The Evolution of Love

by Emil Lucka

FOOTNOTES:

[2] The quotations from Faust are from the translation of Anna Swanwick.

[3] The quotations from the Divine Comedy are from the translation of Henry Francis Cary.

[4] The quotations from Tasso are from the translation of Anna Swanwick.

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CHAPTER III

PERVERSIONS OF METAPHYSICAL EROTICISM

(a) The Brides of Christ

Hitherto I have confined myself to the analysis of the emotional life of man, but there are two other points which must be taken into account. The first is the question of woman's attitude towards the lofty position assigned to her by man; the second and more important one is the question as to whether the women of that period exhibit in their emotional life any traces of a feeling akin to the deification of their sex? The reply to the first question is simple enough. Naturally the adoration and worship of their lovers could not have been anything but pleasant to women. There is a poem by the talented Provençal Countess Beatrix de Die, which betrays genuine sorrow at the infidelity of her friend, and at the same time leaves no doubt that she—and probably a great many others—took the eulogies showered upon them by the enraptured poets, literally. Once again woman accepts the position thrust upon her by man, not this time the position of a drudge, but that of a perfect and godlike being. Countess Beatrix credits herself with all the qualities with which the imagination of her worshipper had endowed her, as if they were unquestionable facts.

Hence all my songs will be with sadness fraught.

My lover fills my soul with bitter woe,

And yet is all the happiness I know.

My grace and favour all avail me naught.

My sparkling wit, my loveliness supreme,

They cannot hold his love and tender thought,

Of all my lofty worth bereft I seem.

But far more interesting than this psychological misunderstanding on the part of the much-lauded sex, is the question as to whether the emotional life of woman matured anything that can be called a worship of man? The answer to this is a decided "no." At no time in the history of woman do we find even the smallest indication of a parallel phenomenon; the profound and tragic dualism of the Middle Ages—one result of which was the spiritual love of woman—passed her by without touching her. In the feminine soul conflict apparently results not in tragedy and productivity, but in morbidness and hysteria.

It may be argued that the love of Jesus, which inspired both the nuns of the Middle Ages and those of a later period, represents a type of man-worship; but in examining all these more or less famous nuns and ascetics we find, instead of genuine spirituality, a concealed and often morbid condition, which in some cases degenerated into hysteria. The dualistic period, the age of metaphysical love, made no impression upon the female soul. There can be no doubt that the emotional life of woman, in strict contrast to the emotional life of man, has had no evolution, and can therefore have no history. It is unadulterated nature and, in its way, it is perfect.

In studying the female mystics, we find an imitation of metaphysical eroticism sufficiently transparent to be easily recognised, even by the layman, as belonging to the domain of pathology. These ecstatics were animated not by a pure, but by an impure spirit. Perverted sensualists, they believed their hearts to be filled with spiritual love. Contrary to the striving of the greater number of the men, who raised their love into heaven so as to keep it pure, and made it one with their religious aspirations, all the figures and symbols of religion were used by these women as an outlet and a foil to their sexuality. The loving soul repairing to the nuptial chamber is the transparent veil of desire half-concealed by religious conceptions. Women have described similar situations in metaphors which—for sensuous passion—leave nothing to be desired, even the famous love-potion of Tristan is not wanting.

The material is abundant, and I have repeatedly touched upon it in previous chapters. At the period of great mystical enthusiasm (the twelfth and thirteenth centuries) this morbid love of God was a sinister attendant phenomenon of true mysticism. Whole convents were seized by epidemics of hysteria, the women writhed in convulsions, flogged each other, sang hymns day and night and had hallucinations—for all of which the love of God, or the temptation of the devil, were made responsible.

Among the more notable of these pseudo-mystics are Christine Ebner (the author of a book entitled, On the Fullness of Mercy), and Mary of Oignies, a passionate worshipper of Christ who mutilated herself in her ecstasies and who, on her deathbed, still sang: "How beautiful art Thou, oh, my Lord God!"

A shining exception among the German nuns of that time was Mechthild of Magdeburg, a woman of rare gifts. She was a genuine mystic, but she, too, revelled in fervent, sensuous metaphors, and it would be an interesting task to separate the two elements in her case; but, having admitted her genuine mysticism in a previous chapter, I will here restrict myself to a few quotations which show her from her other side. Her Dialogue between Love and the Soul abounds in passages like the following: "Tell my beloved that his chamber is prepared, and that I am sick with love of him." "The closer the embrace, the sweeter the kisses." "Then He took the soul into His divine arms, and placing His fatherly hand on her bosom, He gazed into her face and kissed her right well." Mechthild, too, was ready to die with love.

Everyone of the most celebrated Brides of Christ belonged to the Latin race; they were hysterics, and as such have long been claimed by the psychopathist.

The love of Jesus professed by Catherine of Siena (1347-1388), a clever politician, who was in correspondence with the leading statesmen of her time, found vent in passages like the following:

"I desire, then, that you withdraw into the open side of the Son of God, who is a bottle so full of perfume that even the things which are sinful become fragrant. There the bride reclines on a bed of fire and blood. There the secret of the heart of the Son of God is revealed and made manifest. Oh! Thou overflowing cup, refreshing and intoxicating every loving and yearning heart." "I long to behold the body of my Lord!" And straightway the bridegroom appeared to her, opened his side and said to her: "Now drink as much of my blood as thou desirest."

But the saint who enjoyed the greatest fame—partly on account of her frequent portrayal by the plastic arts—was doubtless St. Teresa (Teresia de Jesus), a Spanish nun (1515-1582). During childhood and early youth she suffered from serious illnesses, and on one occasion was even believed to be dead. "Before I felt the presence of God," she says in her biography, "I experienced for some time a very delightful sensation, a sensation which I believe one is partly able to produce at will (!), a pleasure which is neither quite sensuous, nor quite spiritual, but which comes from God." She describes in her "Life" four stages of prayer, which gradually lead the soul to God: "There is no joy to be compared with the joy which the Lord giveth to the soul in its exile. So great is this delight that frequently it seems that the least thing would make it forsake the body for ever." "When the soul seeks God in this way," the saint feels with supreme delight her strength ebbing away and a trance stealing over her until, devoid of breath and all physical strength she can only move her hand with great pain. The delights experienced by her are described in great detail and very sensuous language; hysterical conditions, such as painful convulsions, and hallucinations, are represented as religious phenomena. "It is dreadful what one has to suffer from confessors who do not understand these things," she says in one of her writings with deep regret.

St. Teresa relates her life with the well-known long-winded self-complacency of the hysterical subject. She frequently had visions of Jesus, and again and again she emphasised the beauty of his hands. "Standing by my side, he said to me: 'I have come to thee, my daughter, I am here; it is I; show me thy hands.' And it seemed to me that he took my hands in his, and laid them in his side. 'Behold my wound,' he said, 'thou art not separated from me; bear this brief exile on earth....'" etc.

On one occasion she had a vision of an angel whom she describes as follows: "He was not tall but small, very beautiful, his face so radiant that he seemed to be one of the highest angels, who are, I believe, all fire ... in his hand he held a golden spear, at the point of which was a little flame; he appeared to thrust this spear into my heart again and again; it penetrated my entrails, and as he drew it out he seemed to draw them out also, and leave me on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so intense that I could not but sigh deeply; yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this pain that it made me wish never to be without it. It is not physical, but spiritual pain, although the body often suffers greatly from it. The caressing love between God and the soul is so sweet that I implore Him of His mercy to let all those experience it who believe that I am lying."

The treatise Thoughts of the Love of God on some Words of the Song of Songs is crowded with purely sensuous passages. In accordance with the general custom, she interprets this naïvely sensual Semitic poem allegorically, becomes tremendously excited in meditating on the kiss of the beloved and discusses the question of what the soul should do to "satisfy so sweet a bridegroom."

In the pamphlet The Fortress of the Soul and its Seven Dwellings, St. Teresa describes similar states of mind: "The bridegroom commands the doors of the dwellings to be closed and also the gates of the fortress and its surrounding walls. In freeing the soul from the body, he stops the body's breathing so that, even if the other senses are not quite deadened, speech is impossible. At other times all sensuous perceptions disappear simultaneously; body and hands grow rigid and it seems as if the soul had left the body, which is scarcely breathing. This condition is of short duration. The rigidity passes away to some extent, the body slowly regains life, the breath comes and goes, only to die away again and thus endow the soul with greater freedom. But this deep trance does not endure long." She continues to describe her ecstasies and is careful to point out the complete fusion of supreme delight and bodily pain. Perhaps no hysterical subject has ever described her states of mind so well. Her avowal (made in a letter to Father Rodrigue Alvarez) of her complete unconsciousness of her body is quite in harmony with those states of rapture. She wrote a number of spiritual love-songs which are said to be conspicuous for their ardour and beauty; probably they have never been translated from the original Spanish.

Finally there is the famous Madame Guyon (1648-1717), who—in addition to many other works—wrote a very detailed autobiography. She lived with her husband, whom she treated with coldness, finding her sole joy in her spiritual intercourse with God. "I desire only the divine love which thrills the soul with inexpressible bliss, the love which seems to melt my whole being." God burns her with His fire and still trembling with delight, she says to Him: "Oh, Lord! The greatest libertine, if Thou didst make him experience Thy love as Thou didst make me experience it, would forswear carnal pleasure and strive only after Thy divine love." "I was like a person intoxicated with wine or love, unable to think of anything but my passion," etc. The fact that she sought in this love the pleasure of the senses is very apparent.

We are not concerned here with the problem of how far these women may be regarded as pathological cases; all of them were filled with a vague feminine desire for self-surrender, which they projected on a celestial being, either because they did not come into contact with a suitable terrestrial object, or because the impulse was abnormal from the beginning. But their spiritual love never rose above empty sentimentality and hysterical rapture. All of them, and some of them were highly gifted, were thrilled with the love of Jesus, they had visions of the "sweet wounds of the Saviour," and so on; but their emotion did not kindle the smallest spark of creative power. The Queen of Heaven, on the other hand, was a free creation of spiritually loving poets and monks.

The women imitated metaphysical love and distorted it; sexual impulse, arrogantly attempting to reach beyond the earth, reigned in the place of spiritual, deifying love.

I have included these phenomena not for their own sakes, but to indicate my boundary-line, for very frequently these women are cited as genuine mystics. Even Schopenhauer mentions these "saints" in one breath with German mystics and Indian philosophers; he calls Madame Guyon "a great and beautiful soul whose memory I venerate." And yet there can be no doubt that it is not the fictitious object of love which is conclusive, but the emotion of the lover: the sensualist can approach God and the Virgin with inflamed senses, but to the lover every woman is divine.

The result of this chapter is as far as our investigation is concerned, negative. The deifying love of man has no parallel phenomenon in the emotional life of woman.

(b) Sexual Mystics.

Sexual mysticism is a contradiction in itself, because true mysticism has nothing whatever to do with sexuality. But frequently suppressed sexuality, secretly luxuriating, takes possession of the whole soul, and a religious construction is put on the results. The sexually excited subject attributes religious motives to his ecstasy. I have no hesitation in asserting that the majority of these ecstasies—especially in the case of women—are rooted in sexuality, and that this so-called mysticism is nothing but a deviation or wrong interpretation of the sexual impulse. The same thing applies to the flagellants of the declining Middle Ages, and some Protestant sects of modernity. The raptures of St. Teresa and Madame Guyon, also, belong to this category, however much the fact may be concealed by pseudo-religious conceptions. I have no doubt that Eastern mysticism, too, grew up on a sexual foundation, but (as I have done all along) I will limit my subject to the civilisation of Europe.

This counterfeit mysticism, fed from dubious sources and calling itself love of God, taints the pure intuitions of some of the genuine mystics and metaphysical erotics; they were not always able to steer clear of spurious outgrowths. (Here, too, the psychological naïveté of mediaeval times must to some extent be held responsible.) Conspicuous amongst these is St. Bernard of Clairvaux, who in his Sermones in Canticum took the "Song of Songs" as a base for mystically-sexual imaginings.

There is nothing really new in this direction. But I will cite a few stanzas written by St. Bernard which might equally well have come from one of the amorous nuns:

To the Side-wound of Christ.

Lord, with my mouth I touch and worship Thee,

With all the strength I have I cling to Thee,

With all my love I plunge my heart in Thee,

My very life blood would I draw from Thee,

Oh, Jesus! Jesus! Draw me unto Thee!

How sweet Thy savour is! Who tastes of Thee,

Oh, Jesus Christ, can relish naught but Thee!

Who tastes Thy living sweetness lives by Thee;

All else is void; the soul must die for Thee,

So faints my heart—so would I die for Thee!

(Transl. by Emily Mary Shapcote.)

The greatest religious poet of all times after St. Bernard was Jacopone da Todi, who also, though rarely, revelled in fervid utterances. The Latin hymn, Stabat Mater Speciosa, ascribed to him, is spurious. I quote a translation taken from the Rosary of the B.V.M.

Other Virgins far transcending,

Virgin, be not thou unbending,

To thy humble suppliant's suit.

Grant me then, to thee united,

By the love of Christ excited,

Here to sing my jubilee.

