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It is natural to think of the generally elevating and softening effects of great art as a kind of moral clarifying, and the question how this should be effected just by pity and fear was not pressed. So Lessing in the "Hamburgische Dramaturgie" takes Katharsis as the conversion of the emotions in general into virtuous dispositions.
Among her great writers, Lessing is the one who is the most specifically witty. We feel the implicit influence of wit—the “flavor of mind”—throughout his writings; and it is often concentrated into pungent satire, as every reader of the Hamburgische Dramaturgie remembers.
To banish these unprofitable productions from the German soil, it is not necessary to call in the aid of Lessing's Dramaturgie; Goethe's own masterly parody on French Tragedy in some scenes of Esther, will do this much more amusingly and effectually. At a much earlier period Goethe had, in some of his merry tales and carnival plays, completely appropriated the manner of our honest Hans Sachs.
Hence their writing is deficient in clearness and definiteness, and it is not long before they betray that their only object in writing at all is to cover paper. This sometimes happens with the best authors; now and then, for example, with Lessing in his Dramaturgie, and even in many of Jean Paul's romances. As soon as the reader perceives this, let him throw the book away; for time is precious.
The object of both Maffei and Voltaire was, from Hyginus' account of its contents, to restore in some measure a lost piece of Euripides, which the ancients highly commended. Voltaire, pretending to eulogize, has given a rival's criticism of Maffei's Merope; there is also a lengthened criticism on it in the Dramaturgie of Lessing, as clever as it is impartial.
Lessing, in his Dramaturgie, has hazarded the singular opinion that it is a proof of an advance in the dramatic art, that Euripides should have trusted wholly to the effect of situations, without calculating on the excitement of curiosity. For my part I cannot see why, amidst the impressions which a dramatic poem produces, the uncertainty of expectation should not be allowed a legitimate place.
With such success were his labours attended, that, shortly after the publication of his Dramaturgie, translations of French tragedies, and German tragedies modelled after them, disappeared altogether from the stage. He was the first who spoke with warmth of Shakspeare, and paved the way for his reception in Germany.
It is to this we owe the Dramaturgie, next to the Laocooen the most valuable of his works. But Lessing though it is plain that he made his hand as light as he could, and wrapped his lash in velvet soon found that actors had no more taste for truth than authors.
In the first place commentators have never been able to agree as to the meaning of this proposition, and have had recourse to the most forced explanations of it. Look, for instance, into the Dramaturgie of Lessing. Lessing gives a new explanation of his own, and fancies he has found in Aristotle a poetical Euclid.
It is in the Dramaturgie that Lessing first properly enters as an influence into European literature. He may be said to have begun the revolt from pseudo-classicism in poetry, and to have been thus unconsciously the founder of romanticism.
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