by Will Durant
Even the clergy were touched by the “Clearing Up.” Johann Semler, professor of theology at Halle, applied higher criticism to the Bible: he argued (precisely contrary to Bishop Warburton) that the Old Testament could not be inspired by God, since, except in its final phase, it ignored immortality; he suggested that Christianity had been deflected from the teachings of Christ by the theology of St. Paul, who had never seen Christ; and he advised theologians to consider Christianity as a transient form of the effort of man to achieve a moral life. When Karl Bahrdt and others of his pupils rejected all of Christian dogma except belief in God, Semler returned to orthodoxy, and held his chair of theology from 1752 to 1791. Bahrdt described Jesus as simply a great teacher, “like Moses, Confucius, Socrates, Semler, Luther, and myself.”59 Johann Eberhard also equated Socrates with Christ; he was expelled from the Lutheran ministry, but Frederick made him professor of philosophy at Halle. Another clergyman, W. A. Teller, reduced Christianity to deism, and invited into his congregation anyone, including Jews, who believed in God.60 Johann Schulz, a Lutheran pastor, denied the divinity of Jesus, and reduced God to the “sufficient ground of the world”;61 he was dismissed from the ministry in 1792.
These vocal heretics were a small minority; perhaps silent heretics were many. Because so many clergymen offered a welcome to reason, because religion was much stronger in Germany than in England or France, and because the philosophy of Wolff had provided the universities with a compromise between rationalism and religion, the German Enlightenment did not take an extreme form. It sought not to destroy religion, but to free it from the myths, absurdities, and sacerdotalism that in France made Catholicism so pleasing to the people and so irritating to the philosophers. Following Rousseau rather than Voltaire, German rationalists recognized the profound appeal that religion makes to the emotional elements in man; and the German nobility, less openly skeptical than the French, supported religion as an aid to morals and government. The Romantic movement checked the advance of rationalism, and prevented Lessing from being to Germany what Voltaire had been to France.
V. GOTTHOLD LESSING: 1729-81
His great-grandfather was burgomaster of a small town in Saxony; his grandfather was for twenty-four years burgomaster of Kamenz, and wrote a plea for religious toleration; his father was the head Lutheran pastor in Kamenz, and wrote a catechism which Lessing learned by heart. His mother was the daughter of the preacher to whose pastorate his father had succeeded. It was natural for her to intend him for the ministry, and for him, sated with piety, to rebel.
His early education, at home and in a grammar school at Meissen, was a mixture of German discipline and classic literature, of Lutheran theology and Latin comedy. “Theophrastus, Plautus, and Terence were my world, which I studied with delight.”62 At seventeen he was sent to Leipzig on a scholarship. He found the town more interesting than the university; he sowed some wild oats, fell in love with the theater and an actress, was allowed behind the scenes, learned the machinery of the stage. At nineteen he wrote a play, and managed to get it produced. Hearing of this sin, the mother wept, the father angrily summoned him home. He smiled them out of their grief, and talked them into paying his debts. His sister, coming upon his poems, found them wondrously improper, and burned them; he threw snow into her bosom to cool her zeal. He was sent back to Leipzig to study philosophy and become a professor; he found philosophy deadly, incurred incurable debts, and fled to Berlin (1748).
There he lived as a literary journeyman, writing reviews, making translations, and joining with Christlob Mylius in editing a short-lived magazine of the theater. By the age of nineteen he was an addict of free thought. He read Spinoza and found him, despite geometry, irresistible. He composed a drama (1749?), Der Freigeist (The Free Spirit); it contrasted Theophan, a kindly young clergyman, with Adrast, a harsh and raucous freethinker and something of a rogue; here Christianity had much the better of the argument. But about this time Lessing wrote to his father: “The Christian faith is not something which one should accept on trust from one’s parents.”63 Now he composed another play, Die Juden, discussing the intermarriage of Christian and Jew: a rich and honorable Hebrew, named simply “The Traveler,” saves the lives of a Christian noble and his daughter; the nobleman, as reward, offers him his daughter in marriage, but withdraws the offer when the Jew reveals his race; the Jew agrees that the marriage would be unhappy. It was not until five years later (1754) that Lessing, over a game of chess, made the acquaintance of Moses Mendelssohn, who seemed to him to embody the virtues that he had ascribed to “Der Reisende.”
