Читать книгу The Sexual Life of Our Time in Its Relations to Modern Civilization - Iwan 1872-1922 Bloch - Страница 39

“No fire, no coal, can burn so hot

As secret love, of which no one knows anything.”[137]

The age of chivalry now arrives, the epoch of minne[138] (love) and gallantry. What a new and remarkable change in the spiritual physiognomy of love! This also has left deep traces in the love of modern civilized man; this period represents an important stage in the developmental history of individual eroticism.

In the middle ages the honour of the knight and the love of woman, “the most beautiful radiance coming down to us from the life of this wonderful period,” as Wienberg says, belong together. Since that time man’s honour has been associated in a peculiar manner with woman’s love.

Boldly but aptly the far-sighted Herder has described the knightly minne (love) as a reflex of the Gothic. The same immeasurability of the imagination, the same indescribable sentiment, constructed the huge cathedral, and disclosed the unrivalled worth and beauty of the beloved—created minne and its outward expression, gallantry.

In deifying supplication, the knightly spirit elevated the beautiful sex to the heavens, raised woman far above man, and placed man far beneath woman. The knight sacrificed himself for the mistress of his heart, subjected himself to her judgment before the cours d’amour (courts of love), and in the lists. He became the slave of love and of the beloved woman; he wore her fetters, he obeyed her slightest nod, he endured chastisement and pain for her sake. But was this all reality? Was it not rather pure imagination? There was, indeed, as Johannes Scherr says, a worm at the heart of all this romanticism. The ideal deification of woman did not affect a corresponding elevation in her true social position; minne was but too often a mere “pose,” and was often associated with unbridled sexual licence in relation to women of lower degrees.

The domination of the imaginative element characterized the aberrations of minne, debasing itself for the honour of the beloved. The masochistic element concealed in all love was here for the first time elevated into a system. We shall return to this subject in the chapter on “Masochism.”

And yet there is another side to the matter, and by the spirit of chivalry there was aroused a nobler view of woman’s nature.

“The cause and the secret of this dominance (of women) is this, that woman, with her complete, noble womanliness, entered wholly and fully into life; that she controlled a kingdom which was hers by right, the world of feeling and emotion, but controlled this kingdom and no more. As mistress of feeling, as guardian of feeling, she brought poetry into life; and into art she brought that lofty impetus, the above-described fanciful ideal or feminine tendency, which, when observed and perceived, reacts on the emotional mood of the observer.”[139]

To this time also belongs the development of the conventional in the amatory relations of the sexes, which came to be governed by definite rules; since that time, for example, it has been regarded as improper and scandalous for an unmarried woman to remain for any considerable time alone with a man, a view which has persisted to the present day. The social intercourse of the sexes was based upon “gallantry” or “courtesy,” upon a refined behaviour towards “ladies,” regulated by the laws of beauty, propriety, and social tact. In the sequel there developed out of this that exaggerated modern gallantry, characterized by little real delicacy of feeling, because it exhibits an undertone of contempt which makes woman feel only too clearly that she is the representative of a “weaker,” inferior sex, and is in no way the possessor of any proper individual, personal value. Intelligent, eminent women have always protested against this modern gallantry. Mantegazza, in his “Physiology of Woman,” p. 442 (Jena, 1893), ably describes the hypocrisy underlying this evil form of gallantry.

The first intimation of modern individual love is to be found in Shakespeare, to whom love was in general, indeed, only a “superhuman” passion, something lying beyond good and evil, which seized hold of man against his will; but none the less he embodies in his work the romantic ideal life of his time in feminine characters possessing the fullest individuality—as, for example, Ophelia, Miranda, Juliet, Desdemona, Virginia, Imogen, and Cordelia, whilst in Cleopatra he has described the daimonic-bacchantic traits of the love of woman. In Juliet, who sees in “true love acted simple modesty,” we observe the passionate emotion of the primordial natural impulse, and the first awakening of woman as a personality.

