By CALVIN THOMAS

Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures, Columbia University

Friedrich Schlegel's _Lucinda_, published in 1799, was an explosion of
youthful radicalism--a rather violent explosion which still
reverberates in the histories of German Romanticism. It is a book
about the metaphysics of love and marriage, the emancipation of the
flesh, the ecstasies and follies of the enamored state, the nature and
the rights of woman, and other such matters of which the world was
destined to hear a great deal during the nineteenth century. Not by
accident, but by intention, the little book was shocking, formless,
incoherent--a riot of the ego without beginning, middle, or end. Now
and then it passed the present limits of the printable in its
exploitation of the improper and the unconventional.

Yet the book was by no means the wanton freak of a prurient
imagination; it had a serious purpose and was believed by its author
to present the essentials of a new and beautiful theory of life, art
and religion. The great Schleiermacher, one of the profoundest of
German theologians and an eloquent friend of religion, called
_Lucinda_ a "divine book" and its author a "priest of love and
wisdom." "Everything in this work," he declared, "is at once human and
divine; a magic air of divinity rises from its deep springs and
permeates the whole temple." Today no man in his senses would praise
the book in such terms. Yet, with all its crudities of style and its
aberrations of taste, _Lucinda_ reveals, not indeed the whole form and
pressure of the epoch that gave it birth, but certain very interesting
aspects of it.