There is really nothing to be said to this but ὦ πόποι! In the first place, all this good moral indignation simply explodes through the touch-hole. The tale is pure satire on the actual weakness of man and triumph of woman—and this actuality who dare deny? If Lessing does not think both Soliman and Roxelane natural, so much the worse for Lessing. In the second place, neither is in the least degree held up for our admiration, though the skill of the artist may deserve that admiration in almost the highest degree. We may, if we like, pronounce Soliman a weak man and rather immoral ruler, and suspect Roxelane (as he suspected her himself) of being very little better than she should be. But not only does the critic waste his powder in the direction in which he actually fires; he loses the opportunity of bringing down excellent game. He lets slip altogether (as Tassoni[[53]] had not altogether, though he did not follow it out) the chance of arguing that most important and interesting critical question of the attraction of the irregular, the unexpected, the capricious, the teasing. He might have got “instruction” to his heart’s content, for us and for himself, out of this shocking story of the great Sultan and the petit nez retroussé. Surely it were better done thus to profit by the curves of Roxelane’s countenance than to read us a dull sermon on her want of moral rectitude? But Lessing does not think so—master though he be, at least according to German notions, of that very irony which should have kept him right.

The strictures on Ariosto’s portrait of Alcina.

His merely dramatic and his merely artistic preoccupations deserve less severe treatment, because it cannot be said that they lead him wrong or even astray, except from our special point of view. But from that special point of view they do lead him astray: at least in the sense that he becomes sometimes unimportant to us. In the whole of the Laocoön, reserving a point to be returned to later, I remember only one passage of any length which is really literary,[[54]] and that is the famous and not undeserved, but somewhat insufficiently worked out, censure of Ariosto’s description of Alcina.[[55]] Here Lessing does show what a critic he is by his triumphant demonstration that the carefully accumulated strokes which would in the sister art go towards making, if they would not completely make, a most attractive picture, produce very little definite effect as a passage. Even here he allows himself to be called off from the discovery which he was on the point, it might seem, of making. He excepts for praise the beautiful—in fact consummate—simile of the breasts which—

“Vengono e van, come onda al primo margo

quando piacevole aura il mar combatte.”

Here of course the charm arises from the fact that the image is new, personal—that is to say, that it is literary. The curves of the wind-engrailed surge on the sand are not Vida’s “stealings,” they are originals—whoso takes them will not make them, though in themselves they remain delightful for ever. They are like the “chrysoprase” eyes of Clarimonde in Gautier’s Morte Amoureuse, which make that piece immortal. The man who now gives us eyes of chrysoprase might as well make them gooseberries. Lessing does not say this, does not hint it: indeed (as Lamb’s Scotchman would point out) it would have been, in reference to the Morte Amoureuse, impossible for him to do so. But he is on the way to saying it, and he instigates others to do so if he does not.[[56]]

Hamlet and Semiramis.

The objection indeed which may be most justly taken to these dramatic and artistic preoccupations is that they too often directly prevent him in this way from doing what he might have done. The Dramaturgie is to the student of properly literary criticism a mixture of irritation and delight—a parallel to Coleridge’s conversation, in which “glorious” literary “islets” constantly loom through the dramatic haze, and then get engulfed again. How admirable in principle that comparison[[57]] of Voltaire’s and of Shakespeare’s ghosts! Yet how we sigh for concrete illustrations from the actual words—for a little, little Zusammensetzung, say, of