The news of Kleist's death affected Lessing severely, and so broke down his energies that he felt the imperative need of a change of scene. He therefore accepted an offer to act as secretary to General Tauentzien, who had been appointed Governor of Breslau. He followed him to that city in 1760, hoping to find renewed energies in a fixed employment that gave him good emolument and left him free time for self-culture.
Lessing remained at this post for nearly five years, until the conclusion of the Seven Years' War, and though his letters of that period are very scanty, and though he gained evil repute at Breslau as a gambler and a tavern haunter, they were really the busiest and most studious years of his life. Here he read Spinoza and the Church Fathers, studied æsthetics and Winckelmann's newly issued 'History of Art,' wrote his 'Minna von Barnhelm,' and the 'Laokoon.' Their publication did not occur till his return to Berlin after the peace of Hubertsburg, when Lessing threw up his appointment, greatly to the dismay of his family, who had reckoned on it as a permanent resource. But Lessing had had enough of soldiers and military life, he had exhausted all they could teach him, and he craved to resume his studious and independent existence. He did not like it on resumption so well as he had thought he should at a distance. Restlessness seized him. He wanted to travel; to see Italy. His friends desired an appointment for him as royal librarian. He applied for the post, and was kept for some time in uncertainty. He failed, however, owing to Frederick's dislike to German learned men, and it was in vain that Lessing's friends pleaded that he was anything but the typical German pedant, uncouth, unkempt, who was Frederick's _bête noire_. To prove his efficiency for the post, Lessing had published his 'Laokoon.' He published it as a fragment, and, like too many of Lessing's works, it never grew beyond that stage.
But _torso_ as it is, its influence has been far spreading. The science of æsthetics was in its infancy when Lessing wrote. Pedantic and conventional rules were laid down regarding beauty, and the greatest confusion of ideas existed concerning the provinces and limits of the respective arts. Poetry and painting were treated as arts identical in purpose and scope; indeed each was advised to borrow aid from the resources of the other. Simonides' dictum that "Painting is silent poetry, and poetry eloquent painting," was regarded as an incontrovertible axiom. Winckelmann's lately published 'History of Art' had supported this view of the matter; a point of view that encouraged allegorical painting and didactic poetry. The 'Laokoon' strove to expose the radical error of this idea, as its second title, 'or the boundaries of Poetry and Painting,' proves. The conclusions established by the 'Laokoon' have become to-day the very groundwork of cultured art criticism, and though the somewhat narrow scope of its æsthetic theory has been extended, the basis remains untouched and unshaken. The book is of as much value now as upon its first appearance. Its luminous distinctions, its suggestive utterances, point the way to exact truth, even where they do not define it. Like the celebrated Torso of the Vatican, it can be made an object of constant study, and every fresh investigation will reveal new beauties, new subtle traits of artistic comprehension hitherto overlooked.