Volume 3 / Book 7 — CHAPTER II. THE RALLY OF GERMANY—LESSING.

STARTING-POINT OF THIS VOLUME—NEO-CLASSIC COMPLACENCY AND EXCLUSIVENESS ILLUSTRATED FROM CALLIÈRES—BÉAT DE MURALT—HIS ATTENTION TO ENGLISH—AND TO FRENCH—GERMAN CRITICISM PROPER—A GLANCE BACKWARD—THEOBALD HOECK—WECKHERLIN AND OTHERS—WEISE, WERNICKE, WERENFELS, ETC.—SOME MUTINEERS: GRYPHIUS AND NEUMEISTER—GOTTSCHED ONCE MORE—BODMER AND BREITINGER—THE ‘DISKURSE DER MALER’—GRADUAL DIVERGENCE FROM THEIR STANDPOINT; KÖNIG ON “TASTE”—MAIN WORKS OF THE SWISS SCHOOL—BREITINGER’S ‘KRITISCHE DICHTKUNST,’ ETC.—BODMER’S ‘VON DEM WUNDERBAREN,’ ETC.—SPECIAL CRITICISMS OF BOTH—BODMER’S VERSE CRITICISM—THEIR LATER WORK IN MEDIÆVAL POETRY, AND THEIR GENERAL POSITION—THE “SWISS-SAXON” QUARREL—THE ELDER SCHLEGELS: JOHANN ADOLF—JOHANN ELIAS—MOSES MENDELSSOHN—LESSING—SOME CAUTIONS RESPECTING HIM—HIS MORAL OBSESSION; ON ‘SOLIMAN THE SECOND’—THE STRICTURES ON ARIOSTO’S PORTRAIT OF ALCINA—‘HAMLET’ AND ‘SEMIRAMIS’—THE ‘COMTE D’ESSEX,’ ‘RODOGUNE,’ ‘MÉROPE’—LESSING’S GALLOPHOBIA—AND TYPOMANIA—HIS STUDY OF ANTIQUITY MORE THAN COMPENSATING—AND ESPECIALLY OF ARISTOTLE—WITH WHOM HE COMBINES DIDEROT—HIS DEFICIENCIES IN REGARD TO MEDIÆVAL LITERATURE—THE CLOSE OF THE ‘DRAMATURGIE’ AND ITS MORAL—MISCELLANEOUS SPECIMENS OF HIS CRITICISM—HIS ATTITUDE TO ÆSCHYLUS AND ARISTOPHANES—FREDERIC THE GREAT—‘DE LA LITTÉRATURE ALLEMANDE’.

Starting point of this volume.

It should not be necessary to make much further observation of the linking kind between this volume and the last; but a few more words may be desirable on the fact that from a very early period of the eighteenth century itself there were perceptible underground mutterings of revolt; and that, steadily or fitfully, another current of criticism, fed likewise by springs underground, 12Neo-Classic complacency and exclusiveness illustrated from Callières. made its appearance side by side with, but running counter to, the orthodox, yet almost entirely neglected by orthodoxy. Orthodoxy indeed, in its special home, would have specially emphasised the scornful question, “Can any good thing come out of Germany?” The locus of Bouhours is hackneyed, and has been quoted already (ii. 315). But nothing can better show the state of complacent fatuity to which Neo-Classicism, plus national conceit, had reduced the French at the close of the seventeenth century, than the “Laws of Apollo,” which, in the twelfth book of the treatise which has the honour to have given suggestions to Swift, Callières^[8] represents the god as promulgating to appease the strife of Ancients and Moderns. Les trois nations polies are the French, the Italians, and the Spaniards: all others are more or less barbarians. These barbarians (including not only the Germans, but the nation which had to its credit Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and Dryden, with others who, if lesser than these, were the equals of the two or three best of France) may be allowed to write Latin as a concession to the literary incompetence of their own tongues; but the polished nations should not do so. Homer is the greatest of all poets, and Virgil the second; the third place had better remain vacant. No witchcraft or romance of chivalry is to be admitted into poetry. Acrostics and anagrams are to be banished from it. Et patati et patata. Apollo himself could at the time hardly have got into the head of Callières, not merely academician but diplomatist as he was, what an utterly ridiculous figure he would cut to all but the most philosophical and tolerant of posterity. Yet be it remembered that Gottsched held no different creed nearly fifty years after in Germany itself, and La Harpe no very different one more than a hundred years after in France; while among ourselves, and halfway between these two, even such iconoclasts in other ways as Adam Smith and David Hume would have made very little difficulty about accepting it. The overthrow of a belief of such prevalence, such toughness, such duration, cannot have been achieved but by agencies 13widespreading, patient, various: and it is these agencies that we must now investigate.

The Béat de Muralt.

Not very many years later than the Histoire Poétique there was written, in French also, but not by a Frenchman, a document curiously different in tenor, though by no means ostensibly, or indeed to any great extent really, breaking with Neo-Classicism. The Swiss—as their peculiar position, not merely politically in the midst of Europe, but racially as overlapping and overlapped by France, Germany, and Italy, made almost necessary—had begun early to take a sort of bystander-view of European Literature. The excellent essay of Herr Hamelius^[9] was perhaps the first recent document to attract much attention to the Lettres sur les Anglois et sur les Francois of Béat Louis de Muralt. Muralt was a French-writing but a German-speaking Swiss; he says (rather to his disadvantage as a critic, but usefully on this head) that “Houmour” is “ce que nous appellons Einfall,” and what the French mean by “dire de bons mots,” from which we can at least see that the excellent M. de Muralt had not the faintest notion of what Humour specifically is. He travelled in England during the last decade of the seventeenth century; but his Letters upon us and the French were not published till 1727, in 12mo, with no imprint of place. They acquired, after the fashion of the time, a sort of “snow-ball” increment of comment by apologists (a “Lord,” of course, for England), and are chiefly valuable as symptoms. His attention to English, Muralt is, as we should expect, much more occupied with manners than with letters; and in fact, as regards English, deals in detail with hardly any literary kind save comedy. Here (as the orbis terrarum often remarks of our alter orbis) he thinks that we have too good an opinion of ourselves: “Sur toutes sortes de sujets il faut qu’ils se préfèrent au reste du monde.” He thinks Corneille and Molière (whom he would specially avenge) ill-treated by the English dramatists who borrow from 14them. He accuses Dryden—not by name, but transparently and truly as “the most famous of their poets”—of stealing from Corneille and abusing him; neither of which articles is just. On the other hand, he is certainly too complimentary (though Saint-Evremond^[10] was responsible for the exaggeration) in calling Shadwell “one of the most famous” of the same poets; and we may abandon The Miser to his arrows. He admits that our literature outside the theatre is “full of good sense and originality,” but says little about it. He has himself the good sense to object to Louis Quatorze dress, for Romans and Carthaginians, on both stages.

and to French.

