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enter thoroughly into his stern indignation at all trifling profaners of such a calling. His countrymen call him their second Luther, and rightly. The two men are full-blood brothers in the spirit. In heroism, in power of wrath and love, in sense of moral obligation, in respect for the common people, in belief that the grandest truth is meant for the humblest being, in resolve to do battle ever against all enemies of the general good, they stand side by side, and tower head and shoulders above all others of their race. As were to Luther popes and princes and bishops God's enemies and nothing more, when they dared to veil the glory from above; so, too, to Lessing were the most potent names of Europe, when he found them barbarizing and corrupting the general taste, and robbing the world of the rich and perennial sources of joy and purification that lie waiting in the works of the long line of earth's exalted spirits. No matter from what quarter proceeded any hurtful criticism or noxious work of art, from bosom friend in Berlin, or incense-reeking, servilely dreaded hierarch, Voltaire, in France, - he let fly at once his scathing bolt.

Frederic had rejected Lessing. But many months had not elapsed when he was called to a work which he hailed with rare delight. An effort was to be made in Hamburg to create a theatre worthy of the name. Ballets and all such fripperies were to be discarded. The production of a national dramatic literature was to be in every way encouraged. A journal was to be established in which every thing in each nightly presentation - the play itself, the actors, to their very gait and dress - were to be criticised from the standpoint of absolute principle. The audiences were to be trained to know the good, and reject the bad. He must come on, and take absolute control. And he went.

Of course the grand scheme came to nought. Generous and patriotic as was the spirit which prompted it, it was asking too much of human nature. No Rhadamanthus, like Lessing, could many weeks sit in judgment on thin-skinned mortals, without the accompaniments of a prisoners' bar, with flanking constables, to hold fast the victims, or a three-headed Cerberus to keep the peace. But neither were constables, nor was Cerberus, in the contract. Lessing loved truth, and longed to be purified by it: the actors loved lies, and did not want to be purified at all. Lessing was dead in earnest, and regarded the theatre as a moral agency; the audiences cared only for sentimentalities, for excitement, for fun. But the experiment lasted long enough to give the world the noble series of papers which constitute the "Hamburg Dramaturgy."

The "Hamburg Dramaturgy" is a striking illustration of the fact before adverted to, that, in the hands of Lessing, an inferior work is made, through its very faults, to teach as pregnant lessons as a worthy one through its merits. In the light of the glaring contrast presented by the plays he so mercilessly dissects and exposes in all their nakedness to works deserving of our reverence, we are made to feel, as perhaps in no other way were possible, the informing spirit of the truly great. And yet they were not all vulgar names and reputations which Lessing riddled. He grappled hand to hand with such authorities as Corneille and Voltaire only the more eagerly, not because they were foemen worthy of his steel, - for they were but babies in his grasp, but because they were vast powers of evil influence, corrupters of all Europe, Antichrists in the world of letters. A flattering French critic had asserted that Love itself had dictated Voltaire's "Zaire." "Gallantry rather," was Lessing's scathing answer. Here lay the root of the perversion. Gallantry mistaken for love, bombast for eloquence, monstrosity for sublimity, rant for earnestness, prudery for purity, shocking madhouse horrors for tragic interest, these were what he saw the whole world gaping at, imitating, lauding to the skies. And yet the arch-corrupters, Corneille and Voltaire, had boasted themselves lineal descendants from the Greeks, renewers of Greek art, champions of the fundamental laws laid down by Aristotle!

It was an ill day for them when they had mentioned Aristotle. To them, Aristotle was a fetish, ignorantly worshipped. To Lessing, he was a grand lawgiver, reverenced because understood. There are few things in all criticism equal to the clear-sighted analysis Lessing makes of the famous dictum of Aristotle as to the purifying influence wrought by tragedy through sympathy and fear, and his remorseless appli. cation of the results obtained to the tragedies of Corneille and Voltaire. He shows that the passions to be purified through sympathy and fear are "our sympathy and our fear themselves."

