of wantonness. Lessing himself repeated the group in 'Emilia Galotti',
which in its turn became the mother of a new brood. The tragedy of
lawless passion led by an easy step to the tragedy of social conflict,
which portrayed the depravity of princes and nobles in their relation to
the common people, or called upon mankind to weep for the woes of lovers
separated by the barriers of rank. In Germany the species was very
timely. Nowhere else in Europe had the nobility so little to be proud
of, and nowhere else was the pride of birth so stupidly intolerant. That
fruitful theme of earlier and later poets, the love of nobleman for maid
of low degree, had been lost in the age of gallantry, save in lubricious
tales of intrigue and seduction. The appalling dissoluteness which
characterized the French court during the first half of the eighteenth
century, and was duly copied by the princelings of Germany, had poisoned
the minds of high and low alike and led to a state of affairs in which
there was little room for a noble or even a serious conception of love.
Love was understood to be concupiscence. If an aristocrat stooped to a
bourgeois girl, it was his affair and at the worst only an aberration of
taste; her fate was of no importance.

When the inevitable reaction set in, it took the form of a debauch of
sentimentalism. The poetry of real passion came back into literature and
people wept for joy to find that they had hearts. Love was no longer a
frivolous game played for the gratification of lust, but a divine
rapture of fathomless and ineffable import. It was now the era of the
beautiful soul, of tender sentiment, of virtuous transports and of
endless talk about all these things. Love being natural,--a part of that
nature to which the world was now resolved to return,--it was sacred,
and superior to all human conventions. It belonged to the sphere of the
rights of man. Its enemy was everywhere the corrupt heart and the
worldly, calculating mind. Fortunately the new ecstasy associated itself