" Surely there is no resentment here. Our only wonder would
be at its being written after the Hirschel business. At any rate, we
cannot allow Herr Stahr to shake our faith in the sincerity of Lessing's
motives in criticism,--he could not in the soundness of the criticism
itself,--by tracing it up to a spring at once so petty and so personal.
During a part of 1752,[151] Lessing was at Wittenberg again as student of
medicine, the parental notion of a strictly professional career of some
kind not having yet been abandoned. We must give his father the credit of
having done his best, in a well-meaning paternal fashion, to make his son
over again in his own image, and to thwart the design of nature by
coaxing or driving him into the pinfold of a prosperous obscurity. But
Gotthold, with all his gifts, had no talent whatever for contented
routine. His was a mind always in solution, which the divine order of
things, as it is called, could not precipitate into any of the
traditional forms of crystallization, and in which the time to come was
already fermenting. The principle of growth was in the young literary
hack, and he must obey it or die. His was to the last a _natura
naturans_, never a _naturata_. Lessing seems to have done what he could
to be a dutiful failure.
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