Werther himself, steering a middle-course between these two extremes,
walks straight into modern love, which means death to him.
Both the _New Heloise_ and _Werther_ are, sentimentally, efforts to
reach the synthesis _via_ the soul. Friedrich Schlegel, in his famous
_Lucinda_ (1799), tried the opposite way. He has been savagely attacked
for it by one side and lauded to the skies by the other, and when "the
emancipation of the flesh" became the motto of the day, he was glorified
as a martyr. The philosopher and theologian Schleiermacher saw in
_Lucinda_ a delivery from the tyranny of centuries. "Love has become
whole again and of one piece," he exclaims, joyfully calling the poem "a
vision of a future world God knows how distant." "Love shall come again;
a new life shall unite and animate its broken limbs; it shall rule the
hearts and works of men in freedom and gladness, and supersede the
lifeless phantoms of fictitious virtues." Schleiermacher also voiced the
idea of the synthesis: "And why should we be arrested in this struggle
(_i.e._, between love as the flower of sensuousness and the intellectual
mystical component of love), when in all domains we are striving to
bring the ideas, born by the new development of humanity, into harmony
with the result of the work of past ages?" His _Confidential Letters on
Schlegel's Lucinda_ have made the Protestant pastor Schleiermacher the
philosopher of the third stage of eroticism, as the chaplain Andreas was
the theorist of the second. The third stage gained its first footing
amongst the German romanticists. Women were largely instrumental in
achieving its victory. I will not go into detail but will confine myself
to mentioning in passing the names of Jean Paul, Henrietta Herz,
Brentano, Sophy Mereau, Dorothy Vest, Schelling, Friedrich Gentz. W. von
Humboldt records a conversation which he had in the year of the
Revolution with Schiller. The latter unhesitatingly professed his faith
in the unity of love. "It (the blending of love and sensuality) is
always possible and always there." But Humboldt was diffident, unable
fully to grasp the new conception. "I said that it would sever the most
beautiful, most delicate relationships, that it was too heterogeneous to
admit of coherence; but my principal argument was that in the majority
of cases it was out of the question...."
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