All that saves his egoism from being
hateful is, that, with its immense reaches, it cheats the sense into a
feeling of something like sublimity. A patch of sand is unpleasing; a
desert has all the awe of ocean. Lessing also felt the duty of
self-culture; but it was not so much for the sake of feeding fat this or
that faculty as of strengthening character,--the only soil in which real
mental power can root itself and find sustenance. His advice to his
brother Karl, who was beginning to write for the stage, is two parts
moral to one literary. "Study ethics diligently, learn to express
yourself well and correctly, and cultivate your own character. Without
that I cannot conceive a good dramatic author." Marvellous counsel this
will seem to those who think that wisdom is only to be found in the
fool's paradise of Bohemia!
We said that Lessing's dream was to be a poet. In comparison with success
as a dramatist, he looked on all other achievement as inferior in kind.
In. 1767 he writes to Gleim (speaking of his call to Hamburg): "Such
circumstances were needed to rekindle in me an almost extinguished love
for the theatre. I was just beginning to lose myself in other studies
which would have made me unfit for any work of genius.
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