Lessing completed the Fable in three volumes and the Fable Essay in 1759. He appreciates Aesop's fables and opposes the elaborate language of La Fontaine and his followers. Lessing's three volumes of fables are written in prose with concise language and simple style.
These fables exposed Lessing's sharp edge in criticizing German reality. The bellicose wolf revealed the aggressiveness and belligerence of the Prussian autocratic regime. The Water Snake depicts the cruelty of the ruling class through a water snake that devours frogs. "The Donkey and the Lion" narrates the contempt of a donkey and a lion for the same kind, and satirizes the vanity of a philistine villain. Donkeys and wolves, Zeus and sheep, and so on. With a series of weak animal images, he lashed out at the idea of stealing peace from German citizens. In addition, there are many fables criticizing the phenomenon of German literary and art circles at that time: "ostrich" taunts writers who only sing high-profile and have no creative achievements; The Nightingale and the Lark satirizes writers who are divorced from the masses. Lessing's fables succinctly and powerfully express his progressive thoughts and critical spirit.
Lessing's important aesthetic works are laocoon and On the Boundary between Painting and Poetry (1766). The author discusses the different ways in which paintings and poems reflect the reality through the different treatments of ancient plastic arts and poems to the story of laocoon, a Trojan priest, who was killed by a snake. Since ancient times, literary theorists have failed to draw a clear line between the two arts. Horace said that "poetry is painting", and Simonides Of Ceos, an ancient Greek poet, thought that painting was a poem without words, and poetry was a talking painting. This argument has been accepted for thousands of years. At that time, winkelmann (17 17~ 1768), a famous German art theorist, did not get rid of this view in his study of ancient art. Lessing believes that poetry and painting have their own characteristics, and plastic arts such as sculpture and painting should express the most wonderful "fixed moment", while poetry should simulate continuous movements in time. Lessing distinguishes between poetry and painting in order to emphasize that poetry has its own unique function, which should express people's personality and feelings and describe struggles to meet the needs of bourgeois literature and art.
Lessing has been engaged in drama all her life. He advocated that Germany must have its own national drama as a powerful tool for German national unity. He believes that drama is the highest form of literary genre. As early as in Correspondence on Contemporary Literature (1759~ 1765), Lessing had already talked about the thought of national literature, sharply criticized Gott Schet and proposed to follow Shakespeare's example.
1767, Hamburg established the National Theatre, and Lessing wrote reviews for all previous performances of the theatre. However, the theater closed down after a year of operation. Lessing published a collection of his comments, divided into two volumes, each with 52 articles, named "Hamburg Drama Review" (1767~ 1769), which became an important document of German bourgeois drama theory.
Hamburg drama criticism covers a wide range of issues. In view of the lack of clear goals of drama at that time, Lessing emphasized the educational role of drama and advocated that drama should be a school to improve morality. He believes that Germany should have its own national drama and opposes the imitation and worship of French classical tragedies by many writers. He satirized these people as "more French than the French". He asked the drama to reflect the reality of the German bourgeoisie in the18th century, and advocated writing the tragedy of the citizens, because ordinary people in the citizen class can also have an extraordinary fate, which is more likely to arouse the sympathy of people around them. Lessing also criticized the "historical drama" which is extremely chaotic in content and form. He called for learning from Shakespeare, because Shakespeare's plays reflected the feelings and aspirations of the bourgeoisie and faithfully reproduced a colorful life. Lessing discussed the problem of "imitating nature" and asked literature to reflect objective reality. He said that when portraying characters, writers must conform to the "inherent possibility" and nature, that is, they must be logical, authentic and credible. He opposed the three unifications in drama, thinking that they hindered the principle of "learning from nature".
Lessing also pointed out that when describing the objective reality, writers must be good at distinguishing the main and secondary things and focus on the essential things. Regarding historical dramas, he said that playwrights are not historians, and they use historical stories only for the sake of creation, and they don't have to pursue historical details. However, the character of a character should not be divorced from the historical environment, but should portray the character that a specific character should have in a specific environment, that is, there should be an internal connection between the character and the environment.
