even the gynecocratic family of remote antiquity was openly revived by the ladies of Paris.  Casanova was the sexual hero of the age (as he is to some extent the hero of our present impotent epoch).  Indefatigable in the pursuit of woman and successful until old age, he was a well-bred sexualist without subtlety or depth.  The Vicomte de Valmont, the hero of Choderlos de Laclos’ famous and realistic novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses, an absolutely cold and cunning seducer, was its god.  They were seconded by the pleasure-loving Ninon de l’Enclos, who was still desired at the age of eighty.

This ultra-refinement was followed by the loathing of civilisation and love of nature expressed by Rousseau, Werther and Hoelderlin; closely allied to these passions was sentimental love, the direct precursor of our modern conception of love.  Its peculiarity lay in the fact that although spiritual in its source, it yearned for psycho-physical unity, and was therefore always slightly discordant.  Rousseau was the first exponent of this romantic nature cult and sentimental love of woman.  He represents the sharp recoil from the frivolity of the ancien regime, and the beginning of the third stage of love.  His Nouvelle Heloise (1759) was probably the first work in which sentimental love found expression.  In Goethe’s Werther (1774), which is a faithful portrayal of the poet’s personal feelings, it was represented more powerfully.  Werther’s love was purely spiritual at its inception.  “Lotte is sacred to me.  All desire is silent in her presence.”  But in the end he desires her with unconquerable passion; a dream undeceives him about the nature of his feelings, and as he clasps her in a passionate embrace he is conscious of having reached the summit of his longing.  This would seem the goal of modern love, embodying all its previous stages.  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.”  “Love shall come again; a new life shall unite and animate its