False gallantry, in association with conventional propriety, both of which were developed to the fullest degree at the Courts of Louis XIV. and Louis XV., subordinated love to rules, and was very well compatible with the most frivolous and epicurean sensual life. And this occurred at the expense of deeply-felt natural sentiment, the place of which was taken by mere flirtation and coquetry. Here, also, the contempt of woman clearly shows itself. Especially in regard to this period, the opinion has been maintained that the modern Frenchman has never suspected, understood, recognized the divine in woman’s nature. Still, the general truth of this assertion is belied by the amatory life of the celebrated heroines of the salons, such as Du Deffand, Lespinasse, Du Chatelet, Quinault, and above all of the celebrated Ninon de l’Enclos[140]; and the Abbé Prévost, in his immortal “Manon Lescaut,” proved that even in that period the indestructible belief in woman persisted, at least as an ideal.

It was, in fact, in France that the higher individual love underwent a new spiritual enrichment; Rousseau’s “Julie” appeared on the horizon of Love’s heaven. And in the background was disclosed the German “Werther,” a book strangely influenced by that of Rousseau. The nature-sense on the one hand, sentimentality on the other, are the new elements in the love of the period of Héloïse and Werther.

In Rousseau’s “New Héloïse,” passionate love and a complete self-surrender were described without the artificiality, and also without the coquetry and wantonness, of which the literature of the time was full. It was love in a grander style than people were then accustomed to see. For this reason, the book constituted a turning-point in literature. That love is an earnest thing, that it can become “la grande affaire de notre vie,” has perhaps never been more deeply and thoroughly depicted than in the character of “Julie.” In maintaining the essential purity of the love relationship, when the voice of Nature is really expressed therein, Rousseau speaks of the principal theme of his own life.

“Is not true love,” asks Julie, “the chastest of all bonds?... Is not love in itself the purest as well as the most magnificent impulse of our nature? Does it not despise low and crawling souls, in order to inspire only grand and strong souls? And does it not ennoble all feeling, does it not double our being and elevate us above ourselves? In contrast to social inequalities, the love relationship points to a higher law, before which all are equal.”[141]

The love of Rousseau is, in fact, not social; it is not a product of civilization, but it is a creation of nature; it is one with nature. The nature-sense and the love-sense are here most intimately associated. And he observes both, nature and love, with feeling. The sensibilité de l’âme finds in nature and in love objects of the most glorious delight, of the sweetest pain, of the most burning tears.

“Out of the perceptions of mingled pain and ecstasy which the vision of nature, of beauty, or of a fine action, induced in him, he wove the web of sensibility with which he enveloped the creatures of his imagination. Incessantly thrust back into himself, his heart bleeding from wounded friendship or from unrequited love, self-tormentingly dissecting his own wishes and illusions, his own faculties and impossibilities, he became one of the first heralds of the Weltschmerz, of the woes of Werther and René, to which Byron and Heine had only to add self-mockery.”[142]

The sentimentality of the eighteenth century took its rise in England, as I have explained at some length in my pseudonymous work, “The Sexual Life in England,” vol. ii., pp. 95-107 (Berlin, 1903). In that country it found its most characteristic expression in the romances of Richardson and Sterne, and in landscape-gardening; but it was by Rousseau and Goethe that for the first time it was really brought into contact with the realities of life.

For the history of Julie, the history of Werther—this was the history of all happily or unhappily loving youths and maidens of that day; each maiden had her Saint Preux, each youth his Lotte.

The profound influence exercised by Rousseau, especially on women, has been described by H. Buffenoir in a very careful study.[143] The significance which “Werther” had for the emotional life of the time has been explained with the most cultivated understanding by Erich Schmidt in a well-known monograph.[144]

He shows that the nature-sense and sentimentality are much more deeply felt in Goethe’s “Werther” than in Rousseau’s “Nouvelle Héloïse.” Goethe himself says in “Wahrheit und Dichtung,” speaking of this poetical, rational, intimate, and loving absorption into nature:

“I endeavoured to separate myself inwardly from everything foreign to me, to regard the outward world lovingly, and to allow all beings, from the human onwards, to influence me, each in its kind, as deeply as was possible. Thus arose a wonderful alliance with the individual objects of nature, and an inward harmony, a harmony with the whole; so that every change, whether of places and of regions, or of days and seasons, or of any possible kind, moved me to my inmost soul. The painter’s view became associated with that of the poet; the beautiful country landscape through which the friendly river was wandering, increased my inclination to solitude, and favoured my quiet attitude of contemplation extending itself in every direction.”