Early in 1751 Voltaire, or his secretary, engaged Lessing to translate into German some material which the expatriate philosopher wished to use in a suit against Abraham Hirsch. The secretary allowed Lessing to borrow part of a manuscript of Voltaire’s Le Siècle de Louis XIV. Later in that year Lessing went to Wittenberg, and took the manuscript with him. Fearing that this uncorrected copy might be used for a pirated edition, Voltaire sent Lessing a politely urgent request for the return of the sheets. Lessing complied, but resented the urgent tone; and this may have colored his subsequent hostility to Voltaire’s works and character.
Lessing received the master’s degree at the University of Wittenberg in 1752. Back in Berlin, he contributed to various periodicals articles of such positive thought and pungent style that by 1753 he had won an audience large enough to pardon his publishing, at the age of twenty-four, a six-volume collected edition of his work. These included a new play, Miss Sara Sampson, which was a milestone in the history of the German stage. Till this time the German theater had presented native comedies, but rarely a native tragedy. Lessing urged his fellow playwrights to turn from French to English models, and to write their own tragic dramas. He praised Diderot for defending the comedy of sentiment and the middle-class tragedy, but it was from England—from George Lillo’s The London Merchant (1731) and Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1748)—that he took his inspiration for Miss Sara Sampson .
The play was performed at Frankfurt-an-der-Oder in 1755, and was well received. It had all the elements of drama: it began with a seduction, ended with a suicide, and connected them with a river of tears. The villain Mellefont (Honeyface) is Richardson’s Lovelace; he is a hardened hand at defloration, but deprecates monogamy; he promises marriage to Sara, elopes with her, sleeps with her, then postpones marriage; a former mistress tries to win him back, fails, poisons Sara; Sara’s father arrives, ready to forgive everything and accept Mellefont as his son, only to find his daughter dying; Mellefont, quite out of character, kills himself, as if to exemplify Lessing’s quip that in tragic dramas the protagonists die of nothing but the fifth act.64
He thought that now he could butter his bread by writing for the stage; and as Berlin had no theater he moved to Leipzig (1755). Then the Seven Years’ War broke out, the theater was closed, the book trade languished, Lessing was penniless. He moved back to Berlin, and contributed to Nikolai’s Briefe die neueste Literatur betreffend articles that marked a new height in German literary criticism. “Rules,” said his Letter xix, “are what the masters of the art choose to observe.” In 1760 the Austro-Russian army invaded Berlin; Lessing fled to Breslau as secretary to a Prussian general. During his five years there he haunted taverns, gambled, studied Spinoza, the Christian Fathers, and Winckelmann, and wrote Laokoon. In 1765 he returned to Berlin, and in 1766 he sent his most famous book to the press.
Laokoon, oder Über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie (Laocoon, or On the Boundaries between Painting and Poetry) derived its immediate stimulus from Winckelmann’s Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture (1755). When Lessing had written half of his manuscript Winckelmann’s History of Ancient Art (1764) reached him; he interrupted his essay and wrote: “The History of Art by Herr Winckelmann has appeared. I will not venture a step further without having read this work.”65 He took as his starting point Winckelmann’s conception of classic Greek art as characterized by serene dignity and
grandeur, and he accepted Winckelmann’s claim that the Laocoon statuary group in the Vatican Gallery preserved these qualities despite mortal pain. (Laocoön, priest of Apollo at Troy, suspected that there were Greeks in the “Trojan horse,” and hurled a spear at it; the goddess Athena, favoring the Greeks, persuaded Poseidon to send up from the sea two huge serpents that twined themselves murderously around the priest and his two sons.) Winckelmann supposed that the Laocoön —now reckoned as a work of Rhodian sculptors in the last century before Christ—belonged to the classic age of Pheidias. Why Winckelmann, who had seen and studied the work, ascribed calm grandeur to the distorted features of the priest is a mystery; Lessing accepted the description because he had never seen the statue.66 He agreed that the sculptor had moderated the expression of pain; he proceeded to inquire into the reason for this artistic restraint; and he proposed to derive it from the inherent and proper limitations of plastic art.
