It is
interesting to find embodiments of the extreme poles in two incidental
characters; one has been driven mad by his adoring love for a woman and
wanders about the fields in November to gather flowers for his queen;
the other is a young peasant who kills his rival in jealous rage. But
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.
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