" Whether we admit or not Lord Macaulay's competence in the
matter, we are sure that Lessing would not have thanked his biographer
for this soup-ticket to a ladleful of fame. If ever a man stood firmly on
his own feet, and asked help of none, that man was Gotthold Ephraim
Lessing.
Herr Stahr's desire to _make_ a hero of his subject, and his love for
sonorous sentences like those we have quoted above, are apt to stand
somewhat in the way of our chance at taking a fair measure of the man,
and seeing in what his heroism really lay. He furnishes little material
for a comparative estimate of Lessing, or for judging of the foreign
influences which helped from time to time in making him what he was.
Nothing is harder than to worry out a date from Herr Stahr's haystacks of
praise and quotation. Yet dates are of special value in tracing the
progress of an intellect like Lessing's, which, little actuated by an
inward creative energy, was commonly stirred to motion by the impulse of
other minds, and struck out its brightest flashes by collision with them.
He himself tells us that a critic should "first seek out some one with
whom he can contend," and quotes in justification from one of Aristotle's
commentators, _Solet Aristoteles quaerere pugnam in suis libris_.
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