He is much more copious on French Literature; and his judgments here are more interesting, because he is at a more original angle. Much of his outlook is purely Neo-Classic. He has a thorough belief in Kinds; he has abundance to say “in the aibstract” about bon sens and bel esprit; and for one writing so late he is surprisingly copious on Voiture and Sarrasin and Balzac. He thinks Rabelais quite “beneath humanity,”—having indeed, here and elsewhere, a good deal of solid German morals about him. The most surprising thing is his attitude to Boileau, whom he pronounces to have plenty of sense and art, but no great genius. This attitude, and the taking of English literature into serious literary consideration for almost the first time on the Continent, since Lilius Giraldus,^[11] are the things which, from the literary side, deserve most note in Muralt.^[12] And the latter—not by any means merely from that point of view of “preferring ourselves to others”—is the most important of all. So long as general critical attention to modern literature was confined to French, Italian, and Spanish, all intimately connected with and indebted to each other, and all descended from Latin, no real “fermentation” could take place. The English yeast set it going at once, in Germany as elsewhere.

15Muralt, however, was an exceptional and cosmopolitan sort of person, and the note which he sounded was not immediately taken up, though it is very noteworthy that when it was, it was again in Switzerland.

German Criticism proper.

The account which we gave of German criticism proper before 1700, and of that part of it which belongs to the Neo-Classic dispensation after that date, was avowedly scanty: the reasons for this apparent stinginess being twofold—the comparative paucity of the materials, and even more the comparative unimportance of almost all those that do exist. But we undertook in a manner to make good the seeming slight; and it is our present business to do so.^[13]

A glance backward.

We saw that up to the eighteenth century, and indeed nearly up to the end of its first quarter, German criticism had done very little, and that it was never to do much in the direction of “correctness.” Indirectly, however, in the later half of the seventeenth century, when the furia of the Thirty Years’ War had in a manner sunk to rest, something was done in the way of preliminary fermentation both by the late inoculation of Germany with the Euphuist-Marinist-Gongorist measles, which is there identified chiefly with the names of Lohenstein and Hoffmanswaldau, and by reaction 16against this,^[14] while something further has, at least by some, been considered to have been done by Gottsched himself.

Theobald Hoeck.

The works of this period are not, I believe, very common even in Germany, but the unwearied intelligence with which the British Museum has been managed for the last two generations has supplied English readers with a very fair, though not yet quite satisfying, proportion of the most important. The earliest of these authors—a predecessor of Opitz even, who might, and perhaps should, have been mentioned in the last volume—was Theobald Hoeck, or as he is called on the title-page of his quaintly-named Poems,^[15] Othoblad Oeckhe. Hoeck makes the nineteenth chapter of his “Fair Field of Flowers” an ode of fourteen five-lined stanzas, Von Art der Deutschen Poeterey, which perhaps ranks next to, and certainly marks the new departure from, the vernacular Meister-song Arts referred to above.^[16] But the style and the gist of the piece are, I think, fairly enough shown in the following stanza—

“Warumb sollen wir denn unser Teutsche Sprache[n]

In gwisse Form und Gsatz nit auch mögen machen,

Und Deutsches Carmen schreiben,

Die Kunst zu treiben

Bey Mann und Weiben?”

But it is hard for the poet when he has both metre and rhyme to look to—when

“Mann muss die Pedes gleich so wol scandiren

Den dactylum und auch Spondaeum rieren,”

and at the same time see that his rhymes are proper. The thing is interesting as exhibiting modern German poetry in the 17go-cart with laudable anxiety on the part of the infant to go rightly.

Weckherlin and others.

The chief ferment, however, of German poetic and criticism of a kind did not come till towards the middle of the century and when the Thirty Years’ War was dying down (though it is thought to have been to some extent determined by the sojourning of at least one German of letters^[17] in England quite in the earlier stage of that convulsion): and it took final colour from French rather than from English, partly in the form of Pléiade and Louis Treize ampullæ, partly in that of “correctness” (as far as the Germans could reach it) à la Boileau. The earlier inquirers, such as Schottel, Zesen, Buchner, were painful and estimable rhetoricians, anxious to get German into good scholastic ways. Schottel, in his Teutsche Sprachkunst^[18] and other works, is quite of the old fashion in compounding rhetoric-poetic-composition books with dictionary. Zesen’s Hochdeutscher Helikon^[19] is an extremely fat little book, the component parts of which are separately paged, and sometimes not paged at all, and which discusses with the utmost care the terms of the art in metre, rhyme, stanza-building, &c., gives rhyming dictionaries first of masculine then of feminine rhymes, supplies plenteous example-verse, and finishes with a De Poetica of a more general kind. Augustine Buchner^[20] is still older-fashioned, and reminds one of the sixteenth-century Italians in his little tractate on the office and aim of poetry, its kinds, ornaments, &c.

Weise, Wernicke, Werenfels, &c.

These are hardly at all critical; they are rhetorical-preceptist. But the later men, such as Weise, Wernicke, and Werenfels, exhibit the revolt against the school of conceit and bombast which in the later part of the seventeenth century radiates from France all over Europe. Christian Weise, Professor Poeseos as he called himself, degrades Poetry in his Curiose Gedanken neben 18Deutschen Versen (1691) to the position of a mere ancilla of Rhetoric, and seems to have anticipated Shaftesbury in making “ridicule the test of truth.” His namesake, Wernicke, in the “Ad Lectorem” of his Poetische Versuche,^[21] extols Longinus, and makes “polite” remarks on Lohenstein and Hoffmanswaldau. But the German manifesto against the florid is the Dissertatio de Meteoris Orationis appended to the De Logomachiis Eruditorum of Samuel Werenfels, which appeared at Amsterdam within the eighteenth century,^[22] dedicated to no less a person than Gilbert Burnet, but presents the matter of two theses composed fourteen and ten years earlier. The De Logomachiis itself has a certain interest for us, as it hits among other things at frivolous and verbal criticism; but the Dissertatio is all ours. Werenfels, as usual basing himself upon Longinus, without the slightest suspicion that he will be undone by his reliance, distinguishes between ὕψηλα and μετέωρα—our old friends the True and the False Sublime. He admits the importance of Imagination, but will have it strictly ruled by Judgment, and makes another distinction (not without acuteness) between good Figures and bad. He harks as far back as Longolius and the Ciceronians for examples of literary will-worship; but is evidently thinking throughout rather of gorgeousness than of over-precision, and directs his attacks specially at Claudian among the ancients, though he names Gongora among the moderns. His final decision is that Italians, Spaniards, and Germans are all painfully given to the meteoric; the French are saniores.^[23]

Some mutineers: Gryphius and Neumeister.

