His mind
kindled by friction in the process of thinking, not in the flash of
conception, and its delight is in demonstration, not in bodying forth.
His prose can leap and run, his verse is always thinking of its feet. Yet
in his "Minna" and his "Emilia"[161] he shows one faculty of the
dramatist, that of construction, in a higher degree than any other
German.[162] Here his critical deductions served him to some purpose. The
action moves rapidly, there is no speechifying, and the parts are
coherent. Both plays act better than anything of Goethe or Schiller. But
it is the story that interests us, and not the characters. These are not,
it is true, the incorporation of certain ideas, or, still worse, of
certain dogmas, but they certainly seem something like machines by which
the motive of the play is carried on; and there is nothing of that
interplay of plot and character which makes Shakespeare more real in the
closet than other dramatists with all the helps of the theatre. It is a
striking illustration at once of the futility of mere critical insight
and of Lessing's want of imagination, that in the Emilia he should have
thought a Roman motive consistent with modern habits of thought, and that
in Nathan he should have been guilty of anachronisms which violate not
only the accidental truth of fact, but the essential truth of character.
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