Werther’s feeling for nature is intimately related to his love passion. The two harmonize, and each exercises a reciprocal influence upon the other. Nature is to Werther a second beloved. The youth of nature, the spring of nature, are also the youth and the spring of his love.

In the peculiar association of love with the nature-sense and sentimentality, which is so characteristic of the time of Julie and Werther, are to be found the first beginnings of the “Weltschmerz,” with its erotically significant “ecstasy of sorrow.” The following words in Goethe’s “Stella” appear to me to bind Weltschmerz and eroticism in an extremely distinct relationship. Stella says of men:

“They make us at once happy and miserable! They fill our heart with feelings of bliss! What new, unknown feelings and hopes fill our souls, when their stormful passion invades our nerves! How often has everything in me trembled and throbbed, when, in uncontrollable tears, he has washed away the sorrows of a world on my breast! I begged him, for God’s sake, to spare himself!—to spare me!—in vain!—into my inmost marrow he fanned the flames which were devouring himself. And thus the girl, from head to foot, became all heart, all sentiment.”

Here we find clearly described the erotic element in mental pain; and we observe the remarkable increase of passion by means of sorrow, tears, and a profound perception of the evil of the world. This Weltschmerz fans the flames of eroticism, increases love, and ultimately gives rise to a peculiar sense of power; it is, indeed, most frequently in the first bloom of love, in the years of puberty, that its relations with sexuality are most distinctly manifested. The celebrated alienist Mendel has described this almost physiological Weltschmerz of the age of puberty as “hypo-melancholia.” An indefinite, passionate longing, which seeks relief in tears, a by no means negligible inclination to suicide—of which Werther is the classical exemplar—characterizes this condition, which is connected with the complete revolutionizing of the spiritual and emotional life by means of the sexual. The Weltschmerz of youth is a latent sexual sense of power.

How the nature-sense and love combine to constitute a perception of Weltschmerz has been most beautifully expressed by Byron and Heine in their poetry. With quite exceptional clearness, Heine also describes it in a letter to Friedrich Merckel (written at Nordeney on August 7, 1826), in which he described a nightly recurring scene with a beautiful woman on the seashore:

“The sea no longer appeared so romantic as before—and yet on its strand I had lived through the sweetest and most mystically dear experience of my life which could ever inspire a poet. The moon seemed to wish to show me that in this world happiness yet remained for me. We did not speak—it was only a long, profound glance, the moonlight supplied the music—as we walked to and fro, I took her hand in mine, I felt the secret pressure—my soul trembled and glowed—afterwards I wept.”

How different were these tears from the floods of tears in Miller’s “Siegwart,” and in other similar productions of the Werther epoch, which, with their weakly sentimentality, their emotionally happy “sensibility,” had nothing whatever in common with the much more natural Weltschmerz of Goethe and Heine—more natural because based on a physiological foundation.

In modern love also, the Weltschmerz continues to live. The only difference is that by means of the pessimistic philosophy it has to some extent obtained a logical foundation. And Nietzsche has shown us the force which lies hidden in this ecstasy of sorrow. Precisely on account of the pains of the world, he affirms joyfully life and love. Anyone who wishes to write the history of Weltschmerz, from a psychological point of view so profoundly interesting, must not overlook Nietzsche as a most important turning-point in that history.

The passion inspired by genius, the excess of vital energy in the “Sturm und Drang” epoch of German literature, was admirably consistent with that genuine, primitive Weltschmerz. Rousseau’s more indeterminate sensibility had, on the other hand, a more powerful influence upon the mode of feeling of romanticism, and this movement appears more closely related to him than to Goethe.