The germaner spirit of Germany, however,—to speak “meteorically” and in character,—was by no means quenched by these douches of correctness, and continued to assert itself at intervals between the practice of the Silesians and the theory of the Swiss. The most considerable German dramatist of the seventeenth century, Andreas Gryphius, not merely neglected the “classical” rules in his plays, but made light of them in prefaces 19and lectures. Just before the end of the century, Erdmann Neumeister (who was to live sixty years longer and overlap the time of Goethe), enthusiastically recommending the fashionable opera, dismisses the rules with a contemptuous inaccuracy^[24] much more humiliating than any polemic.

Without therefore wandering longer in these side-walks, we may say that they form a real approach to the Romantic Revolt of the next century, quite as much as—perhaps more than—they lead to the Gottschedian preciseness. And this should sufficiently justify the notice of them here.

Gottsched once more.

The most important—perhaps one might say the only important—critical document furnished by Gottsched himself to our general history is the Kritische Dichtung, which has been already disposed of,^[25] and this is a document of the extremest Neo-Classicism. But he did not reach this point at once: and the successive hardenings of heart by which he did reach it are a curious topsy-turvy document in the other sense—a document of the growth of Romanticism, and its effect in making its enemies the more stubborn. These stages have been traced diligently and clearly, if perhaps with a little unnecessary animus and polemic, by Herr Braitmaier.^[26] When the appearance of the Diskurse der Maler (Thev. infra) induced Gottsched (who is allowed by friends and foes to have had a very shrewd literary sense of the journalist’s or publisher’s kind) to imitate them in the periodical entitled Die Vernünftigen Tadlerinnen^[27]—“The Intelligent Blamingwomen” or “Carperesses”—his attitude was not at first very different from that of his then friends, Bodmer and Breitinger, in appearance at least. But he proceeded to pay attention (perhaps guided by them) to French criticism: and he henceforward followed it, 20more and more to do evil in another periodical, the Biedermann, in the successive editions of his Kritische Dichtkunst, with increasing intensity in the important Beiträge zur Kritischen Historie der Deutschen Sprache,Sprache, Poesie und Beredsamkeit, which he directed from 1732 to 1744, and lastly, in the pamphlets and articles of the so-called Swiss-Saxon or Leipzig-Zürich war.

As for the claims of Gottsched to be not a mere critical fossil, but a real reformer and even a kind of precursor of the great German literary school, in criticism as well as on creation, from Lessing to Goethe, they were first put forward many years ago by Danzel, and after the usual manner of literary whitewashings of the paradoxical kind, have been accepted by some since. But they never could have commended themselves to impartial and instructed students of literary history: and they have been quite sufficiently disposed of by Herr Braitmaier. One may fully take the view which was put forward towards the end of the last volume about Gottsched’s critical worth, and yet have formed it with full knowledge of the fact that he was an active and well-intentioned worker in that enormous effort towards self-improvement to which justice has there been done. But the notion that he was really a fellow-worker with the Swiss school is, I must repeat, mistaken; and the further notions of his having played the part of Dante, or at least of Du Bellay, towards the purification and exaltation of German language, and almost that of Dryden towards the refashioning of German literature, are but fond things.^[28]

Bodmer and Breitinger.

The two Swiss professors, Bodmer and Breitinger, who have already several times been named, form one of the most curious pairs of brothers-in-arms whereof literary story makes mention. They were both born in or near the same town, Zürich; the long lives of both (though Breitinger’s was a little the shorter at both ends) nearly coincided; 21both were christened John James; and they very early began, and long continued, to qualify themselves for the position of heroes of a new “Legend of Friendship” without even finding it necessary to begin with a fight like Spenser’s Cambel and Triamond. Both pugnacious, they always took the same side in their battles; they prefaced each other’s books alternately, and sometimes finding even this association not close enough, signed them jointly J. J. J. J. In this kind of society it is generally difficult to be certain whether even the writings which appear to belong to one writer only do not contain a good deal of the other’s, and therefore to assign a sharply differential character to either: nor is it really of much importance. The general opinion, I believe, is that Bodmer had more originality and enterprise, Breitinger a sounder judgment, wider learning, and a more philosophical ethos: but in such collaborations the parts are almost always thus distributed. There can, however, be no reasonable question that the pair were—more than any other pair or person—responsible for the Rally of Germany: or rather, to use the phrase of our saner custom, that they mark the turn of the tide which neither they nor any one could have caused. Nor is it surprising to find that this turn is at first almost imperceptible.

The Diskurse der Maler.

The Discourses of the Painters took its title directly from a sort of coterie which Bodmer had founded; and was named, probably after Italian models, but indirectly, as no doubt was the coterie also, from the strong prominence in the founder’s mind of the doctrine ut pictura poesis. Started in 1721, the periodical was one, and the most important, of these imitations of The Spectator which, as has been said, played so great a part not merely in English, but in Continental, and especially German, culture. Like the model, the copy was intended to reform manners and morals, speech and style. In the latter respect Bodmer did not merely follow Addison, but fell back to some extent on the French preceptists of “correctness,” cheerfully echoing Boileau’s recommendations of “nature,” though his eclecticism already appears in admiration of Fontenelle likewise. As Boileau himself had made awful examples of the extravagants of the Louis XIII. time, and as 22Addison had denounced “false wit,” conceits, and so forth, so did Bodmer take up his parable anew against the bombast and preciousness of the Lohenstein School in German. Like both, he believes thoroughly in “Taste,” though the “German paste” in him is not contented without an attempt at a more philosophical treatment of this than either the Frenchman or the Englishman had thought necessary. He makes something of a theory of Poetry as Imitation of Nature: he refines upon the doctrines about Imagination which he finds in Addison. But in all this there is not very much advance upon Addison himself. Bodmer has only been brought by Addison to the threshold of Milton, and, it would seem, not even to that of Shakespeare,^[29] while the divine, the instinctive, the all-saving caution, antiquam exquirite matrem, does not in the case of old German poetry carry him beyond Opitz as yet.

