At present the world
has advanced to where Lessing stood, while the Church has done its best
to stand stock-still; and it would be a curious were it not a melancholy
spectacle, to see the indifference with which the laity look on while
theologians thrash their wheatless straw, utterly unconscious that there
is no longer any common term possible that could bring their creeds again
to any point of bearing on the practical life of men. Fielding never made
a profounder stroke of satire than in Squire Western's indignant "Art not
in the pulpit now! When art got up there, I never mind what dost say."
As an author, Lessing began his career at a period when we cannot say
that German literature was at its lowest ebb, only because there had not
yet been any flood-tide. That may be said to have begun with him. When we
say German literature, we mean so much of it as has any interest outside
of Germany. That part of the literary histories which treats of the dead
waste and middle of the eighteenth century reads like a collection of
obituaries, and were better reduced to the conciseness of epitaph, though
the authors of them seem to find a melancholy pleasure, much like that of
undertakers, in the task by which they live. Gottsched reigned supreme on
the legitimate throne of dulness.
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