Excerpt from Laokoon, and How the Ancients Represented Death

Zimmern have, no doubt, done much to dispel this ignorance, and paved the way for a wider study of Lessing's own work, and the publication in Bohn's Libraries of a translation of all his completed dramas, has given English readers an opportunity of estimating his merits for themselves in this particular path of literature. But inasmuch as these dramas, a large preportion of which were composed in his youth, are veiy far from representing the substance of his more mature work, a selection, at least, from his prose writings, in which of course the 'laokoon' must be included, is absolutely necessary to give any adequate notion of Lessing's achievements.

The main bent of his mind was essentially critical, and this fact is sufficient to account for the modified degree of recognition which he has met with. A critic merely as such cannot be a popular writer, and the necessity that the results of his labours, so far as they are effective, must be appropriated and absorbed by succeeding writers has a further tendency to limit the duration of any fame that he may have acquired on the score of them. That Lessing, notwithstanding this, is known as the author of some pieces that are in the truest sense popular is due to qualities not strictly critical, or necessarily coexistent with the clear insight and independence of mind which forced him to analyze afresh'and probe to its depths any subject that came within his intellectual grasp. It is the faculty of invention to which are due such creations as Nathan, Minna, or von Tellheim, and the strong infusion of personal character which gives to his didactic writings the charm of essays, whilst they have the weight of treatises, that constitute his claims to popular appreciation.

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