Gradual divergence from their standpoint; König on “Taste.”

For some years, therefore, it was quite possible for Swiss and Saxons to work together. The literature of the Ancient and Modern quarrel had much influence on both; and that odd upshot of it, the Fénelonian and La Mothian dislike to rhyme, was destined to exercise a very great influence in Germany. For a time, however, attention was principally fixed on the general subject of “Taste,”^[30] and a dispute, really important in its results, if not exactly in itself, grew up round a short dissertation by the Saxon Poet-Laureate König, and led, among 23other things, to an exchange of letters between Bodmer and the Italian Conti,^[31] on the nature of this much-discussed quality or faculty. König’s work appeared in 1727, two years before the first edition of Gottsched’s Dichtkunst, but in the same year with a treatise on Imagination from the Swiss side, in which may be seen the first sketch of their elaborate dealings with Poetics many years later.

Main works of the Swiss School.

By this time the tendencies of the contending parties—of Bodmer and Breitinger in the Æsthetic-Romantic direction, and of Gottsched in the Classical-Preceptist—had been strengthened and developed, in the one case by study of Milton specially, in the other by that of the French: and the gulf between them was deepened and widened in various writings, especially in the successive editions of Gottsched’s Dichtkunst, and in occasional utterances of his Beiträge. But the great manifestos of the Swiss school—four in number, but it would seem representing a larger and more uniform scheme, of which the Imagination had been the pioneer—did not appear till nearly twenty years after the first publication of the Diskurse. Three of them came out at Zürich in the single year 1740; the fourth, a year later, in 1741. The titles given below require no comment in their exhibition of the odd enlacements of the pair.^[32]

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Breitinger’s Kritische Dichtkunst, &c.

Of these the Kritische Dichtung is the largest, the most ambitious, and, according to Herr Braitmaier, the most important. It was certainly that which hurt and shocked Gottsched most, and which drew from him the pathetically ludicrous expostulation with its unpractical character, which was quoted in the last volume.^[33] And no doubt it must appear so to those who pay most attention to the theory of poetry in general. As the very title shows, Breitinger here nails the poetic-pictorial principle to the mast, and he defends it in the book itself, and in the Dissertation on Similes, which is a sort of tender to it, with no insufficient learning and variety of application, with reinforcements of philosophy from LeibnitzLeibnitz and Wolff, even with the sketching of a “Logic of Phantasy,” which is to be regulator and administrator of things poetical.

Bodmer’s Von Dem Wunderbaren, &c.

From my point of view, however, the most important of the four is the Abhandlung von dem Wunderbaren by Bodmer, and next to this, the same writer’s elaborate examination, in the Poetische Gemahlde, of Don Quixote, and of that Durchlauchstigste Syrerin Aramena, which is one of the chief German Heroic Romances, and one of the literary achievements of the House of Brunswick, having been written by Duke Anton Ulrich. The generalities 25of the Kritische Dichtkunst are, no doubt, as one of the characters in Westward Ho! says, “all very good and godly”: but the unfortunate Gottsched, if he had had a little more wit, might so have couched his complaint of their unpracticality that it would not have been ridiculous. “Logics of Phantasy” are all very well: doctrines that the poet must be thus and thus minded are all very well. But we want poems, we want imaginative literature itself; and these were the most difficult things in the world to get in the first half of the eighteenth century. Bodmer, in dealing with prose fiction, recognises, as few critics had recognised, the second greatest division of the imaginative literature of the world—greater even than drama in a way, because it borrows nothing from poetry, but stands on its own merits,—the division which was at last slowly rising from the ocean where it had been so long submerged. And in the Dissertation on the Wonderful he boldly unlocked the tabooed treasury wherein men had been so long forbidden to seek the true riches of poetry.

There was the real labor, the real opus. It is not too much to say that the prevailing doctrine—during the seventeenth century increasingly, and at the beginning of the eighteenth as a recognised orthodoxy—made poetry almost impossible. In spite of the grudging permission of such inadequate safety-valves as furor poeticus, beau désordre, “lucky license,” and the rest, this doctrine was that even the Wunderbar had got to submit itself to the Wahrscheinlich, with a very distinct understanding that it was far the safer way to attend to the Verisimilar and let the Wonderful alone. Even Bodmer himself seems to have been rather led to a sounder creed by his admiration for Milton and his revolt against such things as Voltaire’s condemnation of parts of Paradise Lost,^[34] than by a clear, straightforward apperception of the prerogative of Wonder. Even he proceeds rather by extension of “machinery,” by pointing out the capabilities and interest of the use of Angels and the like, than by any thorough-going anticipation of the Coleridgean “suspension of disbelief.” But this was very natural and almost necessary: while it may be pointed out that his 26attention to the Prose Romance—in which, for this reason or that, the unexpected and the exceptional had always held rather a prominent place—tended in the same direction as his doctrine of the Wonderful in Poetry.

Special criticisms of both.

It is, however, only fair to say that neither Breitinger nor Bodmer fails in that critical examination of actual literature which, as it has been one of the objects of this book to show, is the most fruitful way of the critic. Bodmer’s study of Paradise Lost, which he translated, nay, even that of Opitz, who was edited by the pair, provided perhaps the most important element in his critical education. And whatever gaps there may have been in their literary accomplishment, they knew and used the greatest critics of antiquity. If they did not know or use all its greatest poets, they used what they did know freshly and independently. They knew French and Italian literature fairly, and Breitinger at least had studied the Ancient and Modern Quarrel. They knew something of English besides Milton, though little or nothing of “Sasper,” and their earnest and affectionate study of German literature itself, reaching by-and-by to the treasures of the “Middle High” period, is, to me at least, one of their greatest titles to credit. They may have pushed the picture-poetry notion too far—Lessing was at the door with a veritable “two-handed engine” to cut off any superfluity here. But in their time, and in all times, it could but do more good than harm.

Bodmer’s verse criticism.

With the commentatorial side of their activity may be connected the four verse pieces edited with much care by Herr Baechtold in the Deutsche Literatur-Denkmale.^[35] The two last of these, dating from the author’s latest years, when he felt himself among those that knew not Joseph—Untergang der Beruhmten Namen, and Bodmer nicht verkannt—are in hexameters, and are only pathetic curiosities. The first, Character der Teutschen Gedichte, 1734, with an appendix, Versuch einer Kritik über die Deutschen Dichter, and a second but more independent sequel, Die Drollingerische Muse (Drollinger was a poet and friend of Bodmer’s who had just died), have more substantive interest.^[36] They are in Alexandrines, 27duly arranged with masculine and feminine alternation, and contain not a little mostly sound criticism of mostly much-forgotten bards.

