“This eternal blazon,”
—three words only, but three words with the whole soul of poetry in them, and of
“Arrête! et respecte ma cendre.”[[58]]
The Comte d’Essex, Rodogune, Mérope.
The defence of Thomas Corneille’s Comte d’Essex[[59]] against Voltaire’s unhistorical history is very good; but then it is so unnecessary! and in the longest criticisms of all, those given to the greater Corneille s Rodogune[[60]] and to Maffei’s and Voltaire’s Merope[[61]] (once more one wishes that Lessing could have taken in Mr Arnold’s), the entanglements of the preoccupation reach, for a literary critic, the exasperating.
Lessing’s Gallophobia
The truth is that in reading the Dramaturgie[[62]] one cannot help remembering Carlyle’s capital complaint of Voltaire that “to him the Universe was one larger patrimony of St Peter from which it were good and pleasant to chase the Pope,” and regretting that Lessing should have thought it necessary to substitute Voltaire himself for the Holy Father. It was inevitable perhaps and necessary for the time: but the result is tedious. And unfortunately this Gallophobia in general, this Corneliophobia and Voltairiophobia in particular, affects, and very unfavourably affects, those rectifications and reconstructions of Aristotle which have given the Dramaturgie its great reputation. With all his talent, all his freshness, Lessing is to a very great extent merely varying the Addisonian error—and indeed, as with all these early German critics, Addison himself had too great an influence on him. As Addison had wasted his powers on showing that Milton, whom the pseudo-Aristotelians had decried, was very Aristotelian, or at least Homeric, after all, so Lessing devotes a most unnecessary amount of energy to showing that the pseudo-Aristotelians themselves were not Aristotelian at all. It was true; it was in a sense well worth doing; but there was so much else to do! There is a famous passage at the beginning of No. 7 which itself really annihilates the whole proceeding, and laughs “boundary lines of criticism” out of court. Nor is Lessing’s aberration a mere accidental one. It comes from the fact that he had not cleared up his own mind on some important parts of the question. He says, for instance, in his criticism of Rodogune (No. 31, beginning), “The revenge of an ambitious woman should never resemble that of a jealous one.” Æternum vulnus! What is “the revenge of an ambitious woman?” “the revenge of a jealous one?” Show me the revenge of your jealous Amaryllis, the revenge of your ambitious Neæra; and then I will tell you whether they are right or not.