As Karl Frenzel pointed out as early as 1864, Gutzkow made the stage the battlefield of modern ideas. The inward contrasts of love, the psychological problem of the heart--he first ventured to deal with these in the dramatic form. “We all of us felt the wounds which ‘the world’ inflicted on Werner; we all wandered from the quiet violet, Agathe, to the brilliant rose, Sidonie; as in Ottfried, so in ourselves, the love of the heart battled with the love of the spirit. Who would admit himself to be so miserably poor as never to have revelled, lived, and suffered, in the play of these feelings? What wife has not, at least in imagination, hesitated for a moment, like Ella Rose, between the lover and the husband? Such figures as these bear in themselves the essence of truth, and do not lose their lofty value because, perhaps, their garments are not draped with sufficient harmony. They touch us, because we recognize in them our own flesh and blood; and they fulfil, in so far as the form of the society drama allows, Shakespeare’s canon of dramatic art--they hold the mirror up to nature.” In his tragedies, “Werner,” “Ottfried,” “Ella Rose,” Gutzkow presents in a masterly manner the inner life of the time; we see in them the pulsing wing-beats of the souls, which in pain, as it must be in these days, soar upwards in the effort to attain beauty and freedom.[152] Of all the young German authors, Gutzkow has best grasped the problem of problems in love--the problem of =personality=. In the painful question asked of Helene d’Azimont, in “Die Ritter vom Geiste”-- “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.”