It is scarcely to be wondered at that Winckelmann's reference to Virgil, but especially his reference to Philoctetes, should have provoked challenge from Lessing. Lessing says:

I confess, the depreciating side-glance which he [Winckelmann] throws at Virgil, first caused me to doubt; and then the comparison with Philoctetes.

"Laocoön suffers like the Philoctetes of Sophocles." How does this character suffer? It is singular that his suffering should have left such a different impression upon our minds. The complaints, the screams, the wild execrations with which his pain filled the camp, interrupting the sacrifices and all solemn acts, sounded not less terribly through the desert island. They were the cause of his being banished thither. What tones of impatience, of misery, of despair! The poet made the theatre resound with his imitation of them.

Lessing agrees with Winckelmann that the sculptor's Laocoön does not exhibit the violent demonstration of pain which might have been expected. He agrees further with Winckelmann that the artist's moderation was wise. As to why it was wise, he differs with Winckelmann. Vehement expression under bodily pain, he contends, is perfectly natural even for heroes. He goes to Homer for proof :

...

Homer's wounded warriors fall, not seldom, with a cry to the ground. Notwithstanding that Homer elevates his heroes so far above human nature in some things, they always remain true to it when it comes to the feeling of pain or affront, and to the expression of that feeling by cries or tears, or by railing. In their deeds they are beings of a higher order; but in their sensations they are veritable men.

If, by this time, some of our readers are thinking that the standard of heroic fortitude under suffering must be different for Germans (as well as for Greek) from that which generally holds for Englishmen and Americans, we cannot say that they are wrong. Robert Hall, after a paroxysm of exquisite anguish from spinal disease, says, "O, I suffered terribly, but I did not complain while I was suffering, did I? Did I complain?" Goethe, in sickness, cried out so with violent pain that the guard at the gate of the city heard him. And Goethe is praised for remarkable self-control.

The Greek tragedists also, Lessing makes his witnesses,

taking occasion to have, by the way, his slant at the French teachers of false, artificial decorum in literature:

It is worthy of note, that among the few tragedies that have come down to us from antiquity, there are two in which bodily pain constitutes not the least part of the misery with which the hero suffers; the Philoctetes and the Dying Hercules. The latter, also, like the former, is represented by Sophocles as wailing, moaning, weeping, and crying. Thanks to our decent neighbors [the French], those masters of propriety, a howling Philoctetes, a crying Hercules, would now be most ridiculous and intolerable characters on the stage.

Lessing's induction done, he comes to his inference. He says:

And now I come to my inference. If it is true that cries, under the infliction of bodily pain-more especially according to the old Greek view of the subject—are perfectly consistent with greatness of soul; then the desire of representing such a soul cannot be the reason why the artist was nevertheless unwilling to imitate those cries in his marble. On the contrary, there must be some other reason why, in this particular, he departs from his rival, the poet, who expresses these cries with the most deliberate intention.

So much for Lessing's first chapter, condensed.

In his second chapter, Lessing proceeds to a quest of that true reason for the sculptor's abstaining from violent expression in marble, which he thinks Winckelmann had missed. Coutrasting ancient with modern art, he says:

"Who would wish to paint thee, since no one likes to look upon thee?" said the ancient epigrammatist, of a very deformed person. Many a modern artist would say: "Be thou as deformed as it is possible to be, I will paint thee notwithstanding. Though no one loves to look upon thee, yet shall men look with pleasure on my painting, not because it represents thee, but as a proof of my art which knows how to copy such a scarecrow so accurately."

From certain discursive illustrations of his point he returns to say, with the most admirably suggestive criticism:

But I wander out of my way. I only wished to establish this point, that, with the ancients, beauty was the highest law of the plastic arts. And, this point established, it follows necessarily that every thing else, to which the plastic arts might likewise extend, must yield alto.

gether where it was found incompatible with beauty; and where it was compatible with: beauty must, at least, be subordinated to that.

