Laokoon, and How the Ancients Represented Death

Excerpt from Laokoon, and How the Ancients Represented Death

Though there is no writer whose works may be more advantageously studied as a whole than Lessing's, there are few of equal importance who are known in this country in so partial and fragmentary a manner. Various translations of 'Nathan der Weise' and 'Minna von Barnhelm' have, it is true, exhibited him fairly enough as a dramatist of pure style, refined humour, and liberal thought; at the same time another class of readers has had more than one opportunity of studying the treatise on the 'Laokoon,' and admiring his vigorous and suggestive style of criticism and wide scholarship, which must always give it a literary interest whatever substantial value may be assigned to it. But such an acquaintance with isolated pieces hardly allows a reader to estimate their real value, and still less does it afford him an opportunity of co-ordinating the positions of Lessing the dramatist and Lessing the critic, and forming any definite notion of his true place in literary history. To do so demands in any case some general knowledge of German literature, but whilst Goethe and Schiller have become duly appreciated in this country, their great precursor has, amongst general readers, been little more than a name to those who were even so far acquainted with him.

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