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Updated: May 11, 2025
He talked and laughed, rode and walked, with Claire Lessing with the same free abandon, the same show of uninterested good comradeship, that he had used towards her when they were boy and girl together. There was not a shade more of warmth or self-consciousness in his manner towards her than there had been fifteen years before.
The sciences and mathematics give us knowledge, only literature can give us culture. In the best history we get a measure of both, we get facts and are brought in contact with great minds. Chemistry, physics, geology, etc., are not sources of culture. But Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Shakespeare, etc., are.
To crush forever is rather a strong phrase, Herr Stahr, to apply to the spirit, if one must ever give heed to the sense as well as the sound of what one is writing. But eloquence has no bowels for its victims. We have no doubt the Duke of Brunswick meant well by Lessing, and the salary he paid him was as large as he would have got from the frugal Frederick.
This was because Lessing looked always more to the life than the form, because he knew the classics, and did not merely cant about them.
Then came degeneracy and artifice; after that the great shock of the Reformation; subsequently a servile and pedantic study of classical forms without imbibing their spirit, but preparing the way for a truer art spirit, extracted from their study by the masterly criticism of Winckelmann and Lessing, till the second classical period of German literature and poetry bloomed forth in full beauty, blending the national and legendary elements so well expressed by Herder with the highest effusions of dramatic poetry, partly creative and partly imitative of the Greek models, in Schiller and Goethe.
That's a lovely one, said Lynch, laughing again. That has the true scholastic stink. Lessing, said Stephen, should not have taken a group of statues to write of. The art, being inferior, does not present the forms I spoke of distinguished clearly one from another. Even in literature, the highest and most spiritual art, the forms are often confused.
He was to the end of the chapter a recognized prophet, an uplifter and leader. The far-seeing, clear-minded critics, as Lessing, Goethe and Herder, expressed themselves quite unequivocally in this regard, and there was later no withdrawal of former appreciation.
The cosmopolitan temper which caused Lessing to say that love of country was an unknown feeling to him, gave way before an intenser nationalism. The earlier Romanticists began it; in the later group it took more specific form and became a propaganda. It was also precipitated in verse and prose.
In the eighteenth century there is a new invasion of ideas; all is examined and questioned; religion, government, society, all becomes a matter of discussion for the school called philosophical. Poetry appeared dying out, history drying up, till a truer spirit was breathed into the literary atmosphere by the criticism of Lessing, the philosophy of Kant, and the poetry of Klopstock.
All theories of art are useless for the American student who has not been abroad: the object is not to make up one's mind respecting the principles and limits of beauty in painting and sculpture, to form a code of aesthetics while the great pictures and statues of the world are still unknown; yet if a natural curiosity impel us to the inquiry, there are Lessing and Winckelmann, still the first authorities, despite some slight signs of human fallibility.
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