of the species; but here the spectator is sensible of
the pain inflicted on the genius of the species, and does not find
consolation in the advantages that are assured to the individuals.

Two very well-known little pieces occur to me as examples of this kind:
_La reine de 16 ans_, and _Le mariage de raison_.

In the love-affairs that are treated in tragedies the lovers, as a rule,
perish together: the reason for this is that the purposes of the
species, whose tools the lovers were, have been frustrated, as, for
instance, in _Romeo and Juliet, Tancred, Don Carlos, Wallenstein, The
Bride of Messina_, and so on.

A man in love frequently furnishes comic as well as tragic aspects; for
being in the possession of the spirit of the species and controlled by
it, he no longer belongs to himself, and consequently his line of
conduct is not in keeping with that of the individual. It is
fundamentally this that in the higher phases of love gives such a
poetical and sublime colour, nay, transcendental and hyperphysical turn
to a man's thoughts, whereby he appears to lose sight of his essentially
material purpose. He is inspired by the spirit of the species, whose
affairs are infinitely more important than any which concern mere
individuals, in order to establish by special mandate of this spirit the
existence of an indefinitely long posterity with _this_ particular and
precisely determined nature, which it can receive only from him as
father and his loved one as mother, and which, moreover, _as such_ never
comes into existence, while the objectivation of the will to live
expressly demands this existence. It is the feeling that he is engaged
in affairs of such transcendent importance that exalts the lover above
everything earthly, nay, indeed, above himself, and gives such a
hyperphysical clothing to his physical wishes, that love becomes, even
in the life of the most prosaic, a poetical episode; and then the affair
often assumes a comical aspect. That mandate of the will which
objectifies itself in the species presents itself in the consciousness
of the lover under the mask of the anticipation of an infinite
happiness, which is to be found in his union with this particular woman.
This illusion to a man deeply in love becomes so dazzling that if it
cannot be attained, life itself not only loses all charm, but appears to
be so joyless, hollow, and uninteresting as to make him too disgusted
with it to be afraid of the terrors of dea