But he is undoubtedly the author of the following stanzas:

Soaring upwards love-enkindled,

Does the soul rejoice, afire

In her glad triumphant flight.

Earthly cares to naught have dwindled,

Love's sweet footfall's drawing nigh her

To espouse his heart's delight.

All transformed and naked quite,

Laughing low, with joy imbued,

Pure, and like a snake renewed,

Love divine will ever tend her.

But poems like the following undoubtedly originated in a truly religious and pure sentiment:

Enwrapt in love thine arms Him fast enfolding,

So closely clasp Him that they loose Him never;

And in thy heart His sacred image holding,

Far from the path of sin thou'lt journey ever.

His death in twain shall blast thy callous heart

As once the solid rock He rent apart.

The most distinguished among the fervid lovers of God of later times were the saints Jean de la Croix, Alfonso da Liguori, and François de Sales. The Tract of the Love of God, written by François de Sales, surpasses everything ever achieved in this direction.

I will not dilate further on this barren aspect of emotionalism so easily traceable through the later centuries in many a Catholic and Protestant sentimentalist, but will conclude this chapter with a brief discussion of Novalis. If I mention this poet in this connexion it is not because I desire to depreciate his genius, but because, possessing as he did, in a rare degree, depth of feeling and power of expression, he is an important witness of an unusual type. True, here and there his poems are reminiscent of Jacopone, but he is not sufficiently ingenuous, and is altogether too morbid to be classed with that ardent fanatic. He shares with Jacopone and other poets the yearning to grasp transcendental things with the senses, to approach the Deity with a love which cannot be called anything but sensuous. Novalis' Hymns to the Night are the most magnificent example of this perfect interpenetration of sensuous and transcendental love, and at the same time represent a complete fusion of the love he bore to his fiancée, who died young, and the worship of Mary. Night has opened infinite eyes in us, and we behold the secret of love unfolding itself in the heart of this poet, at once unique and pathetic, lofty and morbid. The whole universe he conceives as a female being for whose embrace he is longing. It is a new emotion: neither the chaste worship of the Madonna, nor the sexually-mystic striving to embrace with the soul. The night gives birth to a foreboding which excites and soothes all vague desires. The lover thus soliloquises of the night:

In infinite space.

Thou'dst dissolve,

If it held thee not,

If it bound thee not,

And thrilled thee,

That afire

Thou begettest the world.

Verily before thou art I was,

With my sex

The mother sent me

To live in thy world,

And to hallow it

With love.

Here the ancient, mystical longing to become one with God is conceived under the symbol of the night. (A symbol which we shall meet again, magnified, in Wagner's Tristan.)

Lo! Love has burst its prison.

No parting now shall be,

And life's full tide has risen

Like to a boundless sea.

One night of love supernal,

Only one golden song,

And the face of the Eternal

To light our path along.

In addition, Novalis was a perfect woman-worshipper. He loved the Middle Ages and Catholicism. "The reformation killed Christianity; henceforth Christianity has ceased to exist." "Catholicism preached nothing but love for the holy, beautiful Lady of Christianity, who, endowed with divine virtue, was able to deliver all loyal hearts from the most terrible dangers." He wrote hymns to Mary in the style of the pietists, emphasising more especially the principle of motherliness:

Oh, Mary! At thy altar

A thousand hearts lie prone,

In this drear life of shadows

They yearn for thee alone.

All hoping to recover

From life's distress and smart,

If thou, oh holy Mother,

Wilt take them to thy heart.

He idolised his fiancée, who died young. "Her memory shall be my better self, a sacred image in my heart before which a sanctuary lamp is ever burning, and which will save me from the temptations of the Evil One." And through the mouth of Heinrich of Ofterdingen he proclaims: "My beloved is the abbreviation of the universe; the universe is the elongation of my beloved." "Heaven has given you to me to worship. I adore you, you are a saint, you are divine glory, you are eternal life!"

This sentimental worship of woman, combined with an all-transcending insatiable sensuousness, produced the peculiar sexually-mystic world-feeling which is so characteristic of him. Night deeply moves his soul, longing, the memory of the beloved woman, adoration for the Virgin, his fantastic conception of an incarnated universe are fused into one great emotion:

Praise to the Queen of the World!

The lofty herald

Of the sacred world.

The patroness

Of rapturous love!

Thou art coming, beloved—

Night has descended—

My soul is ravished—

Over is this earthly journey

And thou art mine again.

I gaze into thy dark, deep eyes,

And see naught but love and happiness.

We sink down on the altar of the night,

The soft couch—

The veil falls,

And kindled by the rapturous embrace,

Glows the pure fire

Of the sweet sacrifice.

The climax and unique example of sensuousness, unsurpassed for its symbols of the physical embrace, is the hymn: "Few know the Secret of Love." It is too long to give in full. The following are a few stanzas:

Would that the ocean

Blushed!

And in fragrant flesh

Melted the rock!

Infinite is the sweet repast,

Never satisfied is love;

Nor close, nor fast enough

Can it hold the beloved.

By ever more tender lips

Transformed, the past ecstasy

Grows closer, more intimate.

Rapturous love

Thrills the soul;

Hungrier and thirstier

Grows the heart.

And thus the transports of love

Endure for ever.

Here the remotest limit has been reached—sensuousness seems to flow into eternity, voluptuousness would shatter the world to pieces and create a new relationship of things. Before this poem all ecstasies of sensuousness masquerading as cosmic emotion are dull and timid. The transcendent symbols of Catholicism are used to guide the insatiable sensuous imagination to metaphysics. "Who can say that he understands the nature of blood?" Novalis may ask this question. It is truly blood, human blood, longing to gush forth and pulsate through the body of the universe.

In time to come all will be body

One body;

In celestial blood,

Float the enraptured twain.

The human blood has become celestial blood; the voluptuousness of man, the voluptuousness of the world, and because the whole world is one body, it needs no duality; sexuality which has become a cosmic law rules over humanity, God, Christ and the universe. This hymn is the immortalisation of voluptuousness. If the love-death is the immortalisation of love unable to find satisfaction on earth, so its counterpart, cosmic sensuousness is, in the last sense, orientalism. Only a genius could invent a new, symbolic language to express feelings so alien to the European. Earthly sensuality did not satisfy Novalis, voluptuousness detached from man, voluptuousness in itself, was his dream and his religion—the supremest creation ever achieved by sexuality intensified into a cosmic emotion.

I think that I have now made clear the fact that the emotional life of man is rooted in two elements, completely distinct from the beginning: the sexual impulse and personal love. It is in studying the love of the transcendental, that culminating point of so many feelings springing from various sources, that the inherent contrast between the two fundamental principles becomes most apparent; and that we realise why they have always been intermingled both in theory and in reality.

We have last examined the attempt of sexuality to possess itself of the whole universe; we will now turn our attention to the true union of both erotic elements. This union occurred at the time when Goethe and Novalis were bringing spiritual love and cosmic sensuousness to their highest summit.

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THE THIRD STAGE

(The Unity of Sexual Impulse and Love)

CHAPTER I.

THE LONGING FOR THE SYNTHESIS.

Humanity inherited the pairing-instinct from the animal-world; but as differentiation progressed, this instinct tended to restrict itself to a few individuals—sometimes even to a single representative only—of the other sex. In the beginning of the twelfth century a new and unprecedented emotion—spiritual love of man for woman based on personality—made its appearance, and until modern times the two fundamental erotic principles existed side by side without inner relationship. Sexuality with its various manifestations has existed from the beginning; the ultimate object of sexual intercourse is pleasure; but here and there, and parallel with sexual pleasure, there have been, in varying degrees of intensity, instances of spiritual love. In the second half of the eighteenth century there appeared—timidly at first, but gradually gaining in strength and determination—a tendency to find the sole course of every erotic emotion in the personality of the beloved, a longing no longer to dissociate sexual impulse and spiritual love, but to blend them in a harmonious whole. Personality should knit body and soul together in a higher synthesis. The first signs of this longing became apparent in the period of the French revolution; (we find traces of it in the works of Rousseau and in Goethe's Werther); it was developed by the romanticists and represents the typical form of modern love with all its incompleteness and inexhausted possibilities. The achievement of this eagerly desired unity, which would be synonymous with the victory of personality over the limitations of body and soul, is the great problem of modern time in the domain of eroticism. The characteristic of this third stage of eroticism is the complete triumph of love over pleasure, the neutralisation of the sexual and the generative by the spiritual and the personal. The physical and spiritual unity of the lovers has become so much supreme erotic reality, that the line of demarcation between soul and senses is completely obliterated. In extreme cases—which are not at all rare—the bodily union is not realised as anything distinct, specifically pleasurable; it does not occupy a prominent position in the complex of love; sensuous pleasure, the universal inheritance from the animal world, has been vanquished by personality, the supreme treasure of man. The characteristic of the first stage was the unquestioned sway of one of the elements of erotic life, sensual gratification (this stage has, of course, never ceased to exist), as well as the aesthetic pleasure in the beauty of the human form. The second stage gave prominence to all those spiritual qualities which were most appreciated, virtue, purity, kindness, wisdom, etc., because love rouses and embraces everything in the human soul which is perfect. In the third stage, sensuous pleasure and spiritual love no longer exist as separate elements; the personality of the beloved in its individuality is the only essential, regardless as to whether she be the bringer of weal or woe, whether she be good or evil, beautiful or plain, wise or foolish. Personality has—in principle—become the sole, supreme source of eroticism. In this stage there is no tyranny of man over woman—as in the sexual stage—no submission of man to woman—as in the stage of woman-worship; it is the stage of the complete equality of the sexes, a mutual giving and taking. If sexuality is infinite as matter, spiritual love eternal as the metaphysical ideal, the synthesis is human and personal.

Before the eighteenth century, this new erotic union did not exist as a phenomenon of civilisation, but occasionally we find it anticipated or vaguely alluded to. Some of the early German minnesingers (such as Dietmar von Aist and Kürnberg) sometimes betray, especially when speaking through the medium of a woman, sentiments prophetic of our modern sentimental ballads. The following verses by Albrecht of Johansdorf, express the reciprocity characteristic of modern love:

When two hearts are so united

That their love can never wane,

Then I ween no man should blight it,

Death alone should part the twain.

Even more modern in sentiment are the following stanzas:

This is love's measure:

Two hearts and one pleasure,

Two loves one love, nor more nor less,

And both right full of happiness.

In woe one woe,

And neither from the other go.

Though Walter von der Vogelweide adopted the contemporaneous conception of love as the source of everything good and noble ("Tell me what is Love?") he never quite accepted it:

Love is the ecstasy of two fond hearts,

If both share equally, then love is there.

More ancient evidence even is the definition of marriage by the scholastic Hugo of St. Victor, who had leanings towards mysticism: "Marriage is the friendship between man and woman," he says.

My knowledge of the subject cannot, of course, be unexceptional, but I do not believe that personal love of the third stage, that is, the blending of both erotic elements, was quite definitely expressed before the second half of the eighteenth century. We may be justified in maintaining that the tension between sexuality and spiritual love had been slackening in the course of the centuries, that sexuality was conceived as less diabolical, and love as less celestial than heretofore; but the principle had remained unchanged. Only the female portraits of Leonardo da Vinci are deserving of special mention; the great artist was possibly the first who artistically divined, if he did not achieve, the synthesis. The exceptional position always granted to his women—particularly to his Mona Lisa—must doubtless be ascribed to this premonition. We may be certain that Leonardo not only as artist, but as lover also, was ahead of his time; but he must be regarded as an isolated instance. The three stages apply to the eroticism of man only. His emotion soared from brutality to divinity, and then gradually became human; his feeling alone has a history. The force which seized, moulded and transformed him, had no influence over woman. Compared to man, she is to-day what she was at the beginning, pure nature. Her lover has always been everything to her; never merely a means for the gratification of the senses, nor, on the other hand, a higher being to whom she looked up and whom she worshipped with a purely spiritual love; but at all times he possessed her undivided love, unable in its naïve simplicity to differentiate between body and soul. The higher intuition, the object of the supreme erotic yearning of man, for the possession of which he has struggled for centuries, and even to-day does not fully possess, has always been a matter of course to her. She whose truest vocation is love, received from nature that which the greatest of men have striven hard to win and only half succeeded in winning. Man's profound dualism is alien to her; her greatness—but also her limitation—lies in the simplicity and infallibility of her instinct, which has had no evolution and is consequently not liable to produce atavisms and aberrations. She is hardly conscious of the chasm between sexual instinct and personal love. Wherever this is not so, we may find intellectual greatness (as for instance in the case of the Empress Catherine of Russia), but as a rule we find only morbidness, despondency and callousness. To the normal woman the phenomena of dualistic eroticism appear unintelligible, even unwholesome. The unity of love is a matter of course to her, so that the third stage is practically male acquiescence to female intuition.

Even in our time, when so much is said and written about modern woman and her claims, her feeling is still perfect in itself; compared to the discord and heterogeneity of man, she represents simplicity and harmony. Both purely spiritual worship and undifferentiated sexual desire are exceptions as far as she is concerned and must still be regarded as abnormal.

