This he knew well enough himself. Further, it is clear that his dramas, like his epigrams and fables, are consciously worked out on the basis of pre-established principles. But does it follow from this that they are to be regarded as mere grammatical exercises, added in order to illustrate general rules? This question raises interesting problems respecting the nature of poetic invention, and of its connection with reflection. Into these we cannot here enter. We may assume that good poetry, even if not the best, has been produced by this reflective kind of work, and the question is reduced to the form : "Are Lessing's dramas real works of art?" Of these dramas only three claim our attention, viz., Minna von Barnhelm, Emilia Galotti, and Nathan the Wise. Of these, the first and last at least have, so far, held a distinguished place on the German stage. If Lessing had never written anything but Minna von Barnhelm, he would have proved himself a dramatist of no mean order. This delightful comedy, though strictly related, as Goethe observes, to the circumstances of the time of its production, is now as fresh and impressive as when it was written. To see it well put on the German stage is one of the intellectual treats of a visit to Germany. The action is quick and stimulating, the plot sufficiently intricate and clearly developed, and the dialogue crisp and bright. It may bear comparison with some of the best English comedies of the last century. The character of Minna herself has at once the charm of Shakspeare's Portia and of Goldsmith's Miss Hardcastle; she is sensible, dignified, and admirable, yet, at the same time, gaily mischievous; and the other characters, Tellheim, Just, &c., are excellently portrayed. There is in this play no trace of an effort to construct according to fixed rule: it flows on spontaneously and is alive with true poetic inspiration. With Emilia von Galotti the case is different. Here we have a modern tragedy consciously thought out in relation to the different conditions of ancient and of modern life. And the effect is decidedly a lame one. It has, no doubt, many excellences, upon which Lessing's apologist, Adolf Stahr, expands. But it lacks the characteristic excellence of modern tragedy, the presence of an unmistakable element of necessity binding together the various parts of the action and the resulting catastrophe. The best critics will hold against Stahr that the motive of the play is essentially classic, and wholly out of place in a modern tragedy. Emilia's fear-which has puzzled every critic from Goethe onwards-remains unintelligible, and yet it is only this which necessitates the closing bloody act. Both Mr. Sime and Miss Zimmern clearly point out these defects of the play. There remains Nathan the Wise, a dramatic poem, written with the express purpose of setting forth a moral idea, in which dialogue preponderates over incident, and of which the dénoûment is uniformly condemned as prosaic and dissatisfying. What shall be said of it? Does not Lessing here fly in the face of his own principles and subordinate art to morality? A distinction must be drawn between inculcating a moral truth and embodying a moral idea. In Nathan the Wise Lessing does the latter, and not the former. His aim is to present a perfect ideal embodiment of the spirit of toleration. Is it legitimate to make the presentation of a beautiful character the aim of a drama? Everything is right in art which produces a satisfying impression, and judged in this way, Nathan the Wise is a powerful drama. Whoever has seen this noble character adequately represented, as, for example, by the veteran Döhring of Berlin, will admit that we have in this poem the material of a worthy dramatic impression. Art, Lessing tells us, may and should moralise us, though this ought not to be its ruling intention; and whoever reads, or better, sees Nathan the Wise, must be elevated in spirit by the communion with this wise and noble-hearted Jew. The Germans love this drama, and place it beside Faust as one of their two finest classics. Their estimate of its worth is confirmed by the judgment of more than one foreign nation. In the face of such evidence we may be sure that it is a genuine work of art, however difficult it may be to make it fit into our ordinary classifications. In Nathan the Wise the diverging streams of Lessing's intellectual activity become reunited. It is the joint product of poetic impulse, critical reflection, and theological and philosophical thought. In this ideal character we have the ripest fruit of Lessing's intellectual and moral nature. In the clear-sighted Jew, with his wide knowledge of man, his calm self-restraint, his large charity, his reverence for our essential humanity as distinguished from its accidental forms, in this Nathan, who stands out from and overtops his narrow-minded race, Lessing might almost be said to give us unwittingly an enlarged image of himself as he appears against the background of a narrow and unappreciative age. 207 Orpheus and Eurydice. THE LESSON OF A BAS-RELIEF. NO GREEK myth has a greater charm for our mind than that of Orpheus and Eurydice. In the first place, we are told by mythologists that it is a myth of the dawn, one of those melancholy, subdued interpretations of the eternal, hopeless separation of the beautiful light of dawn and the beautiful light of day, which forms the constantly recurring tragedy of nature, as the tremendous struggle between light and darkness forms her never-ending epic, her Iliad and Nibelungenlied. There is more of the purely artistic element in these myths of the dawn than in the sun myths. Those earliest poets, primitive peoples, were interested spectators of the great battle between day and night. The sun-hero was truly their Achilles, their Siegfried. In fighting, he fought for them. When he chained up the powers of darkness the whole earth was hopeful and triumphant; when he sank down dead, a thousand dark, vague, hideous monsters were let loose on the world, filling men's hearts with sickening terror; the solar warfare was waged for and against men. The case is quite different with respect to the dawn tragedy. If men were moved by that it was from pure, disinterested sympathy. The dawn and the day were equally good and equally beautiful; the day loved the dawn, since it pursued her so closely, and the dawn must have loved the day in return, since she fled so slowly and reluctantly. Why, then, were they forbidden ever to meet? What mysterious fate condemned the one to