Now, applying this to the Laocoön, we see clearly the reason which I am seeking. The master labored for the highest beauty possible under the given conditions of bodily pain. Bodily pain, in all its deforming vehemence, was incompatible with that beauty. It was necessary, therefore, that he should reduce it-that he should soften cries into sighs. Not because crying betrays an ignoble soul, but because it disfigures the countenance in a manner which is disgusting, Do but tear open the mouth of Laocoön, in imagination, and judge! Let him scream, and see! Before, it was a creation which inspired compassion, because it united pain with beauty. Now, it has become an unsightly, an abominable creation, from which we are fain to turn away our faces, because the sight of pain awakens displeasure, and that displeasure is not converted into the sweet sentiment of pity by the beauty of the suffering object. With two additional extracts from this luminous and illuminating essay of Lessing's, we bring our citations to a close. The first of the two is found in the third chapter. No thoughtful reader will fail to see that in these pregnant paragraphs there speaks a consummate master of criticismof criticism in the highest and most generous sense of that word:

Since the artist can use but one moment of ever-changing nature, and the painter, more especially, can use that moment only from a single point of view; and since their works are made, not to be seen merely, but to be contemplated, and to be contemplated repeatedly and long, it is evident that, in the selection of that single moment and that single point of view, too much care cannot be had to choose the most fruitful. But only that is fruitful which gives the imagination full play. The more we see, the more we must be able to imagine, and the more we imagine, the more we must think we see. Now, in the whole course of a passion, there is no one moment which possesses this advantage in so slight a degree as the climax of that passion. There is nothing beyond it; and to exhibit to the eye the uttermost, is to bind the wings of imagination, and to compel her, since she is unable to exceed the sensible impres sion, to occupy herself with feebler images, below that impression—shunning, as limitation, the visible fullness expressed.

In the words which we have italicized, Lessing, usually the embodiment of good sense and self-possession, seems to us to run, for a moment, into something very like mere empti

ness and quiddity. Is not the harm done by climax in artistic expression rather this, that it dulls the imagination by leaving it nothing to add, than that it forces the imagination to employ itself with conceptions inferior to the climax already expressed?

We resume our interrupted extract:

Further, since this single moment receives from art an unchangeable duration, it should express nothing that can be conceived only as transient. ... La Metrie, who caused himself to be painted and engraved as a second Democritus, laughs but the first time he is seen. If we look at him often, the philosopher becomes a buffoon, and the laugh changes to a grin. So of cries. The violent pain which extorts the cry is either soon relieved, or else it destroys the sufferer. Although, therefore, a man of the greatest patience and fortitude may cry, he does not cry unceasingly. And it is only this appearance of perpetuity in the material imitations of art, that makes his crying seem like feminine impotence or like childish petulance. This at least, the author of the Laocoön was bound to avoid, even though the act of crying were not incompatible with beauty, or though his art would allow him to express suffering without beauty.

In the second extract, our last, taken from his fourth chapter, Lessing reaches his justification of that descriptive passage in Virgil, which Winckelmann had impliedly condemned. He does so by defining the proper province of the poet, that artist in words, as distinguished from the provinces of the painter and the sculptor, those artists in color and form. He says:

The poet is not required to concentrate his sketch into a single moment. He can, if he pleases, take each action at its origin and carry it through to its termination. Each of those variations, which would cost the painter a separate picture, costs him but a single stroke. And though this one stroke, in itself considered, might offeud the imagination of the hearer, it is so well prepared by what preceded, or so qualified and compensated by what follows, that it loses its individuality, and, taken in connection with the rest, produces the most charming effect.

Who, then, will reproach him [Virgil]? Who will not rather confess that, if the artist did well not to represent Laocoon as crying, the great poet did equally well to let him cry?

We wish we had room for some specimen passages from Lessing's essay on The Education of the Human Race. This

little treatise is probably to be regarded as the starting-point, indeed as the fountain-head, of German free-thinking in theology. Lessing was essentially a free-thinker, not only in the good, but also in the technical bad, sense of the expression.

There is no sentence of Lessing's more characteristic of the man, as none more universally familiar in quotation, than his really proud, though formally humble, declaration contained in the following words:

If God should hold all truth inclosed in his right hand, and in his left only the ever-active impulse to the pursuit of truth, although with the condition that I should always and forever err, and should say to me, "Choose!" I should fall with submission upon his left hand, and say, "Father, give! Pure truth is for thee alone!"

Famous words, and words worthy of their fame! But surely they bespeak, not so much the man who loves truth supremely, as the man who supremely loves intellectual activity.

V.

WIELAND.

1733-1813.

Or all the most celebrated writers of Germany, the writer least celebrated among English - speakers is undoubtedly Wieland. Equally undoubted is another curious, a seemingly incongruous, fact. Wieland is the author of a poem, of which, despite a certain grave inextricable fault involved, it may be affirmed that it is, by eminence, of all the poetic productions of German genius-considerable in length and not dramatic-the one poem best fitted to interest and to please the English-reading public. The singularity of the case is increased by the circumstance, that of this exceptional poem of Wieland's there exists, and there has long existed in English, a version scarcely less charming than the charming original. To carry the paradox to its height, there was formerly a time when Wieland's Oberon-for such is the title