Introduction
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–81) was one of the leading figures of the German Enlightenment, and perhaps its most prominent literary critic. Lessing played a crucial role in the shift that took place in the German tradition towards what is now thought of as modern criticism. Developing the techniques of the philological tradition and supplementing them with a historical awareness that works both to examine the contexts and sources of artworks and to consider their resonances for his own time, Lessing’s thought is a vital step in the emergence of aesthetics as a serious discipline.
Lessing was keen that German literature should not be constrained by the rhetorical and neoclassical models that dominated poetics, suggesting that the plays of Shakespeare, for example, might provide a better template for the development of modern German drama than French classicism. Importantly, Lessing grounds his argument in a thorough reassessment (and in places retranslation) of Aristotle’s Poetics. Since classicism appealed to a certain vision of Aristotelian thought for its validity, Lessing’s unsettling of the very foundations of that appeal proved to be highly effective.
In his conception of criticism, Lessing sought to provoke a response from his readers rather than to provide a doctrine. In place of a form of poetics based on rules, taste and judgement are emphasized. But while the concept of taste often implies a certain universalizing urge – since the judgement of an individual work seeks to go beyond its singularity by comparison, and so on – Lessing insists on the historical determination of taste, and on the rootedness of artworks in their relation to a specific audience. So Greek tragedy takes the generic form that it does by virtue of the relation between drama and its social functions and audience; these generic elements are not appropriate to a modern drama that is addressed to a fundamentally different social relation.
Modern criticism continues to debate the nature of Lessing’s thinking. For some critics, his is essentially an aesthetic and semiotic theory, related to the discussion of genius in, for example, IMMANUEL KANT’s Critique of Judgment and in the wider debates within German Romanticism. For others, Lessing’s work remains tied to the rhetorical tradition, anticipating later eighteenth century developments in hermeneutics. These twin axes may be discerned in his work, both in the Hamburg Dramaturgy and in his famous 1766 text Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry. Lessing’s style as well as his ideas would prove to be deeply influential, especially in the German tradition, and he is acknowledged by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, A. W. SCHLEGEL and many later critics.
Further reading: A major new translation appeared too recently to be taken into account here: G. E. Lessing, The Hamburg Dramaturgy: A New and Complete Annotated English Translation, trans. Wendy Arons and Sara Figal, ed. Natalya Baldyga (2019). See also Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766, trans. 1982). Benjamin Bennett, Beyond Theory: Eighteenth Century German Literature and the Poetics of Irony (1993); Robert Leventhal, The Disciplines of Interpretation: Lessing, Herder, Schlegel, and Hermeneutics in Germany, 1750–1800 (1994); Anthony Savile, Aesthetic Reconstructions: The Seminal Writings of Lessing, Kant, and Schiller (1987); David Wellbery, Laokoon: Aesthetics and Semiotics in the Age of Reason (1984).
No. 2.
Yet another remark, also bearing on Christian tragedies might be made about the conversion of Clorinda. Convinced though we may be of the immediate operations of grace, yet they can please us little on the stage, where everything that has to do with the character of the personages must arise from natural causes. We can only tolerate miracles in the physical world; in the moral everything must retain its natural course, because the theatre is to be the school of the moral world. The motives for every resolve, for every change of opinion or even thoughts, must be carefully balanced against each other so as to be in accordance with the hypothetical character, and must never produce more than they could produce in accordance with strict probability. The poet, by beauty of details, may possess the art of deluding us to overlook misproportions of this kind, but he only deceives us once and as soon as we are cool again we take back the applause he has lured from us. Applying these remarks to the fourth scene of the third act, it will be seen that Sophronia’s speeches and acts could have roused pity in Clorinda, but were much too impotent to work conversion on a person who had no natural disposition to enthusiasm. Tasso also makes Clorinda embrace Christianity, but only in her last hour, only after she has recently heard that her parents were also inclined to this faith, subtle weighty reasons by whose means the operations of a higher power are, as it were, entwined with the course of natural events. No one has better understood how far this point may be carried on the stage than Voltaire. After the sensitive noble soul of Zamor has been shaken to its depths by example and entreaties, by generosity and exhortation, he allows him to divine rather than believe in the truths of a religion whose adherents evince such greatness. And perchance Voltaire would have suppressed even this surmise if it had not been needful to do something for the pacification of the spectator.
Even Corneille’s ‘Polyeucte’ is to be condemned in view of the above remarks, and since the plays made in imitation of it are yet more faulty, the first tragedy that deserves the name of Christian has beyond doubt still to appear. I mean a play in which the Christian interests us solely as a Christian. But is such a .piece even possible? Is not the character of a true Christian something quite untheatrical? Does not the gentle pensiveness, the unchangeable meekness that are his essential features, war with the whole business of tragedy that strives to purify passions by passions? Does not his expectation of rewarding happiness after this life contradict the disinterestedness with which we wish to see all great and good actions undertaken and carried out on the stage?
