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Updated: May 24, 2025
So a rendezvous was made between Mrs. Goldsmith and the sextette for Lessing's store on Michigan Avenue at three o'clock on an afternoon when Galbraith was to be busy with the principals. He might manage to drop in before they left to cast his eye over and approve the selection.
Lessing's grief has that pathos which he praised in sculpture, he may writhe, but he must not scream. Nor is this a new thing with him. On the death of a younger brother, he wrote to his father, fourteen years before: "Why should those who grieve communicate their grief to each other purposely to increase it?... Many mourn in death what they loved not living.
It was Lessing's Emilia Galotti, and represented her as pulling the rose to pieces; but the picture was a portrait. It appeared singular in contrast with the poverty by which it was surrounded. "Whom does it represent?" asked I. "Oh!" said one of the old women, "it is the face of the German lady, the poor lady who once was an actress!"
They were reading in every spare moment, twelve plays of Shakespeare, Goethe's works, Wilhelm Meister, Götz von Berlichingen, Hermann and Dorothea, Iphigenia, Wanderjahre, Italianische Reise, and others; Heine's poems; Lessing's Laocoön and Nathan the Wise; Macaulay's History of England; Moore's Life of Sheridan; Brougham's Lives of Men of Letters; White's History of Selborne; Whewell's History of Inductive Sciences; Boswell; Carpenter's Comparative Physiology; Jones' Animal Kingdom; Alison's History of Europe; Kahnis' History of German Protestantism; Schrader's German Mythology; Kingsley's Greek Heroes; and the Iliad and Odyssey in the original.
In this way originated "Nathan the Wise." But it in no way answered to the expectations either of Lessing's friends or of his enemies. Both the one and the other expected to see the controversy with Goetze carried on, developed, and generalized in the poem.
He translated Goethe's "Iphigenia" , Lessing's "Nathan" , Wieland's "Dialogues of the Gods," etc. ; he published "Tales of Yore," translated from several languages, and a "Letter concerning the two first chapters of Luke," in 1810, "English Synonyms discriminated" in 1813, and an "Historical Survey of German Poetry," interspersed with various translations, in 1823-30.
In the next year, 1781, Raspe's absolute command of the two languages encouraged him to publish two moderately good prose-translations, one of Lessing's "Nathan the Wise," and the other of Zachariae's Mock-heroic, "Tabby in Elysium."
But a man who is able to write a sentence in which Lessing's Works are spoken of as if the reading of them tended to make men "transcendentalists of the supra-nebulous order" no more deserves a scourging by angels for his devotion to German literature than Saint Jerome did for being a Ciceronian.
The tendency of the play was left intact, but many changes were made in the interest of brevity, simplicity and rapidity of movement. To these no one can seriously object, since Lessing's text is too long for an evening in the theater, as the matter was regarded in those pre-Wagnerian days.
At any rate, we cannot allow Herr Stahr to shake our faith in the sincerity of Lessing's motives in criticism, he could not in the soundness of the criticism itself, by tracing it up to a spring at once so petty and so personal.
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