dramatists of the seventeenth century into rigid inviolable laws, and
a dramatist would in a doubtful case think it necessary to demonstrate
to his public in a special discourse that he had not been guilty of
any breach of the law in this respect! The authority of the supreme
law-giver was incontestable; the only question was how to interpret
his enactments. Does, for example, "one revolution of the sun" mean
twelve hours or twenty-four? This and other such weighty matters were
subjects of warm controversy. Lessing's mind was critical rather than
creative; he, too, was an enthusiastic student of Aristotle, and read
with far truer artistic intelligence than Corneille. The criticism of
his _Hamburgische Dramaturgie_ cleared the way for the great
creative poets of the end of the eighteenth and first half of the
nineteenth century. It was a period of experiment, both in
subject-matter and in form. The latter hovers between that of classic
tradition and the licence of Shakespeare, while the subjects are
generally taken from foreign history or from Greek mythology; only
occasionally, as in _Goetz von Berlichingen_ and _Wallenstein_, from
German history. The entire dramatic movement of this period is an
endeavour to find a workable compromise between the classic and
the Elizabethan drama, an endeavour which attained a fair measure
of success a little later in the superb classic tragedies of Grillparzer.
Still, noble as were its achievements in this direction, the German
nation had higher aims. As it gained in self-consciousness and
conceived its own artistic ideals it could not but feel itself worthy to
bring forth an art characteristically its own. Till now the only
indigenous German art had been instrumental music, and the stupendous
achievements of a Bach, a Haydn, a Beethoven must have helped to
bring home to the Germans the artistic capabilities latent within them.

The decisive step in German art was taken by Richard Wagner, whose