Their later work in mediæval poetry, and their general position.

I find myself, perhaps necessarily from the difference of our points of view, again in disagreement with Herr Braitmaier as to the critical importance of Bodmer’s later industry (shared again in part by Breitinger) on older German literature. To me, the mere fact that Bodmer in 1748—that is to say, before the middle of the eighteenth century, and nearly twenty years before the appearance of Percy’s Reliques—published with his faithful double J. J. his Specimens of Old Suabian Poetry, the Middle High German poetry of the thirteenth century; nine or ten years later, and still before Percy, before Hurd, Fabeln aus der Zeiten der Minnesänger; with, later again, parts of the Nibelungenlied and collections of Minnesong itself, is, as perhaps the reader knows by this time, an almost greater claim to importance in the History of Criticism and Literary Taste than his earlier directly critical work, and a much greater one than the more abstract æsthetic inquiries of Breitinger even, still more of Baumgarten and Sulzer and the rest. Taken with these earlier inquiries they give him and his coadjutor a high and most memorable place in the general story of the appreciation of literature. He was certainly not a man of much—and Breitinger does not seem to have been one of any—original poetical power; he does not himself seem to have had even so much as his colleague had of learning or acuteness: and both were echt Deutsch in their long-windedness and want of concinnity. But they did what they could; and it turned out that they had done a great deal.

The “Swiss-Saxon” quarrel.

Of the famous “Swiss-Saxon” quarrel^[37] which followed the publication of Breitinger’s Kritische Dichtkunst and Gottsched’s denunciation thereof in a new edition of his own, I shall, according to my previous practice, say little. It has in all the books the usual disproportionate prominence of such things, and its actual importance was even 28less than usual. A brief but good account of it, and of all the underground jealousies and littlenesses that led up to it, may be found in Braitmaier. These jealousies, especially the general revolt against the sort of tyranny of letters which Gottsched’s skilful management of his periodicals and his pedagogic temper had instituted, were much more noticeable in it than any clear classic-romantic “dependence.” But, on the whole, the revolt against Gottsched was in the direction of revolt against at least Neo-Classicism. By degrees, too, it branched out into an attack on, and a defence of, two particular poets—Haller and Klopstock; and though neither of these is very delectable “to us,” both were distinctly in their time champions of the freedom of the poetic Jerusalem. It was fought out in Gottsched’s Beiträge on his side, and in a kind of periodical entitled Sammlung Kritischer, poetischer, und geistvoller Schriften, which Bodmer brought out in opposition,^[38] in divers others,^[39] and in numerous pamphlets. The most important critics whom it produced, and these indirectly for the most part, were the elder Schlegels, especially the eldest, Johann Elias, who, from a contributor, though never exactly a partisan, of Gottsched, became one of the objects of his special indignation. Of others, Schwabe, Cramer, Mylius, Pyra, we can but take note in passing here. Gellert has been mentioned in the last volume.^[40]

29

The elder Schlegels: Johann Adolf.

If not every schoolboy, every one with the slightest tincture of letters, is supposed to be aware that there were two persons of the name of Schlegel, who are of very great account in German and in European criticism. Not merely the schoolboy, but the person ordinarily tinged with letters, may perhaps be excused if he does not know that at least^[41] four of the name and family have claim to rank here—Johann Elias, his younger brother Johann Adolf, August Wilhelm, and Karl Wilhelm Friedrich, these two last being sons of Johann Adolf. Of these the elder pair concern us in this particular place. And of them it will be most convenient to take Johann Adolf first, not for the sake of his famous offspring, but because his critical work is the less important. He took part in the obscure and uninteresting squabble over the Pastoral school,^[42] but his main contribution to our subject is a translation, with notes and elaborate Abhandlungen, of Batteux. In this, published as early as 1751, and reprinted later,^[43] he is still an evidence of the domination of French, which his more original brother at least partly rejected. But there are signs and tokens. He is constantly making respectful suggestions and limitations: “This conclusion is too large,” “this is true to a certain extent,” and so forth.

The Abhandlungen show the German tendency to generalisation and abstract disquisition:—On the Origin of Arts, the Building up of Taste, the divisions of Poetry, its foundation in imitation or illusion, its distinction from History, and from Ornate Prose, &c. Schlegel is very much cumbered about Kinds, insists that we must try each new kind and see whether it comes naturally or not. If it does, that is right. The Wonderful has “a natural right to please us, a right 30founded in the constitution of our souls.” The soul demands novelty, &c. But like his part-master, Gottsched, he is very doubtful about Ariosto and Milton (Death and Sin are such “shadowy persons”!), and I do not think he mentions Shakespeare. He has a considerable position in the list of writers on German versification, a subject which was acquiring much importance from the set against rhyme, mentioned above.

Johann Elias.