Until a work of genius arises that incontestably decides these objections, – for we know by experience what difficulties genius can surmount, – my advice is this, to leave all existent Christian tragedies unperformed. This advice, deduced from the necessities of art, and which deprives us of nothing more than very mediocre plays, is not the worse because it comes to the aid of weak spirits who feel I know not what shrinking, when they hear sentiments spoken from the stage that they had only expected to hear in a holier place. The theatre should give offence to no one, be he who he may, and I wish it would and could obviate all preconceived offence.
Cronegk only brought his play to the end of the fourth act. The rest has been added by a pen in Vienna: a pen – for the work of a head is not very visible. The “continuator” has, to all appearance, ended the story quite otherwise than Cronegk intended to end it. Death best dissolves all perplexities, therefore he despatches both Olindo and Sophronia. Tasso lets them both escape, for Clorinda interests herself for them with noble generosity. But Cronegk had made Clorinda enamoured, and that being the case, it was certainly difficult to guess how he could have decided between two rivals, without calling death to his aid. In another still worse tragedy where one of the principal characters died quite casually, a spectator asked his neighbour, “But what did she die of?” – “Of what? Of the fifth act,” was the reply. In very truth the fifth act is an ugly evil disease that carries off many a one to whom the first four acts promised a longer life.
But I will not proceed more deeply with the criticism of the play. Mediocre as it is, it was excellently performed. I keep silence concerning the external splendour, for this improvement of our stage requires nothing but money. The art whose help is needful to this end is as perfect in our country as in any other, only artists wish to be paid as well as in any other.
We must rest satisfied with the performance of a play if among four or five persons some have played excellently and the others well. Whoever is so offended by a beginner or a makeshift in the subordinate parts that he turns up his nose. Nose at the whole, let him travel to Utopia and there visit the perfect theatre where even the candle‐snuffer is a Garrick.
Interspersed moral maxims are Cronegk’s strong point. . . . Unfortunately he often tries to persuade us that coloured bits of glass are gems, and witty antitheses common sense. Two such lines in the first act, had a peculiar effect upon me.
The one:
The other:
I was taken aback to see a general movement in the parterre and to hear that murmur with which approval is expressed when close attention does not permit it to break out. I thought on the one hand: Most excellent! they love morality here, this parterre finds pleasure in maxims, on this stage Euripides could have earned fame, and Socrates would gladly have visited it. But on the other I noticed as well how false, how perverted, how offensive were these presumed maxims, and I greatly wished that disapproval had had its share in this murmur. For there has only been one Athens and there will ever remain but one Athens, where even the mob has moral feelings so fine and delicate that actors and authors run the risk of being driven from the stage on account of impure morality. I know full well that the sentiments in a drama must be in accordance with the assumed character of the person who utters them. They can therefore not bear the stamp of absolute truth, it is enough if they are poetically true, if we must admit that this character under these circumstances, with these passions could not have judged otherwise. But on the other hand this poetical truth must also approach to the absolute and the poet must never think so unphilosophically as to assume that a man could desire evil for evil’s sake, that a man could act on vicious principles, knowing them to be vicious and boast of them to himself and to others. Such a man is a monster as fearful as he is uninstructive and nothing save the paltry resource of a shallow‐head that can deem glittering tirades the highest beauties of a tragedy. If Ismenor is a cruel priest, does it follow that all priests are Ismenors? It is useless to reply that the allusion refers to priests of a false religion. No religion in the world was ever so false that its teachers must necessarily be monsters. Priests have worked mischief in false religion as well as in true, but not because they were priests but because they were villains who would have abused the privileges of any other class in the service of their evil propensities.
If the stage enunciates such thoughtless judgments on priests, what wonder if among these are found some foolish enough to decry it as the straight road to hell?
But I am falling back into the criticism of the play and I wanted to speak of the actors.
No. 11.
The appearance of a ghost was so bold a novelty on the French stage, and the poet who ventured upon it justified it by such curious reasons, that it really repays the trouble of investigating them a little.
“They cry and write on all sides,” says M. de Voltaire, “that we no longer believe in ghosts and that the apparition of a ghost is held childish in the eyes of an enlightened nation. But how,” he replies to this; “should all antiquity have believed in such miracles and should we not be permitted to adapt ourselves to antiquity? How? Our own religion has hallowed the belief in such extraordinary dispensations of Providence and it should be held ridiculous to revive them!”
These exclamations appear to me to be more rhetorical than philosophical. Above all things I should wish religion to be left out of the question. In matters of taste and criticism, reasons extorted from religion are all very well to silence an opponent, but not well suited to convince him. Religion as religion has nothing to decide here, and regarded as a form of ancient tradition her testimony has neither more nor less value than all other testimonies of antiquity. Consequently in this instance we have only to deal with antiquity.
Very good then; all antiquity believed in ghosts. Therefore the poets of antiquity were quite right to avail themselves of this belief. If we encounter ghosts among them, it would be unreasonable to object to them according to our better knowledge. But does this accord the same permission to our modern poets who share our better knowledge? Certainly not. But suppose he transfer his story into these more credulous times? Not even then. For the dramatic poet is no historian, he does not relate to us what was once believed to have happened, but he really produces it again before our eyes, and produces it again not on account of mere historical truth but for a totally different and a nobler aim. Hist...