This unbroken, determinative female eroticism may possibly be explained (as Weininger explains it) by woman's sexuality, which is absolute, and does not rise above the horizon of distinct consciousness, but Weininger's dualism is in this direction attempting to value and standardise something which in its essence is alien to his standard.

Psycho-physical unity, then, is the basic characteristic of female eroticism, but the state of affairs in the case of male eroticism is a very different one. A study of the gradual origin of the erotic elements will facilitate a better understanding of the relevant phenomena.

In the case of woman, the primary sexual instinct pervades the whole being; it has been refined and purified without any great fluctuations or changes; in the case of man it has always been restricted to certain regions of his physical and psychical life, and an entirely novel experience was required before it could win to the final form of personal love. This prize, in his case, is therefore enhanced by the fact of being the outcome of a long conflict; the reward of a task still showing the traces of the struggle and pain of centuries. The truth of the words "Pleasure is degrading" had been established by experience.

A few historical instances, illustrating female eroticism, will uphold my contention. In the remote days of Greek antiquity, we find an example of undivided wifely love in Alcestis, whose devotion to her husband sent her to voluntary death in order to lengthen his life. Wifely devotion accomplished what parental love could not achieve. The Alcestis of Euripides represents a feeling very familiar to us. Penelope, the faithful martyr, is a similar instance.

At the time when spiritual love, accompanied by eccentricities and Latin treatises, gradually, and amidst heavy conflict, struggled into existence, the soul of woman was already glowing with the emotion which we, to-day, realise as love. I have three witnesses to prove this statement. The Lais of the French poetess Marie de France, based on Breton and Celtic motifs, are permeated by a sweet sentimentality, very nearly related to the sentiment of our popular ballads. They tell of simple feelings, of love and longing and the grief of love. One of her lais treats the touching story of Lanval and Guinevere, and another an episode of Tristan and Isolde.

De Tristan et de la reine,

De leur amour qui tant fut fine,

Dont ils eurent mainte doulour

Puis en moururent en un jour.

The naïve sentiment of these poems forms a delicious contrast to the contemporaneous mature and subtile art of Provence, and the entire erudite armoury of love.

A great baron declared that only the man who could carry his daughter in his arms to the summit of a certain mountain—an impossible feat—should win her hand in marriage. No man possessed strength to carry her farther than half way. But the knight whom she loved secretly went out into the world, and after years of searching, discovered a magic potion able to endow him who quaffed it with enormous strength. Full of joy he returned home and, his beloved in his arms, began the laborious ascent. Strong and jubilant, he laughed at the potion. But after a while, feeling his strength ebbing away, the maiden implored him: "Drink, I beseech thee, beloved!" "My heart is strong, to drink were waste of time." And again she pleaded: "Drink now, beloved, thy strength is diminishing fast." But he, eager to win her only by his own effort, staggered on and reached the summit, only to sink to the ground and expire. The maiden, throwing herself on his lifeless body, kissed his eyes and lips and died with him.

We recognise in this simple tale the new form of love, mutual devotion, and the thought of the consummation of this love, the Love-death, which was not definitely realised until six hundred years later. It originated in the Celtic soul, as the worship of woman originated in the Romanesque (the Teutonic soul shared in the development of both). It was a dream of the suppressed Celtic race, spending its whole soul in dreams and producing visions of such depth and beauty that even we of to-day cannot read them without being profoundly moved.

Next there are three love-letters written in Latin by a German woman of the twelfth century. In very touching words she tells her lover that the love of him can never be torn out of her heart. "I turn to you whom I hold for ever enclosed in my inmost heart." She promises and claims faithfulness until death: "Among thousands my heart has chosen you, you alone can satisfy my longing, and you will never find my love wanting. I trust myself to you, all my hope is centred in you. I could say a great deal more," she concludes, "but there is no need of it." And then follow the charming German stanzas:

Thou to me and I to thee,

Knit for all eternity.

In my heart art thou imprisoned,

And I threw away the key.

Nevermore canst thou be free.

In the third letter she drops the formal Latin and addresses him in intimate, simple German. But the man's replies are clumsy and strange, and plainly evidence his uncertainty of himself: "You have put a human head on a horse's neck, and the beautiful female form ends in an ugly fish's tail." It looks as if a parting were inevitable.

But the most touching testimony from the Middle Ages is the famous love story of Abélard and Héloïse. We probably possess no older document of the passionate devotion of a woman, differing in nothing from the sentiment of the present age, than the letters of Héloïse. Abélard persuaded her to take the veil and repent in a convent the sin of voluptuousness—but she knows nothing of God—her whole soul is wrapped up in her lover: "I expect no reward from God, for what I did was not done for love of Him.... I wanted nothing from you but yourself; I desired only you, not that which belonged to you; I did not expect marriage or gifts; I did not seek to gratify my desires and do my will, but yours, and well you know that I am speaking the truth! The name of wife may seem sacred and honourable to you, but I prefer to be called your mistress or even your harlot. The more I degraded myself for your sake, the more I hoped to find grace in your eyes.... I renounced all the pleasures of the world to live only for you; I kept nothing for myself but the desire to belong entirely to you." Abélard's replies are pious sermons and theological treatises; he thinks of the love of the past only as the cursed desires of the flesh, the snare in which the devil had caught them, and urges Héloïse to thank God that henceforth they are safe. "My love which entangled both of us in sin," he says in one of his letters, "deserves not the name of love, for it was naught but carnal lust. I sought in you the gratification of my sinful desires," etc. He blessed the savage crime committed on him because it saved him for ever from the sin of voluptuousness. What Héloïse loved and treasured as her sweetest memory, was to him hell and devil's work. He wrote to her almost as if in mockery: "What splendid interest does the talent of your wisdom bear to the Lord day after day! How many spiritual daughters you have borne to Him! What a terrible loss it would have been if you had abandoned yourself to the lust of the flesh, had borne, with travail, a few earthly children, while now, with joy, you bear a great number of daughters for the kingdom of Heaven. You would have remained a woman like all the rest, but now you are far exalted even above men." This correspondence plainly reveals the tragedy of the lacerated man of the Middle Ages, as compared to the never-varying woman, emerging perfect from the hands of nature. A long and toilsome road still stretches out before him; she had reached the goal, without a struggle, at the outset. How strange is this cry of a mediaeval nun: "It seems as if the world had grown old, as if all men and all living creatures had lost their freshness, as if love had grown cold not in many, but in all hearts."

What was really the final cause of the hostility to sensuousness displayed by dualistic mediaeval Christianity? Was it not contained in eroticism itself?

This hostility was based on the fact that the world knew as yet only spiritual love and its antithesis, the sexuality which man shares with the animals; the only salvation, not merely in the Christian sense, but from the point of view of every lofty conception of civilisation, lay in the victory over animalism. The contempt of and the struggle against the lower form of eroticism animating the dualistic period was absolutely consistent; asceticism represents the highest form of culture attainable by that period. (The rejection of spiritual love was an inconsistency on the part of the clergy.) The principle of personality was the fundamental principle of Christianity; this is clearly expressed by the fact that Christianity regarded the soul as the supreme value. And what is the soul but the consciousness of human personality conceived naïvely as substance? In the light of this higher intuition sensuousness was bound to appear base and degrading.

It is therefore historically correct, though essentially an error, to regard Christianity as the religion of asceticism, for the asceticism of the Middle Ages was nothing but the immature stage of the principle of personality. Directly spiritual love was no longer in opposition to sexuality, directly a synthesis had been effected, Christianity should have drawn the obvious conclusion from its fundamental principle and acknowledged love, which united the hostile elements. Protestantism did so, half-heartedly. Luther's vacillating attitude towards sexuality is typical of this indecision. At heart he could not justify sexuality; he regarded it, in the same way as did the Fathers of the Church, as an evil with which one had to make terms. His sanction of marriage was nothing but a crooked and ill-founded compromise; and as he remained at the old dualistic standpoint, it could not have been otherwise. But the moment the new sensuous-supersensuous form of love had come into existence, it behoved Christianity, as the religion of personality, to acknowledge it.

After this digression I return to the period of the inception of the third stage of love. If I were writing a history of eroticism, I should now have to describe the rococo period, a period essentially rationalistic and devoted to pleasure, a period which believed in nothing but the obvious and understood love only in the sense of sensual pleasure. If sensuality had hitherto been evil—at least theoretically—it now became obscene. Stripped of every grand and cosmic feature, it degenerated into the principal form of amusement. The eighteenth century, though instructive and interesting to the student of eroticism, produced nothing new. Under the undisputed sway of France, a period of sensuality set in, unparalleled by any other epoch in the history of the race, except, perhaps, the early oriental epoch; even the gynecocratic family of remote antiquity was openly revived by the ladies of Paris. Casanova was the sexual hero of the age (as he is to some extent the hero of our present impotent epoch). Indefatigable in the pursuit of woman and successful until old age, he was a well-bred sexualist without subtlety or depth. The Vicomte de Valmont, the hero of Choderlos de Laclos' famous and realistic novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses, an absolutely cold and cunning seducer, was its god. They were seconded by the pleasure-loving Ninon de l'Enclos, who was still desired at the age of eighty.

This ultra-refinement was followed by the loathing of civilisation and love of nature expressed by Rousseau, Werther and Hölderlin; closely allied to these passions was sentimental love, the direct precursor of our modern conception of love. Its peculiarity lay in the fact that although spiritual in its source, it yearned for psycho-physical unity, and was therefore always slightly discordant. Rousseau was the first exponent of this romantic nature cult and sentimental love of woman. He represents the sharp recoil from the frivolity of the ancien régime, and the beginning of the third stage of love. His Nouvelle Héloïse (1759) was probably the first work in which sentimental love found expression. In Goethe's Werther (1774), which is a faithful portrayal of the poet's personal feelings, it was represented more powerfully. Werther's love was purely spiritual at its inception. "Lotte is sacred to me. All desire is silent in her presence." But in the end he desires her with unconquerable passion; a dream undeceives him about the nature of his feelings, and as he clasps her in a passionate embrace he is conscious of having reached the summit of his longing. This would seem the goal of modern love, embodying all its previous stages. It is interesting to find embodiments of the extreme poles in two incidental characters; one has been driven mad by his adoring love for a woman and wanders about the fields in November to gather flowers for his queen; the other is a young peasant who kills his rival in jealous rage. But Werther himself, steering a middle-course between these two extremes, walks straight into modern love, which means death to him.

Both the New Héloïse and Werther are, sentimentally, efforts to reach the synthesis via the soul. Friedrich Schlegel, in his famous Lucinda (1799), tried the opposite way. He has been savagely attacked for it by one side and lauded to the skies by the other, and when "the emancipation of the flesh" became the motto of the day, he was glorified as a martyr. The philosopher and theologian Schleiermacher saw in Lucinda a delivery from the tyranny of centuries. "Love has become whole again and of one piece," he exclaims, joyfully calling the poem "a vision of a future world God knows how distant." "Love shall come again; a new life shall unite and animate its broken limbs; it shall rule the hearts and works of men in freedom and gladness, and supersede the lifeless phantoms of fictitious virtues." Schleiermacher also voiced the idea of the synthesis: "And why should we be arrested in this struggle (i.e., between love as the flower of sensuousness and the intellectual mystical component of love), when in all domains we are striving to bring the ideas, born by the new development of humanity, into harmony with the result of the work of past ages?" His Confidential Letters on Schlegel's Lucinda have made the Protestant pastor Schleiermacher the philosopher of the third stage of eroticism, as the chaplain Andreas was the theorist of the second. The third stage gained its first footing amongst the German romanticists. Women were largely instrumental in achieving its victory. I will not go into detail but will confine myself to mentioning in passing the names of Jean Paul, Henrietta Herz, Brentano, Sophy Mereau, Dorothy Vest, Schelling, Friedrich Gentz. W. von Humboldt records a conversation which he had in the year of the Revolution with Schiller. The latter unhesitatingly professed his faith in the unity of love. "It (the blending of love and sensuality) is always possible and always there." But Humboldt was diffident, unable fully to grasp the new conception. "I said that it would sever the most beautiful, most delicate relationships, that it was too heterogeneous to admit of coherence; but my principal argument was that in the majority of cases it was out of the question...."

There is a document from the year 1779 which contains in its entirety the modern conception of harmonious love, together with its ecstatic apotheosis, the love-death, a document which puts the later theorising romanticists and Lucinda completely in the shade. I am referring to the only one of Gottfried August Bürger's letters to Molly, which has been preserved. It contains the following passages: "I cannot describe to you in words how ardently I embrace you in the spirit. There is in me such a tumult of life that frequently after an outburst my spirit and soul are left in such weariness that I seem to be on the point of death. Every brief calm begets more violent storms. Often in the black darkness of a stormy, rainy midnight, I long to hasten to you, throw myself into your arms, sink with you into the infinite ocean of delight and—die. Oh Love! oh Love! what a strange and wonderful power art thou to hold body and soul in such unbreakable bonds!... I let my imagination roam through the whole world, yea, through all the heavens and the Heaven of heavens, and examine every delight and compare it to you, but by the Eternal God! there is nothing I desire so ardently as to hold you, sweetest and heavenliest of all women, in my arms. If I could win you by walking round the earth, naked and barefoot, through thorns and thistles, over rocks and snow and ice, and, on the point of death, with the last spark of life, sink into your arms and draw new life and happiness from your loving bosom, I should consider that I bought you for a trifle."

