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 his public, but in the serious drama likewise (in which, however, he also played his part) in those Haupt- und Staatsactionen (high-matter-of-state-dramas), the plots of which were taken from the old stores of the English comedians, from the religious drama and its sources, and from the profane history of all times. The hero of this period is “Magister” J. Velthen (or Veltheim), who at the head of a company of players for a time entered the service of the Saxon court, and, by reproducing comedies of Molière and other writers, sought to restrain the licence which he had himself carried beyond all earlier precedent, but who had to fall back into the old ways and the old life. His career exhibits the climax of the efforts of the art of acting to stand alone; after his death (c. 1693) chaos ensues. The strolling companies, which now included actresses, continued to foster the popular love of the stage, and even under its most degraded form to uphold its national character against the rivalry of the opera, and that of the Italian commedia dell’ arte. From the latter was borrowed Harlequin, with whom Hans Wurst was blended, and who became a standing figure in every kind of popular play. He established his sway more especially at Vienna, where from about 1712 the first permanent German theatre was maintained. But for the actors in general there was little permanence, and amidst miseries of all sorts, and under the growing ban of clerical intolerance, the popular stage seemed destined to hopeless decay. A certain vitality of growth seems, under clerical guidance, to have characterized the plays of the people in Bavaria and parts of Austria.

The first endeavours to reform what had thus apparently passed beyond all reach of recovery were neither wholly nor generally successful; but this does not diminish the honour due to two names which should never be mentioned without respect in connexion with the history of the drama. Friederike Karoline Neuber’s (1697–1760) biography is the story of a long-continued effort which, notwithstanding errors and weaknesses, and though, so far as her personal fortunes were concerned, it ended in failure, may almost be described as heroic. As directress of a company of actors which from 1727 had its headquarters at Leipzig (hence the new school of acting is called the Leipzig school), she resolved to put an end to the formlessness of the existing stage, to separate tragedy and comedy, and to extinguish Harlequin. In this endeavour she was supported by the Leipzig professor J. Chr. Gottsched, who induced her to establish French tragedy and comedy as the sole models of the regular drama. Literature and the stage thus for the first time joined hands, and no temporary mischance or personal misunderstanding can obscure the enduring significance of the union. Not only were the abuses of a century swept away from a representative theatre, but a large number of literary works, designed for the stage, were produced on it. It is true that they were but versions or imitations from the French (or in the case of Gottsched’s Dying Cato from the French and English), and that at the moment of the regeneration of the German drama new fetters were thus imposed upon it, and upon the art of acting at the same time. But the impulse had been given, and the beginning made. On the one hand, men of letters began to subject their dramatic compositions to the test of performance; the tragedies and comedies of J. E. Schlegel, the artificial and sentimental comedies of Chr. F. Gellert and others, together with the vigorous popular comedies of the Danish dramatist Holberg, were brought into competition with translations from the French. On the other hand, the Leipzig school exercised a continuous effect upon the progress of the art of acting, and before long K. Ekhof began a career which made his art a fit subject for the critical study of scholars, and his profession one to be esteemed by honourable men.

Among the authors contributing to Mme. Neuber’s Leipzig enterprise had been a young student destined to complete, after a very different fashion and with very different aims, the work which she and Gottsched had begun. The critical genius of G. E. Lessing is peerless in its comprehensiveness, as in its keenness and depth; but if there was any branch of literature and art which by study and practice he made pre-eminently his own, it was that of the drama. As bearing upon the progress of the German theatre, his services to its literature, both critical and creative, can only be described as inestimable. The Hamburgische Dramaturgie, a series of criticisms of plays and (in its earlier numbers) of actors, was undertaken in furtherance of the attempt to establish at Hamburg the first national German theatre (1767–1769). This fact alone would invest these papers with a high significance; for, though the theatrical enterprise proved abortive, it established the principle upon which the progress of the theatre in all countries depends—that for the dramatic art the immediate theatrical public is no sufficient court of appeal. But the direct effect of the Dramaturgie was to complete the task which Lessing had in previous writings begun, and to overthrow the dominion of the arbitrary French rules and the French models established by Gottsched. Lessing vindicated its real laws to the drama, made clear the difference between the Greeks and their would-be representatives, and established the claims of Shakespeare as the modern master of both tragedy and comedy. His own dramatic productivity was cautious, tentative, progressive. His first step was, by his Miss Sara Sampson (1755), to oppose the realism of the English domestic drama to the artificiality of the accepted French models, in the forms of which Chr. F. Weisse (1726–1804) was seeking to treat the subjects of Shakespearian plays. Then, in his Minna von Barnhelm (1767), which owed something to Farquhar, he essayed a national comedy drawn from real life, and appealing to patriotic sentiments as well as to broad human sympathies. It was written in prose (like Miss Sara Sampson), but in form held a judicious mean between French and English examples.

The note sounded by the criticisms of Lessing met with a ready response, and the productivity displayed by the nascent dramatic literature of Germany is astonishing, both in the efforts inspired by his teachings and in those which continued to controvert or which aspired to transcend them. On the stage, Harlequin and his surroundings proved by no means easy to suppress, more especially at Vienna, the favourite home of frivolous amusement; but even here a reform was gradually effected, and, under the intelligent rule of the emperor Joseph II., a national stage grew into being. The mantle of Ekhof fell upon the shoulders of his eager younger rival, F. L. Schröder, who was the first to domesticate Shakespeare upon the German stage. In dramatic literature few of Lessing’s earlier contemporaries produced any works of permanent value, unless the religious dramas of F. G. Klopstock—a species in which he had been preceded by J. J. Bodmer—and the patriotic Bardietten of the same author be excepted. S. Gessner, J. W. L. Gleim, and G. K. Pfeffel (1736–1809) composed pastoral plays. But a far more potent stimulus prompted the efforts of the younger generation. The translation of Shakespeare, begun in 1762 by C. M. Wieland, whose own plays possess no special significance, and completed in 1775 by Eschenburg, which furnished the text for many of Lessing’s criticisms, helps to mark an epoch in German literature. Under the influence of Shakespeare, or of their conceptions of his genius, arose a youthful group of writers who, while worshipping their idol as the representative of nature, displayed but slight anxiety to harmonize their imitations of him with the demands of art. The notorious Ugolino of H. W. von Gerstenberg seemed a premonitory sign that the coming flood might merely rush back to the extravagances and horrors of the old popular stage; and it was with a sense of this danger in prospect that Lessing in his third important drama, the prose tragedy Emilia Galotti (1772), set the example of a work of incomparable nicety in its adaptation of means to end. But successful as it proved, it could not stay the excesses of the Sturm und Drang period