The New International Encyclopædia/Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim

LES′SING, Gotthold Ephraim (1729-81). A German critic and dramatist, born at Kamenz, January 22, 1729; the earliest of the great German classical writers. More than any other, Lessing reformed German literature. His father, pastor at Kamenz, gave him his early instruction, and sent him to a famous school at Meissen, where he learned so rapidly that by royal decree he was admitted at seventeen to the University of Leipzig. Here his sturdy nature almost immediately asserted itself against the smug platitudes of the Leipzig critics. “I realized,” he wrote at this time, “that books might make me learned, but would never make me a man. I sought society to learn life.” He took lessons in dancing, fencing, riding, translated French plays for free theatre tickets, and thus he learned stage technique. In 1747 he printed a little volume of anacreontic verse, and in 1748 produced a juvenile play, Der junge Gelehrte. Then, assuring his disappointed father that he ‘could become a preacher any day,’ he left the theological faculty and entered the school of medicine. Soon afterwards (1748) he left Leipzig for Wittenberg and Berlin, the latter then as now the centre of German free thought. He lived by his pen, writing keen literary criticism and hack translations, and venturing on original dramas and lyrics of no great value.

At Berlin Lessing met Voltaire. They soon quarreled and parted, for Voltaire asserted that Lessing had betrayed a literary confidence, an improbable insinuation often revived by Lessing's literary enemies. Critically Lessing profited greatly by Voltaire. He gained wider horizons and was one of the first among German scholars to address himself directly to the body of the nation. Under his impulse Berlin grew independent of the Swiss school (see Bodmer), and his leadership was by 1755 so obvious that there was a demand for a collected edition of his Works.

In the same year Lessing went back to Leipzig, and he had begun a journey to England when he was recalled at Amsterdam by the disturbances of the Seven Years' War, at a moment when Frederick's deeds were giving to lyric poetry a popular turn, which was welcomed by Lessing in his preface to the Lieder eines preussischen Grenadiers of Gleim (q.v.). He went to Leipzig, attempted a Faust, returned to Berlin in 1758, and began to issue Litterarische Briefe, which cleared the air of choking mawkishness and false formality. With these Letters the classical period of German literature begins and on distinctively national lines. The Letters are the oldest German work generally read to-day, and make Lessing ‘the Father of German criticism.’

The Letters were continued till 1765, irregularly; for in 1700 Lessing went to the seat of war in Silesia as secretary of General Tauenzien and gathered there materials for the greatest drama and the greatest work of æsthetic criticism that Germany had yet seen, Minna von Barnhelm (1763) and Laokoon (1766). But before these he had produced in Miss Sara Sampson (1755) a play epoch-making for the German stage, based on the family relation, the strongest feeling in German national life, and emphasizing the social worth of the middle and lower classes. But the reform that it started has made it seem antiquated. Minna von Barnhelm, on the other hand, was a national drama; its personages were Germans of the day, drawn from Lessing's Silesian experience, and all of them true to the soil. In every literary field its health-giving influence was felt.

The Laokoon attempts to define the demarcation and the limits of poetry and painting. Only a third of it was ever written, yet that third revolutionized literary taste in Germany. “That long misunderstood phrase, Ut pictura poësis, was set aside. The distinction between the speaking and the plastic arts was clear. All the results of this glorious thought were revealed to us as by a lightning flash,” said Goethe. Lessing hastened the publication of the Laokoon, hoping to win by it the post of royal librarian at Berlin; but Voltaire had prejudiced the King against him. Lessing, however, was called to Hamburg to be critic and adviser of the National Theatre there. Having sold his library to pay debts and rent, with his Laokoon unfinished, Lessing left Berlin in April, 1767.

In May, 1767, Lessing began to publish twice weekly the theatrical criticisms known as the Hamburgische Dramaturgie. These criticisms soon came to be true essays on dramatic art. The Dramaturgie may be regarded as a continuation of the Laokoon, and to this day remains the vade mecum of the German stage. It gave the death-blow to French imitation and pointed the way to Schiller and Goethe.

In 1769 Lessing suspended the Dramaturgie, which pirated reprints had made unprofitable, and was attracted to antiquarian studies by the ill-natured attacks of Professor Klotz, of Halle, against whose journal Lessing openly declared war in the Antiquarische Briefe. One of the last Letters on How the Ancients Represented Death banished the skeleton and hour-glass from German art.

