Gretchen and Helena in “Faust” embody very clearly the contrast between romantic and classical love. We find these contrasts united in Wilhelm Heinse’s celebrated “Ardinghello,” a romance which even to us at the present day seems so modern. In this work we find the Dionysiac-Faustian impulse of the loving individual, and the Apollinian-artistic contemplation of the loved one, described with equal mastery. In regard to love, Heinse was the prototype of “=Young Germany=.” And we are young Germany. For all the problems of amatory life which to-day occupy our minds have already been made topics of public discussion by the authors of young Germany. In young German love-philosophy, the “Knights of the Spirit” as well as the “Knights of the Flesh,” come to their full rights. Only the ignorant can regard the so-called “emancipation of the flesh,” the apotheosis of lascivious sensuality, as the sole characteristic of the efforts and battles of our own time. No, he who wishes to understand modern love, in all its =spiritual= manifestations and relationship, let him read the writings of young Germany, especially the works of Laube, Gutzkow, Mundt; and also those of Heine, who has a more intimate relationship to young Germany than he has to romanticism. More especially Gutzkow,[149] who appears to me the greatest and most comprehensive spirit of the young German literature--indeed, of the more recent German literature in general--overlooks no single riddle and problem of modern eroticism. Of all the writers of the nineteenth century, he has the profoundest knowledge of women. How stimulating are his girl characters; how true, notwithstanding their manifoldness! Wally, riding proudly upon a white palfrey, outwardly an image of beauty, but, like so many modern emancipated women, inwardly tormented by the demon of doubt; Seraphine the dreamer, uncertain about herself and her love, of whom the poet himself later admitted that her character was based on reality; Idaline,[150] full of majesty, the ideal “bride of the waves,” a typical figure of conventional high life, who yet in sudden revolution against this conventionalism gives her whole being to a chance love, a love of the moment,[151] which alienates her from her betrothed and later husband, and drives her to death; then, again, all the brilliant feminine characters in the great romances, “Die Ritter vom Geiste,” Melanie, Helene, Selma, Pauline, Olga--all are characters bearing the stamp of reality in their spiritual and emotional life, so various and yet so true, and, above all, in their manifold, differentiated relationships to men, genuinely =modern= women. Gutzkow was also the first to bring upon the stage the modern woman and the problems of modern love, long before the French dramatists and before Ibsen.