We have now enough of examples; let us consider to what conclusion they have led us. Choosing a simple emotion, but one of those which every school of literature sets itself to express and interpret, and which each expresses and interprets in a characteristic manner, we have examined a number of different specimens of the manner in which it is interpreted by this particular school. Here, as in all the other domains of literature which we have inspected, we have found the natural side of life ignored, or concealed, or blackened, or represented as something to be ashamed of. Chateaubriand and Madame de Krüdener seek out cases in which love is considered to be criminal and sinful, and either describe the triumphant yells of the powers of hell when the hero succumbs or the jubilations of the principalities and powers when the infamy is not perpetrated. We have the same paraphernalia in Alfred de Vigny's writings: Les Chérubins brûlants qu'enveloppent six ailes, Les tendres Séraphins, Dieux des amours fidèles, Les Trônes, les Vertus, les Princes, les Ardeurs, Les Dominations, les Gardiens, les Splendeurs, Et les Rêves pieux, et les saintes Louanges, Et tous les Anges purs, et tous les grands Archanges. De Vigny makes Satan speak like Eros, that is to say, Eros like Satan. Lamartine enthrones love in his poetry as seraphic, as emancipated from all earthly passion, but in _Raphael_ describes it as what it really was, ethereal against its will--which, however, only adds to the merit of the lovers and provides angels and burnt-offerings, these latter of a sweet savour unknown since the days of poor Abélard. And below everything there is an under-current of hypocrisy. Eudore, who would have us believe that he is made utterly miserable by Velléda's passion, is nevertheless secretly flattered by her having cut her white throat for his sake. He bewails his fall in expressions which convey the idea that he feels tempted to fall again. The authoress of _Valerie_ proclaims the moral purity of her heroine in the market-place and clamours of chastity and renunciation in all the newspapers at a time when she herself is peculiarly unfit to be a teacher of morality. Lamartine, as novelist, naïvely gives an explanation of his relations with Elvire which differs entirely from the impression of them that the public had naturally gathered from the ethereal ecstasies of _Les Méditations_, and ends by smothering the real beauties of his literary art in languid, lachrymose sentimentality. In the representation of love, as in everything else, men aimed at supernaturalness, and only succeeded in either crippling or hypocritically ignoring nature.[4] [1] Doch wenn du sprichst: Ich liebe dich, So muss ich weinen bitterlich. [2] (F. L. Liebenberg, _Bidrag til den Oehlenschlägerske Litteraturs Historie_, i 183. Genoveva "sees Christ in him."