To adduce more historical evidence of modern love would serve no purpose; in the next chapter I shall discuss its metaphysical consummation, the love-death. But I will briefly point out the not quite obvious difference between synthetic love and sexuality projected on a specific individual. In several of the higher animals the sexual instinct is to some extent individualised, but nevertheless it is no more than instinct, seeking a suitable mate for its gratification. All the well-known theories of "sexual attraction," from Schopenhauer to Weininger, accounting love as nothing but a mutual supplementing of two individuals for the purpose of the best possible reproduction of the species, do not apply to love in the modern sense, but to the sexual impulse; they completely disregard the individual, and are only aware of the species; they apprehend individualisation as an instrument in the service of the race. But genuine personal love is not kindled by instinct; it is not differentiated sexual impulse; it embraces the psycho-physical unity of the beloved without being conscious of sexual desire. It shares with the purely spiritual love the eagerness of man to raise and glorify the beloved woman, without ulterior motive or desire. This distinction may be called hair-splitting, and I admit that it is frequently impossible to make it in practice, but it is important in principle because it goes back to origins and finds in the metaphysical climax of the third stage, the love-death, its practical anti-generic proof. But with all this it is of common occurrence that spiritual and sensual love are at different times projected on one and the same woman.

Schopenhauer's instinct of philoprogenitiveness has to-day become an article of faith with the learned and unlearned. Schopenhauer was the first, probably, to conceive the idea that love was the consciousness of the unconscious instincts in the service of the species, and had no other content or purpose than the will of the species to produce the best possible offspring. In a chapter of his principal work, entitled The Metaphysics of Love, he essayed to promulgate and prove his theory in detail. "All love, however ethereal it may pretend to be, is rooted solely in the sexual instinct; it is nothing more nor less than specialised, strictly speaking individualised, sexual desire." Schopenhauer's conception of love does not rise above this specialised impulse. He calmly ignores all phenomena such as those I have described because they do not fit his theory. With the exception of his cheap observation that contrasts attract each other (which is the pith of all his "truths") he does not adduce the smallest evidence for the truth of his myth of "the genius of the species spreading his wings over the coming generation." However much the results of breeders may be applicable to the human species, they have nothing to do with love, and the believers in the theory of the instinct of philoprogenitiveness are silent on the subject of the best and most suitable subject for the purpose; is it the law-abiding citizen? the restless reformer? or the artist and thinker? Strange to say, the legend of the instinct of philoprogenitiveness, intuitively conscious of the right way, is to-day accepted even by scientists who are in sympathy neither with Schopenhauer's nor with any other metaphysic. It is taken for granted that love can only serve the purpose of the species; the fact that this theory is both metaphysically and scientifically unsound is ignored. For even leaving the genius of the species out of the question, his intelligent comprehension of the "composition of the next generation" is nevertheless devoutly believed in. Even Nietzsche, that arch-individualist, was completely under the spell of this dogma, as is proved by many of his utterances, for instance, by the well-known socialistic definition of marriage as "the will of twain to create that which is higher than its creators," and also by his theory that man is not an end in himself but a bridge to something else. Nietzsche's pronouncement that he has not yet found the woman whom he would like to be the mother of his children, echoes the philosophy of Schopenhauer, the superstition of the genius of philoprogenitiveness. The intrinsic worth of love without any ulterior motive, without a view to pleasure or to offspring, seems to have been unknown to Nietzsche. Schopenhauer's hero puts the purport of love not in the actual individual, but in a conception, and annihilates the value of the individual and the unique. Every great emotion is an end in itself, and whatever we may read into it of "purposes" and "expediencies," is an invention, and independent of the emotion itself. The aim of the purely spiritual love of the second stage was not propagation, and yet it was an emotion whose loftiness cannot easily be surpassed. With the deification of woman love reached far beyond the beloved into infinitude, and the phenomenon of the love-death renders all the supposed generic purpose of love impossible. But even if we ignored love altogether and admitted the existence of the sexual instinct only, its mysterious endeavour in the interest of the species would still remain pure imagination, and a conception far inferior to that of the winged god of love. The instinct does not possess a trace of "discretion," takes no interest in the weal and woe of humanity, but is utterly selfish, seeking its own gratification and nothing else.

The theory which fits so well into Schopenhauer's metaphysics has, without it, neither sense nor support. There is no instinct of philoprogenitiveness, but rather a pairing-instinct, and in addition to this a conscious desire for offspring. The difference between these two instincts is great, for as a rule, the pairing-instinct is not accompanied by a wish for children (that it should be so unconsciously is a theory not worth considering seriously), and the longing for children very frequently exists without any sexual desire; to manufacture an instinct out of those two inherently dissimilar impulses is fantastic metaphysics and not spiritual reality. The history of antiquity furnishes ample proof of my contention, for in the days of the remote past the sexual impulse had its special domain, as well as the wish for progeny, which was often regarded in the light of a duty.

The legend of the instinct of philoprogenitiveness which is to-day so universally believed, is undoubtedly the result of the general feeling that sexual intercourse as such is base and degrading. But because of the more or less clear consciousness that sexual intercourse is really what is most desired in love, and because of the lack of courage openly to admit it, attempts are made to justify it from a social standpoint.

The task of establishing the equilibrium between love and sensuousness has not yet been accomplished. What is so often realised as the sexual trouble has its origin in the fact that the higher stage has not yet been finally reached. There is an infinite number of unions, all of which have a flaw. Witness modern literature with its indefatigable treatment of eroticism. If a complete unity is ever to be established, then doubtless it will be the privilege of the Germanic race to achieve it, for the Neo-Latin nations mean by love either the individualised instinct, or the rare, purely spiritual love. But it is not likely that the third stage will become a universal condition; in all probability it will, for a long time to come, be limited to special individuals, and even then only to specific phases of their lives. The feeling of the great majority of men has not changed; it is primitively sexual; in the state of mind which is called to be in love it is centred on an individual woman, to be, after a time, gradually stifled by other interests. The emotional life of the majority of women, on the other hand, is still what it was in remotest antiquity. Love impels woman into the arms of a man to whom she remains faithful, until slowly her instincts are transformed into love for her children. But in the case even of the average woman, body and soul are equally affected; there is no more terrible moment in a woman's life than the one in which she discovers that the man to whom she has given herself has merely used her as a means for gratification. Harmoniously organised woman has given herself to a merely sexual man who sought in her only the satisfaction of his senses. This also is the cause of the horror with which the normal woman regards the prostitute, for the latter has made of herself a means for the gratification of male sexuality, losing thereby her inherent harmony and individuality. And it is also the reason why, in spite of ethical convictions and logical conclusions, we should have different standards for the loyalty of the husband and the loyalty of the wife; in man sexuality is a distinct element, an element, it is true, which we do not value, but which nevertheless exists and has, as we have seen, a historical root. When a man gives way to his instincts, his individuality is not only not destroyed, but it is hardly affected. It is very different in the case of the woman; with her, emancipated sexuality is synonymous with inward annihilation, for it has not the support of the past and cannot exist independently. A man's spiritual annihilation from the emotional sphere is unthinkable because his organisation is naturally heterogeneous. The mere sexualist represents a past stage of male eroticism which has been largely overcome, but he is rarely so completely under the spell of sexuality that he cannot highly develop other parts of his entity. The double morality has, therefore, an objective reason (though perhaps not a higher justification), and would only be unjustifiable if man had achieved a complete erotic unity.

The more complicated life becomes, the more numerous and complex are the relations between individuals and groups. A man is a member of a trades union; he has political, artistic, sporting and social relations; he may be a collector or interested in certain social phenomena, etc. In modern civilisation every component part of the human personality is separated from the entire personality and brought into a systematic connection with similar component parts of other entities. Our social principle is division of labour, not only in the community but also in the individual. With one man one can talk only philosophy, with another music, with a third personal matters, and so on. But because in this way only one part of man, and never the whole being, can be satisfied at a time, the desire to expend one's whole personality in one great achievement, or in connection with another individual, is increasing exactly in proportion as specialisation is increasing in the community and in the individual. The more richly endowed and synthetic a man, the more inappeasable will be his yearning to find the talents scattered broadcast over humanity combined in one personality, and to give himself wholly and entirely to that personality. The splitting up of man caused by our social conditions is one of the principal causes of the longing for the great and strong love which we hear so much discussed. The yearning for the absolute, for perfection, no longer separating and selecting but embracing man as a whole, annihilating body and soul in a higher intuition, the longing for mutual self-surrender, for giving and receiving an undivided self, is growing stronger and stronger. The idea of modern love, a love embracing the whole breadth of human development, is unequalled in human history. A single person shall stand for all mankind. The lover has always been all the world to woman, but man has possessed many things in addition to the beloved. Our age claims (wherever it understands its own eroticism) that woman, on her part, shall give to man all things in existence in a higher and purer form; not only complete satisfaction of the senses, not only the lofty emotion of spiritual love, but also friendship as a fellow-man; she shall be to him the friend who meant so much to the Greek and the ancient Teuton. It is self-evident that the true erotic of our time has very little to spare for friendship, while on the other hand the man who is not erotic in the true sense of the word, but merely sexual, has generally a poor idea of woman and a great appreciation of male friendship. But modern love does not only seek to combine all human relationships; it would fain include work, recreation, art. The instinctive jealousy of every occupation which she does not share with her lover, is nothing more than a loving woman's fear that the things which belong to him exclusively may become a danger to the unity of love. Whether such an all-absorbing love is possible in richly-endowed natures, and whether it will not be the cause of new conflict, are questions which cannot here be entered upon. But one thing is certain: the great love cannot find its consummation on earth.

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CHAPTER II

THE LOVE-DEATH

(THE SECOND FORM OF METAPHYSICAL EROTICISM)

The craving for infinitude is latent in love; its essence is the longing to reach beyond the attainable, to find the meaning of the world in ecstasy. The great erotic is a man whose inward being rests on emotion, who must bring this emotion to its climax—and who is wrecked on the incompleteness of human feeling. We recognise in him one of the tragic figures at the confines of humanity. For it is the final tragedy of a soul impelled by the inexorable will to self-realisation, to be broken on the wheel of human limitations.

The tragedy of the great man of action is less conditioned by principle than the tragedy of other types of greatness, because he is not limited by the universal restrictions of humanity, but by individual and accidental ones. He recognises, partly because of his unmetaphysical constitution, no limits to human activity, and in gaining his individual object, he reaches a relative end. It is otherwise with the thinker, the artist, the religious enthusiast and the lover. The thinker possesses the highest intellectual endowments; he represents cognisant humanity, and his portion is the anguish of realising that the essence of being cannot be grasped by the intellect. The great artist creates a masterpiece; his heart is aglow with the ideal of perfect beauty beheld by none but him, but his ideal eternally eludes him; the saint has achieved perfection as far as perfection is possible to humanity, and stands aghast at the burden of insufficiency which weighs down mankind; the great erotic is the hero in the world of feeling, his soul yearns for the consummation of his love—and already he has reached the confines of life.

There are various paths by which the erotic may travel towards perfection; they correspond to the principal erotic types. I have devoted a special chapter to the seeker of love, or the Don Juan; the woman-worshipper who cannot find satisfaction on earth has been dealt with already. The great and rare lover, however, the exponent of the final form of love, who loves a woman of flesh and blood with every fibre of his being, differs very essentially from either of these types. The profounder the emotional depth of the soul, the greater is the difficulty of finding a complementary being. The erotically undifferentiated nature (whose intellectual level may, however, be a high one) finds, and in case of loss replaces, the complementary being comparatively easily. The difficulty both of finding and of substitution increases in proportion to the differentiation and the intensity of feeling. The true erotic, once he has found his complementary being, is overwhelmed by the will to the perfect realisation of his passion. It appears with the unanswerable logic of the unique and final, carrying in its train supreme happiness and infinite sorrow. A love able to deliver a soul from its solitude is rare; once there, the whole world is as nothing to it. All life is embraced and brought under its spell. (In this connection I need only mention Michelangelo.) A lover of this type surrenders himself to love unconditionally—love shall completely annihilate, completely renew him.

But it is just in this overwhelming love that the impassable barrier becomes apparent. The lovers are two beings and not one indivisible entity. The fundamental fact of individuality stands between them as the last obstacle to their complete union. The more intense the emotion, the more desperately it tilts against this barrier, against the impossibility of complete mutual absorption, and the more passionately it demands another common form of existence. Individuality and the eternal duality of being is felt as a curse. The lovers cannot endure the thought of continuing life as distinct personalities.