He quoted the dictum of the Greek poet Simonides that “painting is silent poetry, and poetry is eloquent painting.”67 But, he added, the two must keep within their natural bounds: painting and sculpture should describe objects in space, and not try to tell a story; poetry should narrate events in time, and not try to describe objects in space. Detailed description should be left to the plastic arts; when it occurs in poetry, as in Thomson’s The Seasons or Haller’s Die Alpen, it interrupts the narrative and obscures the events. “To oppose this false taste, and to counteract these unfounded opinions, is the principal object of the following observations.”68 Lessing soon forgot this purpose, and lost himself in a detailed discussion of Winckelmann’s History. Here he was without experience or competence, and his exaltation of ideal beauty as the object of art had a sterilizing effect upon German painting. He confused painting with sculpture, applying to both of them the norms proper chiefly to sculpture, and so encouraging the cold formality of Anton Raphael Mengs. But his influence on German poetry was a blessing; he freed it from long descriptions, scholastic didacticism, and tedious detail, and guided it to action and feeling. Goethe gratefully acknowledged the liberating effect of the Laocoön .
Lessing found himself more at home when (April, 1767) he moved to Hamburg as playwright and dramatic critic at eight hundred thalers per year. There he produced his new play, Minna von Barnhelm. Its hero, Major Tellheim, returning with honors from the war to his estates, wins betrothal to the wealthy and lovely Minna. A turn of fortune and hostile intrigues reduce him to poverty; he withdraws from his engagement as being no longer a fit husband for the heiress to a great fortune. He disappears; she pursues him and begs him to marry her; he refuses. Perceiving his reason, she contrives a hoax whereby she becomes attractively penniless; now the major offers himself as a mate. Suddenly two messengers enter, one announcing that Minna, the other that Tellheim, has been restored to affluence. Everybody rejoices, and even the servants are precipitated into marriage. The dialogue is sprightly, the characters are improbable, the plot is absurd—but nearly all plots are absurd.
On the same day (April 22, 1767) that saw the opening of the National Theater at Hamburg Lessing issued the prospectus of his Hamburgische Dramaturgie. Periodically, in the next two years, these essays commented on the plays produced in Germany, and on the theory of drama in the philosophers. He agreed with Aristotle in judging drama to be the highest species of poetry, and he accepted with reckless inconsistency the rules laid down in the Poetics: “I do not hesitate to confess … that I deem it as infallible as the Elements of Euclid”69 (who has ceased to be infallible). Yet he implored his countrymen to abandon their subserviency to Corneille, Racine, and Voltaire, and to study the art of drama as revealed in Shakespeare (who ignored Aristotle’s rules). He felt that the French drama was too formal to effect that catharsis of the emotions which Aristotle had found in the Greek drama; Shakespeare, he thought, had accomplished this purge better in Lear, Othello, and Hamlet by the intensity of the action and the force and beauty of his language. Forgetting Desdemona’s handkerchief, Lessing stressed the need of probability: the good dramatist will avoid dependence upon coincidences and trivialities, and he will so build up each character that the events will follow inevitably from the nature of the persons involved. The dramatists of the Sturm-und-Drang period agreed to take Shakespeare as a model, and gladly liberated the German drama from the French. The nationalist spirit, rising with the victories of Frederick and the defeat of France, inspired and seconded Lessing’s appeal, and Shakespeare dominated the German stage for almost a century.
The Hamburg experiment collapsed because the actors quarreled among themselves and concurred only in resenting Lessing’s critiques. Friedrich Schroder complained: “Lessing was never able to devote his attention to an entire performance; he would go away and come back, talk with acquaintances, or give himself up to thought; and from traits which excited his passing pleasure he would form a picture that belonged rather to his own mind than to the reality.”70 This perceptive judgment well described Lessing’s wayward life and mind.