Romantic love combines the elements of feeling of the previous epochs in an increased subjectivism. Not nature alone, but history also, folk-tales, legends, poetry, and the wonderful secrets of the primeval age—all these are reflected in romantic love, and awaken singular dreams and emotions. The “mondbeglänzte Zaubernacht” (“moon-illumined magic night”) is much more than a mere feeling of nature; it is the recognition of a connexion with the past and with its secret, sweet, half-forgotten stories. Fonqué’s “Undine” is the classical type of all this. Romantic love delights in this wonder-mood of the heart; reality becomes, as it were, a dream. The obscure, the problematical—these attract the romanticist. It is for this reason that he loves the night and the night-mood of nature, rather than the clear daylight. Moonshine reverie is a characteristic trait of romantic love. Everything flows away into the indeterminate, the cloudy, the boundless. This love knows no limitation or narrowing, no fetters. It is the sworn enemy of the conventional, narrow-hearted, philistine morality, and of all limitations of personality. In Friedrich Schlegel’s “Lucinde” this most celebrated monument of romantic love, the campaign against philistinism, as the greatest enemy of a free, noble amatory life, is most energetically carried on. It is utterly untrue to describe “Lucinde” as a romance in which there is a cult of suggestive nudity—as the poetry of the flesh. It certainly preaches the free natural conception and perception of the nude and the sexual, and is a glorious protest against the artificial and hypocritical separation of body and soul in love; but, on the other side, it unlocks in love the entire kingdom of the emotional and spiritual life, and discloses its significance for the individual man as a free personality.

More than Rousseau’s “Julie” and Goethe’s “Werther” is Friedrich Schlegel’s “Lucinde” the apotheosis of individual love. Romantic love is the mirror of personality; it is changeable, filled with the highest spiritual content, and, above all, like personality, is capable of development. In a masterly manner Schlegel has represented the intimate connexion between true love and all vital energy. The relations of love to genius have never before been so admirably described.

“Here,” says Karl Gutzkow, “there is no question of artificiality; we have to do rather with the yearning of a youth who loves, who sees the one and only beloved in many different forms, in the metamorphoses of his own ego, which yearns to reconcile egoism and love.”

Schleiermacher, in his “Confidential Letters regarding Lucinde,” Gutzkow in his preface to the new edition of this work, and recently H. Meyer-Benfey,[145] have supplied us with conclusions regarding the true significance of “Lucinde,” conclusions in harmony with our own view.

We must allude here to a new element in romantic love, which since that time has played an important part in modern eroticism. It is l’art pour l’art of love, the revelling in pure moods and emotions as the means of enjoyment. The emotional frequently grows luxuriantly and chokes the natural feeling of love. Jean Paul, for example,

“regards eroticism purely as a method of cultivation. Human beings are not to be actually loved, but are to be used to strike sparks from, by which one’s own inward life may be illuminated.... He is the exemplar of that artist-love which, vampire-like, drinks the souls of those who become its prey. This love sees in the hearts offered to it only the stuff for pictures; and in their warm blood it finds only an intoxicating, stimulating drink.”[146]

This unqualified search for personal emotional experiences in love, without regard to the love-partner, is especially represented in Jean Paul’s “Titan.”

Wackenroder, in his “Phantasien über die Kunst” (“Imaginative Studies concerning Art”), has already warned us of the dangers of this purely erotic-emotional love. Karl Joel has recently described very vividly how the romanticists ultimately reduced all vital relationships to the emotions of love.[147] This attempt must lead finally to mysticism, the poetical representative of which is Novalis.

It is very interesting to find that all the diverse elements of romantic love may also be detected in the latter-day renascence of romanticism. In his admirable book on “Nietzsche and Romanticism,” Karl Joel has clearly shown the existence of this romantic element in modern love, and, above all, has insisted upon the intimate connexion which the philosophy of Nietzsche has with the joy in battle and the vital energy of the romanticists. Both are apostles of the Dionysiac, not of the Apollinian.[148]

This also is the difference by which “romantic” love is distinguished from “classical” love—a difference and a distinction which I find indicated for the first time in Theodor Mundt’s romance “Madelon oder die Romantiker in Paris” (Leipzig, 1832).

