[LESSING.]
Since Luther, Germany has produced no greater or better man than Gotthold Ephraim Lessing; these two are Germany's pride and joy.
This is the witness of Heine, and with Goethe in memory, none would pronounce the statement too bold. Luther and Lessing are Germany's representative men; each inaugurates an epoch the very existence of which would not have been possible without him. Nor is this the only point of analogy. Lessing was the Luther of the eighteenth century. Like Luther, Lessing is distinguished by earnestness, ardour, true manliness, fierce hatred of dissimulation, largeness of mind, breadth, and profundity of thought. Like Luther, he stands in history a massive presence whereon the weak may lean. Like Luther, he led the vanguard of reform in every department of human learning into which he penetrated. Like Luther, he was true to every conviction, and did not shrink from its expression. Like Luther, he could have said, "I was born to fight with devils and storms, and hence it is that my writings are so boisterous and stormy." Like Luther, he became the founder of a new religion and of a new German literature. And again, like Luther, his life labours were not for Germany alone, but spread over all Europe; and few of us know how much of our present culture we owe directly or indirectly to Lessing's influence.
In this country he has not been sufficiently known. Up to the present, his name has been familiar to Englishmen only as the author of the 'Laokoon,' 'Nathan the Wise,' and, possibly also, of 'Minna von Barnhelm.' In knowing these, we certainly know the names of some of his masterpieces, but we cannot thence deduce the entire cause of the man's far-spreading influence.
Fully to understand Lessing's influence, and fully to understand the bearing of his works, some slight previous acquaintance with German literature is absolutely requisite. For unless we comprehend the source whence an author's inspirations have sprung, we may often misconceive his views. And Lessing's writings, above all, essentially sprang from the needs of his time. The subject is a large one, and can only be briefly indicated here; but we venture to remark, for those whose interest may be aroused in the subject of this volume, that the fuller their knowledge of the man and the motive force that evoked his works, the keener will be their enjoyment of these works themselves.
In naming Lessing, Goethe, and Schiller, we utter the three greatest names that German literature can boast. And between the three runs a connecting link of endeavour; the efforts of none can be conceived without the efforts of the others; but Lessing was the leader. He was the mental pathfinder who smoothed the way for Goethe's genius, and prepared the popular understanding for Schiller, the poetical interpreter of Kant.
Lessing was born in the early years of the eighteenth century, at a time therefore when Germany may be said practically to have had no literature. For the revival of learning, the interest in letters that arose with the Reformation, and had been fostered by the emancipating spirit of Protestantism, had been blighted and extinguished by the terrible wars that ravaged the country for thirty years, impoverishing the people, destroying the homesteads and farms, and utterly annihilating the mental repose needful to the growth and to the just appreciation of literature. Books were destroyed as relentlessly in those sad times as flourishing cornfields were down-trodden by the iron heel of the invader. It was a fearful period of anarchy and retrogression, under the baneful effects of which Germany still labours. Peace was at last restored in 1648 by the Treaty of Westphalia, but it found the nation broken in spirit and vigour, and where material needs entirely absorb the mental energies of a people the Muses cannot flourish. And not only was the spirit of the people broken by the war, their national feeling seemed totally extinct. The bold fine language wherewith Luther had endowed them was neglected and despised by the better classes, who deemed servile imitation of the foreigner the true and only criterion of good taste. It grew, at last, to be held quite a distinction for a German to be unable to speak his own language correctly, and it seems probable that but for the religious utterances of the hymn-writers, who thus provided the poor oppressed people with ideal consolations, the very essence of the language, in all its purity, might have perished. It is among these hymn-writers that we must seek and shall find the finest, truest, and most national expressions of that time. Shortly before Lessing's birth there had awakened a sense of this national degradation, and some princes and nobles formed themselves into a society to suppress the fashionable Gallicisms and reinstate the people's language. Their efforts met with some little success, but their powers were too limited, and their attempts too artificial and jejune to exert any considerable influence either in the direction of conservation or of reform. It needed something stronger, bolder, to dispel the apathy of a century. Still these associations, known as the two Silesian schools, bore their part in sowing the good seed, and though most of it fell on stony ground, because there was little other ground for it whereon to fall, still some fell on fruitful earth, and brought forth in due season. An excessive interest in French literature was opposed by an equal interest in English literature. The adherents of these two factions formed what was known as the Swiss and Leipzig schools. They waged a fierce paper warfare, that had the good effect of once more attracting popular attention to the claims of letters, as well as showing the people that in French manners, French language, and French literature, the Alpha and Omega of culture need not of necessity be sought. The leader of the Leipzig faction, who stood by the French, was Gottsched, a German professor of high pretensions and small merits, who put his opponents on their mettle by his pedantic and arrogant attacks. He had instituted himself a national dictator of good taste, and for a long time it seemed probable that he and his party would triumph. His ultimate defeat was accomplished by Lessing, whose early boyhood was contemporaneous with the fiercest encounters of these antagonists. It was he who gave the death-blow to their factious disputes, and referred the nation back to itself and its own national glory and power. He found Germany without original literature, and, before his short life was ended, the splendid genius of Goethe shed its light over the land. Who and what was the man who effected so much?
