Miscellaneous specimens of his criticism.
But the twenty volumes of Lessing’s Works, or rather the round dozen, more or less, of them which contain or concern criticism, are not to be passed over without some more detailed mention. The first contains (besides the early and not uninteresting Preface to his collected Poems in 1753) the famous Dissertations on the Fable, which, whether one agrees or not with them, give an admirable example of the thoroughness, the sense, and the scholarship of Lessing’s critical method. He lays out the history of opinion on his subject from Aristotle and Aphthonius to Breitinger and Batteux; he combats, not long-windedly but scientifically, those opinions with which he disagrees; he sets forth his own with such further disposition of the subject as he thinks proper. And in sixty pages he has given as masterly an example of “criticism on a kind,” of general criticism (for we must maintain the reservations above outlined), as need be desired—an example uniting antique clearness and proportion, scholastic method, and modern vivacity and illustrative variety. A somewhat different kind of document, but the kind which we have so often looked for in vain hitherto, is given by the great mass of reviews, literary letters, the rhetorical discussions of various kinds, and the like, which fill four successive volumes.[[74]] From the very first, written when Lessing was but two-and-twenty, his scholarship, his reading, and his formidable and rather aggressive intellectual ability, appear unmistakably. Much is mere abstract, but more independent work appears from the long and early criticism of the Captivi[[75]] to the review of Meinhardt’s Italian Poets, which came just before the Laocoön.
Here may be found all manner of dealings with interesting and heterogeneous subjects and persons, from Rousseau’s Dijon Discourse through Klopstock and Piron, Bodmer’s sacred epics (“Three Epic Poets in Germany at once!” says Lessing, setting the tone of mischievous reviewing early; “too much! too much of a good thing!”), and “Gentil” Bernard on the Art of Love, to elaborate dissertations on Simon Lemnius, the author of that edifying work the Monachopornomachia.[[76]] And later,[[77]] in more extensive reference to German Literature, much about the early work of Klopstock and Wieland, a sustained polemic against Gottsched, ranging from serious attacks on his authority as a literary historian and critic to “skits” tending to prove that he was the author of Candide,[[78]] not unaccompanied by businesslike abstracts of the critic’s own work to adjust the same to more general acceptance.[[79]]
Of the Kleinere Philologische Abhandlungen, which fill the 15th volume, the curious “Rettungen des Horaz” have been glanced at above. The opening “Vademecum für Lange,” a vitriolic and practically destructive retort on that blundering translator of Horace himself, who had not had the sense to sit down quietly under a severe but not offensive review of Lessing’s, is one of the capital examples of its kind—a kind questionable but sometimes to be allowed. The “Anmerkungen über das Epigramm,” the principal single constituent of the volume,[[80]] are very noteworthy. The rest consist mainly of textual and other animadversions of the kind which we reluctantly leave out here from the Renaissance downward. The chief are on Paulus Silentiarius, and on that interesting book the fables of the so-called Anonymus Neveleti.
He returns to this in one[[81]] of the numerous papers of vol. xvi., another collection of notes, notices (some of Old German Literature), and reviews, the last mostly very short and sometimes a little perfunctory. What might have been the most, and is not the least, interesting of these,[[82]] has for subject a German translation of the first two volumes of The Rambler in 1754. Lessing does not name Johnson, nor does he seem to know anything about him; but he praises the Essays highly. Now, if you could have combined the good points of these two, and “sprinkled in,” as Mambrun might say,[[83]] a little furor romanticus, it would have been difficult to get a better critical mixture than the result.
The still further collection of critical miscellanea in vol. xix. is mostly philosophical or, according to Lessing’s unfortunate later habit, theological in character,[[84]] but the long “Pope als Metaphysiker” deserves mention as at least partially literary and as more than partially good. Finally, the numerous and not seldom interesting notes or motes of the Kollectaneen or Commonplace Book published after Lessing’s death, though they frequently approach or flit round strictly literary criticism, never, I think, actually constitute it.[[85]]
His attitude to Æschylus and Aristophanes.
In the case of so great a name occupying the most prominent position at the last turning-point of the recorded critical course, it is necessary to insist on those reserves which have been made already. Everybody who has read Lessing carefully must have noticed, whether with immediate understanding of the reason or not, the very small attention which he pays to two writers in his own favourite department, whom some would call the very greatest in it, as far as Greece is concerned, and to whom hardly any nowadays would deny a place among the greatest of Greece or of the world—that is to say, Æschylus and Aristophanes. His defenders are prompt with an excuse at least as damaging as most excuses. People did not, says Lessing’s very able and very erudite commentator, M. Kont, fully understand in those days the importance of Æschylus in connection with Greek myths: and the forms of drama which he, and still more Aristophanes, adopted were unsuitable to that modern use and application which Lessing always had at heart. Alas! the value of an author in connection with Greek myths is so exceedingly indifferent to literature! and his value as helping to fill a stage at the present day is also of so very little importance! If ignorance of one of these things and consciousness of the absence of the other determined Lessing’s neglect of the greatest tragic poet of Greece,—of the greatest comic poet, except Shakespeare, of the world,—then it will be but too clear that whatever Lessing cared most for, it was not poetry,—that his care for poetry as such—nay, for literature as such—was even rather small. To call him a “king of criticism” is foolish, because that is just what he is not. He is grand-duke of not a few critical provinces which, somehow or other, he never can consolidate into a universal monarchy of critical wit.