“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.