The great erotic who, against all expectation, finds the being to whom he can surrender himself unreservedly and with a sense of immortality, discovers within himself the supreme and only happiness, and by that very fact has himself become the source of his unhappiness. Personality, the greatest gift bestowed upon the children of man, has flashed its light upon the tragedy of life: solitude, eternal duality. The soul recognises with unspeakable dismay in its own fundamental principle the cause of its isolation and the impossibility of final union with the beloved. The supreme value of European civilisation, the value of complete personality, into whose gradual development and perfecting all human forces had been built, and in whose interest countless sacrifices had been made, knows itself as the cause of supreme suffering, as an element which ought on no account to exist. Not its completion, but its annihilation is what should really be desired. We have here arrived at the very confines of humanity. If the great thinker has found the boundaries of all knowledge in the limitations of the intellect, and is thus the representative of the human mind with its unattainable goal: knowledge of the secret of being, the erotic has gone a step further. He has found the boundary in the very perfection of his personality and, to him, the barrier is unendurable. In the rare love of the rare personality is discovered the eternal separateness of the ego; only the destruction of its origin, the annihilation of itself, might, perhaps, throw down the barrier which separates the lovers. Inevitably there arises in the soul the desire and the will to escape, together with the beloved, the insufferable solitude of existence; to achieve in death what life denies; to realise another, a higher condition, divined in dreams and seen in visions; to become one with the beloved, to transform all human existence into a new, divine universal existence: "Then I myself am the world!" Everything individual, all life, is blotted out; the death of the lovers from love and through love is the mystic portal of a higher state of being. It is the last ecstasy of unity—the love-death—an ecstasy which life cannot give because it must always be wrecked on duality. It is the despairing attempt to escape from separateness, to effect a delivery which to human understanding seems final, and it is characteristic that Wagner, who made the problem of redemption peculiarly his own, should have expressed this attempt uniquely and with unparalleled grandeur.

It would be a mistake to read into the idea of the love-death a rejection of the European view of life, a denial of the world-feeling of personality, and a victory of the impotent philosophy of the East which exalts non-existence above existence (that is to say, individual existence). For the essence of the love-death is contained in the determination of personality to realise itself in a new and positive form of existence. It is felt as the final synthesis, exactly as (in other spheres) the union of the ideal with the personal is seen as the perfection of human life. How would it be possible at once to annihilate and to transcend the individual soul, the source of personal love, if this soul were not first presupposed as the essential and supreme value? Where personal love does not exist, as in the Orient and Japan, the thought of the love-death would be an absurdity. The burning of Indian widows is a phenomenon widely differing from the love-death. The Indian widow slavishly abandons a life which has become aimless through her master's death; she does not make a sacrifice in the true sense of the word, and is not actuated by love.

The complete unity of the lovers is possible on earth for a brief hour and it will, in most cases, satisfy erotic yearning. It can be realised in two ways: by the blissful rest of the lovers in each other, which silences all desires and apparently robs time of its tyranny.

The heart is still, and nothing can disturb

The deepest thought, the thought to be her own.

says Goethe; and a newer poet:

Close around me, wondrous being,

Wind thy magic veil oblivion,

All my heart from unrest freeing,

Let there be untroubled calm.

Give me peace; the helter skelter

Of the wide world has gone by;

And this narrow, silent shelter

Holds the potent healing balm.

By the side of this idyllic consummation of the longing for love, there is the other, the ecstatic consummation of mutual rapture. It almost blots out individual consciousness in the singly (no longer doubly) felt, body and soul entrancing ecstasy; it is such sheer delight that pleasure is no longer perceived as a distinct element, but rather is there the consciousness of a complete transformation of life. Pleasure, which, a great psychologist maintains, "craves eternity" is annihilated in its perfection, knows no more of itself, and is a part of the lovers' sense of complete unity. It does not "crave eternity"; such a craving is its last stage but one, the outer court (further than which Nietzsche as far as eroticism is concerned never penetrated); in the innermost sanctuary pleasure disappears; it has no longer any meaning, it becomes void before the new consciousness. The supreme ecstasy of great love proves that the summit of human emotion is beyond pleasure and pain, and does not acknowledge the limitations of bodily existence. Thus, of necessity, the rapture of love must engender the idea of its own eternity, the destruction of individual consciousness. I will quote in this connection a few verses by Erika Rheinsch:

To open now my lips were vain indeed,

Nor word nor even kiss could e'er confess

What sighs and joy and grief and happiness

Would flash from me to you with lightning speed.

Nor hope nor pray'r can still the soul's desire,

For God Himself can never join us twain;

My bitter tears fall on my heart like rain

And cannot quench its all-consuming fire.

Oh! Now to break the spell—the storm to breast

With broken heart and life-blood ebbing fast,

Bearing the pangs of death for you, at last,

Dark troubled love—at last thou wert at rest!

We perceive that love can no longer content itself with the penultimate—it must dare the last heroic step which creates beyond body and soul something new and final, for "God Himself can never join us twain." The love-death is the last and inevitable conclusion of reciprocal love which knows of no value but itself, and is resolved to face eternity, so that no alien influence shall reach it. The two powers, love and death, tower above human life fatefully and mysteriously; an isolated experience cannot appease them, they involve the whole existence. To the individual who loves with an all-absorbing love, and to the individual on the point of death, everything dwindles into insignificance. Before the majesty of the love-death life breaks down, to be laid hold of and transcended in a new (divined) sphere.

The thought of the love-death, the will that the world should be governed by love, is the most unconditional postulate of feeling ever laid down. For the love-death is the definite and irrevocable victory of emotion; it is ecstasy as a solution of the world-problem and the world-process. It is human to regard love and death as antitheses; to consider them far removed from each other; marriage and funeral are the poles of social life. The ecstasy of the love-death, however, owing to its all-transcending claim, unites the two poles. The climax of life shall also be its end.

It is here, in the voluntary surrender of life in order to attain a divined unity, and not in the union of begetting and destroying, that the frequently assumed connection between love and death is to be found. Voluptuousness and death are not interlinked, as is so frequently asserted since Novalis (not on the higher plane of eroticism), but voluptuousness has immolated itself, has been annihilated in the love-death. The view that begetting and destroying are related functions, is based on the supposition that love is bound up with propagation. This is the fateful error of the modern theory of love, a rationalistic, metaphysical abstraction, which touches no corresponding chord in the human soul. To base the relationship of love and death on an association of becoming and declining is a beautiful idea, but nothing more. Modern synthetic love produces this relationship in its metaphysical perfection out of itself; it is foreign alike to pure sexuality and to spiritual love. (Wherever the desire to destroy is found hand in hand with sensuality, morbid instincts are at play.)

It frequently occurs that lovers commit suicide together because external circumstances prevent their union. This is a step corresponding to suicide from offended vanity or incurable disease; life has become unbearable to the individual haunted by a fixed idea, and he throws it away. But this has nothing whatever to do with the love-death; it is a purely negative act of despair, whereas the love-death is an altogether positive act, namely, the will to win to a higher (and to the intellect inconceivable and paradoxical) metaphysical unity. The love-death aspires to perform a miracle. It has, possibly, never been realised in its full greatness; the evidence of the common death of Heinrich von Kleist and Henrietta Vogel must be rejected. During the last days of his life Kleist was wrapped up in the idea of their common death, and in a letter to his cousin, Marie von Kleist, he says: "If you could only realise how death and love strive to beautify these last moments of my life with heavenly and earthly roses, you would be content to let me die. I swear to you I am supremely happy." In the same letter he speaks of "the most voluptuous of deaths." And yet it was no real love-death, that is to say, death following as a necessary corollary in order that love may be consummated. Kleist as well as Henrietta had separately resolved to commit suicide, and when they—almost accidentally—heard of this mutual intention, they conceived the idea of the new voluptuousness of a common death. Love did not play a very great part in this. Kleist further says in the same letter: "Her resolution to die with me drew me, I cannot tell you with what unspeakable and irresistible power, into her arms. Do you remember that I asked you more than once to die with me. But you always said 'No.'" From this and other passages it is clear that Kleist would have taken his life in any case, and that he only seized this specific opportunity to plunge into the ecstasy of a common death.

The thought of the love-death is often present in the hearts of individuals who are genuinely in love. We read in Schlegel's Lucinda: "There (in a transcendental life) our longings may perhaps be satisfied." And in Lenau's letters to Sophy the same thought is more than once apparent.

The idea reached perfection and immortality in Wagner's "Tristan and Isolde." It is Wagner's world-famous deed to have lived through and embodied this complex of emotion for the first, and so far for the last time; his lovers are in a superlative degree representative of human love; they typify the climaxes of human emotion. Wagner has immortalised the metaphysical form of synthetic love; his importance to synthetic love surpasses Dante's importance to deification.

Already in the first act the exchange of love-potion and death-draught is profoundly significant: both Tristan and Isolde seek death because they are alarmed by the external obstacles to their love. But the thought of death and love, the foreboding that their love can find rest only in the ultimate, in finality, has been in their hearts from the outset. Together they receive new life from love, and together love leads them, step by step, to death. In the profoundest sense no exchange of potions has taken place, but the power of the love-potion has made them conscious of what was latent in their souls, waiting to burst into life. At the very moment when Isolde proffers Tristan the death-draught, the conviction flashes into his soul that she is giving him death through love: "When thy dear hand the goblet raised, I recognised that death thou gav'st." And in the same way Isolde: "From golden day I sought to flee, in darkest night draw thee with me, where my heart divined the end of deceit, where illusion's haunting dream should fade, to drink eternal love to thee, joined everlastingly, to death I doom'd thee."

The second act leads them further and further into the coils of their love; they are more and more convinced that death alone is left to them, step by step they discover the secret of the mystical union—and yet they are still completely imprisoned within the limits of their personalities and cannot quite understand the miracle: "How to grasp it, how to grasp it, this great gladness, far from daylight, far from sadness, far from parting?" For it is the profoundest secret of the world which here must be guessed by love—the final unity of two souls and through it unity with all life. Clearer and clearer and more and more compelling looms the thought of a common death, until it is grasped and comprehended; the lovers realise that to be completely one they must surrender their lives, and that by losing life they can lose nothing essential. "All death can destroy is that which divides us." Ultimately Tristan pronounces the final decision, and Isolde repeats it word by word, follows it step by step like a sleep-walker, so as to make it quite her own. "Thus should we die no more to part, in endless joy, one soul, one heart, never waking, never haunted by pale fear, in love undaunted, each to each united aye, dream of love's eternity." The grand, artistic symbol for this state of consciousness touches metaphysic. Wagner introduces night as the visible emblem of an existence in a world—inconceivable by our senses—beyond the grave, in contrast to the earthly day, to "the day's deceptive glamour." (Nietzsche later on adopted this symbol "midnight" as the emblem of everything lofty.) The lovers who in their day-consciousness believed that they hated each other, now that they are walking towards eternal night divine that which is beyond the reach of their separated selves, beyond all illusion and duality. The duality is outwardly expressed by their different names, separated and united "by the little word and." All at once the knowledge dawns upon them that great love cannot be consummated in the day of the world, but that it points to a life beyond. They have discovered the final meaning of life and the world—the annihilation of individual life and death through love—analogous to the last wisdom of the mystic: "To become God." "I myself am the world." Death is the inevitable corollary of supreme love. But as they tremblingly yearn for and await the inconceivable, earth once more stretches out her arms to them, the dream of metaphysical existence melts slowly away. In the orchestration phantoms of the day, dreams of morning, suppress the new, the divined conception.

At the opening of the third act the motif for horns and violas gradually ascending and dying away, expresses the unspeakable dreariness and senselessness of material life, after its profound meaning, the re-creation of the world by love, has been lost. This feeling of absolute senselessness dominates the awakening sleeper; Tristan, interpreting it in the sense of Schopenhauer as the universal aimlessness of the world and of life, is merely expressing the doom of his own longing for the supreme: he has divined and has lost the loftiest value. Wagner intuitively perceives that sin is a component part of the supreme sublimation of love and personality; Tristan must curse himself and the beloved woman because love, as the last consequence of sin, demands the love-death, which can never find completion; "The terrible draught myself I have brewed it! A curse on thee, terrible draught! A curse on him who brewed it!"

In the music at the end of the third act, which is known by the (not quite relevant) title of "Isolde's Love-death," Wagner, after previously expressing by Tristan's last words, "Do I near light?" the inadequacy of the physical senses—attempts to describe the metaphysical condition of the unity of love, which to our consciousness can only have the negative characteristics of the unthinkable and intangible—the unconscious. This he tried to accomplish artistically by making use of the senses, by trying to convey in terms of sound, light, scent, what he understood by this complete immersion in the swirling totality of cosmic life—"in des Weltatem's wehendem All." The essence of this condition is that the duality of the souls, and finally the multiplicity of the world, is resolved in a higher unity. But as we are concerned with the emotional life of the lovers and not with vague metaphysical propositions, we may say that such a death is not a being dead, destroyed, annihilated, dispersed, but a being transformed, perfected in love. The amazing phenomenon of this complex of feeling is the fact that real life has become unbearable, and that another life is created without the least regard to possibility or truth; it is as if the emotion of the lovers were endowed with divine, creative power.

