devoted Christianity, Greek sensuousness, and pornographic mysticism.  There is a never-ending esthetic coquetry with the flesh, with a serious defense of some very Greek practices indeed.  All of this is thoroughly typical of the spirit of the Romantic school, and it is by no means surprising that Friedrich’s first book, the novel Lucinda (1799), should stand as the supreme unsavory classic in this field.  That excellent divine, Schleiermacher, exalted this document of the Rights of the Flesh as “a paean of Love, in all its completeness,” but it is a feeble, tiresome performance, absolutely without structure, quite deserving the saucy epigram on which it was pilloried by the wit of the time: 

Pedantry once of Fancy begged the dole Of one brief kiss; she pointed him to Shame.  He, impotent and wanton, then Shame’s favors stole.  Into the world at length a dead babe came—­ “Lucinda” was its name.

The preaching of “religion,” “womanliness,” and the “holy fire of divine enjoyment” makes an unedifying melange:  “The holiest thing in any human being is his own mind, his own power, his own will;” “You do all according to your own mind, and refuse to be swayed by what is usual and proper.”  Schleiermacher admired in it that “highest wisdom and profoundest religion” which lead people to “yield to the rhythm of fellowship and friendship, and to disturb no harmony of love.”  In more prosaic diction, the upshot of its teaching was the surrender to momentary feelings, quite divorced from Laws or Things.  The only morality is “full Humanity;” “Nature alone is worthy of honor, and sound health alone is worthy of love;” “Let the discourse of love,” counsels Julius, “be bold and free, not more chastened than a Roman elegy”—­which is certainly not very much—­and the skirmishes of inclination are, in fact, set forth with an almost antique simplicity.  Society is to be developed only by “wit,” which is seriously put into comparison with God Almighty.  As to practical ethics, one is told that the most perfect life is but a pure vegetation; the right to indolence is that which really makes the discrimination between choice and common beings, and is the determining principle of nobility.  “The divine art of being indolent” and “the blissful bosom of half-conscious self-forgetfulness” naturally lead to the thesis that the empty, restless exertion of men in general is nothing but Gothic perversity, and “boots naught but ennui to ourselves and others.”  Man is by nature “a serious beast; one must labor to counteract this shameful tendency.”  Schleiermacher ventured, it is true, to raise the question as to whether the hero ought not to have some trace of the chivalrous about him, or ought not to do something effective in the outer world—­and posterity has fully supported this inquiry.