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.