With whom he combines Diderot.
Nothing can illustrate this better than the fact that Lessing’s second master in criticism is—Diderot! He does not regard that erratic and cometic genius as he regards Aristotle, he does not think the Bijoux Indiscrets, and the remarks on the Fils Naturel, and the rest, as being “as infallible as the Elements of Euclid.”[[70]] He would have disqualified himself from serious consideration if he had. He dissents from some of Diderot’s opinions; he combats some of his arguments. But he admits, almost in so many words, and in a constant attitude which is more valuable than any verbal admission, that this most irregular, revolutionary, casual of modern thinkers has set him on his own path of independent revaluation of critical principles.
His deficiencies in regard to mediæval literature.
And we find confirmation of this in those of his critical writings which have not yet been mentioned, as well as illustrations of other critical characteristics in him. It is curious that Lessing, so sensitive and receptive to ancient and later modern influences, is almost as proof against mediæval and (in his own language) early modern as Gottsched himself. His low estimate of Lyric seems to come partly from the fact that Aristotle had slighted it, or at least passed it over, partly from the fact that in relation to Germany he is not thinking of her ballads and lays, not even of the extravagances of the seventeenth century, but of the tame Anacreontic of Hagedorn, Gleim, and Company. Even his study of Shakespeare has not set him right in this respect. It is most curious to read his contemporary Hurd, a contemporary for whom Lessing had a just respect, and to remember that Hurd could appreciate not merely both Aristotle and Shakespeare, but both Horace and Spenser. And there are few things which bring out more clearly that immense debt to Shakespeare and Spenser themselves which has been insisted on as due by English criticism. It was too early for Lessing to have gone back to Gottfried and Walther;[[71]] the German Renaissance had nothing (save the ballads, which he would not have) to offer him.
The close of the Dramaturgie and its moral.
The greatest places of the Dramaturgie are those at the close of No. 95, and the penultimate passage of all. In the former, after a long discussion of the Aristotelian commentaries of Hurd and Dacier, he refashions his master’s famous dictum in other matter, that “accuracy must not be expected.” He is not, he says, “obliged to solve all the problems he raises.” His thoughts may seem desultory, or even contradictory: but it does not matter if they supply others with the germ of individual thought. He would but scatter “fermenta cognitionis.” In the other, he proceeds still farther, though still perhaps without a clear idea how far the path itself will lead. Germans, he says (I shorten somewhat here), had imitated the French because the French were believed to be your only followers of the ancients. Then English plays came in, an entirely different style of drama was revealed, and the Germans concluded that the aim of tragedy could be fulfilled without the French rules—that the rules were wrong. And then they went on to object to rules altogether as mere genius-hampering pedantry. “In short, we had very nearly thrown away in wantonness all past experience, insisting that the poet shall in every instance discover the whole art for himself.” Lessing has endeavoured “to arrest this secondary fermentation,” and that is all.
Invaluable words! and, if somewhat extra-literary,—or, from another point of view, directed to too narrow a part of literature,—yet in their true acceptation governing and guiding the whole method, the entire campaign, of literary criticism. Whether Lessing had taken any suggestion from Batteux,[[72]] who had written long before him, I do not know: but the different attitude of the French critic and the German is most interesting, and gives the reason why we have treated Batteux in the last volume and are treating Lessing in this. Both writers perceive, each in his own fashion, that every work of genius is, or at any rate contains, a rule. I do not even know that it can be denied that Lessing, almost as much as Batteux, though under happier stars, has an idea of working out one general rule of all the particulars—a process which is but too likely to lead back again into the House of Bondage; but his actual notion takes a far more catholic form, leads far more directly to the way of salvation. You must study each work of genius in order to get its contribution to the Inner Rule, the highest formula. And if you do this all will be well. It is not the Rule—as some falsely hold, and as perhaps some even have falsely thought that the present writer holds—that does the harm, but its exclusive and disfranchising application a priori—not even the Kind, but its elevation into a caste, with the correlative institution of pariahdom. And Lessing’s principle of never neglecting study of former experience saves this danger at once.[[73]]