His elder brother, Johann Elias, is a much more original and independent person. The very high claims made for him by his editor, Herr von Antoniewicz,^[44] and by Herr Braitmaier, may require some deduction when we consider his actual work; but not much. He died (1749) at a little over thirty: and during this short life he had been a diplomatist, a professor, a prolific and remarkable dramatist, and a miscellaneous poet. So that he had not much time to spare for criticism. But his work in it has that rare quality, or combination of qualities, which we have noted in Dryden, the quality of marking and learning the things that a man reads and writes of, and correcting himself by both processes. It is quite astonishing to read his first critical work, a “Letter on Ancient and Modern Tragedy,” and to note, though his actual standpoint is not very advanced, the thoroughness and freshness of appreciation shown by a boy of one-and-twenty, in the very dawn and almost the twilight of the great period of German literature. Other interesting papers lead to the still more remarkable review of Borck’s prose translation of Julius Cæsar, with its parallel between that play and the Leo Armenius of the German seventeenth-century dramatist, Andreas Gryphius. There is, of course, a danger, if this be uncritically read, of our failing to grasp Schlegel’s standpoint in regard to both the subjects, and of the excellent Gryph appearing to us too much in the light in which Shakespeare himself appeared to Voltaire. Moreover, the German Alexandrine is—even to an ear broken to a thousand measures in half a dozen languages—one of the most disagreeable that can 31be found. But allow for all these things, as criticism demands, and you will have a piece of appreciation such as (so far at least as I know) had not appeared in German before, and one of which, æquatis æquandis, hardly any of the greatest English or French critics since need have been ashamed in his Lehrjahre. The discussions of Imitation,^[45] which the lovers of abstract criticism seem to regard as Schlegel’s greatest title to fame, and which are certainly his largest, though very sound and stimulating for their time, and not even obsolete in regard to the “realist” and “naturalist” debates of the latest nineteenth century, are a little scholastic in method. From reading some estimates of Schlegel the student might almost be prepared to find in him a promulgation of one of the last secrets of criticism, the discovery that not only need you not always realise but you nearly always must disrealise—give the things as they are not in nature; and that by no means merely to suppress uglinesses and the like. So far as this I do not think he gets anywhere,^[46] but he gets pretty far: and his argument was most valuable at the time when Gottsched was priding himself on having once more based Poetic on a rigid Imitation-principle. But some of the best of Schlegel’s work is to be found in the last example of it, the “Gedanken zur Aufnahme des Dänischen Theaters,” where the good and bad points of both English and French drama, and the imitation or avoidance which they deserve accordingly, are set forth with an insight, a range, and a power of appreciation which do not come much behind Lessing, not to mention an impartiality which Lessing by no means always shows. In the Shakespeare-and-Gryph parallel Johann Elias had practically founded German Shakespeare-study, and in this piece he takes the line necessary to prevent a too one-sided pursuit of it. His actual critical achievement is not, and could not be, large; but it is precious in itself, and it shows that, had he lived, there was almost nothing at all possible in his time that he might not have done in criticism. 32You could trust him, I think, on the English novel, and you could trust him on German and mediæval poetry, with the certainty that, in the long-run at any rate, he would come

right.

Moses Mendelssohn.

Of the praiseworthy industry of Nicolai we have spoken in the last volume: and the only critic whom it is necessary to mention in any detail before passing to Lessing, who is himself in a way the critical sum and substance as well as the crown and flower of this period—Moses Mendelssohn—belongs rather to the æstheticians pure and simple. He did, however, much solid actual critical work, to a great extent in collaboration with both of the persons just mentioned. Those who are curious about him may consult the very extensive (indeed, I fear it must rather be called the disproportionately extensive) notice of him by Herr Braitmaier, who gives this learned Jew some two-thirds of his second volume, and not much less than one-third of his whole book. Mendelssohn, however, is really an important person in the history of German criticism, and probably counted for something in the development of Lessing, who was his intimate friend. He seems to have had little tincture of classical literature, but was intensely interested in modern; and was for some twenty years a constant reviewer of it. He inclines somewhat to the moral rather than to the purely literary judgment in his notices of English writers, even of Shakespeare, much more of Young and Richardson, and he was not disposed to accept the Wartonian view of Pope. Indeed, with all his merits he seems to me to be further “below proof,” from the literary point of view, not merely than Lessing but than J. E. Schlegel. The actual critical work^[47] of this Moses, as shown in his collected writings, leaves us, if not in the depths of the wilderness, at any rate at some distance from the Promised Land. There is a certain amount of criticism in his Letters, and he illustrates eighteenth-century tendencies by writing on Das Erhabene und das Naïve. His general drift is very frankly displayed in the epistles of Aristes to Hylas, on “How the Young should read Old and New Poetry,” where Plutarch’s title^[48] is not more 33closely followed than his spirit. The treatise, though in no way contemptible, is one of those which have been described (no doubt by a reminiscence of Hobbes) as “all -keit and -lung.” And Mendelssohn’s attitude to criticism could not be better indicated than in the following sentence:^[49] “We laugh at Regnard’s Le Joueur and avoid being called gamblers; we weep over the English Gamester and are ashamed to be such.” Perhaps so; perhaps also not. But the symptoms, if existent, are quite compatible with the existence of any degree of literary merit in either case, if not also with the existence of none.

Baumgarten, Sulzer, and some others must be relegated to the Æsthetic pound.

Lessing.

The general reputations which are wholly or mainly founded on criticism are so few that it behoves the historian thereof to approach them with unusual circumspection, to “put on the inquirer’s holy robe and a purged considerate mind,” as Mr Arnold says. There is the obvious danger of merely indorsing the general opinion in a tame and banal assentation; and there is the not much less obvious (and perhaps not a little greater) danger of succumbing to the temptation of “saying something different”—of aiming at a cheap distinction by paradox or eccentricity. Perhaps it is even easier to escape these dangers in reality than to seem to escape them: more particularly in the case of Lessing, of whom, in England at least, almost every educated person knows that he was a great critic, while only specialists know much more.

Some cautions respecting him.

That he was a great critic nobody can deny: but it is perhaps desirable to warn those who come to him knowing something of literary criticism already, and expecting great things in it from him, that they should not raise their expectations too high, and that they should thoroughly master certain preliminary facts. The most important of these is that Lessing’s interests were not, as the interests of very great critics almost invariably have been, either wholly literary, or literary first of all, or, as in Aristotle’s case, as literary as possible. As it was said of Clarissa that “there is always something that she prefers to 34the truth,” so there is nearly always something that Lessing prefers to literature, constantly as he was occupied with books. Now it is the theatre;^[50] now it is art—especially art viewed from the side of archæology; now it is classical scholarship of the minuter kind; now philosophy or theology; now it is morals; not unfrequently it is more, or fewer, or all of these things together, which engage his attention while literature is left out in the cold.

His moral obsession; on Soliman the Second.

The most curious instance of his moral preoccupation (which, as the commonest and that with which we are most familiar, we may get rid of first) has reference^[51] to Marmontel’s conte of Soliman the Second.^[52] Lessing rather liked Marmontel, who had been civil to Miss Sara Sampson, I think, and whom he somewhere couples with Diderot, thereby showing that he at any rate was able to distinguish in the author of the Eléments de Littérature something very different from a perruque. He admits “the wit, the knowledge of the world, the elegance, the grace” of this “excellent and delightful” tale. But he is fearfully disturbed at its morality. The Sultan, it seems, is “a satiated libertine”; [but would not Rymer be for once justified in urging this as “a character worn by them in all ages of the world” in which there were Sultans?] Roxelane is “a baggage which gets its way.” [Undoubtedly: but do not baggages as a rule get theirs?] Lessing, however, cannot away with “the thing,” as he calls the owner of the petit nez retroussé. What a wretched part is the great Soliman made to play! He and Roxelane “belong neither to the actual world, nor to a world in which cause and effect follow a different order, but to the general effect of good.” 35“The Turk only knows sensual love” [Rymer! Rymer!]. Lessing is afraid that the lune rousse will rise for Soliman on the very morrow of his wedding: and that he will see in Roxelane “nothing but her impudence and the nez retroussé.” [Now as these were the very things that captivated him, it might rather seem that all would be well.] In Soliman the instructive is lacking. “We ought to despise both him and Roxelane; or rather one [which one?] ought to disgust and the other to anger us,” though, or perhaps more particularly, because “they are painted in the most seductive colours.”