Famous, but poor, Lessing left Hamburg, and in the spring of 1770 became Court librarian of the Duke of Brunswick at Wolfenbüttel. He was now eager to found a home, for he had fallen deeply in love with Eva König, widow of a silk manufacturer of Hamburg. In 1775 he visited her at Vienna, where he was welcomed as no German author had ever been. He was recalled thence to accompany the Duke's son to Italy, and found that his fame had gone before. In February, 1776, he returned and soon afterwards married his betrothed. During these years of waiting he had completed a remarkable tragedy, Emilia Galotti (1772). The story is that of Virginia, made familiar by Macaulay's “Lay;” the scene is ostensibly modern Italian, but so obviously German and political in its purpose that the Court of Gotha forbade the representation. Lessing's work as a reformer of the German stage ends here. His Nathan der Weise (1779), though still acted, is rather a philosophical work in dramatic form, uniting his ethical and æsthetic studies to the theological controversies that were to fill his later years. The year after Lessing's marriage was the happiest of his life. On Christmas Eve, 1777, a son was born to him. The child died on Christmas day, the mother on January 10, 1778. Sadly yet bravely, Lessing plunged into three years of intense controversial activity. Of this controversy the immediate cause was Lessing's editing of some posthumous essays by a Hamburg friend, Reimarus. a free-thinker, which Lessing was not, though he was an unflinching believer in free speech, in the higher criticism of Scripture, and in the development of doctrine, as he showed in Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts (1780). He thought and said that it was better error should be taught than freedom of thought stifled, and, further, that “the letter is not the spirit and the Bible is not religion.” All these were novel ideas in that generation and peculiarly hateful to Pastor Goeze of Hamburg, who led a numerous band of obscurantists, while at first Lessing was almost the only defender of free discussion. Lessing's letters in this controversy are remarkable for their eloquence, wit, satiric power, and dramatic vivacity. They mark a distinct advance in German prose style and a permanent gain to the religious life of the German nation. And out of the bitterness of the dispute came as a sweet fruit the dispassionate expression of its results in the dramatic poem of toleration, Nathan the Wise, inspired by his friendship for Moses Mendelssohn.

The same lofty theme was pursued during Lessing's closing years in Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts, the work on education cited above; and its principles appear in the political sphere in Ernst und Falk, Gespräche für Freimaurer (1788), whose bold utterance was muzzled by the Brunswick censor. Lessing in these last days wrote as one to whom hard experience had taught its lesson of self-denying wisdom. His mind was still active and eager, but his body was gradually giving way. On a visit to Brunswick he broke down utterly, and died after a brief illness, February 15, 1781.

Lessing, says Goethe, was great by character and tenacity of will. Critical distinctions are his strongest side. By them he restored a national drama to Germany, gave his nation true canons of æsthetic and dramatic criticism, freed her from a petrified orthodoxy, and taught her to breathe a more tolerant and loftier Christianity, giving to all her sons the example of a life devoted to the search for truth.

Lessing's Works have been, often collected, notably by Lachmann (13 vols., 1838-40). Most of them are published separately. There are translations of the Laokoon, Minna von Barnhelm, Emilia Galotti, and Nathan der Weise. Consult: Danzel and Guhrauer, Lessing, sein Leben und Seine Werke (Leipzig, 1850-54); Erich Schmidt, Lessing (Berlin, 1899); Fischer, G. A. Lessing, als Reformator der deutschen Litteratur (Stuttgart, 1881); Düntzer, Erläuterungen zu Lessings Werken (Leipzig, 1883); Spicker, Lessings Weltanschauung (ib., 1883); Braun, Lessing im Urteile seiner Zeitgenossen (Berlin, 1884-97); Kort, Lessing et l'antiquité (Paris, 1894); Consentius, Lessing und die Vossische Zeitung (Leipzig, 1900); Blumner, Lessings Laokoon (Berlin, 1879); Schröter und Thiele, Lessings Hamburgische Dramaturgie (Halle, 1877); Strauss, Nathan der Weise (Berlin, 1866); Pabst, Vorlesungen über Nathan der Weise (Bern, 1881). There are English Lives by Sime (London, 1877), Zimmern (ib., 1878), and Rolleston (ib., 1889).