We
might answer, hardly at all. His position was that of armed neutrality.
Long ago at Leipzig he had been accused of Prussian leanings; now in
Berlin he was thought too Saxon. Though he disclaimed any such sentiment
as patriotism, and called himself a cosmopolite, it is plain enough that
his position was simply that of a German. Love of country, except in a
very narrow parochial way, was as impossible in Germany then as in
America during the Colonial period. Lessing himself, in the latter years
of his life, was librarian of one of those petty princelets who sold
their subjects to be shot at in America,--creatures strong enough to
oppress, too weak to protect their people. Whoever would have found a
Germany to love must have pieced it together as painfully as Isis did the
scattered bits of Osiris. Yet he says that "the true patriot is by no
means extinguished" in him. It was the noisy ones that he could not
abide; and, writing to Gleim about his "Grenadier" verses, he advises him
to soften the tone of them a little, he himself being a "declared enemy
of imprecations," which he would leave altogether to the clergy. We think
Herr Stahr makes too much of these anti-patriot flings of Lessing, which,
with a single exception, occur in his letters to Gleim, and with
reference to a kind of verse that could not but be distasteful to him, as
needing no more brains than a drum, nor other inspiration than serves a
trumpet.
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