There is really nothing to be said to this but ὦ πόποι! In the first place, all this good moral indignation simply explodes through the touch-hole. The tale is pure satire on the actual weakness of man and triumph of woman—and this actuality who dare deny? If Lessing does not think both Soliman and Roxelane natural, so much the worse for Lessing. In the second place, neither is in the least degree held up for our admiration, though the skill of the artist may deserve that admiration in almost the highest degree. We may, if we like, pronounce Soliman a weak man and rather immoral ruler, and suspect Roxelane (as he suspected her himself) of being very little better than she should be. But not only does the critic waste his powder in the direction in which he actually fires; he loses the opportunity of bringing down excellent game. He lets slip altogether (as Tassoni^[53] had not altogether, though he did not follow it out) the chance of arguing that most important and interesting critical question of the attraction of the irregular, the unexpected, the capricious, the teasing. He might have got “instruction” to his heart’s content, for us and for himself, out of this shocking story of the great Sultan and the petit nez retroussé. Surely it were better done thus to profit by the curves of Roxelane’s countenance than to read us a dull sermon on her want of moral rectitude? But Lessing does not think so—master though he be, at least according to German notions, of that very irony which should have kept him right.

The strictures on Ariosto’s portrait of Alcina.

His merely dramatic and his merely artistic preoccupations 36deserve less severe treatment, because it cannot be said that they lead him wrong or even astray, except from our special point of view. But from that special point of view they do lead him astray: at least in the sense that he becomes sometimes unimportant to us. In the whole of the Laocoön, reserving a point to be returned to later, I remember only one passage of any length which is really literary,^[54] and that is the famous and not undeserved, but somewhat insufficiently worked out, censure of Ariosto’s description of Alcina.^[55] Here Lessing does show what a critic he is by his triumphant demonstration that the carefully accumulated strokes which would in the sister art go towards making, if they would not completely make, a most attractive picture, produce very little definite effect as a passage. Even here he allows himself to be called off from the discovery which he was on the point, it might seem, of making. He excepts for praise the beautiful—in fact consummate—simile of the breasts which—

“Vengono e van, come onda al primo margo

quando piacevole aura il mar combatte.”

Here of course the charm arises from the fact that the image is new, personal—that is to say, that it is literary. The curves of the wind-engrailed surge on the sand are not Vida’s “stealings,” they are originals—whoso takes them will not make them, though in themselves they remain delightful for ever. They are like the “chrysoprase” eyes of Clarimonde in Gautier’s Morte Amoureuse, which make that piece immortal. The man who now gives us eyes of chrysoprase might as well make them gooseberries. Lessing does not say this, does not hint it: indeed (as Lamb’s Scotchman would point out) it would have been, in reference to the Morte Amoureuse, impossible for him 37to do so. But he is on the way to saying it, and he instigates others to do so if he does not.^[56]

Hamlet and Semiramis.

The objection indeed which may be most justly taken to these dramatic and artistic preoccupations is that they too often directly prevent him in this way from doing what he might have done. The Dramaturgie is to the student of properly literary criticism a mixture of irritation and delight—a parallel to Coleridge’s conversation, in which “glorious” literary “islets” constantly loom through the dramatic haze, and then get engulfed again. How admirable in principle that comparison^[57] of Voltaire’s and of Shakespeare’s ghosts! Yet how we sigh for concrete illustrations from the actual words—for a little, little Zusammensetzung, say, of

“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 38help 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.

and typomania.

The fact is, that on what we may call the other side of his virtue—to call it the defect of his quality would be rather to beg the question—he is, after all, a preceptist with some difference. Not merely is he an unflinching and almost “right-or-wrong” Aristotelian, but from genuine agreement of taste and judgment he still criticises almost 39wholly by Kinds. It is the drama, the epic, the fable, the lyric, the epigram that he makes for, across or sometimes almost outside of the actual examples of their classes. And here, too, we find that the more poetical divisions and the more poetical aspects of these and others have no very special appeal to him. He belittles Lyric altogether; if he is particularly fond of the Fable in the special sense, it is because it also has a “fable” in the general, it is an imitation of life, a criticism of it. His attempt to prove that Horace had no looking-glasses in his bedroom^[63] is a pleasant pendant to his indignation with Roxalana’s minois chiffonné: and though there is a great deal to be said for Martial, Lessing^[64] is bribed to adopt the vita proba view rather by the Roman poet’s intense vivacity than by his literary merit.

His study of antiquity more than compensating.

Yet this, once more, is but “the other side of a virtue.” The best authorities agree that to Lessing may be assigned absolutely the return to, if not the very initiation of,^[65] a direct, scholarly, intelligent, literary study of the ancients themselves. As far as the Greek Theatre itself is concerned, Brumoy had anticipated him: far too little justice has often been done to the work of this modest and solid scholar. But Brumoy’s outlook was wanting in range. Lessing had in his mind, as well as Latin and Greek, English,^[66] French and German always, Italian, even Spanish^[67] 40to some extent. And he read the Latin and the Greek in themselves—and with all due apparatus of technical scholarship considering his time. He was as far from the twice- and thrice-garbled sciolism of the average French, and even English, critic of the late seventeenth and earlier eighteenth century, as from the arid pedantry of the Dutch and German scholars of the same date. To him, more perhaps than to any one else, it is due that modern criticism has not followed, more than it has done, the mere foolishness of the “modern” advocates in the Quarrel—that it has fortified itself with those sound and solid studies which antiquity alone can supply. For once more let it be said that if, from the pure critical point of view, Ancient without Modern is a stumbling-block, Modern without Ancient is foolishness utter and irremediable.

And especially of Aristotle.

