LES'SING, Gm-mow EPHRAIM (1729-81). A German critic and dramatist, born at Kamenz, January 22, 1729; the earliest of the great Ger man classical writers. More than any other, Leasing reformed German literature. His father, pastor at Kamenz, gave hint his early instruction, and sent him to a famous school at Meissen, where he learned so rapidly that by royal decree he was admitted at seventeen to the University of Leipzig. Here his sturdy nature almost im mediately asserted itself against the smug plati tudes of the Leipzig critics. "I realized," he wrote at this time, "that books might make me learned, hut would never make me a man. T sought society to learn life." He took lessons in dancing, fencing, riding, translated French plays for free theatre tickets, and thus he learned stage technique. In 1747 he printed a little volume of anacreontie verse, and in 1748 pro duced a juvenile play. Der junge Gelehrte. Then, assuring his disappointed father that he 'could become a preacher any day,' be left the theologi cal faculty and entered the school of medicine. Soon afterwards (1748) he left Leipzig for Wit tenberg and Berlin, the latter then as now the centre of German free thought. He lived by his pen, writing keen literary criticism and hack translations, and venturing on original dramas and lyrics of no great value.
At Berlin Lessing met Voltaire. They soon quarreled and parted, for Voltaire asserted that Lessing had betrayed a literary confidence, an improbable insinuation often revived by Lcs sing's literary enemies. Critically Lessing profit ed greatly by Voltaire. He gained wider horizons and was one of the first among German scholars to address himself directly to the body of the nation. Under his impulse Berlin grew indepen dent of the Swiss school (see DORMER), and his leadership was by 1755 so obvious that there was a demand for a collected edition of his Works.
In the same year Leasing went back to Leipzig, and he had begun a journey to England when he was recalled at Amsterdam by the disturbances of the Seven Years' War, at a moment when Frederick's deeds were giving to lyric poetry a popular turn, which was welcomed by Leasing in his preface to the Lieder eines preussischen Grenadiers of Gleim (q.v.). He went to Leipzig,
attempted a Foust, returned to Berlin in 1758, and began to issue Litterarische Brick, which cleared the air of choking mawkishness and false formality. With these Letters the classical period of German literature begins and on distinctively national lines. The Letters are the oldest Ger man work generally read to-day, and make Les sing 'the Father of German criticism.' The Letters were continued till 1765, irregu larly; for in 1760 Lessing went to the seat of war in Silesia as secretary of General Tauenzien and gathered there materials for the greatest drama and the greatest work of :esthetic criticism that Germany had yet seen, Minna von Barnhelm (1763) and Laokoon (1766). But before these he had produced in Miss Sara Sampson (1755) a play epoch-making for the German stage, based on the family relation, the strongest feeling in German national life, and emphasizing the social worth of the middle and lower classes. But the reform that it started has made it seem anti quated. Minna von Barnhelm, on the other hand, was a national drama ; its personages were Ger mans of the day. drawn from Lessing's Silesian experience, and all of them true to the soil. In every literary field its health-giving influence was felt.
The Laokoon attempts to define the demarca tion and the limits of poetry and painting. Only a third of it was ever written, yet that third revolutionized literary taste in Germany. "That long misunderstood phrase. Ut pictura poesis, was set aside. The distinction between the speak ing and the plastic' arts was Blear. All the re sults of this glorious thought were revealed to us as by a lightning flash," said Goethe. Leasing hastened the publication of the Laokoon, hoping to win by it the post of royal librarian at Berlin: but Voltaire had prejudiced the King against him. Lessing, however, was called to Hamburg to be critic and adviser of the National Theatre there. Having sold his library to pay debts and rent, with his Laokoon unfinished, Leasing left Berlin in April, 1767.