The relevant passage (pp. 9-12) runs as follows:

“I am therefore of opinion that there can be a romantic and a classical poetry; there are also romantic and classical love; and it is only by means of this twofold nature that it is possible to discover and understand this contrast in poetry....

“This wild and yet so sweet disturbance of the heart, in which love subsists, this rejoicing and revelry of the aroused imagination which, originated by the charm of the beloved, lead to an intoxication with all the sensual dreams of a delightful, ethereal happiness; and as in the flower-bud in which a burning ray of sunshine has suddenly awakened the impulse to bloom, give rise to the desire and longing of sensual impulsion—all these tears and sighs of the lovers, pains and joys, this love-happiness and love-misery at the same time, this star-flaming night-side of passion, to which after a vagrant drunken frenzy, an ice-cold, unwelcome morning follows—all this, my friend, is romantic love....

“And shall I now describe also classical love?... Believe me, there are faces which at the very first glance seem to us so trustworthy and so near akin, they draw us to them, as if we had spent years with them in sympathy, asking for love and receiving love. By the sight of this girl’s face there was induced in me so suddenly a sense of peace, such as never before in my life had I experienced; and this gentle feeling which drew me towards her, I may call true love and true happiness. In her loving eyes there glowed no seductive fire, no repellent pride like that of our romantic Madelon; in the simple beautiful German girl, all is clear and true; out of her gentle features speaks her gentle soul; and all for which I have longed in passionate, aberrant hours of my life—a definite, unalloyed happiness in existence—seemed to me, as I saw her for the very first time, to shine on me out of her blue true eyes. My friend, is not that classical love?”

It is the Apollinian-Platonic element of modern love which Theodor Mundt here describes as “classical” love, and certainly he wrongly places it before romantic love, which is the expression of modern subjectivism and individualism. Such classical love found in Goethe’s “Tasso” its most complete representation. Here love was conceived as “possession, which should give peace”; the beloved being influences after the manner of an already understood picture. As Kuno Fischer remarks, in the world of Goethe’s “Tasso” the Platonic Eros is the fashion. Love is here the pure, quiet contemplation of beauty in and with the beloved.

Gretchen and Helena in “Faust” embody very clearly the contrast between romantic and classical love. We find these contrasts united in Wilhelm Heinse’s celebrated “Ardinghello,” a romance which even to us at the present day seems so modern. In this work we find the Dionysiac-Faustian impulse of the loving individual, and the Apollinian-artistic contemplation of the loved one, described with equal mastery.

In regard to love, Heinse was the prototype of “Young Germany.” And we are young Germany.

For all the problems of amatory life which to-day occupy our minds have already been made topics of public discussion by the authors of young Germany. In young German love-philosophy, the “Knights of the Spirit” as well as the “Knights of the Flesh,” come to their full rights. Only the ignorant can regard the so-called “emancipation of the flesh,” the apotheosis of lascivious sensuality, as the sole characteristic of the efforts and battles of our own time. No, he who wishes to understand modern love, in all its spiritual manifestations and relationship, let him read the writings of young Germany, especially the works of Laube, Gutzkow, Mundt; and also those of Heine, who has a more intimate relationship to young Germany than he has to romanticism.

More especially Gutzkow,[149] who appears to me the greatest and most comprehensive spirit of the young German literature—indeed, of the more recent German literature in general—overlooks no single riddle and problem of modern eroticism. Of all the writers of the nineteenth century, he has the profoundest knowledge of women. How stimulating are his girl characters; how true, notwithstanding their manifoldness! Wally, riding proudly upon a white palfrey, outwardly an image of beauty, but, like so many modern emancipated women, inwardly tormented by the demon of doubt; Seraphine the dreamer, uncertain about herself and her love, of whom the poet himself later admitted that her character was based on reality; Idaline,[150] full of majesty, the ideal “bride of the waves,” a typical figure of conventional high life, who yet in sudden revolution against this conventionalism gives her whole being to a chance love, a love of the moment,[151] which alienates her from her betrothed and later husband, and drives her to death; then, again, all the brilliant feminine characters in the great romances, “Die Ritter vom Geiste,” Melanie, Helene, Selma, Pauline, Olga—all are characters bearing the stamp of reality in their spiritual and emotional life, so various and yet so true, and, above all, in their manifold, differentiated relationships to men, genuinely modern women.