die at the touch of the other-the beloved to elude the lover, the lover to kill the beloved? This sad, sympathising question, which the primitive peoples repeated vaguely and perhaps scarce consciously, day after day, century after century, at length received an answer. One answer, then another, then yet another, as fancy took more definite shapes. Yes, the dawn and the morning are a pair of lovers over whom hangs an irresistible, inscrutable fate-Cephalus and Procris, Alcestis and Admetus, Orpheus and Eurydice. And this myth of Orpheus and Eurydice is to our mind the most charming of the tales born of that beautiful, disinterested sympathy for the dawn and the morning, the one in which the subdued, mysterious pathos of its origin is most perfectly preserved, in which no fault of infidelity or jealousy, no final remission of doom, breaks the melancholy unity of the story. In it we have the real equivalent of that gentle, melancholy fading away of light into light, of tint into tint. Orpheus loses Eurydice as the day loses the dawn, because he loves her; she has issued from Hades as the dawn has issued from darkness; she melts away beneath her lover's look even as the dawn vanishes beneath the look of the day. The origin of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice is beautiful; the myth itself, as evolved by spontaneous poetry, is still more so, and more beautiful still are the forms which have successively been lent it by the poet, the sculptor and the musician. Its own charm adds to that of its embodiments, and the charm of its embodiments adds in return to its own, a complete circle of beautiful impressions, whose mysterious, linked power it is impossible to withstand. The first link in the chain are those lines of Virgil's, for which we would willingly give ten neids, those grandly simple lines, half hidden in the sweet luxuriance of the fourth book of the Georgics, as the exquisitely chiselled fragment of some sylvan altar might lie half hidden among the long grasses and flowers, beneath the flowering bays and dark ilexes, broken shadows of boughs and yellow gleams of sunlight flickering fantastically across the clear and supple forms of the sculptured marble: Jamque pedem referens casus evaserat omnes, ... Immemor, heu! victusque animi respexit . . . Ibi omnis Foedera terque fragor stagnis auditus Avernis. Illa: Quis et me, inquit, miseram, et te perdidit, Orpheu, Prensantem nequidquam umbras, et multa volentem These lines suggest a bas-relief to us, because a real bas-relief is really connected with them in our mind, and this connection led to a curious little incident in our æsthetic life which is worth narrating. The bas-relief in question is a sufficiently obscure piece of Greek workmanship, one of those mediocre, much degraded works of art with which Roman galleries abound, and among which, though left unnoticed by the crowd that gathers round the Apollo, or the Augustus, or the Discobolus, we may sometimes divine a repetition of some great lost work of antiquity, some feeble reflection of lost perfection. It is let into the wall of a hall of the Villa Albani, where people throng past it in search of the rigid, pseudoAttic Antinous. And it is as simple as the verses of Virgil: merely three figures slightly raised out of the flat, blank background, Eurydice between Orpheus and Hermes. The three figures stand distinctly apart and in a row. Orpheus touches Eurydice's veil, and her hand rests on his shoulder, while the other hand, drooping supine, is grasped by Hermes. There is no grouping, no embracing, no violence of gesturenay, scarcely any gesture at all; yet for us there is in it a whole drama, the whole pathos of Virgil's lines. Eurydice has returned, she is standing beneath our sun-jam luce sub ipsa-but for the last time. Orpheus lets his lyre sink, his head drooping towards her-multa volens dicereand holds her veil, speechless. Eurydice, her head slightly bent, raises her eyes full upon him. In that look is her last long farewell : Jamque vale, feror ingenti circumdata nocte, Invalidas tibi tendens, heu! non tua, palmas. Behind Eurydice stands Hermes, the sad though youthful messenger of the dead. He gently takes her hand; it is time; he would fain stay and let the parting be delayed for ever, but he cannot. Come, we must go. Eurydice feels it; she is looking for the last time at Orpheus, her head and step are prepared to turn away-jamque vale. Truly this sad, sympathising messenger of Hades is a beautiful thought, softening the horror of the return to death. And we look up again at the bas-relief, the whole story of Orpheus laying firmer hold of our imagination; but as our eyes wander wistfully over the marble they fall for the first time upon a scrap of paper pasted at the bottom of it, a wretched, unsightly, scarce legible rag, such as insult some of the antiques in this gallery, and on it is written : Antiope coi figli Anfione e Zeto. A sudden, perplexed wonder fills our mind-wonder succeeded by amusement. The bunglers, why they must have glued the wrong label on the basrelief. Of course! and we turn out the number of the piece in the cata logue, the solemn, portly catalogue, full of references to Fea, and Visconti, and Winckelmann. Number-yes, here it is, here it is. What, again? Antiope urging her sons, Amphion and Zethus, to avenge her by the mur'er of Dirce. We put down the catalogue in considerable disgust. What, they don't see that that is Orpheus and Eurydice! They dare, those soulless pedants, to call that Antiope with Amphion and Zethus! Ah!—and with smothered indignation we leave the gallery. Passing through the little ilex copse near the villa, the colossal bust of Winckelmann meets our eyes, the heavy, clear-featured, strong-browed head of him who first revealed the world of ancient art. And such profanation goes on, as it were, under his eyes, in that very Villa Albani which he so loved, where he first grew intimate with the antique! What would he have said to such heartless obtuseness? We have his great work, the work which no amount of additional learning can ever supersede, because no amount of additional learning will ever enable us to feel antique beauty more keenly and profoundly than he did we have his great work on our shelf, and as soon as we are back at home, our mind still working on Orpheus and Eurydice, we take it down and search for a reference to our bas-relief. We search all through the index in vain; then turn over the pages where it may possibly be VOL. XXXVIII.-NO. 224. 11. |