Lessing's drama creation is the practice of his drama theory. He reflected the key issues of the times with concise and distinctive language, and played the anti-feudal and anti-church enlightenment thought.
Lessing began to write plays in his early years, among which Miss Sarah Samson (1755) can be said to be the real beginning of the tragedy of German citizens. His famous plays include the comedy Ming Na von Balheim, the tragedy Amelia Galetti and the poetic drama Nathan the Wise.
Ming Na von Balheim (1767), also known as the blessing of soldiers, wrote a story after the Seven Years' War (1756~ 1763). Telheim, a Prussian officer, fell in love with a noble lady in Saxony, an enemy country, and got engaged. Then they finally got married after all kinds of twists and turns. The author created a rational and morally perfect ideal figure-Telheim, to reflect his enlightenment thought and emphasize the influence of morality. The play also reflects the darkness of Prussia. In order to maintain his autocratic rule, the king of Prussia only allowed nobles and foreigners to serve as officers in his army, while enlightened people like Telheim were excluded. In the play, the police spy system in Prussia is also exposed through the hotel owner's exploration of people's secret activities. The whole play is compact in structure and lively in dialogue.
The story of Amelia Garetti (1772) took place in Italy in the 5th century. It tells the story of a duke who, in order to cheat Amelia, adopted his favorite strategy of Marinelli, hired a group of robbers to kill her fiance on her way to marriage and tricked her into coming home. Amelia's father, Oddo-Addo, reluctantly killed her to protect her virginity. The duke in the play is the embodiment of the dissolute and shameless feudal ruler of Germany in the 18th century. Marinelli was a court attendant who was good at flattery and intrigue. Amelia is a quiet and simple woman under the civic moral education. The most typical character in the play, Oddo-Addo, is a declining aristocrat. He has bourgeois ideas, hates rulers and is unwilling to associate with the court, but he is weak and only adopts an evasive attitude. His daughter was cheated into the palace, which triggered a battle of "reason and anger" in his heart, and he wanted to avenge "the victim's morality". When he killed his daughter, he thought he protected her virginity and won a moral victory. This embodies the characteristics of the German bourgeoisie. They hate the moral corruption of the feudal ruling class, but they have no power to fight face to face with the ruling class, so they can only fight it with civic morality. This is an outstanding civic tragedy in German literature.
Nathan the Wise (1779) is a work in which Lessing argued with the German Orthodox Church against religious prejudice. The story took place in Jerusalem during the Crusade. A Christian Templar was captured by Muslim Sultan. One day, Dana, a rich Jewish businessman, caught fire in his home. The knight rescued Dana's adopted daughter Laixia from the fire, and they fell in love. But they have different beliefs and can't get married. At this time, Sudan turned to Nathan for help because of domestic financial difficulties. During the conversation, the Sultan asked Nathan which is the real religion, Christianity, Islam or Judaism. Nathan's allusion to the three rings shows that religions should be tolerant of each other and should not be hostile to each other. Finally, I found the truth. It turns out that Lai Xia and the Templar are brother and sister, both sons and nephews of Sudan.
The story of the ring comes from Boccaccio's decameron. Each of the three brothers gets a ring from his father, one is real and the other is fake. The judge advised them that any ring would show their strength as long as they worked hard. Lessing used this to show that all three religions are valuable, to oppose the intolerance of the Orthodox Church, and to promote the tolerant thought of the Enlightenment. The author hopes for the prospect of human mutual love, and only wants to overcome the resistance of the ignorant world with an ideal humanism.
Under the backward political and economic situation in Germany, Lessing bravely exposed the decadence of the feudal ruling class, criticized the palace literature and art, publicized the enlightenment thought and raised the national consciousness, which opened up a new position for German literature and had a far-reaching influence on contemporary and future writers.