It seems strikingly modern on the one hand to seek elements of individualism and irrationalism in Lessing, and thus to view him as a precursor of the Storm and Stress movement, while at the same time pointing up how great a revolt from the rationalist Lessing this new generation constitutes.1 Actually, as Annemarie Sauerlander has pointed out to me, James Russell Lowell in 1867, writing a review of Stahr's work on Lessing, stated that Lessing “may be said to have begun the revolt from pseudo-classicism in poetry, and to have been thus unconsciously the founder of romanticism”, but he immediately added: “It may be doubted whether the immediate effect on literature of his own critical essays was so great as Herr Stahr supposes. Surely Gölz and The Robbers are nothing like what he would have called Shakespearean, and the whole Sturm und Drang tendency would have roused in him nothing but antipathy.”2 The standard biographies of Lessing, such as Danzel-Guhrauer, Erich Schmidt, and Oehlke, have tended to enlarge on the chasm separating Lessing from Storm and Stress, while some monographs and more general works3 have emphasized evolution, rather than revolution, as the dynamic force operative on German literature, at least throughout the eighteenth century.4