Those who realise the love-death as a necessity of their inmost being, resemble the great ecstatic whom earthly life can no longer satisfy, because he is conscious of a force compelling him to enter into a higher cosmic existence. His inmost experience is the annihilation of the individual soul in God; he aspires to a direct pouring of the soul into the divine love. Those who die in love are directly seeking complete unity with each other, and only indirectly, through this unity, the divined annihilation in metaphysical being. The love-death is the erotic, bi-human form of mystic ecstasy, and could not be evolved until the highest form of love had been developed.

Metaphysical eroticism is a product of the spirit of Europe, for it is linked to personality whose will is the immortalisation of love. Orientalism neither comprehends nor appreciates this emotion, for it lacks the foundation of the culture of personality. The Semite, the Indian and the Japanese experience only the rapture of the senses; and gratification, restlessly revolving round itself between enjoyment and exhaustion, is condemned to eternal sterility. All religio-sexual orgies of which history tells us are so many attempts of sensuality to possess itself of a higher intuition—vain attempts, because casual intercourse and the annihilation of the individual can never produce new values. According to Hegel the immanent sense of everything that happens in the world is the destiny of the individual to grow from slavery into freedom; but is it not rather the meaning of increased culture that man should realise himself as an individual (which is by no means a contradiction to the first proposition)? Metaphysical eroticism is the completion of personality in love. Simultaneously with the birth of personality originated the deification of woman; the destruction of the most highly evolved personality, the last painful consequence of its blessed-unblessed nature, gives birth to the conception of the love-death. Like antique torch-bearing genii the two metaphysical forms of love stand at the head and the feet of self-conscious man. Here and there erotic emotion, transcending all limitations, becomes the pathway leading to the ultimate secrets of life: deification creates a supernatural female being as the erotic representative of everything divine. This is a productive act, erotic, artistic and religious at the same time. It produces out of its own fulness new forces for the service of higher ideals; it creates a new world of emotion with new contents.

Simultaneously with the projection of the love of woman into eternity were sown the seeds of those great things on which the higher spiritual life of to-day is based. Deification demands shape and individuality beyond the earthly sphere, in eternity. But from one side it is love, love without response (unless the lover finds response in and through artistic expression), the eroticism of the solitary man, and it occurs as such to this day in rare minds. Woman-worship is the natural and the highest form of love for the man who does not seek his own perfection in duality—a reciprocal relationship with another being—but solitarily, and yet not, as the mystic, shapelessly, but rather in a love definitely projected on another being. The dream of the perfect woman is the only erotic dream which reality can never disappoint, for it makes no claim on reality. Doubtless it is to some extent paradoxical that the inherently social feeling, anchored in duality, should be experienced and perfected solitarily, that it should waive all claim to response and reciprocity, to all appearances the most important elements of love.

The love-death corresponds more completely to the erotic ideal inasmuch as it is founded on absolute equality in reciprocity. It finds its climax not in solitude but in the company of the beloved. The idea of complete abandonment is revolting to the solitarily loving individual; the lover whose whole soul turns to the beloved cannot understand the love of the solitary soul; it appears to him unnatural and cold, perhaps meaningless and crazy. Woman does not know true solitude, the thought of deification is foreign to her nature; she attains to the supreme only with and through man; it is easier to her to give herself to her lover entirely, and even to follow him into death. But in this connection I am unable to suppress a doubt as to whether the fundamental emotion of the mystical world-union is altogether present in woman, whether she really divines behind her lover—eternity.

While deification is universally creative, while it is fresh as the spring and full of faith, the love-death with its gloomy pathos demands the entire individual and destroys everything but itself. It has no creative power, for there is nothing beyond it. One may justly maintain that the love-death realises the mystico-ecstatic religious emotion, while in the deification of woman the religious need to worship finds satisfaction. Both are combinations of love and religion, both are metaphysical eroticism, paradoxical and yet logical conclusions of human emotion.

The overwhelming longing which is connected at least with the first stages of a great love, may be interpreted in another, in a social sense. Love is the intensest and most direct relationship which can exist between two beings, and the impossibility of realising its final longing represents the most genuine tragedy of life among men and women of the social world. The need which impels two beings to each other lacks, in this union too, the possibility of complete consummation. And if the most powerful of all social emotions (and as many believe the root of all others) suffers from an inner duality, to how much greater an extent must the less intense feelings which unite individuals share the same lot! Humanity, wherever it is comprehended profoundly and spiritually, not economically, carries within itself the germ of its tragical imperfection. Whatever social relationship we may enter, we find that it has a flaw, and the more genuine and profound the relationship, the less dictated by utilitarian considerations (which in this connection correspond to the element of sensuality in eroticism), the more painfully does this flaw make itself felt,—whether it be in friendship, in the relationship of master and man, or in free companionship. Every relationship between individuals is stricken with the curse of incompleteness—even love cannot escape this fate. Love enforces in the deification of woman a transcending of earthly life—and it throws itself into the last embrace of a common death—that is to say, it shudderingly admits the impossibility of its consummation.

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CHAPTER III

THE CONFLICT BETWEEN SEXUALITY AND LOVE

The Seeker of Love and The Slave of Love

It is obvious that even an equilibrium between sexuality and love cannot always be established, while a genuine and complete unification is very unusual and may, perhaps, be called utopian. In the previous chapters I have dealt with the blending of both elements in the highest form of eroticism; in the following I will attempt to throw light on some of the principal phenomena resulting from a defective union of sexuality and love, phenomena which I am convinced have never been correctly interpreted. I allude to perversions which are not inherently pathological, although they are as a rule only observed and described in their pathological form.

The fundamental form of so-called sadism may be discovered in an erotic type which I will call the seeker of love. A lover of this type is characterised by an unappeasable longing for pure, spiritual love; he passes from woman to woman in the hope of realising this desire, but owing to his own material disposition he is unable to do so. Time after time he succumbs to sexual promptings. Thus groping, frequently quite unconsciously—for a fictitious being, he hates every woman whose fate it is to rouse his desire, for each one cheats him out of that which he seeks. A genuine illusionist, he knows nothing of the woman of flesh and blood, and continues seeking his ideal, only to be again and again disappointed. He blames every woman he conquers for what is really his own insufficiency; he despises her or revenges himself on her, punishes and ill-treats her; we recognise the true Don Juan and his morbid caricature, the sadist. But even the most brutal representative of this type may still be psychologically described as "a man who seeks spiritual love in woman after woman and, finding only sexuality, revenges himself on her." Quite a number of men harbour sadistic feelings for only one woman, and that the one to whom they owe their great disillusionment. Doubtless many men have almost lost the psychical roots of their perversions and are completely involved in physical acts. There is nothing remarkable in this fact; it occurs in every sphere of human life. The vague instinct of revenge on woman animates also, though perhaps unconsciously, the pathological sadist.

There is one thing which the seeker of love and the woman-worshipper have in common: both seek a higher ideal far beyond the woman of every-day life; but while the worshipper safeguards the purity of his feeling by putting the greatest possible distance between him and the object of his worship (and is therefore never disappointed), the seeker of love, blinded by the illusion that he has at last found the object of his quest, draws every woman towards him and again and again discovers that he is nothing but a sensualist. Every fresh conquest destroys his dream afresh, and he revenges himself, if he is a Don Juan, by despising and disgracing the unfortunate victim, and if he is a sadist, by maltreating her. And yet he never entirely loses his illusion; he craves for complete satisfaction, and as he is incapable of self-knowledge, he never abandons the hope of meeting the woman he seeks. He differs very little from the type represented by Sordello, who loved one woman spiritually, but regarded all the others from the standpoint of sex. It is the tragedy of Don Juan to revolt from the low erotic sphere which is his portion, and where he rules supreme, and for ever to aspire to a realm from which he is shut out. He is convinced that with the help of a woman he may redeem himself—and sinks deeper and deeper into the slough of his own sensuality. He becomes malevolent, cruel and callous; the pleasure whose slave he is repels him:

From craving to enjoyment thus I reel,

And in enjoyment languish for desire.

He is insatiable, but not as the primitive hedonist, whose natural element is pleasure, but because he again and again mistakes pleasure for love. He knows only "women," and thus he sins against personality and the love which is the outcome of personality.

The opinion that Don Juan is no more than a votary of pleasure is not worthy of criticism; the famous Casanova, for instance, has nothing in common with him. Casanova was a sensualist without psychical complexity and without tragedy. His sole endeavour was to wring the utmost measure of enjoyment out of life. He knew the woman of reality and did not waste his time in running after phantoms. In his old age he revelled in the after-taste and settled down to write his memoirs. Don Juan, on the contrary, has such a loathing for all the women he betrays, that he hardly remembers them, and certainly has the strongest disinclination to evoke their memory. Casanova was an entirely unmetaphysical and unproblematical nature. His philosophy is clearly expressed in the preface to his Memoirs: "I always regarded the enjoyment of sensual pleasures as my principal object; I never knew a more important one." Casanova, who, strange to say, enjoys such high erotic honours, was merely an ordinary, very successful man of the world, and is of no importance to the subject in hand. But even the greater and wilder Vicomte de Valmont (the hero of the famous novel of Choderlos de Laclos) is in spite of all his art and esprit and perverse principles no seeker of love and no Don Juan, but a fop and a braggart, seducing women in order to boast of his success. He is moreover only a representative of the bored Upper Ten of the ancien régime, and not by any means unique.

Thoughtful critics contend that Don Juan was an autocrat, a destroyer, a criminal nature with satanic tendencies, bent on the enslavement of women, on their social and moral death; that conquest only, not enjoyment, was his passion. I do not altogether reject this interpretation, but it fastens too exclusively on the external and the obvious, and overlooks the essential. What is the reason of his preposterous procedure? Is he really actuated by the evil desire to injure the women he woos? Such a motive may occur occasionally (the Vicomte de Valmont was so constituted), but it cannot be regarded as the guiding principle of a life—and above everything its pettiness is the exact reverse of so great and demoniacal a character as Don Juan. Were he conqueror in the highest sense, then—ascetic and proud—he would be content with the mere consciousness of victory. But his whole attitude belies the idea of a conqueror; he is not in the least interested in the women to whom he makes love. They are as necessary to him as "the air he breathes," but they are unable to give him what he seeks. At the moment of disappointment he abandons them in disgust, innocent of any despotic desires (which would pre-suppose interest). As far as he is concerned, women exist only for the purpose of quickening something in his soul. But his soul remains dead; divine love has no part in him, he cannot be saved and is doomed to eternal damnation.

But what is the reason why women cannot resist him? Let us first settle the point as to why women are attracted to men. I will answer this question briefly, and though my answer may appear dogmatical, it need not therefore be wrong. Women know very little of man, but there is one thing they feel with unfailing certainty, and that is whether their sex is of great or of small significance to him. (I am only alluding to the general effect of men on women, not to genuine personal love which is always incommensurable.) The greater the importance a man attaches to women, the more readily do they respond to his influence. They are attracted by his erotic will, not by one or the other of his spiritual or physical qualities. Women cannot resist a man to whom they mean much, everything. It is as if they were compelled to throw themselves into the chasm of his vacuity—every fresh victim with the fond hope of filling it—but all of them perish. And yet, at the moment of their defeat they are supremely happy, for they experience the full intensity of his passion and the boundlessness of his longing. The erotic craving of a man simply means that women are to him the most important thing in life. Women instinctively yield to that man who most eagerly desires them. The coarse sensualist, to whom all women are alike, attracts sensual women, not exactly because they find in him the satisfaction of their craving, but because they themselves act on him indiscriminately. But a woman will adapt herself with the greatest ease to the needs of the differentiated erotic (for instance, she will become really sentimental to please the man who prefers sentimental women), for she loves to give herself to the man who most desires her and as he desires her.

Don Juan, animated by illimitable erotic yearning, is therefore the undisputed master of the other sex. He has the power of bestowing absolute happiness, even if only for a brief hour, because in his boundless love (which is projected on anything but her) a woman receives the supreme value. Maybe he would be saved if a woman denied herself to him—maybe he would cease to be a seeker of love and become a worshipper, for he could not refuse to believe in the woman who rejected him; but it is his fate that no woman he woos can resist him, that all throw themselves into his arms without an exception and without a struggle.

