That he suffered at Wolfenbuettel is true;
but was it nothing to be in love and in debt at the same time, and to
feel that his fruition of the one must be postponed for uncertain years
by his own folly in incurring the other? If the sparrow-life must end,
surely a wee bush is better than nae beild. One cause of Lessing's
occasional restlessness and discontent Herr Stahr has failed to notice.
It is evident from many passages in his letters that he had his share of
the hypochondria which goes with an imaginative temperament. But in him
it only serves to bring out in stronger relief his deep-rooted manliness.
He spent no breath in that melodious whining which, beginning with
Rousseau, has hardly yet gone out of fashion. Work of some kind was his
medicine for the blues,--if not always of the kind he would have chosen,
then the best that was to be had; for the useful, too, had for him a
sweetness of its own. Sometimes he found a congenial labor in rescuing,
as he called it, the memory of some dead scholar or thinker from the
wrongs of ignorance or prejudice or falsehood; sometimes in fishing a
manuscript out of the ooze of oblivion, and giving it, after a critical
cleansing, to the world. Now and then he warmed himself and kept his
muscle in trim with buffeting soundly the champions of that shallow
artificiality and unctuous wordiness, one of which passed for orthodox in
literature, and the other in theology.
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