Gutzkow was also the first to bring upon the stage the modern woman and the problems of modern love, long before the French dramatists and before Ibsen.

As Karl Frenzel pointed out as early as 1864, Gutzkow made the stage the battlefield of modern ideas. The inward contrasts of love, the psychological problem of the heart—he first ventured to deal with these in the dramatic form.

“We all of us felt the wounds which ‘the world’ inflicted on Werner; we all wandered from the quiet violet, Agathe, to the brilliant rose, Sidonie; as in Ottfried, so in ourselves, the love of the heart battled with the love of the spirit. Who would admit himself to be so miserably poor as never to have revelled, lived, and suffered, in the play of these feelings? What wife has not, at least in imagination, hesitated for a moment, like Ella Rose, between the lover and the husband? Such figures as these bear in themselves the essence of truth, and do not lose their lofty value because, perhaps, their garments are not draped with sufficient harmony. They touch us, because we recognize in them our own flesh and blood; and they fulfil, in so far as the form of the society drama allows, Shakespeare’s canon of dramatic art—they hold the mirror up to nature.”

In his tragedies, “Werner,” “Ottfried,” “Ella Rose,” Gutzkow presents in a masterly manner the inner life of the time; we see in them the pulsing wing-beats of the souls, which in pain, as it must be in these days, soar upwards in the effort to attain beauty and freedom.[152]

Of all the young German authors, Gutzkow has best grasped the problem of problems in love—the problem of personality. In the painful question asked of Helene d’Azimont, in “Die Ritter vom Geiste”—

“Is it, then, thy innermost need,

To be everything to others, nothing to thyself? Nothing to woman’s highest glory, love, Nothing, Helene, to the pang of renunciation?”

—this inalienable right to the safeguarding and development of the individual personality, notwithstanding all the self-sacrifice of passionate love, is most forcibly maintained. This is, indeed, the true nucleus of all higher individual love between man and woman.

Gutzkow has been accused, by those who had in mind only the purely symbolic nudity scene in “Wally,” of preaching the “emancipation of the flesh”; the same accusation has been levelled against other young German authors, such as Lambe (in “Jungen Europa”), Theodor Mundt (in the “Madonna”), Wienbarg (in the “Aesthetische Feldzüge”), Heine (in the “Neue Gedichte”). The charge is unjust. It is only the poetry of the flesh which they wish to bring to its rights. Notwithstanding his enthusiastic hymn of praise to Casanova, Theodor Mundt declares in his “Madonna” that the separation of flesh and spirit is the “inexpiable suicide of the human consciousness.”

Much more important, the true characteristic of all the authors of young Germany, appear to me the parts which self-analysis and reflection here for the first time play in love, visible beneath the influence of the offshoots of French romanticism, in which, however, we also encounter the same phenomenon, as in George Sand’s “Lelia,” in Alfred de Musset’s “Confession d’un Enfant du Siècle,” in Balzac’s “Femme de Trente Ans”—in which last romance we find the following passage:

“Love assumes the colouring of every century. Now, in the year 1822, it is doctrinaire. Instead of, as formerly, proving it by deeds, it is argued, it is discussed, it is brought upon the tribune in a speech.”

Just as in the middle ages the idea of “sin” was the disturbing principle of love, so for the modern civilized man, since the days of young Germany, this cold self-reflection, this critical analysis of one’s peculiar passionate perceptions and feelings, is the modern disturbing principle. This is the worm which gnaws unceasingly at the root of our love, and destroys its most beautiful blossoms. Gutzkow’s “Wally the Doubter” and “Seraphine” are the classical literary documents for this destructive ascendancy of pure thought in love. Very noteworthy is it that in both these romances it is woman who destroys life and love by reflection, whilst from earliest days this danger has always lain in the path of man. It is the fate of the modern woman, of individual personalities, which is here depicted; this fate makes its appearance from the moment when woman comes to take a share in the spiritual life of man. The cold dialectic of Seraphine, who, as Gutzkow makes one of her lovers say, reverses the natural order of man and woman, is a necessary product of the love of woman ripening in the direction of a free personality—happily, however, it is only a transient phenomenon. The fully developed personality will return to the primitiveness of feeling, and will no longer endure within herself any kind of division or laceration. The corresponding phenomena in man have been described by Kierkegaard and Grillparzer in their diaries, which are classical documents of “reflection-love.”

