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Lessing said a very wise thing when he declared that, if God should offer him the perfect truth in one hand and the privilege of seeking for it in the other, he should accept the privilege of search as the nobler and more valuable gift, because, in this seeking, we develop ourselves, we cultivate the Divine, and work our natures over into the likeness of God.
There must be something else, something very different from this, to explain the position which he holds in Germany, or the fascination which his writings exerted over such minds as those of Lessing or of Göthe; the fact of so enduring an influence is more than a sufficient answer to mere depreciating criticism. This, however, is not a point which there is any use in pressing.
Those who persevere in studying his writings until they master what he really was aiming at cannot fail at last to admit that as philosopher he is at least suggestive, as art-critic he is amongst the very first of all times, worthy of a place beside Plato, Lessing, Ruskin. A critical discussion of only the more important of the problems raised by Wagner would require not one volume but several.
On page 34, comparing Lessing with Goethe on arriving at the University, Mr. Evans, we think, obscures, if he does not wholly lose the meaning, when he translates Leben by "social relations," and is altogether wrong in rendering Patrizier by "aristocrat." At the top of the next page, too, "suspicious" is not the word for bedenklich.
Meanwhile, the fragments that remain of his own attempts in this direction are no considerable contributions. His Hints for an Essay on the Drama are jejune and infertile, when compared with the vigorous and original thought of Diderot and Lessing at about the same period. He wrote an Account of the European Settlements in America.
"There are gauze and bandages in the office." He laughed at her expression as she laid down the saw. "You won't object to that box of tin soldiers?" she asked. "Decidedly. You don't want to spoil him at the start. For a boy who never had a toy in his life he's acquired enough now to turn his head. Come away, Mrs. Lessing flee temptation. Come, Bobby boy." And Burns led the way.
The appearance of Ninus is a mixture of the Ghost in Hamlet and the shadow of Darius in Aeschylus. That it is superfluous has been admitted even by the French critics. Lessing, with his raillery, has scared away the Ghost. With a great many faults common to ordinary ghost-scenes, it has this peculiar one, that its speeches are dreadfully bombastic.
"That's bad," Burns asserted. "The quicker they broke, the less objection I'd have to 'em. It's a wonder the modern child has a trace of resource or inventiveness left in him. Teach him to construct, not to destroy, then you've done something for him." "Isn't he rather young for tools?" Mrs. Lessing was turning over a small saw in her hands, feeling its sharp teeth with a premonitory finger.
Our Master does not always know which he prefers to be Voltaire or Lessing; but on no account will he be a Philistine. At a pinch he would not object to being both Lessing and Voltaire that the word might be fulfilled that is written, "He had no character, but when he wished to appear as if he had, he assumed one."
Man's pleasure, his purest delight, is allied with the act of learning, of getting at the truth of things, of acquiring knowledge with differentiation. And hence the famous saying of Lessing which I have already quoted. There is a story told of an ancient Spaniard who accompanied Vasco Núñez de Balboa when he climbed that peak in Darien from which both the Atlantic and the Pacific are visible.
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