At the same time, in the sixties of the nineteenth century Schopenhauer’s philosophy was dominant in Germany, and his metaphysic of love, which considered the individual not at all, but the species as all in all--this =pessimistic= conception of all love found its poetic expression in Edward Grisebach’s “New Tanhäuser,” published in 1869. Here, also, it would be a grave error to condemn these erotic poems of the day, on account of their glowing sensuality, as mere glorifications of carnal lust. The poet himself was the new Tanhäuser. He wished, as he often told me, to find expression in these poems for the life-denying as well as for the life-affirming forces. He sang the pleasure and the pain, the hopes and the disappointments of modern love. For him love is indeed the rose =with= the thorns. For this reason the motto of the poem is a saying of Meister Eckart: “The voluptuousness of the creature is intermingled with bitterness;” and this is the theme of the poets, though expressed in numerous variations: “There is no pleasure without regret.” But for this reason Grisebach--and in this respect he resembles Nietzsche--wished none the less joyfully to affirm this life, filled as it is with pain, and in all its activity bringing with it regrets. In this sense he is no exclusive pessimist, but an apostle of =activity=, like the men of young Germany, in whose footsteps, and especially in those of Heine, he follows. The beautiful saying of Laube, in his “Liebesbriefen” (Leipzig, 1835, p. 29), “He who has never been shaken to the depths by any profound sorrow is also ignorant of all deep rejoicing, he knows no single verse of that enthusiasm which woos the denied heaven, he experiences no sort of religion, he is capable of no sacrifice, of no greatness,” is suited also to the “new Tanhäuser,” which so powerfully influenced German youth during the seventies and eighties of the nineteenth century. He who wishes to understand how the various love-problems are represented in the literature of the present, strongly influenced as it is by the problem-poems of Ibsen, by Zola’s naturalism, and by the French symbolism[153] dependent on him, will find it described later in a special chapter devoted to love in the literature of to-day. In the following chapter we have to consider one additional influence which is especially apparent in the love and eroticism of the present day, and possesses great importance for the individualization of love. This is the artistic element in modern love. [134] H. T. Finck, “Romantic Love and Personal Beauty.” [135] _Cf._ G. Hirth, “Ways to Freedom,” pp. 468-472 (Munich, 1903).