and the parlour were the home of Comedy, Tragedy was to be sought only in the throne-room-or, as Voltaire was bold enough to add, in the family vault -of princes.

In breaking through this convention, Lessing avowedly followed in the steps of Lillo.1 The inLessing and cidents of his play, together with some of Diderot. the names, were clearly suggested by Clarissa. The stream of English influence, which was to count so largely in the revival of the next fifty years, had already begun to flow; and Lessing, always alive to new currents of thought and imagination, was among the first to take advantage of it. He may, to some extent, have been anticipated by Gellert in his own country; but he had the far higher honour of forestalling Diderot across the border. Le Fils Naturel and Le Père de Famille, with the discourses on Dramatic Poetry attached to them, belong respectively to 1757 and 1758; while Lessing's Essay on Sentimental Comedy was published in 1754; and the Play which put a like theory into practice in the field of Tragedy had its first performance, as we have seen, in 1755. Lessing, however, was always forward to acknowledge the originality of Diderot, "the most philosophical of all critics since Aristotle"; and a translation of the great Frenchman's two Plays and Discourses was issued by him in 1760.

The conception of Miss Sara Sampson is far better than its execution. This is the last thing that could

1 George Barnwell, 1731.

be said of the author's next dramatic venture of Minna von importance. In Minna von Barnhelm Barnhelm. (1763-67) Lessing sprang at one bound. to the full height of his powers. His two later pieces may have aimed at more; but neither of them surpasses, one of them certainly does not equal, it in dramatic genius. Here he turns from the Tragedy of common life to what, in his mind as in Diderot's, was the kindred field of serious Comedy. The besetting sin of such Comedy is to lay itself out for a ceaseless flow of tears. To this danger Lessing, no less as dramatist than as critic, was keenly alive. And nothing in Minna is more remarkable than the unfailing instinct which preserves him from yielding to it. The one scene which must, if presented to the eye, have outstepped the bounds of comedy-the scene in which Minna believes herself to be forsaken by her lover -is, for this reason, merely a reported scene; and, still further to break its moving force, the report is made by the one person who stands entirely outside the emotional interest of the play. This, however, is merely a negative device. The salt of the piece lies in its abounding humour; not the superficial humour which depends on incident, but the far nobler and richer humour which flows from the deepest springs of character. The whole action. of the play is dominated by Minna; and in her resolute control of circumstance, in the zest with which she "reads her lesson" to the quixotic Major, she is perhaps the one heroine of modern Comedy

who is not unworthy to take place beside the women of Shakespeare.

Among the great qualities of the play, this is doubtless the greatest and the most abiding. But it has a further importance, as the earliest drama drawn from a purely national source. In the Litteraturbriefe, Lessing had assailed Gottsched for imposing French fashions upon the German stage. In preferring the English dramatists, he had assigned the specific ground that their way of thought was far more in accord with the genius of the German race than that of the French; and, after quoting a fragment from the old popular Faust, he had ended with a prayer "for a German Play composed solely of such scenes as this." In the widest sense-a sense certainly less literal than he would have given to the words at the moment-Minna von Barnhelm was the answer to that prayer. It paints the inmost heart and ideals of the nation-its fidelity, its honour, and perhaps something more than its humour. More than this, it is cut from the very quick of the popular movement of the time; it is born of the hopes and fears, of the misery and heroism, of the war which first wakened Germany to a faint consciousness that she too was a nation. In this connection Goethe, who cannot be suspected of laying too great a stress on either the - patriotic or the moral bearings of imaginative art, was the first to recognise its importance.

Five years after the performance of Minna, Emilia Galotti was produced at Brunswick (1772). The first conception of the play dates from 1758, or even

Emilia

earlier. And it is probable that in the interval the design had been more or less completely Galotti. recast. It was as "a Virginia of common life" that Lessing first thought of his heroine; and that is hardly a description that could be applied to her in the finished work. It is only by courtesy that Emilia can be called "a domestic tragedy"; in reality it is as far removed from any such partial and limited interest as it is possible for a tragedy to be. It embodies the pure, we might almost say the abstract, ideal of Tragedy which Lessing had worked out for himself, not without involun tary aid from Voltaire and Corneille, in the Hamburgische Dramaturgie. And it owes as little to the conditions of time, or place, or class, as Iphigenie or Hamlet. It is, in fact, a Greek tragedy in modern dress. The characters, the surroundings, belong to Lessing's own age; but the method which selects and orders them is that of Sophocles; or, as Lessing himself might have preferred to say, of Aristotle. The portraiture is more detailed, the incidents more romantic, than in the classical drama. But in simplicity, in compression, in closely knit dependence of action on character, Emilia is of all modern plays that which is most closely modelled on the Greek. Starting from the theme given in the story of Virginia, Lessing has deliberately stripped it of all save its purely human interest. The political motive, which was of the essence of the story in its original shape, is rejected from the first. The problem he set himself was this. Given that a father slays his daughter,

M

what characters and what circumstances are necessary to account for such a deed? The characters of the seducer and his accomplice left little room for hesitation; though the skill with which each is lifted above the conventionality almost inseparable from the part cannot sufficiently be admired. The real knot of the situation lay in the conception of the father and daughter. The father, austere and suspicious towards the outside world, jealously watchful over his own kin; the daughter, easily cowed by the first shock of danger, immovably resolute directly time has been given her to collect herself-" at once the most timid and the most determined of womankind," such are the characters whom the reckless selfishness of the Prince threatens with dishonour. And they are just the characters from which, when driven to despair, desperate deeds are to be expected. Yet, even so, Odoardo does not nerve himself to strike the blow until the cast-off mistress of the Prince, herself a triumph of dramatic portraiture, has goaded him to fury; until the craft of the Prince's pander has cut off all hope of Emilia's escape; until Emilia herself implores him to take her life as the only safeguard against shame. If any motive could prompt to so terrible a deed, if any circumstances could reconcile us to it, they must surely be such as these.

Emilia was a reversion, though a reversion such as only genius could make, to the stricter form of classical drama. In his next and last play, Lessing broke through all recognised forms and struck into a path where there

Nathan.