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was born on the twenty-second of January, 1729, at Camentz, a small town in Saxony, of which his father was head pastor. For several generations Lessing's ancestors had been distinguished for their learning, and with few exceptions they had all held ecclesiastical preferment. The father of Gotthold Ephraim was a man of no inconsiderable talents and acquirements. His upright principles, breadth of vision and scholarly attainments, made him a venerated example to his son, with whom he maintained through life the most cordial relationship, though the son's yet more enlightened standpoint came to transcend the comprehension of the father. Their first divergence occurred on the choice of a profession. It had been traditional among the Lessings that the eldest son should take orders, and accordingly Gotthold Ephraim was silently assumed to be training for the ministry. He was sent for this end, first to the Grammar-school of his native town, then to a public school at Meissen, and finally to the University of Leipzig. At Meissen he distinguished himself in classical studies, and attempted some original German verses. He outstripped his compeers, and before he had accomplished his curriculum, the rector recommended his removal, inasmuch as he had exhausted the resources of the school. At Leipzig he appeared to turn his back on study. He deserted the class-rooms of the theologians and was the more constant attendant instead at the theatre, at that time the bête noire of all who affected respectability, and decried loudly by the clergy as a very hotbed of vice. News of their son's haunts reached the dismayed parents. They urged him to abandon his courses, that could only end in mental and moral destruction. In vain the son represented to them that he had lived in retirement too long, that he now wished to become acquainted with the world and men, and that he held the theatre to be a popular educator. In vain he represented that he did attend the philosophical courses of Professors Kaestner, Ernesti, and Christ. He was a playgoer, and what was still worse, he was a play-writer, for the directress of the Leipzig Theatre, Frau Neuber, a woman, of great taste and intelligence, had put on the stage Lessing's juvenile effort, 'The Young Scholar.' Nay more, he associated with a notorious freethinker, Mylius, and in concert with him had contributed to various journals and periodicals. And meanwhile the magistracy of Camentz was allowing Lessing a stipend on condition of studying theology. It was too much. His son was neglecting the dic cur hic, and to obviate this the father recalled him home by a stratagem, informing him that his mother was dying and desired once more to see her son. The ruse, intended also as a test of Lessing's filial obedience, succeeded in so far as to prove that this was at least unshaken; but his parents urged in vain that he should abandon his evil ways. He once more expressed with great decision his disinclination towards a theological career. But he was also firmly resolved to be no longer a burden to his parents, whose large family was a great drain on their resources. He determined to follow Mylius, who had gone to Berlin in the capacity of editor, convinced that a good brain and steadfast will would force their own way in the world.
Accordingly Lessing settled in Berlin in 1748, a youth of barely twenty years, prepared to fight a hand-to-hand struggle for existence. Frederick the Great at that time ruled in Prussia, and his capital was in ill repute as a hotbed of frivolity and atheism. If anything could be worse in the parents' eyes than their son's attendance at the theatre, it was his presence at Berlin. They urged his return home. He refused respectfully but decidedly. He had found employment that remunerated him. Voss's Gazette had appointed him literary editor, he wrote its critical feuilletons, and here he had the first opportunity of attacking the Swiss and Leipzig factions, and of exposing the absurdities of both schools. He was able to teach himself Spanish and Italian, he translated for the booksellers, he catalogued a library; and while thus earning his livelihood tant bien que mal, he indirectly prosecuted his studies and enlarged his knowledge of literature and life. For at Berlin he was not forced to associate only with books, he also came in contact with intellectual men, his views expanded, his judgment became sure. A volume of minor poems that he published in 1751 excited attention.
The essays he contributed to Voss's Gazette gave him notoriety on account of their independent spirit, their pregnant flashes of originality and truth. This unknown youth ventured alone and unsupported to attack Gottsched's meretricious writings, and so successfully that even the vain dictator trembled, and the rival schools asked each other who was this Daniel that had come to judgment? With pitiless subtlety he exposed the crudity, the inflation of Klopstock's 'Messiah,' which at that time one half the world extolled, the other half abused, while he alone could truly distinguish in what respects the poem fell short of its pretensions to be a national epic, and where its national importance and merit really lay.