least, things will be livelier and noisier than they are at the
present moment, in which the carpet-slippered rapture of our heavenly
leader and the lukewarm eloquence of his lips only succeed in the end
in making us sick and tired. I should like to know how a Hallelujah
sung by Strauss would sound: I believe one would have to listen very
carefully, lest it should seem no more than a courteous apology or a
lisped compliment. Apropos of this, I might adduce an instructive and
somewhat forbidding example. Strauss strongly resented the action of
one of his opponents who happened to refer to his reverence for
Lessing. The unfortunate man had misunderstood;--true, Strauss did
declare that one must be of a very obtuse mind not to recognise that
the simple words of paragraph 86 come from the writer's heart. Now, I
do not question this warmth in the very least; on the contrary, the
fact that Strauss fosters these feelings towards Lessing has always
excited my suspicion; I find the same warmth for Lessing raised almost
to heat in Gervinus--yea, on the whole, no great German writer is so
popular among little German writers as Lessing is; but for all that,
they deserve no thanks for their predilection; for what is it, in
sooth, that they praise in Lessing? At one moment it is his
catholicity-- the fact that he was critic and poet, archaeologist and
philosopher, dramatist and theologian. Anon, "it is the unity in him
of the writer and the man, of the head and the heart." The last
quality, as a rule, is just as characteristic of the great writer as
of the little one; as a rule, a narrow head agrees only too fatally
with a narrow heart. And as to the catholicity; this is no
distinction, more especially when, as in Lessing's case, it was a dire
necessity. What astonishes one in regard to Lessing-enthusiasts is
rather that they have no conception of the devouring necessity which
drove him on through life and to this catholicity; no feeling for the
fact that such a man is too prone to consume himself rapidly, like a