Flashes they indeed are, his finest intuitions, and of very
different quality from the equable north-light of the artist. He felt it,
and said it of himself, "Ever so many flashes of lightning do not make
daylight." We speak now of those more rememberable passages where his
highest individuality reveals itself in what may truly be called a
passion of thought. In the "Laocooen" there is daylight of the serenest
temper, and never was there a better example of the discourse of reason,
though even that is also a fragment.
But it is as a nobly original man, even more than as an original thinker,
that Lessing is precious to us, and that he is so considerable in German
literature. In a higher sense, but in the same kind, he is to Germans
what Dr. Johnson is to us,--admirable for what he was. Like Johnson's,
too, but still from a loftier plane, a great deal of his thought has a
direct bearing on the immediate life and interests of men. His genius was
not a St. Elmo's fire, as it so often is with mere poets,--as it was in
Shelley, for example, playing in ineffectual flame about the points of
his thought,--but was interfused with his whole nature and made a part of
his very being. To the Germans, with their weak nerve of sentimentalism,
his brave common-sense is a far wholesomer tonic than the cynicism of
Heine, which is, after all, only sentimentalism soured.
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