When we rise from a thoughtful reading of a "Hamlet" or a "Lear," we feel that we have been carried into the very depths of this mysterious drama of humanity, in which we ourselves are likewise sufferers and actors. The entrancing joys, the terrible vicissitudes, the insoluble problems, the dreads, the hopes, the whole circle of thoughts and events which come sweeping in upon the human soul in life itself, have been brought to bear upon us. Our sympathies and our fears alike have been educated and been purified. Were these first too cold, they have been set aglow; were they excessive, sentimental, weak, the eternal connection of justice and discipline with suffering has toned and braced them. Were our fears too sluggish, our sense of immunity from evil too rooted, the awful realities of life have inspired a salutary dread. Were they too ready to startle and unnerve us, we have been shown the real calamities which overtake man, and the limits that hedge them in; and have been brought face to face with the compensations which attend them. It is salutary for man to have his fears and sympathies thus wrought upon and modified. It links him in with the great common fate of his fellows, and shows him how to bear himself. A very different thing is this, as the dramatist's end, from a gross sensation aim at creating horror by a hideous medley of ghastly atrocities, incomprehensible crimes, earthquakes, eruptions, fire, and flood. Such work as this he may leave to the agents of " Accident-Insurance Companies," who, to quicken the sense of human vicissitude and induce the purchase of policies, think to compass their object by heaping together in a single picture, lit up by a glaring conflagration, a frightful railroad collision, a runaway stage-coach plunging over a precipice, an annihilating steamboat explosion, and a

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whelming avalanche of snow from a roof. The dramatist has one work to do; the "Police Gazette" or the "Terrific Register," another. Corneille and Voltaire failed to perceive this delicate distinction. They robbed other departments of their inherent rights. They bodily stole the electrician's prescriptive claim to make man's hair stand on end, and insisted that it belonged to the drama alone.

The Hamburg enterprise had come to wreck. Again was Lessing compelled to strike his tent, and wander forth into the world. He stood, worse than penniless, - in debt. The matchless papers which had dethroned such potent idols, and were to break the abject thraldom to France in which the nation stood, from Frederic on the throne to every scribbler in his garret, had brought their author nothing but detraction and ill-will. They had been widely read, but in pirated editions. In this sad juncture of affairs, he received a call to Wolfenbüttel, as Librarian to the Duke of Brunswick. The salary offered was only a wretched pittance; but promises of a better place and an ampler support were freely extended by the prince. It was a bitter thing to Lessing to give up his liberty, and enter into service; but to the stress of poverty now was added the stress of love. In Hamburg he had met the first woman that ever won his heart, - Madame Eva König; and for her he must build a home. In an unhappy hour he accepted the position. And now began the dark days of Lessing's life. Henceforth it was to be one long, heartrending tragedy. The prince was a hollow-hearted, shameless cheat. He wanted Lessing for the glory of having him; but he wanted the glory cheap. His money was for his pleas. ures and his mistresses; and other pay, the pay of broken pledges, must serve for the famous man.

All shapes of evil now accumulated on the head of Lessing, poverty, hope deferred making the heart sick, utter loneliness in wretched Wolfenbüttel, a malarious climate, which ruined his constitution, and made him a martyr to chills and rheumatism. The disordered condition in which the affairs of Eva König had been left by her former husband necessitated that she should spend years in weary journeyings to and fro, and

debarred all present hope of union. It is heart-rending to behold so grand a man for six long years plunged in such woes and humiliations. They are described with painful distinctness in the "Life of Lessing," and we are made to feel them in all their long-drawn anguish. And when at last a bright day dawns, and the two noble beings we have learned to love and venerate are united, it proves after all but a fitful gleam of sunshine. On Christmas Eve of the year 1776, his wife, to Lessing's unspeakable joy, bore him a son. In twenty-four hours the child was dead; and, in a few days, the mother followed. When anguish grows too oppressive to express itself through the common channels, it finds vent in strange and startling ways. To one who knows the human heart, could any serious language tell the tale of woe so movingly as these words, so full of the "wit of sorrow," he wrote to Eschenberg?

"I seize the moment, when my wife is lying senseless, to thank you for your kind sympathy. My joy was only short. And I was so sorry to lose him, this son; for he had so much sense! so much sense! Do not think that my few hours of fatherhood have already made me such an ape of a father. I know what I say. Did it not show his sense, that they were obliged to draw him into this world with forceps?-that he so soon became disgusted with his new abode? Was he not wise in seizing the first opportunity to make off again? Το be sure, the little hasty-head drags the mother also away with him; for there is little hope left that I shall save her. I wished, just for once, to prosper like other men; but it has fallen out badly for me."

And yet these years of sorrow and humiliation in Wolfenbüttel were full of enduring fruit. A tragedy, indeed, they were; but a tragedy which purifies every beholding soul, which forbids alike all emasculate sympathy and all craven fear. They were the years which witnessed the birth of Lessing's "Emilia Galotti," of "The Wolfenbüttel Fragments," of "The Controversy with Goeze," of "Nathan the Wise," of "The Education of the Human Race," - works full of an inspiration, a glow of beauty, a wit, a wisdom, a fire of passion, which awaken our amazement when we reflect against what

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