Perhaps Lessing’s greatest glory is that he has given answer to the despairing question which his master quoted in the Ethics.^[68] “If the water chokes, what must one drink on the top of it?” “More and purer water” is that answer, of course: and Lessing scoured the clogged and stagnant channels of Neo-Classicism by recurrence to the original fount. Of course he was not himself absolutely original. He owed something to Heinsius, in that most remarkable tractate to which we did justice in its place, among the more distant moderns, to Dacier, pedant as he is, to Brumoy, to Hurd among the nearer. But more than to any of them he devoted himself to the real text of the Poetics, interpreted by a combination of scholarship and mother-wit. To this day he has to be consulted upon the cruces of Fable and Character, of Unity, of knotting and unknotting, of katharsis.^[69] That he has said no final word on them matters nothing: final words are not to be said on things of opinion and probability

Until God’s great Venite change the song.

41But on these and not a few other matters he reorganised the whole method and the whole tenor of the inquiry. And so he not only earns his own place in the story, but half unintentionally establishes, or helps us to establish, the great truth that the whole is a story, a history, a chain of opinion and comment on opinion, now going more, now less, right, but to be kept as a chain.

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 42remember 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.

43Invaluable 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]

44

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 45(“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, 46and 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 47days 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.

Let me, however, assure any of my readers who are apt to regard as “unfriendly” or “unsympathetic” criticism which is not eulogy thick and slab, neat and unmixed, that there is no intention here of belittling Lessing’s critical qualities,^[86] only one of indicating critically what they were and what they were not. The gift of critical expression he most certainly had in a very high degree. His exposition is masterly: though he is constantly, as has been said, leading the discussion aside from concrete to abstract, and from particular to general points, he is scarcely ever obscure, confused, or vague. His language is precise, without being technical or jargonish. He has something of the German lack of urbanity, but he often has a felicity of expression that is French rather than German, with depth and humour which are far more German than French. Never has one of the tricks of the critical pedant—common to the kind in our day as in his—been so happily described as in the opening of Wie die Alten den Tod gebildeten: “Herr 48Klotz always thinks he is at my heels. But when I look back at his yelp, I see him lost in a cloud of dust quite astray from the road I have trodden.”^[87] The unlucky distraction of his later years, to theological or anti-theological squabbling may—nay, must—have lost us much. But as it is, he never fails for long together to give those fermenta cognitionis of which he speaks. He is always “for thoughts”: that fecundity, as a result of the critical congress, which we shall remark in his part-master Diderot, is everywhere present in him.

Frederic the Great.

Lessing, whom the king neglected, may suggest Frederic the Great, whose De la Littérature Allemande (1780) the Germans have most forgivingly translated into the language despised by the writer, and adopted as a “monument” of its literature.^[88] It is certainly a monument of a kind, and the most striking contrast possible to Lessing’s work. I shall not say that it shows, as a Carlylian not less fervent than myself^[89] has admitted of Frederic’s historian on Marryat, that Frederic “was stupid for once in his life.” But it certainly shows that he could be absurdly narrow and perverse, and could push the confidence of ignorance to a wonderful length. That Frederic was very ignorant of literature there is no doubt. It is known that he “had small Latin^[90] and no Greek”; his expressions about English, the language and the literature, in this very tractatule, are, if possible, more impudently ignorant than those about German: he does not, I think, so much as name a Spanish author; and his references to Italian might have been, and probably were, derived from mere hearsay.

All this was a good preparation for judging a literature in the very peculiar state of German in 1780, when, to do it justice, a man should have had the knowledge, then almost 49impossible, of the various periods from “Middle High” onwards, the power to appreciate its very different phases, which few had, and the power, which hardly anybody ever has, of appreciating the literary present, and even future. But Frederic need not have made so near an approach to stupidity as he makes here.^[91]

De la Littérature Allemande.

That there is considerable truth and shrewdness in the king’s censure of his subjects’ pedantry and want of taste is quite certain; that the German language was in a less favourable condition for literature than any other of the great European languages is certain also. Many of his practical precepts are as sensible as we should expect from a man so great in affairs. But his literary criticism is rather worse than we should expect even from a disciple of Voltaire, whose pet prejudices they not merely reflect but exaggerate. Of all the “answers” (a most interesting list of which, with account of them where possible, from that one of Goethe’s, which has the here most deplorable “defect of being lost,” downwards, will be found in Herr Geiger’s Introduction) the happiest is in three words of Herder’s, which describe the treatise as “ein comisches Meisterstück.”^[92] Frederic attributes to Horace, and in the Ars Poetica too, four words^[93] which do not occur there, which would not be very easy to get into the metre without destroying their juxtaposition, and which it would be not much easier to adjust to any context of the actual piece. He attributes to Aristotle not merely the Three Unities, but instead of the “Unity of Action” the “Unity of Interest,” thus handing over

50the whole position to the anti-Aristotelians after a fashion which, if one of the king’s own generals had imitated it in actual war, would have “broken” him for life, if it had not put him against a wall, and opposite to a file of grenadiers. He thinks that Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius wrote in Latin; that Toland wrote the Leviathan; that Marot, Rabelais, and Montaigne wrote a jargon at least as bad as any German—“gross and destitute of grace.” In the most celebrated passage^[94]—perhaps the only one generally known—he not only out-Voltaires Voltaire by speaking of the “abominable pieces of Shakespeare,” those absurd “farces worthy of Canadian savages,” but stigmatises Goetz von Berlichingen as a “detestable imitation” of them. He hardly knows of any other German writers, and of those whom he praises Gellert and Gessner are the only ones who have retained the least reputation. If for one thing that he did—the injunction to write in German and not take refuge in other languages—one is tempted to spare him, the merit almost disappears when one remembers that he meant the German to be written in the teeth of the natural bent of the language. The bulk of his positive directions has nothing to do with literature whatsoever, but with the teaching of physical science, of law, &c. And the real apex of the comisches Meisterstück (for Herder’s words are too good not to be repeated) is to be found at the end. He prophesies, and (such is the unending and unfathomable irony of Fate!) he prophesies quite truly, that “the palmy days of our Literature have not come, but they are approaching,” that he is their harbinger, that they are just about to appear, “that though he shall not see them, his age making it hopeless, he, like Moses, sees the Promised Land, but must not enter it.” The inevitable jests at Moses himself, and the bare “rocks of sterile Idumea,” follow. But it was Moses who laughed last. Every word of Frederic’s prophecy came true; but it was because Germany neglected every item of Frederic’s prescription. The palmy days did come: they lasted for fifty glorious years and (with Heine) longer. But their light was the light borrowed from the 51abominable Shakespeare, and their leader was the author of Goetz von Berlichingen.^[95]

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