counsel had a certain influence in the disposal of clerical preferment. Alas, for human nature! even in cassock and bands. And thus, when Lessing produced his "Dissertation on the Education of the Human Race," in which positive religion[1] is treated as a mere pro tempore makeshift, or transient process of discipline, in the progress of society—a childish thing, to be put away on reaching man's estate—it was read without a repetition of the old stormy wind and tempest. Menzel strenuously defends Lessing from the charge of being one with the systematic rationalists; and Lessing himself rebutted the imputation with some scorn. But if he was not one of that motley brotherhood, he was something more. If he fares worse, it is because he goes further. If he does not tamper with texts, it is because he can drive a coach and six through them. Why should he trouble himself about a microscopic defect in the needle's eye, whose hermeneutics make it a royal road for a whole caravan of camels!
But enough of polemics. In the calmer aspect of a polished and powerful littérateur, it is more pleasant to view our busy author. There had been a divorce between literature and life in Germany. Lessing accounted it his mission and his great privilege to do something towards healing the breach. His personal history illustrates this matter. Bookworm as he was, he would be something more—a man of the world. A student of old folios, he would be also a student; of men and manners. A polyglott he was ready to be called, but not a pedant. If they must dub him a cyclopædia, let it be a walking one. When he went up as a freshman to Leipzig, he was oppressed with schoolboy bashfulness and gaucherie, which made him ill at ease among his fellows. But that did not drive him from the magic circle which he so longed to tread as a familiar: he set to work as a candidate for social honours, by hiring a dancing-master, fencing-master, posture-master, and so on—and never ceased till he had danced and posed himself into shape. It was a favourite maxim of his, that to he buried among your books is about as bad as literal churchyard sepulture. Individual or personal experience he calls wisdom, in contradistinction to acquaintance with the experience of others, or book-learning: the smallest stock of the former is worth more, he affirms, than millions of the latter. These radically sound principles give a marked tone to his writings. His later and better plays, to which we now come, are infused with a spirit of practical observation, far removed from the closet unrealities and pedantic common-places of his immediate predecessors in the dramatic art.
Having noticed his earlier plays, we come to "Miss Sara Sampson," a tragedy in five acts, of the domestic doleful order. The title is suggestive rather of a comedy or farce—at least to English ears; and the punctilious ceremony with which the too seductive Mellefont invariably addresses his mistress as "Miss"—especially when he is in the heroics of despair, and the poor girl is in articulo mortis—has the effect of what Falstaff would call "tickling the catastrophe." But to all intents and
- ↑ Lessing always drew an emphatic distinction between the religion of Christ and the Christian religion. "Jene," says he, "ist mit den klarsten und deutlichsten Worten in den Evangelisten enthalten; diese so ungewiss und vieldeutig, dass schwerlich je zwei Menschen, mit einer Stelle den nämlichen Gedanken verbunden haben."