The love of the present day contains within itself, and nourishes itself upon, all the above-described spiritual elements of the past. More especially at the present day is the question of the so-called free love or free marriage, disregardant of the legally binding forms of civil and ecclesiastical marriage, representative of all the heartfelt needs of highly civilized mankind, hitherto held back, oppressed, and fettered by the materialism of the time, and still more by its conventionalism still active beneath its covering of outlived forms. The problem of free love was first formulated in “Lucinde,” but found in the young German literature, especially in the writings of Laube, Mundt, and Dingelstedt, its theoretical foundation; and in the Bohemian life of the Second Empire free love obtained its practical realization, although the purely idyllic character of this Bohemian life, and its limitation to the circle of the dolce far niente students and artists, in truth makes it differ widely from the most intensely personal free love, taking its part fully in the struggle for life, as it presents itself in the ideal form to modern humanity.

The Second French Empire, whose significance for the spiritual tendencies of our time was a very great one, allowed two elements of love, to which we have earlier alluded, to appear with marked predominance—elements still influential at the present day: the satanic-diabolic element of eroticism, which found its most incisive expression in the works of Barbey d’Aurevilly (strongly influenced by the writings of de Sade), of Baudelaire, and more particularly of the great Félicien Rops; and the purely artistic element, as it appears in the works of the authors just mentioned, but more especially in the writings of Théophile Gautier. This “Young France” (to use the name of a novel of Gautier’s) has influenced the amatory life and the amatory theory of the present day almost as strongly as young Germany.

At the same time, in the sixties of the nineteenth century Schopenhauer’s philosophy was dominant in Germany, and his metaphysic of love, which considered the individual not at all, but the species as all in all—this pessimistic conception of all love found its poetic expression in Edward Grisebach’s “New Tanhäuser,” published in 1869. Here, also, it would be a grave error to condemn these erotic poems of the day, on account of their glowing sensuality, as mere glorifications of carnal lust. The poet himself was the new Tanhäuser. He wished, as he often told me, to find expression in these poems for the life-denying as well as for the life-affirming forces. He sang the pleasure and the pain, the hopes and the disappointments of modern love. For him love is indeed the rose with the thorns. For this reason the motto of the poem is a saying of Meister Eckart: “The voluptuousness of the creature is intermingled with bitterness;” and this is the theme of the poets, though expressed in numerous variations: “There is no pleasure without regret.”

But for this reason Grisebach—and in this respect he resembles Nietzsche—wished none the less joyfully to affirm this life, filled as it is with pain, and in all its activity bringing with it regrets. In this sense he is no exclusive pessimist, but an apostle of activity, like the men of young Germany, in whose footsteps, and especially in those of Heine, he follows. The beautiful saying of Laube, in his “Liebesbriefen” (Leipzig, 1835, p. 29), “He who has never been shaken to the depths by any profound sorrow is also ignorant of all deep rejoicing, he knows no single verse of that enthusiasm which woos the denied heaven, he experiences no sort of religion, he is capable of no sacrifice, of no greatness,” is suited also to the “new Tanhäuser,” which so powerfully influenced German youth during the seventies and eighties of the nineteenth century.

He who wishes to understand how the various love-problems are represented in the literature of the present, strongly influenced as it is by the problem-poems of Ibsen, by Zola’s naturalism, and by the French symbolism[153] dependent on him, will find it described later in a special chapter devoted to love in the literature of to-day.

In the following chapter we have to consider one additional influence which is especially apparent in the love and eroticism of the present day, and possesses great importance for the individualization of love. This is the artistic element in modern love.