Thus the seeker of love, too, though in a restricted sense, may be regarded as a metaphysical erotic, for he loathes sexuality—his portion—and yearns for a higher form of love. He shares this attitude with the slave of love, who is also a sensualist and a would-be lover. The slave of love imitates the attitude of the worshipper, but he infallibly sinks into the sexual sphere. What the psychopathist since Kraft-Ebbing designates as masochism, is the pathological degeneration of this particular emotion, which is very common and appears in various forms, but does not seem to me to be at all morbid. Certainly it is morbid when a man allows himself to be insulted, bound and flogged, but it is fairly normal when his passionate admiration is roused by an imperious woman, who passes him by like a queen without even noticing his abject adoration; when he longs to kneel down before her and kiss her feet, which in reward would spurn him. Quite normal, too, is the boyish happiness in serving an admired and adored woman (Kraft-Ebbing calls this pageism) described so beautifully in Dostoievsky's novel, A Young Hero, and fairly common among troubadours and minnesingers. (I need only mention Ulrich von Lichtenstein.) There are numerous degrees of this feeling—we frequently come across it in the novels of Dostoievsky, Jacobsen, Strindberg, D'Annunzio, and others—but the essence of it is always contained in the fact that the man, although yearning to worship the beloved woman, cannot maintain himself in the sphere of spiritual love, and aspires to direct physical contact. His attitude, which closely imitates purely spiritual love, cannot be other than sexual. The blending of love and sexuality together with the incapacity of effecting a real synthesis, the confusion of value and pleasure is most clearly shown in the masochist—far more clearly than in the case of the (rare) seeker of love. The outward modes preferred by the individual are a matter of indifference; for the most part they are symbolical acts, indicating the lover's inferiority and the loftiness and power of his mistress. What is really of importance is the spiritual attitude which induces him to commit these strange acts, and in these we find the characteristic attitude of the woman-worshipper: that of the slave before his queen. The slave of love is a sensualist incapable of approaching woman in a normally manly, instinctive and natural way, but requiring the pose of the spiritual worshipper. One might be tempted to believe that he harboured the secret wish to atone for his incapacity of feeling a pure love by being degraded and ill-treated. Thus from a human point of view the slave of love is a higher type than the seeker of love; all his transgressions, the fault of his morbid disposition, come home to him; he takes the blame of his sin upon his own shoulders, while the seeker of love revenges himself on his victims for his own shortcomings. The seeker of love is by nature polygamous, while the slave of love is, as a rule, monogamous (and consequently has little success with the opposite sex). Both aspire to a union of sensual and spiritual eroticism, but in both cases the union is a failure. All the repulsive and terrible manifestations of these perversions which have been recorded, can easily be shown to fit my theory. In psychological research it is merely a question of selecting the great types from the mass of phenomena and determining them correctly.

The so-called fetichist, too, whose passion is roused by indifferent objects which belonged, or might belong, to the beloved, or in fact to any woman, is a variant of the slave of love. The classical representative of fetichism is the mediaeval knight who carried a handkerchief, a glove, or any other article of clothing belonging to his lady, next to his heart, thus believing himself proof against evil influences. There we see already spiritual love groping for material objects in order to gain earthly support; not every man is a Dante, not every man is capable of keeping his soul free from the taint of this earthly sphere. But even the "plait-cutter," so well known to the reader of newspapers, the collector of garters, and similar desperadoes, require a relic, a fetich which they apparently worship. To the same category belongs the idolatrous cult which some men, especially artists—but also madmen—practise with female pictures and statues (more especially with heads). In this case the fundamental feeling of the love of beauty, which we know as an essential factor of purely spiritual eroticism, is made to serve sensual purposes. The desired illusion of spiritual worship is facilitated, and is protected from self-revelation, owing to the fact that a painted head rouses in the normal individual no passion, but inspires him with purely spiritual sentiments.

I have briefly touched on this subject because my theory of the two roots of eroticism permits of a new, and in my opinion plausible, explanation of erotic perversions; one might even go as far as to say that the existence of perversions follows as a necessary consequence; that they must exist because it obviously cannot always be possible to maintain a harmonious balance of sensuality and love. This chapter is therefore a necessary supplement to the previous ones in which the perfection of modern love is dealt with. The seeker of love and the slave of love are phenomena of dualistic eroticism incapable of attaining to unity. For this reason they neither existed in antiquity, nor do we find genuine examples of them in the female sex. All female perversions closely examined are hysteria—that is to say, want of inner balance—in various forms; a woman's subjection to the will of a man is in very many instances a natural symptom, and cannot be regarded as perverse. And thus we again perceive that the eroticism of woman is more harmonious and natural than that of the eternally groping and eternally erring man.

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CHAPTER IV

THE REVENGE OF SEXUALITY

The Demoniacal and the Obscene

In conclusion I will attempt to elucidate a group of phenomena which play a part, important though often ignored, in the emotional life of the present day. They are related to the subject under discussion, inasmuch as they, too, are the result of a lack of harmony between sensuousness and love. As long as sensuousness is felt and understood as a natural element, and one which does not under normal circumstances enter consciousness as a distinct principle, the emotional sphere which may be designated as demoniacal-sexual and obscene, does not exist. Not until sensuousness is confronted by a higher principle, a now solely acknowledged spiritual-divine principle, will natural life, and particularly normal sexuality, be stigmatised as low and ungodly, even as demoniacal. In proportion as the conception of God became more spiritual and divine, the conception of the devil became more horrible; the higher the soul soared, the deeper sank the body. This philosophy of pure spirituality was expressed by St. Bernard of Clairvaux in the following words: "Oh, soul, stamped with the image of God, adorned with His semblance, espoused to faith, endowed with His spirit, redeemed by His blood, the compeer of angels, invested with reason—what hast thou in common with the flesh, for which thou must suffer so much?... And yet it is thy dearest companion! Behold, there will come a day when it shall be a miserable, pallid corpse, food for worms! For however beautifully it may be adorned, yet it is nothing but flesh!" The man of the later Middle Ages, and especially the cleric, who was completely dominated by the contrast of the ascetic and the sexual, feared the devil more than he loved God, and regarded the sensual temptations which beset his excited, superstitious and eternally unsatisfied imagination as sent by the devil. The naïveté of sensuality had passed away for ever; as goodness was looked upon as divine and supernatural, nature and natural instincts were condemned. Man was torn asunder.

But the devil was not only feared, he was also worshipped. A devil-worship, the details of which have been little studied, existed from the tenth to the fourteenth century (when it reached its climax), side by side with the worship of God. The greater the dread of heresy and witchcraft, the greater became the number of men who, despairing of salvation, prostrated themselves before the devil, whom they seemed unable to escape (a single evil thought was sufficient to doom their souls to eternal damnation), in the hope that he would at least save their bodies from the stake and vouchsafe them the pleasures of this world. Satan promised his worshippers unlimited pleasure; he became the redeemer of those whom the clergy persecuted. It is asserted that his worship consisted in an obscene parody of the Mass; according to Michelet, the body of a female worshipper served as the altar on which a toad was consecrated and partaken of instead of the Host. The adept solemnly renounced Jesus and did homage to Satan by kissing his image.

Asceticism and libertinism always go hand in hand. They are convertible principles rending their victim. Temptation is the fundamental motif of this condition. The devil was believed to send out his servants to win new souls; monks were visited by demons in the shape of a voluptuous woman, the succubus; Satan himself, or one of his emissaries, disguised as a fashionable gentleman, the incubus, appeared to the nuns. Undoubtedly the dreams of over-excited men and women played a very important part in this connection; many hysterical women felt the devil's kiss and embrace. All these women were themselves convinced of the truth of their hallucinations and imaginings, and once the belief in witchcraft was firmly established (in the thirteenth century) the obvious atonement for their hysteria was the stake.

The fear of witches, which existed parallel with the love of the Madonna, was typical of the declining Middle Ages. The first Christian centuries knew neither the Lady of Heaven in the later meaning of the word, nor did they know anything of witches. In the reign of Charlemagne the penalty for the belief in witchcraft was death. At all times man has exhibited a tendency to see in woman either a celestial or an infernal being, and nowhere was this tendency more strongly developed than in the soul of the mediaeval dualist: he created the beloved and adored Queen of Heaven, the mediator between God and humanity and, as her counterpart the witch, the despised and dreaded seducer, a being between man and devil. Powerless to effect a reconciliation between spiritual love and sensuous pleasure, he required two distinct female types as personifications of the two directions of his desire; love and the pleasure of the senses could have nothing in common, and once the highest value was realised in the spiritual love of woman, pleasure could not appear otherwise than degraded, sinful and diabolical. In this respect, also, woman submitted without a murmur to the dictates of male will.

Mary and the devil became more and more the real hostile powers of the thirteenth century; the classical time of woman-worship was also the climax of the fear of the devil and witchcraft. The Dominican monks who, above all other orders, contributed to the spread of the cult of Mary, proceeded, soon after the establishment of the Inquisition, against the witches, the enemies of Mary. In the second half of the thirteenth century the persecution of heresy gradually gave way to the persecution of witchcraft.

I will not go into these well-known details, for the psychical position is clear enough: to the man whose heart is filled with the love of good and the spiritual love of woman, sensuousness will appear as dangerous and perilous, and will have at the same time the glamour of the demoniacally-sexual. It is the diabolical element of dualistic consciousness in the sphere of eroticism. Many people of the present day will not be able to understand this feeling, for it pre-supposes a completely inharmonious emotional life.

The consciousness of the obscene is allied to the conception of the demoniacal; it accompanies modern synthetic love as its temptation and its shadow. In personal love sensuality and soul are no longer independent, contrasted principles; personality, taking the spiritual as its foundation, includes the sensuous. In this highest stage all eroticism not hallowed by mutual affection is felt as unpardonable. The purely sexual principle continues to exist, but whenever it appears in its impersonal and brutal crudity as an element hostile to personality, it creates the consciousness of the obscene. The obscene is, therefore, the purely sexual, not in its naïve normality, but as a force inimical to a value, as a rule to the value of personality. The obscene expresses scorn and hatred for personal love. It is the seduction of the primitive which is no longer something earlier, but something baser (for every age must gauge all things by its own standard). The aesthetic principle—in this connection the sense of the beauty of the human form—so powerful an element in naïve sensuality as well as in every other form of eroticism, is excluded, because in this particular condition the beauty of the human body is not objectively realised, but is looked upon with the eyes of the senses. The moment personality is acknowledged as the only decisive factor in erotic life, chaotic impersonal sensuality stands condemned. The obscene is the darker aspect of modern love, and without modern love it could not exist. Its essence is negative, is the tendency to caricature and mock the highest form of love. The photograph of a nude woman is not obscene; but if the face is hidden, and thus the personal moment intentionally eliminated in favour of the generic element, it approaches the obscene. This accounts for the widely felt pleasure in obscene pictures; the beholder is not personally engaged, he can enjoy these pictures without taking upon his shoulders any kind of responsibility. Even that minimum of respect which the very dregs of humanity may claim is not required of him. The picture is capable of affording pleasure without claiming a grain of human kindness. Thus it would seem that sensual pleasure is possible without any sacrifice of the inwardly professed higher eroticism, a sacrifice which might be a bar to a primitive relationship with a woman of flesh and blood. Actually, however, it is not possible, for with the surrender to the base source of enjoyment, the spiritual position is abandoned, and personally conceived humanity inwardly annihilated.

It follows from the foregoing that the fascination of the obscene can only be fully felt by one who has completely acknowledged the principle of personality in eroticism, and who has also latent within him the possibility of erotic dualism. The more highly evolved the emotional life of a man (all these considerations apply only to a man in whom the possibility of dualism is latent), the more will he realise the purely sexual, the emphasis of the element of pleasure, as something unseemly and disagreeable; something which he ought to deny himself, but which attracts him with the irresistible fascination of the obscene. The man who surrenders himself naïvely to sensuality does not realise it as obscene, but the man who, conscious of his higher concept, strives against it, experiences the reaction of sensuality with the full force of its perverse seduction. Even if only for a brief space, he annihilates the higher element and gives himself up to the pleasure of the base and degraded.

In this connection we are face to face with the strange but still logical fact, that a man who has completely attained to the third stage of love, feels even the purely spiritual love as odious in its incompleteness. It strikes him as unnatural and forced, a feeling which must, however, not be confused with the ordinary contempt of spiritual love.

Primitively constituted man knows only undifferentiated sexuality. He enjoys the nude, and sees no difference between a Venus by Titian and an ordinary photograph of a nude figure; the aesthete, and more especially the artist, can never understand that a work of art may be sensually stimulating. That it may be so will always be bluntly denied by an individual capable of enjoying a beautiful form, but to the uncultivated mind the picture of the female body will only evoke memories of pleasure. This feeling, however, is quite distinct from the obscene; it is neither hostile to the higher spiritual life, nor is it criminal; it is natural and harmonious. But the same feeling may become obscene if a man, aware of higher aesthetic values, ignores art and enjoys the picture merely as a representation of a nude figure. Here, too, the seduction lies in a demoniacal element, namely in the destruction of the aesthetic value. The destructive characteristic of the obscene wars against all higher conceptions; it is the revenge of chaotic sex deposed by a higher principle, and has the special charm of secret wrong-doing.

I might go even further, and maintain that because modern love does not admit pleasure as its foundation and content, and because the craving for pleasure is deeply rooted in human nature, love favours to a high degree the desire to reserve a sphere for pleasure distinct from personal love. This region is the obscene, and one might prophesy that it will grow in proportion as the principle of personal love acquires dominion; for pleasure will always need an undisturbed retreat untroubled by higher demands. This can only be found in the sphere of the obscene in which the element of personality is entirely eliminated.

