and typomania.
The fact is, that on what we may call the other side of his virtue—to call it the defect of his quality would be rather to beg the question—he is, after all, a preceptist with some difference. Not merely is he an unflinching and almost “right-or-wrong” Aristotelian, but from genuine agreement of taste and judgment he still criticises almost wholly by Kinds. It is the drama, the epic, the fable, the lyric, the epigram that he makes for, across or sometimes almost outside of the actual examples of their classes. And here, too, we find that the more poetical divisions and the more poetical aspects of these and others have no very special appeal to him. He belittles Lyric altogether; if he is particularly fond of the Fable in the special sense, it is because it also has a “fable” in the general, it is an imitation of life, a criticism of it. His attempt to prove that Horace had no looking-glasses in his bedroom[[63]] is a pleasant pendant to his indignation with Roxalana’s minois chiffonné: and though there is a great deal to be said for Martial, Lessing[[64]] is bribed to adopt the vita proba view rather by the Roman poet’s intense vivacity than by his literary merit.
His study of antiquity more than compensating.
Yet this, once more, is but “the other side of a virtue.” The best authorities agree that to Lessing may be assigned absolutely the return to, if not the very initiation of,[[65]] a direct, scholarly, intelligent, literary study of the ancients themselves. As far as the Greek Theatre itself is concerned, Brumoy had anticipated him: far too little justice has often been done to the work of this modest and solid scholar. But Brumoy’s outlook was wanting in range. Lessing had in his mind, as well as Latin and Greek, English,[[66]] French and German always, Italian, even Spanish[[67]] to some extent. And he read the Latin and the Greek in themselves—and with all due apparatus of technical scholarship considering his time. He was as far from the twice- and thrice-garbled sciolism of the average French, and even English, critic of the late seventeenth and earlier eighteenth century, as from the arid pedantry of the Dutch and German scholars of the same date. To him, more perhaps than to any one else, it is due that modern criticism has not followed, more than it has done, the mere foolishness of the “modern” advocates in the Quarrel—that it has fortified itself with those sound and solid studies which antiquity alone can supply. For once more let it be said that if, from the pure critical point of view, Ancient without Modern is a stumbling-block, Modern without Ancient is foolishness utter and irremediable.
And especially of Aristotle.
Perhaps Lessing’s greatest glory is that he has given answer to the despairing question which his master quoted in the Ethics.[[68]] “If the water chokes, what must one drink on the top of it?” “More and purer water” is that answer, of course: and Lessing scoured the clogged and stagnant channels of Neo-Classicism by recurrence to the original fount. Of course he was not himself absolutely original. He owed something to Heinsius, in that most remarkable tractate to which we did justice in its place, among the more distant moderns, to Dacier, pedant as he is, to Brumoy, to Hurd among the nearer. But more than to any of them he devoted himself to the real text of the Poetics, interpreted by a combination of scholarship and mother-wit. To this day he has to be consulted upon the cruces of Fable and Character, of Unity, of knotting and unknotting, of katharsis.[[69]] That he has said no final word on them matters nothing: final words are not to be said on things of opinion and probability
Until God’s great Venite change the song.
But on these and not a few other matters he reorganised the whole method and the whole tenor of the inquiry. And so he not only earns his own place in the story, but half unintentionally establishes, or helps us to establish, the great truth that the whole is a story, a history, a chain of opinion and comment on opinion, now going more, now less, right, but to be kept as a chain.