(1697-1760) biography is the story of a
long-continued effort which, notwithstanding errors and weaknesses, and
though, so far as her personal fortunes were concerned, it ended in
failure, may almost be described as heroic. As directress of a company
of actors which from 1727 had its headquarters at Leipzig (hence the new
school of acting is called the Leipzig school), she resolved to put an
end to the formlessness of the existing stage, to separate tragedy and
comedy, and to extinguish Harlequin. In this endeavour she was supported
by the Leipzig professor J. Chr. Gottsched, who induced her to establish
French tragedy and comedy as the sole models of the regular drama.
Literature and the stage thus for the first time joined hands, and no
temporary mischance or personal misunderstanding can obscure the
enduring significance of the union. Not only were the abuses of a
century swept away from a representative theatre, but a large number of
literary works, designed for the stage, were produced on it. It is true
that they were but versions or imitations from the French (or in the
case of Gottsched's _Dying Cato_ from the French and English),[282] and
that at the moment of the regeneration of the German drama new fetters
were thus imposed upon it, and upon the art of acting at the same time.
But the impulse had been given, and the beginning made. On the one hand,
men of letters began to subject their dramatic compositions to the test
of performance; the tragedies and comedies of J. E. Schlegel, the
artificial and sentimental comedies of Chr. F. Gellert and others,
together with the vigorous popular comedies of the Danish dramatist
Holberg, were brought into competition with translations from the
French. On the other hand, the Leipzig school exercised a continuous
effect upon the progress of the art of acting, and before long K. Ekhof
began a career which made his art a fit subject for the critical study
of scholars, and his profession one to be esteemed by honourable men.

Lessing.

Among the authors contributing to Mme. Neuber's Leipzig enterprise had
been a young student destined to complete, after a very different
fashion and with very different aims, the work which she and Gottsched
had begun. The critical genius of G. E. Lessing is peerless in its
comprehensiveness, as in its keenness and depth; but if there was any
branch of literature and art which by study and practice he made
pre-eminently his own, it was that