[134] H. T. Finck, “Romantic Love and Personal Beauty.”

[135] Cf. G. Hirth, “Ways to Freedom,” pp. 468-472 (Munich, 1903).

[136] G. Saint-Yves (“La Littérature Amoureuse,” Paris, 1887, p. 25) also sees in the æsthetic contemplation of the beloved person the fundamental root of individual love. It has gradually developed out of the ordinary æsthetic contemplation of nature. An interesting proof of this connexion is the Song of Solomon, in which the æsthetic stimuli of the beloved one are compared with every possible animate and inanimate natural object.

[137] Cf. regarding the numerous variations of this ancient couplet, the interesting account given by Arthur Kopp, “Old Proverbs and Popular Rhymes for Loving Hearts,” published in the Zeitschrift des Vereins für Volkskunde, Heft i., pp. 8, 9 (Berlin, 1902).

[138] Minne is an old German word (now obsolete) for love, “the love of fair women.” The minnesinger were love-singers who sang their own compositions to the accompaniment of the music of harp or viol—in fact, they were lyric poets. The most flourishing years of this art were from about 1170 to 1250; thus the minnesinger were contemporary with and closely akin to the Provençal troubadours. But the German development was essentially native, and the minnesinger’s treatment of love was characterized by a more ideal note than was usually attained by the troubadours. A good, though brief, account (with a list of authorities) is given of the minnesinger in “Chambers’s Encyclopædia.”—Translator.

[139] Jacob Falke, “The Society of Knighthood in the Epoch of the Cult of Women,” p. 49.

[140] In her letters (“Letters of Ninon de l’Enclos,” with ten etchings by Karl Walser, Berlin, 1906), the deep spiritual relationships of love found a classical representation.

[141] Cf. Harald Höffding, “Rousseau and his Philosophy,” pp. 86, 89 (Stuttgart, 1897).

[142] Emil Du Bois-Reymond, “Frederick II. and Jean Jacques Rousseau.”

[143] H. Buffenoir, “Jean Jacques Rousseau and Women” (Paris, 1891).

[144] Erich Schmidt, “Richardson, Rousseau, and Goethe” (Jena, 1875).

[145] H. Meyer-Benfey, “Lucinde,” published in Mutterschutz—Zeitschrift zur Reform der sexuellen Ethik, 1906, No. 5, pp. 173-192. Edited by Dr. Helene Stöcker.

[146] Felix Poppenberg, “Jean Paul Friedrich Richter’s Liebe und Ehestand,” in “Bibelots,” p. 214 (Leipzig, 1904).

[147] Carl Joel, “Nietzsche und die Romantik,” pp. 13-16 (Jena and Leipzig, 1905).

[148] Cf. also Helene Stöcker, “Nietzsche und die Romantik,” in Kölnische Zeitung, No. 1127, October 29, 1905.

[149] At the present time but few of my living contemporaries share this opinion of Gutzkow, which I myself base upon the careful reading of all his works. I may quote, however, with satisfaction the prophecy of the deceased dramatist Theodor Wehl. He writes of Gutzkow: “As a literary phenomenon he will grow with time. After long, long years, out of the literature of our time two characteristic heads will emerge—one laughing, and one glancing round him earnestly and sorrowfully: the head of Heinrich Heine, and the head of Karl Gutzkow” (F. Wehl, “Zeit und Menschen,” “Tagebuch Aufzeichnungen aus den Jahren von 1863 bis 1884,” vol. i., p. 297 (Altona, 1889)).

[150] Karl Gutzkow, “Reminiscences of my Life,” p. 18 (Berlin, 1875).

[151] “The time of love is not age, it is not youth: the time of love is the moment,” says Beate, one of Gutzkow’s characters, at the end of the tragedy “Ein Weisser Blatt.”

[152] K. Frenzel, “Karl Gutzkow,” published in “Büsten und Bilder,” pp. 177 and 178 (Hanover, 1864).

[153] Heinrich Stümcke refers to this connexion between naturalism and symbolism in a very thoughtful essay (“Zwischen den Garben,” p. 156; Leipzig, 1899).