with his years. He writes

to Lavater, 18th March, 1781: "Lessing's death has greatly depressed

me. I had much pleasure in him and much hope of him." This is a

little patronizing in tone. But in the last year of his life, talking

with Eckermann, he naturally antedates his admiration, as

reminiscence is wont to do: "You can conceive what an effect this

piece (_Minna_)had upon us young people. It was, in fact, a shining

meteor. It made us aware that something higher existed than anything

whereof that feeble literary epoch had a notion. The first two acts

are truly a masterpiece of exposition, from which one learned much

and can always learn."

[163] Nothing can be droller than the occasional translation by

Vischer of a sentence of Lessing into his own jargon.

[164] Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe, III. 229.