Shall we stop him here in mid-career and look at him? He was of medium height, proudly erect, strong and supple through regular exercise; with fine features, dark-blue eyes, and light-brown hair that kept its color till his death. He was warm in his friendships, hot in his enmities. He was never so happy as in controversy, and then he dealt wounds with a sharp pen. “Let a critic,” he wrote, “. . . first seek out someone with whom he can quarrel. Thus he will gradually get into a subject, and the rest will follow as a matter of course. I frankly admit that I have selected primarily the French authors for this purpose, and among them particularly M. de Voltaire”71—which was brave enough. He was a brilliant but reckless talker, quick in repartee. He had ideas about everything, and they were too many and forceful to let him give them order, consistency, or full effect. He enjoyed the pursuit of truth more than the dangerous delusion of having found it. Hence his most renowned remark:
Not the truth of which a man is—or believes himself to be—possessed, but the sincere effort he has made to reach it, makes the worth of a man. For not through the possession, but through the investigation, of truth does he develop those energies in which alone consists his ever-growing perfection. Possession makes the mind stagnant, indolent, proud. If God held enclosed in His right hand all truth, and in His left hand simply the ever-moving impulse toward truth, although with the condition that I should eternally err, and said to me, “Choose!,” I should humbly bow before His left hand, and say, “Father, give! Pure truth is for Thee alone.”72
Two precious friendships remained from the Hamburg fiasco. One was with Elise Reimarus, daughter of Hermann Reimarus, who was professor of Oriental languages in the Hamburg Academy. She made her home a center for the most cultivated society in the city; Lessing joined her circle, and Mendelssohn and Jacobi came when they were in town; we shall see the vital part that this association played in Lessing’s history. Still more intimate was his attachment with Eva König. Wife of a silk merchant, mother of four children, she was, Lessing tells us, “bright and animated, gifted with womanly tact and graciousness,” and “still had some of the freshness and charm of youth.”73 She too gathered about her a salon of cultured friends, of whom Lessing was facile princeps. When her husband left for Venice in 1769 he said to Lessing, “I commend my family to you.” It was hardly a provident arrangement, for the dramatist had no asset but genius, and owed a thousand thalers. And in October of that year he accepted an invitation from Prince Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand of Brunswick to take charge of the ducal library at Wolfenbüttel. This town had declined to some six thousand souls since the removal (1753) of the reigning Duke’s residence to Brunswick, seven miles away, but Casanova reckoned the collection of books and manuscripts to be “the third greatest library in the world.”74 Lessing was to receive six hundred thalers a year, with two assistants and a servant, and free residence in the old ducal palace. In May, 1770, he settled in his new home.
He was not a successful librarian; stil
l he pleased his employer by discovering, amid the manuscripts, a famous but lost treatise by Berengar of Tours (998-1088), questioning transubstantiation. In his now sedentary life he missed the strife and stimulus of Hamburg and Berlin; poring over bad print in poor light weakened his eyes and brought on headaches; his health began to fail. He consoled himself by writing another drama, Emilia Galotti, which expressed his resentment of aristocratic privileges and morals. Emilia is the daughter of an ardent republican; their sovereign, the Prince of Guastalla, desires her, has her fiancé murdered, and abducts her to his palace; the father finds her, and, at her insistence, stabs her to death; then he surrenders himself to the Prince’s court and is condemned to die, while the Prince continues his career only momentarily disturbed. The passion and eloquence of the play redeemed its finale; it became a favorite tragedy on the German stage; Goethe dated from its première (1772) the resurrection of German literature. Some critics hailed Lessing as a German Shakespeare.
In April, 1775, Lessing went to Italy as cicerone to Prince Leopold of Brunswick. For eight months he enjoyed Milan, Venice, Bologna, Modena, Parma, Piacenza, Pavia, Turin, Corsica, Rome; there he was presented to Pope Pius VI, and may have seen, belatedly, the Laocoön. By February, 1776, he was again at Wolfenbüttel. He thought of resigning, but was persuaded to stay by an increase of two hundred thalers in his salary, and by receiving a hundred louis d’or per year as adviser to the Mannheim theater. Now, aged forty-seven, he proposed to the widowed Eva König that she become his wife and bring her children with her. She came, and they were married (October 8, 1776). For a year they experienced a quiet happiness. On Christmas Eve, 1777, she gave birth to a child, who died the next day. Sixteen days later the mother died, too. Lessing lost his savor for life.