True religion and creative genius
were both so beautiful to him that he could never abide the mediocre
counterfeit of either, and he who put so much of his own life into all he
wrote could not but hold all scripture sacred in which a divine soul had
recorded itself. It would be doing Lessing great wrong to confound his
controversial writing with the paltry quarrels of authors. His own
personal relations enter into them surprisingly little, for his quarrel
was never with men, but with falsehood, cant, and misleading tradition,
in whomsoever incarnated. Save for this, they were no longer readable,
and might be relegated to that herbarium of Billingsgate gathered by the
elder Disraeli.
So far from being "crushed in spirit" at Wolfenbuettel, the years he spent
there were among the most productive of his life. "Emilia Galotti," begun
in 1758, was finished there and published in 1771. The controversy with
Goetze, by far the most important he was engaged in, and the one in which
he put forth his maturest powers, was carried on thence. His "Nathan the
Wise" (1779), by which almost alone he is known as a poet outside of
Germany, was conceived and composed there. The last few years of his life
were darkened by ill-health and the depression which it brings.
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