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Updated: May 24, 2025
It was this indecision of his that had produced the silence while he and Rose had stood in the entrance to Lessing's store. The only resolution he had come to there had been not to allow her to say good night to him and walk away. But now that she was striding along beside him, he couldn't make up his mind what to say to her.
But of this we find nothing in Lessing. With him all is sunny, serene, and pagan. Not the dim aisle of a vast cathedral, but the symmetrical portico of an antique temple, is the worshipping-place into which he would lead us. But if Lessing's theology must be considered imperfect, it is none the less admirable as far as it goes.
It was then a fine period in literature, when eminent men were yet treated with respect; although the disputes of Klotz and Lessing's controversies already indicated that this epoch would soon close. Winckelmann enjoyed an universal, unassailed reverence; and it is known how sensitive he was with regard to any thing public which did not seem commensurate with his deeply felt dignity.
He is also the Worshipful Master of the local Masonic lodge, 'The Three Rings, so called after the famous parable of religions tolerance in Lessing's noble drama, Nathan der Weise.
Very naturally Goethe and Schiller, who were strongly in sympathy with Lessing's tendency, were desirous of domesticating 'Nathan' on the Weimar boards. So Schiller undertook an adaptation, taking the task very seriously.
For a young man of twenty-two, Lessing's criticisms show a great deal of independence and maturity of thought; but humor he never had, and his wit was always of the bluntest, crushing rather than cutting. The mace, and not the scymitar, was his weapon.
I, too, was then a sound, slim sapling, and am now such a rotten, gnarled trunk!" This was written on the 19th of December, 1780; and on the 15th of February, 1781, Lessing died, not quite fifty-two years old. Goethe was then in his thirty-second year, and Schiller ten years younger. Of Lessing's relation to metaphysics the reader will find ample discussion in Herr Stahr's volumes.
We like the accomplished end and not the pursuit of the end, the goal and not the road, in short, ideas ready-made and bread ready-baked, the reverse of Lessing's principle. What we look for above all are conclusions.
Which made me think of a favourite quotation of Lessing's from Minna: "Tout les gens d'esprit aiment le jeu
The command "to love one another," to check the barbarous impulses inherited from the pre-social state, while giving free play to the beneficent impulses needful for the ultimate attainment of social equilibrium, or as Tennyson phrases it, to "move upward, working out the beast, and letting the ape and tiger die," was, in Lessing's view, the task set before us by religion.
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