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?”