Somewhat harsh justice this—and all the to-do was on account of Lucinde!
It is not the creative power displayed in it which makes Lucinde one of the most important works of the Romantic School, for, in spite of all the "fleshly" talk in the book, there is no flesh and blood in it, no real body. Neither is it depth of thought. There is more philosophy in the few paradoxical pages written by Schopenhauer under the title Metaphysik der Liebe than in pretentious Lucinde from beginning to end. It is not even a bacchantic joy in nature, in life. If we compare it with Heine's Ardinghello, a book glowing with genuine Southern joy of life, we see clearly how anæmic and theoretic Lucinde is. It is as a manifesto and programme that the book is valuable. Its main idea is to proclaim the unity and harmony of life as revealed to us most clearly and most comprehensibly in the passion of love, which gives a sensual expression to the spiritual emotion, and spiritualises the sensual pleasure. What it aims at depicting is the transformation of real life into poetry, into art, into Schiller's "play" of powers, into a dreamy, imaginative existence, with every longing satisfied, a life in which man, acting with no aim, living for no purpose, is initiated into the mysteries of nature, "understands the plaint of the nightingale, the smile of the new-born babe, and all that is mysteriously revealed in the hieroglyphics of flowers and stars."
This book is totally misunderstood by those who, like Kierkegaard, arm themselves with a whole set of dogmatic principles, and fall upon it, exclaiming: "What it aims at is the unmitigated sensuality which excludes the element of spirituality; what it combats is the spirituality which includes an element of sensuality." One can scarcely realise the blindness implied by such an utterance—but there are no better blinders than those provided by orthodoxy. Nor is it possible really to understand Lucinde so long as, like Gutzkow, we only see in it a vindication of the doctrine of free love, or, like Schleiermacher, a protest against incorporeal spirituality, a denunciation of the affected foolishness that denies and explains away flesh and blood. The fundamental idea of the book is the Romantic doctrine of the identity of life and poetry. This serious thought, however, is presented in a form expressly calculated to win the laurels of notoriety. Our admiration is aroused by the bold, defiant tone of the author's challenge, by the courage, born of conviction, with which he exposes himself to personal insult, and to public, ill-natured discussion of his private life.
F. SCHLEGEL.
Worthy of admiration, too, is the skill with which the different views and watchwords of Romanticism are collected and presented to us in small compass; for all the various tendencies of the movement, developed by so many different individuals, are to be seen in this one book, spreading fan-wise from a centre. But we are disgusted by the artistic impotence to which the so-called novel, in reality a mere sketch, bears witness, by its many beginnings that end in nothing, and by all the feeble self-worship which seeks to disguise barrenness by producing an artificial and unhealthy heat in which to hatch its unfertile eggs. Caroline Schlegel has preserved for us the following biting epigram, written soon after the book came out—
"Der Pedantismus bat die Phantasie
Um einen Kuss, sie wies ihn an die Sünde;
Frech, ohne Kraft, umarmt er die,
Und sie genas mit einem todten Kinde,
Genannt Lucinde."[1]