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.