This
Lessing was always wont to do. He could only feel his own strength, and
make others feel it,--could only call it into full play in an
intellectual wrestling-bout. He was always anointed and ready for the
ring, but with this distinction, that he was no mere prize-fighter, or
bully for the side that would pay him best, nor even a contender for mere
sentiment, but a self-forgetful champion for the truth as he saw it. Nor
is this true of him only as a critic. His more purely imaginative
works--his Minna, his Emilia, his Nathan--were all written, not to
satisfy the craving of a poetic instinct, nor to rid head and heart of
troublous guests by building them a lodging outside himself, as Goethe
used to do, but to prove some thesis of criticism or morals by which
Truth could be served. His zeal for her was perfectly unselfish. "Does
one write, then, for the sake of being always in the right? I think I
have been as serviceable to Truth," he says, "when I miss her, and my
failure is the occasion of another's discovering her, as if I had
discovered her myself."[150] One would almost be inclined to think, from
Herr Stahr's account of the matter, that Lessing had been an
autochthonous birth of the German soil, without intellectual ancestry or
helpful kindred.
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