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We think Herr Stahr makes too much of these anti-patriot flings of Lessing, which, with a single exception, occur in his letters to Gleim, and with reference to a kind of verse that could not but be distasteful to him, as needing no more brains than a drum, nor other inspiration than serves a trumpet.
But if the authority of Lessing, by making people feel easy in their admiration for Shakespeare, perhaps increased the influence of his works, and if his discussions of Aristotle have given a new starting-point to modern criticism, it may be doubted whether the immediate effect on literature of his own critical essays was so great as Herr Stahr supposes.
To such horrors may a woman sink, when she has abandoned the love of God; and a fair face may hide a soul "leprous as sin itself." Well may Adolf Stahr observe that Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth and husband-murdering Gertrude are mere children by the side of this awful giant-shape of steely feminine cruelty. Such was the princess who, in the year A.D. 49, recalled Seneca from exile.
He seems to have lived a rather free-and-easy life during his term of office, kept shockingly late hours, and learned, among other things, to gamble, a fact for which Herr Stahr thinks it needful to account in a high philosophical fashion.
You have understood "Lohengrin" aright; Stahr has not. I withdraw my consent to his opinion; it was given in haste. You will soon hear more from me, best of all men! Your August 23rd, 1851 At last I am able to break my long silence.
He was the first German who had any conception of style, and who could be full without spilling over on all sides. Herr Stahr, we think, is not just the biographer he would have chosen for himself. His book is rather a panegyric than a biography.
At any rate, he was willing, and even heartily desirous, that his friends should succeed in getting for him the place of royal librarian. But Frederick, for some unexplained reason, would not appoint him. Herr Stahr thinks it had something to do with the old Siecle manuscript business.
When Adolf Stahr gravely raised the same objection to the solution of the Lohengrin question, I was really taken aback by the uniformity of opinion; and as, owing to some excitement, I was just then no longer in the same mood as when I composed Lohengrin, I was foolish enough to write a hurried letter to Stahr in which, with but a few slight reservations, I declared him to be right.
Let Herr Stahr put all Lessing's "inimitably roguish words" together, and compare them with these few intranslatable lines from Voltaire's letter to Rousseau, thanking him for his Discours sur l'Inegalite: "On n'a jamais employe tant d'esprit a vouloir nous rendre betes; il prend enviede marcher a quatre pattes quand on lit votre ouvrage."
Professor Stahr, who has become a dear friend, and Fanny Lewald have been here about a fortnight. Stahr is going to write about "Lohengrin" in the National Zeitung or Kolnische Zeitung. Muller has written another "Lohengrin" article in the Weimar Zeitung, which he has probably sent to you.
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