Criticism can at best teach writers without genius what is to
be avoided or imitated. It cannot communicate life; and its effect, when
reduced to rules, has commonly been to produce that correctness which is
so praiseworthy and so intolerable. It cannot give taste, it can only
demonstrate who has had it. Lessing's essays in this kind were of service
to German literature by their manliness of style, whose example was worth
a hundred treatises, and by the stimulus there is in all original
thinking. Could he have written such a poem as he was capable of
conceiving, his influence would have been far greater. It is the living
soul, and not the metaphysical abstraction of it, that is genetic in
literature. If to do were as easy as to know what were good to be done!
It was out of his own failures to reach the ideal he saw so clearly, that
Lessing drew the wisdom which made him so admirable a critic. Even here,
too, genius can profit by no experience but its own.
For, in spite of Herr Stahr's protest, we must acknowledge the truth of
Lessing's own characteristic confession, that he was no poet. A man of
genius he unquestionably was, if genius may be claimed no less for force
than fineness of mind,--for the intensity of conviction that inspires the
understanding as much as for that apprehension of beauty which gives
energy of will to imagination,--but a poetic genius he was not.
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