aks out in exclamations of
delight; and it is interesting to learn that when the play was brought
upon the stage at Constantinople a few years ago, the Turkish audience
was similarly affected. There is in the story that quiet, stealthy
humour which is characteristic of many mediaeval apologues, and in which
Lessing himself loved to deal. It is humour of the kind which hits
the mark, and reveals the truth. In a note upon this passage, Lessing
himself said: "The opinion of Nathan upon all positive religions has for
a long time been my own." Let him who has the genuine ring show it by
making himself loved of God and man. This is the central idea of the
poem. It is wholly unlike the iconoclasm of the deists, and, coming in
the eighteenth century, it was like a veritable evangel.

"Nathan" was not brought out until three years after Lessing's death,
and it kept possession of the stage for but a short time. In a dramatic
point of view, it has hardly any merits. Whatever plot there is in it is
weak and improbable. The decisive incidents seem to be brought in like
the deus ex machina of the later Greek drama. There is no movement,
no action, no development. The characters are poetically but not
dramatically conceived. Considered as a tragedy, "Nathan" would be weak;
considered as a comedy, it would be heavy. With full knowledge of these
circumstances, Lessing called it not a drama, but a dramatic poem; and
he might have called it still more accurately a didactic poem, for
the only feature which it has in common with the drama is that the
personages use the oratio directa.

"Nathan" is a didactic poem: it is not a mere philosophic treatise
written in verse, like the fragments of Xenophanes. Its lessons are
conveyed concretely and not abstractly; and its characters are not mere
lay figures, but living poetical conceptions. Considered as a poem among
classic German poems, it must rank next to, though immeasurably below,
Goethe's "Faust."

There are two contrasted kinds of genius, the poetical and the
philosophical; or, to speak yet more generally, the artistic and the
critical. The former is distinguished by a concrete, the latter by an
abstract, imagination. The former sees things synthetically, in
all their natural complexity; the latter pulls things to pieces
analytically, and scrutinizes their relations. The former sees a tree
in all its glory, where the latter sees an exogen with a pair of
cotyledons. The former sees whole