Nathan the Wise; a dramatic poem in five acts. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

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      Nathan the Wise; a dramatic poem in five acts

      INTRODUCTION

      Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was born on the 22nd of January, 1729, eldest of ten sons of a pious and learned minister of Camenz in the Oberlausitz, who had two daughters also.  As a child Lessing delighted in books, and had knowledge beyond his years when he went to school, in Meissen, at the age of twelve.  As a school-boy he read much Greek and Latin that formed no part of the school course; read also the German poets of his time, wrote a “History of Ancient Mathematics,” and began a poem of his own on the “Plurality of Worlds.”

      In 1746, at the age of seventeen, Lessing was sent to the University of Leipsic.  There he studied with energy, and was attracted strongly by the theatre.  His artistic interest in the drama caused him to be put on the free list of the theatre, in exchange for some translations of French pieces.  Then he produced, also for the Leipsic stage, many slight pieces of his own, and he had serious thought of turning actor, which excited alarm in the parsonage at Camenz and caused his recall home in January, 1747.  It was found, however, that although he could not be trained to follow his father’s profession, he had been studying to such good purpose, and developing, in purity of life, such worth of character, that after Easter he was sent back to Leipsic, with leave to transfer his studies from theology to medicine.

      Lessing went back, continued to work hard, but still also gave all his leisure to the players.  For the debts of some of them he had incautiously become surety, and when the company removed to Vienna, there were left behind them unpaid debts for which young Lessing was answerable.  The creditors pressed, and Lessing moved to Wittenberg; but he fell ill, and was made so miserable by pressure for impossible payments, that he resolved to break off his studies, go to Berlin, and begin earning by his pen, his first earnings being for the satisfaction of these Leipsic creditors.  Lessing went first to Berlin to seek his fortune in December, 1748, when he was nineteen years old.  He was without money, without decent clothes, and with but one friend in Berlin, Mylius, who was then editing a small journal, the Rudigersche Zeitung.  Much correspondence brought him a little money from the overburdened home, and with addition of some small earning from translations, this enabled him to obtain a suit of clothes, in which he might venture to present himself to strangers in his search for fortune.  A new venture with Mylius, a quarterly record of the history of the theatre, was not successful; but having charge committed to him of the library part of Mylius’s journal, Lessing had an opportunity of showing his great critical power.  Gottsched, at Leipsic, was then leader of the war on behalf of classicism in German literature.  Lessing fought on the National side, and opposed also the beginning of a new French influence then rising, which was to have its chief apostle in Rousseau.

      In 1752 Lessing went back to Wittenberg for another year, that he might complete the work for graduation; graduated in December of that year as Master of Arts, and then returned to his work in Berlin.  He worked industriously, not only as critic, but also in translation from the classics, from French, English, and Italian; and he was soon able to send help towards providing education for the youngest of the household of twelve children in the Camenz parsonage.  In 1753 he gave himself eight weeks of withdrawal from other work to write, in a garden-house at Potsdam, his tragedy of “Miss Sarah Sampson.”  It was produced with great success at Frankfort on the Oder, and Lessing’s ruling passion for dramatic literature became the stronger for this first experience of what he might be able to achieve.  In literature, Frederick the Great cared only for what was French.  A National drama, therefore, could not live in Berlin.  In the autumn of 1755, Lessing suddenly moved to Leipsic, where an actor whom he had befriended was establishing a theatre.  Here he was again abandoning himself to the cause of a National drama, when a rich young gentleman of Leipsic invited his companionship upon a tour in Europe.  Terms were settled, and they set out together.  They saw much of Holland, and were passing into England, when King Frederick’s attack on Saxony recalled the young Leipsiger, and caused breach of what had been a contract for a three years’ travelling companionship.  In May, 1758, Lessing, aged twenty-nine, returned to his old work in Berlin.  Again he translated, edited, criticised.  He wrote a tragedy, “Philotas,” and began a “Faust.”  He especially employed his critical power in “Letters upon the Latest Literature,” known as his Literatur briefe.  Dissertations upon fable, led also to Lessing’s “Fables,” produced in this period of his life.

      In 1760 Lessing was tempted by scarcity of income to serve as a Government secretary at Breslau.  He held that office for five years, and then again returned to his old work in Berlin.  During the five years in Breslau, Lessing had completed his play of “Minna von Barnhelm,” and the greatest of his critical works, “Laocoon,” a treatise on the “Boundary Lines of Painting and Poetry.”  All that he might then have saved from his earnings went to the buying of books and to the relief of the burdens in the Camenz parsonage.  At Berlin the office of Royal Librarian became vacant.  The claims of Lessing were urged, but Frederick appointed an insignificant Frenchman.  In 1767 Lessing was called to aid an unsuccessful attempt to establish a National Theatre in Hamburg.

      Other troubles followed.  Lessing gave his heart to a widow, Eva König, and was betrothed to her.  But the involvements of her worldly affairs, and of his, delayed the marriage for six years.  To secure fixed income he took a poor office as Librarian at Wolfenbüttel.  In his first year at Wolfenbüttel, he wrote his play of “Emilia Galotti.”  Then came a long-desired journey to Italy; but it came in inconvenient form, for it had to be made with Prince Leopold, of Brunswick, hurriedly, for the sake of money, at the time when Lessing was at last able to marry.

      The wife, long waited for, and deeply loved, died at the birth of her first child.  This was in January, 1778, when Lessing’s age was 49.  Very soon afterwards he was attacked by a Pastor Goeze, in Hamburg, and other narrow theologians, for having edited papers that contained an attack on Christianity, which Lessing himself had said that he wished to see answered before he died.  The uncharitable bitterness of these attacks, felt by a mind that had been touched to the quick by the deepest of sorrows, helped to the shaping of Lessing’s calm, beautiful lesson of charity, this noblest of his plays—“Nathan the Wise.”  But Lessing’s health was shattered, and he survived his wife only three years.  He died in 1781, leaving imperishable influence for good upon the minds of men, but so poor in what the world calls wealth, that his funeral had to be paid for by a Duke of Brunswick.

      William Taylor, the translator of Lessing’s “Nathan the Wise;” was born in 1765, the son of a rich merchant at Norwich, from whose business he was drawn away by his strong bent towards literature.  His father yielded to his wishes, after long visits to France and to Germany, in days astir with the new movements of thought, that preceded and followed the French Revolution.  He formed a close friendship with Southey, edited for a little time a “Norwich Iris,” and in his later years became known especially for his Historic Survey of German Poetry, which included his translations, and among them this of “Nathan the Wise.”  It was published in 1830, Taylor died in 1836.  Thomas Carlyle, in reviewing William Taylor’s Survey of German Poetry, said of the author’s own translations in it “compared with the average of British translations, they may be pronounced of almost ideal excellence; compared with the best translations extant, for example, the German Shakespeare, Homer, Calderon, they may still be called better than indifferent.  One great merit Mr. Taylor has: rigorous adherence to his original; he endeavours at least to copy with all possible fidelity the term of praise, the tone, the very metre, whatever stands written for him.”

      “Introite nam et heic Dii sunt!”—Apud Gellium.