GERMAN TESTIMONY

Modern German literature contains many sincere tributes, in prose and verse, to the purity and nobility of true love and its refining influence.  The psychologist Horwicz refers briefly (38) to the way in which

“love, growing up as a mighty passion from the substratum of sexual life, has, under the repressing influence of centuries of habits and customs, taken on an entirely new, supersensual, ethereal character, so that to a lover every thought of naturalia seems indelicate and improper.”  “I feel it deeply that love must ennoble, not crush me,”

wrote the poet Korner; and again,

“Your sweet name was my talisman, which led me undefiled through youth’s wild storms, amid the corruption of the times, and protected my inner sanctum.”  “O God!” wrote Beethoven, “let me at last find her who is destined to be mine, and who shall strengthen me in virtue.”

According to Dr. Abel, while love longs ardently to possess the beloved, to enjoy her presence and sympathy, it has also a more or less prominent mental trait which ennobles the passion and places it at the service of the ideal of its fancy.  It is accompanied by an enthusiasm for the good and the beautiful in general, which comes to most people only during the brief period of love.  “It is a temporary self-exaltation, purifying the desires and urging the lover to generous deeds.”

     Des hoechste Glueck hat keine Lieder,
     Der Liebe Lust ist still und mild;
     Ein Kuss, ein Blicken hin und wieder,
     Und alle Sehnsucht ist gestillt.
                                   —­Geibel.

Schiller defined love as an eager “desire for another’s happiness.”  “Love,” he adds, “is the most beautiful phenomenon in all animated nature, the mightiest magnet in the spiritual world, the source of veneration and the sublimest virtues.”  Even Goethe had moments when he appreciated the purity of love, and he confutes his own coarse conception that was referred to in the last section when he makes Werther write:  “She is sacred to me. All desire is silent in her presence."[41]

The French Edward Schure exclaims, in his History of German Song: 

“What surprises us foreigners in the poems of this people is the unbounded faith in love, as the supreme power in the world, as the most beautiful and divine thing on earth, ... the first and last word of creation, its only principle of life, because it alone can urge us to complete self-surrender.”

Schure’s intimation that this respect for love is peculiar to the Germans is, of course, absurd, for it is found in the modern literature of all civilized countries of Europe and America; as for instance in Michael Angelo’s

     The might of one fair face sublimes my love,
     For it hath weaned my heart from low desires.