he shoulders of his
eager younger rival, F. L. Schruder, who was the first to domesticate
Shakespeare upon the German stage. In dramatic literature few of
Lessing's earlier contemporaries produced any works of permanent value,
unless the religious dramas of F. G. Klopstock--a species in which he
had been preceded by J. J. Bodmer--and the patriotic _Bardietten_ of the
same author be excepted. S. Gessner, J. W. L. Gleim, and G. K. Pfeffel
(1736-1809) composed pastoral plays. But a far more potent stimulus
prompted the efforts of the younger generation. The translation of
Shakespeare, begun in 1762 by C. M. Wieland, whose own plays possess no
special significance, and completed in 1775 by Eschenburg, which
furnished the text for many of Lessing's criticisms, helps to mark an
epoch in German literature. Under the influence of Shakespeare, or of
their conceptions of his genius, arose a youthful group of writers who,
while worshipping their idol as the representative of nature, displayed
but slight anxiety to harmonize their imitations of him with the demands
of art. The notorious _Ugolino_ of H. W. von Gerstenberg seemed a
premonitory sign that the coming flood might merely rush back to the
extravagances and horrors of the old popular stage; and it was with a
sense of this danger in prospect that Lessing in his third important
drama, the prose tragedy _Emilia Galotti_ (1772), set the example of a
work of incomparable nicety in its adaptation of means to end. But
successful as it proved, it could not stay the excesses of the _Sturm
und Drang_ period which now set in. Lessing's last drama, _Nathan der
Weise_ (1779), was not measured to the standard of the contemporary
stage; but it was to exercise its influence in the progress of time--not
only by causing a reaction in tragedy from prose to blank verse (first
essayed in J. W. von Brawe's _Brutus_, 1770), but by ennobling and
elevating by its moral and intellectual grandeur the branch of
literature to which in form it belongs.

The Sturm und Drang.

Meanwhile the young geniuses of the _Sturm und Drang_ had gone forth, as
worshippers rather than followers of Shakespeare, to conquer new worlds.
The name of this group of writers, more remarkable for their collective
significance than for their individual achievements, was derived from a
drama by one of the most prolific of their number, M. F. von
Klinger;[284] other members of the fraternity were J. A. Leisewitz[285]
(1752-1