gotthold ephraim lessing 1729–1781 - St. Francis Xavier University

462 / GOTTHOLD EPHRAIM LESSING
the periodical the Hamburg Dramaturgy (which contained views far more radical
than any he could practice), invested in a publishing house, and engaged again
in a polemic— this time with the antiquarian Christian Adolphe Klotz, who had
attacked his Laocoön. In response, he wrote Letters of Antiquarian Content (1768–
69) and How the Ancients Portrayed Death (1769). Finally, unable to extricate himself
from the dispute, frustrated with the constraints of the theater, and unsuccessful
in business, he took refuge in the post of librarian at the Ducal Library in Wolfenbüttel.
Lessing was well suited for the job, though the library was dilapidated and isolated.
As he put it in order, he corresponded with scholars and, in 1773, began publishing
some of the library’s holdings. He also began a correspondence with the
recently widowed Eva König (whose family he had known in Hamburg), whom he
married in 1776; a year later Eva gave birth to a child, and both died within days.
Lessing continued his work in drama, completing Emilia Galotti, a po liti cal tragedy,
in 1772. Nathan the Wise, a dramatic poem about religious tolerance, was performed
at Easter 1778; it stirred controversy by putting its message of universal
brotherhood in the mouth of a noble Jew. Lessing went on publishing his library discoveries
as well, and the fragments from Heinrich Samuel Reimarus’s thesis on natural
religion embroiled him in his final, and most intense, polemical exchange. His
main attacker was Johann Melchior Goeze, and Lessing’s angry Anti- Goeze pamphlets
of 1778 and other writings on religion led to his being censored: he had to submit his
later writings to the duke for approval. His provocative argument was that the truth
of religion could never be captured in any fixed form; even the Bible was full of errors
and contradictions. It was the search for truth and not any one Truth that proved the
value of humanity. Little wonder that Lessing fell so readily into polemic: for him,
such exchanges did not lead to truth but enacted it. In his last work, The Education
of the Human Race (1780), Lessing continued to analyze the relation between reason
and faith, education and revelation. Furious with all existing religions, Lessing
was equally furious with smug atheism or complacent freethinking. His health
declined after 1778, and he died at Wolfenbüttel at the age of fifty- two.
In spite of the variety of his interests and writings, Lessing’s importance for literary
criticism in En glish rests almost exclusively on the impact of his 1766 Laocoön.
He begins it by discussing the role of the critic, whose duty with respect to the work
of art is to make distinctions and discern causes rather than simply to register
effects. While endorsing the well- known saying of the early- fifth- century b.c.e.
poet Simonides that painting is mute poetry and poetry a speaking picture, he
argues that although the two arts are similar in aim (imitation) and in effect (pleasure),
they differ greatly in means (visual versus verbal). Lessing goes on to analyze
their differences.
In the course of his essay, Lessing takes on a veritable bookshelf of other writings,
most notably Count Caylus’s Tableaux tirés de l’Iliade, de l’Odyssée d’Homère et
de l’Enéide de Virgile, avec des observations générales sur le costume (1757, Scenes from
Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid, with General Comments about Costume);
Joseph Spence’s 1747 dialogues on visual and verbal art called Polymetis;
and, most important, Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s 1754 Gedanken über die
Nachahmung der greichischen Werke (Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works). It
is Winckelmann’s concept of classical Greek “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur”
that Lessing wishes to combat, not in the visual arts (where, he argues, it belonged)
but in the verbal arts: epic and (implicitly) tragedy. The cold formalism of classical
French drama was too much like sculpture; Lessing wants to make sure that the art
of imitation in drama draws on Aristotle (plot is the “imitation of an action”) rather
than plato (mimesis is the imitation of a form). Winckelmann’s idealization of Greek
beauty had a powerful appeal; indeed, it was still being attacked a century later by
friedrich Nietz sche in The Birth of Tragedy (1872).