Years  before,  while  following  up  the  theory  of  the
drama  in  his  strict  and  strenuous  fashion,  he  had  con-
vinced himself  that  'Nathan'  was  a  monstrosity;  it
was  neither  tragedy  nor  comedy  nor  tragi-comedy,  and
he  was  opposed  to  a  mixture  of  types.  In  tragedy,
so  he  had  reasoned  in  his  essay  upon  '  Naive  and
Sentimental  Poetry  ',  raisonnement  is  out  of  place;  in


44°       Unfinished  Plays  and  Adaptations

comedy,  pathos.  Lessing  had  yielded  to  the  '  whim  '
of  mixing  the  two.  If,  therefore,  it  was  desired  to
make  an  acceptable  stage-play  out  of  '  Nathan  '  it
would  be  advisable  to  modify  it  in  the  direction  of
tragedy  by  reducing  its  raisonnement,  or  else  to  make
it  more  like  comedy  by  reducing  its  pathos.  In  other
words,  theory  had  given  Schiller  a  point  of  view  which
is  not  the  modern  point  of  view.  To-day  no  one,
unless  it  were  a  pedant,  would  be  disposed  to  criticize
Lessing,  because,  toward  the  end  of  his  days,  out  of
the  fullness  of  his  heart  and  following  the  impulse  that
was  in  him,  he  for  once  threw  his  own  theories  to  the
winds  and  wrote  a  dramatic  masterpiece  of  its  own
peculiar  kind.  The  very  fact  that  it  is  unique  is  for  us
a  part  of  its  merit.
