His book is rather
a panegyric than a biography. There is sometimes an almost comic
disproportion between the matter and the manner, especially in the epic
details of Lessing's onslaughts on the nameless herd of German authors.
It is as if Sophocles should have given a strophe to every bullock slain
by Ajax in his mad foray upon the Grecian commissary stores. He is too
fond of striking an attitude, and his tone rises unpleasantly near a
scream, as he calls the personal attention of heaven and earth to
something which Lessing himself would have thought a very
matter-of-course affair. He who lays it down as an axiom, that "genius
loves simplicity," would hardly have been pleased to hear the "Letters on
Literature" called the "burning thunderbolts of his annihilating
criticism," or the Anti-Goetze pamphlets, "the hurtling arrows that sped
from the bow of the immortal hero." Nor would he with whom accuracy was a
matter of conscience have heard patiently that the Letters "appeared in a
period distinguished for its lofty tone of mind, and in their own
towering boldness they are a true picture of the intrepid character of
the age."[149] If the age was what Herr Stahr represents it to have been,
where is the great merit of Lessing? He would have smiled, we suspect, a
little contemptuously, at Herr Stahr's repeatedly quoting a certificate
from the "historian of the proud Britons," that he was "the first critic
in Europe.
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