As modern life was most perfectly developed in France under Louis XIV., so the new classic poetry received there its most finished perfection, and, in a measure, an independent originality.  Through the political influence of that great king this poetry spread over Europe; in Italy, its home, it assumed a French color, and thence the heroes of French tragedy went with the Anjous to Spain; it passed with Henrietta Maria to England, and we Germans, as a matter of course, built our clumsy temples to the powdered Olympus of Versailles.  The most famous high-priest of this religion was Gottsched, that wonderful long wig whom our dear Goethe has so admirably described in his memoirs.

Lessing was the literary Arminius who delivered our theatre from this foreign rule.  He showed us the nothingness, the laughableness, the flat and faded folly of those imitations of the French theatre, which were in turn imitated from the Greek.  But he became the founder of modern German literature, not only by his criticism, but by his own works of art.  This man pursued with enthusiasm and sincerity art, theology, antiquity, and archaeology, the art of poetry, history—­all with the same zeal and to the same purpose.  There lives and breathes in all his works the same great social idea, the same progressive humanity, the same religion of reason, whose John he was, and whose Messiah we await.  This religion he always preached, but, alas! too often alone and in the desert.  And there was one art only of which he knew nothing—­that of changing stones into bread, for he consumed the greatest part of his life in poverty and under hard pressure—­a curse which clings to nearly all great German geniuses, and will last, it may be, till ended by political freedom.  Lessing was more inspired by political feelings than men supposed, a peculiarity which we do not find among his contemporaries, and we can now see for the first time what he meant in sketching the duo-despotism in Emilia Galotti.  He was regarded then as a champion of freedom of thought and against clerical intolerance; for his theological writings were better understood.  The fragments On the Education of the Human Race, which Eugene Rodrigue has translated into French, may give an idea of the vast comprehensiveness of Lessing’s mind.  The two critical works which exercised the most influence on art are his Hamburg Dramatic Art (Hamburgische Dramaturgie), and his Laokoon, or the Limits of Painting and Poetry.  His most remarkable theatrical pieces are Emilia Galotti, Minna von Barnhelm, and Nathan the Wise.

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was born at Camenz in Lausitz, January 22, 1729, and died in Brunswick, February 15, 1781.  He was a thorough-going man who, when he destroyed something old in a battle, at the same time always created something new and better.  “He was,” says a German author, “like those pious Jews, who, during the second building of the Temple, were often troubled by attacks of the enemy, and so fought with one hand while with the other they worked at the house of God.”  This is not the place where I can say more of Lessing, but I cannot refrain from remarking that he is, of all who are recorded in the whole history of literature, the writer whom I love best.