Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 100.djvu/147

Rh carried on with signal success, although the critics abased one another with a licence quite "tolerable and not to be endured." In 1766 appeared the famous treatise on the limits of poetry and painting, "Laokoon," which Lessing calls, in one of his epistles, a "mingle-mangle of pedantry and crotchets." The excellence of his prose was the result of intelligent and painstaking study of his native language, combined with a natural aptitude for lucid style, quite remarkable in a bonâ fide German. He applied himself to a grammatical analysis of die deutsche Sprache, and took especial interest in collecting striking expressions and graphic epithets, from the pages of old authors, to enrich his own writings and the current value of his mother-tongue. Hence his renown as the revivifying genius of modern German literature (der erweckende Genius der neuen deutschen Literatur), while Klopstock is similarly honoured as awakening poesy to new and sublime life by the tones of his musical pathos.

While acting as librarian at Wolfenbüttel, under the Duke of Brunswick's patronage, Lessing published those "Contributions to Literary History," among which occur the notorious "Fragments," ever memorable in tracing the antecedents of neology and religious rationalism. The extensive collection of manuscripts to which, ex officio, he had access, provided him with the materials for this eventful publication. The "Fragmente eines Ungenannten" comprise various tneological essays, all tending more or less to "throw doubts upon the facts of Scripture and the veracity of the Evangelists," and "bolstered up by an array of quotations from German theologians in support of his positions," The accompanying series of treatises discuss such topics as these: the denunciation or Reason from the pulpit; the impossibility of a Revelation on which all men can found a reasonable belief; the passage of the Israelites through the Red Sea; the history of the Resurrection, &c. It is now decided, according to Hagenbach, that Lessing was not the actual author, but only the editor, of these works, which are generally ascribed to Reimarus. Violent was the ferment created in the clerical world by this theological "yeast." Lessing's bitterest opponent was the pastor Götze, of Hamburg; but in the mêlée which ensued, great was the company of the preachers; and it is, in fact, to their tortuous apologetics and system of compromise that the French historian of rationalism attributes the real origin of the evil. In 1778, the continuance of the "Contributions" was prohibited by authority. But within two years a new duke. Prince Leopold, succeeded to the government of Brunswick; and then Lessing, his favourite, who had just been denounced on all sides as an antichristian monster, an impious Atheist, was "whitewashed into a teacher of forbearance, a patron of equity, and an apostle of liberality," —because it was seen that his