Modern man is beset by another peculiar temptation. The beauty of woman, which in the days of the past was regarded as sacred, can be made a means of pleasure, and thus drawn from the realm of values into the realm of sensuality. This is a breach with the principle of personal love, for to the latter the beauty of a woman is so much part and parcel of the whole personality that it cannot be enjoyed separately, that indeed it can hardly be noticed as a distinct element. This cleavage has become so nearly universal that we are hardly conscious of its profound perversity. It is the arch-sin of all higher eroticism to realise beauty not as the undetachable and self-evident outward form of a beloved soul, but as a means of heightening pleasure. Although in its essence it is the same thing as the examination of a work of art merely for the sake of the pleasure it affords to the senses, the offence is here aggravated because personality is involved. This degradation of the higher values, whether of nature, art, beauty, knowledge, kindness, religion or the human soul, to serve the ends of sensual pleasure is the expression of a perversity which is possibly the most radical and characteristic of our age. To-day the soul of a woman has frequently the same effect on man as her physical beauty; he enjoys it as a subtile charm instead of respecting it as a mystery.

I can hardly expect to make my meaning quite clear to the multitude, but the tendency to enjoy beauty of form or soul as a distinct element represents a rupture with the principle of synthetic love, the love which does not separate but realises the personality of the beloved as an indivisible entity. The enjoyment of beauty as a separate element pre-supposes a conscious, spiritual division, not only of the beloved, but also of the lover, and is therefore the destruction of the principle of unity. Aesthete and libertine alike sink to the lower level of pleasure, and their emotions become obscene. There is no question of a division when Tristan in his vision of Isolde exclaims, "How beautiful thou art!" For great love can create the beauty of the beloved out of its own soul.

Prudery is based on a similar duality. It expresses a consciousness that the nude can only be alluring, obscene, "indecent," and should therefore be feared and avoided. It is the defensive weapon of sexually excited, for the most part, slightly hysterical women, against the purely sexual, whose sphere they often extend amazingly. Prudery conceives sexuality as a distinct, restricted complex in consciousness. Such division is alien to woman and, where it exists, a hysterical condition, a condition of inner discord, is clearly indicated. We may take it that the obscene which affects normal men, affects only hysterical, inwardly discordant women who try to take shelter behind prudery. To the normal woman the obscene does not exist as a spiritual principle; she turns with a feeling of displeasure from all the lower sexual manifestations, and even finds them absurd. The elimination of personality of eroticism, the charm of which is felt by even the most highly differentiated man, has always been foreign to woman—she lacks the duality of erotic emotion which man is slowly and laboriously striving to overcome—a still further proof of the unbroken, synthetic emotion of woman.

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CONCLUSION

THE PSYCHOGENETIC LAW

The Individual as an Epitome of the Human Race

The biogenetic law of Ernst Haeckel teaches us that the human embryo passes through all the stages of development traversed by its ancestors in their evolution from the lower forms of the animal world. Although each successive stage completely replaces the preceding one, the latter is there as its organic supposition. Man is not born as a human being until he has travelled over the principal portions of the road to evolution. This law, which establishes the natural connection of the individual with the whole chain of organisms, is continued in a psychogenetic law, not founded on the heredity of the blood but on the heredity of culture (and therefore quite independent of the doctrine of the origin of species). In the course of his development the individual repeats the psycho-spiritual stages through which the species has passed. But while the human body cannot sustain life until it is perfectly developed, the degrees of psychic perfection vary very considerably; not every individual reaches perfection; most men attain to some degree, but there are others who do not even acquire the rudiments.

It would be an attractive and grateful task to point out the halting-places of the human race in the life of the individual; to fix the moment when for the first time in his life the child says "I"—a moment which usually occurs in his second year, and represents the humanisation of the race, the great intuition, when primitive man, divining his spiritual nature, severed himself from the external world; to perceive the child—like its primitive ancestors in their day—treating all weaker creatures which fall into its hands with almost bestial cruelty; to watch the boyish games reflecting the period when the nations lived on war and the chase, their eagerness to draw up rules and regulations and create gradations of rank and marks of distinction. I am not able to carry out such a task in detail and, moreover, as I am dealing with the erotic life only, such a proceeding would be out of place here.

The psychogenetic law, then, comes to this: Every well-developed male individual of the present day successively passes through the three stages of love through which the European races have passed. The three stages are not traceable in all men with infallible certainty, there are numerous individuals whose development in this respect has been arrested, but in the emotional life of every highly differentiated member of the human race they are clearly distinguishable, and the greater the wealth and strength of a soul, the more perfectly will it reflect the history of the race. The evolution of every well-endowed individual presents a rough sketch of the history of civilisation; it has its prehistoric, its classical, its mediaeval, and its modern period. Many men remain imprisoned in the past; others are fragmentary, or appear to be suspended in mid-air, rootless. The spirit of humanity has lived through the past and overcome it, so as to be able to create its future.

The gynecocratic stage actually survives to this day in the nursery. Here the mother rules supreme; the father is an intruder, the brothers are dominated by their sisters, often their juniors. Women mature at an earlier age than men; this assertion applies with equal force to individual and sex in connection with the history of civilisation. After he has left the nursery, there follows in the life of the boy a period during which he associates only with his school-friends, shuns the society of his mother and sisters, and is ashamed of his female relatives. This represents the revival of the men's unions of remote antiquity in the life of the individual of the present day.

At the period of puberty the sexual instinct makes itself felt for the first time; as a rule, if its nature is not recognised, it is accompanied by restlessness and depression. I do not believe that the instinct is, as soon as it appears, directed to the other sex, or anything else outside the individual. This fact cannot be explained by want of opportunity, shyness or bad example; there is a positive reason for it; the longing for a member of the other sex is still unfelt.

Between his twentieth and thirtieth year a man is often dominated by an enthusiastic spiritual love quite unconnected with the sensuality which has hitherto ruled his emotions. I will not elaborate the growth of this love and the new feelings which arise in connection with it; just as in the remote past the sense of personality was born as the centre of a new consciousness, so the individual now undergoes a period of purification and regeneration; through the love for his mistress he discovers his inmost self, of which, until now, he had been practically ignorant. The generative, undifferentiated impulse is supplanted by the love for an individual and stigmatised as base and contemptible. Guincelli's words characterising the second erotic stage of the race: Amor e cor gentil sono una cosa, to-day apply to the second stage in the life of the individual. It also occurs that in the heart of a man whom reality has failed to satisfy an ideal woman gradually wins life and shape. Sometimes it is the idealised counterpart of an actual woman, but not infrequently it is a vague, unsubstantial shadow. Here we have the deification of the woman reproduced in the heart of the individual. To illustrate my point, I will quote the very pertinent conversation between Foldal, the embittered old clerk, and John Gabriel Borkman (Ibsen).

Borkman: Indeed! Can you show me one who is any good?

Foldal: That's just the point. The few women I've known are no good at all.

Borkman: (with a sneer) What's the good of them if you don't know them?

Foldal (excitedly): Don't say that, John Gabriel! Isn't it a magnificent, an ennobling thought, to know that somewhere, far away, never mind where, the true woman lives?

Borkman (impatiently): Stop your high falutin' nonsense!

Foldal (hurt): High falutin' nonsense? You call my most sacred belief high falutin' nonsense?

In conclusion I should like to mention here that I look upon Otto Weininger as a tragic victim of the second stage of love which—in our days—is sick with an almost insurmountable inner insufficiency.

There is no need to elaborate my subject further and point out that—the first stage passed—the prime of life brings with it the fusion of sexuality and love. This union is the inner meaning of marriage in the modern sense—whether it is rarely or frequently realised is beside the point.

In previous chapters I have illustrated various phenomena of the emotional life by showing their reflections on the lives of two or three distinguished men. In conclusion I will endeavour to point out the reproduction of all the erotic stages through which the race has passed, in the psychical evolution of Richard Wagner, and their immortalisation in his works. We shall recognise in him the erotic representative of modern man, a personality in whom all that which as a rule is vague and only half expressed, has become great and typical. Love has been the leitmotif of his life. The concluding phrase of the crude fairy tale Die Feen ("The Fairies"), composed by the youth of nineteen, is: the infinite power of love, and the last words written down two days before his death, were: love—tragedy.

The opera Das Liebesverbot ("The Prohibition to Love"), written in 1834, is eminently symptomatic of the first stage. It is a coarser rendering of that bluntest of all Shakespearean plays, Measure for Measure; its sole subject is the pursuit of sensual pleasure, in which all indulge, and the ridiculing of those who appear to yearn for something higher. To detail the contents of the text—it cannot be called a poem—would serve no purpose; biographically, but not artistically interesting, it exhibits with amazing candour the first, purely sexual, stage of the young man of twenty-one. It was the period when "young Germany's" device was the emancipation of sensuality. Wagner himself says that his "conception was mainly directed against Puritan cant, and led to the bold glorification of unrestrained sensuality. I was determined to understand the grave Shakespearean subject only in this sense." And in his "Autobiographical Sketch" he says: "I learned to love matter." In addition to this Wagner gives us the following synopsis of a (lost) libretto, "Die Hochzeit" ("The Wedding"), written at an earlier period: "A youth, madly in love with his friend's fiancée, climbs through the window into her bedroom, where the latter is awaiting the arrival of her lover; the fiancée struggles with the frenzied youth and throws him down into the yard, where he expires."

The second, discordant, stage of love is embodied in Tannhäuser, composed when Wagner was twenty-nine years of age. There is probably no modern work of art in which the mediaeval feeling of dualism in the scheme of the universe has been expressed with greater pathos. We see man tossed between heaven and hell, between the worshipped saint and seductive sensuality, impersonated by a she-devil. A man of the Middle Ages would have recognised in this work the tragedy of his soul. Wagner had planned the opera before he had really reached the second period, under the title of Der Venusberg ("The Mountain of Venus"), and in this earlier version the purely sexual occupied a far more prominent place, probably in closer conformity with the old legend. For here Tannhäuser returns to Venus unsaved and defying the eternal values, determined to renounce a higher life and give himself up to the pleasure of the senses for all eternity. This idea was retained in a later version up to the decisive final turn; the purely spiritual love for Elizabeth eventually overcomes the unrestrained instinct.

As the despairing monk of mediaeval times, apparently abandoned by the love of God, turned to Satan and worshipped him, so Tannhäuser, cast out of the Kingdom of Heaven by the words of the Pope, and renounced by Elizabeth, again gives himself up to sensuality, which is here contrasted with spiritual love, and represented as demoniacal. Tannhäuser is not vacillating between the love of two women—a spiritualised and a sensual love; he is wavering between the purely spiritual love of Elizabeth and promiscuous sexuality represented by Venus, not centring on her as an individual, but diffused, as it were, through her whole kingdom. The dualism which rends the whole universe is strongly and uncompromisingly emphasised in text and music, and Wagner himself explained to the opera singer, Schnorr von Carolsfeld, that the main characteristic of the principal part was "the intensest expression of delight and remorse without any intermediate stage of feeling, changing abruptly and decisively." The closing words of the first scene: "My salvation lies in Mary!" are the real turning point of the drama. As abrupt as his desertion of Venus for Mary, is his return to her in the third act. By the side of Mary is placed the more human, the more earthly but yet idealised form of Elizabeth, a figure closely resembling Beatrice and Margaret.

The music of Tannhäuser (more especially the overture) expresses the contrast between the two erotic world-elements with striking abruptness. The harmonious and musically perfect motive of religious yearning (the chorus of the pilgrims) which forms the beginning and the end of the overture, is assailed by the briefer motives of sensuous seduction and ecstasy of the middle; the quivering, tickling passages of the violins play round the sacred music of the chorale like so many seductive elves. The Venusberg music is probably the most perfect expression of pure sensuality which has ever been reached in the world of music; it is the complete translation of sensual craving and sensual rapture into the language of music. In the Venusberg music composed for the performance in Paris, this motive is still more richly elaborated, and the recently published "sketches" for the scene in the Venusberg contain a number of details which were eliminated from the later version. Here bestial and demoniacal sensuality, not content with human couples, nymphs, maenads, sirens and fauns, calls for beings half-brute, half-human, represented by centaurs and sphinxes, for black goats, cats, tigers, panthers, and so on, finally for obscene representations of antique legends, such as Leda and the Swan, Europa and the Bull, symbols and illustrations of the climax of perversion. It is a magnificent, poetico-musical picture of untrammelled sexuality, whose queen is Woman, the priestess of voluptuousness, represented by Venus. Tannhäuser's yearning for humanity and divinely pure love gives to this world a tinge of the demoniacal, for the latter is nothing but natural sensuality regarded from a higher standpoint, in this case from the point of view of spiritual love. Whenever it is opposed to the transcendental, the natural is conceived as dangerous and diabolical. At the moment of the abrupt inner change in Tannhäuser, Venus and her world must vanish like a phantom of the night. "A consuming, voluptuous excitement kept my blood and nerves tingling while I sketched and composed the music of Tannhäuser...." says Wagner in one place, and in another he confesses that sensual pleasure, while attracting and seducing him, filled him with repugnance. He speaks of his longing to "satisfy my craving in a higher, nobler element which, unpolluted by the sensuality so characteristic of modern life and art, appears to me as something pure, something chaste and virginal, unapproachable and intangible. What else can this longing for love, the noblest feeling I am capable of, be, than the yearning to leave this world of facts behind me and become absorbed in an element of infinite, transcendental love, to which death would be the gate...."

The dualism in the music of Tannhäuser is consistently maintained. The two elements war against each other without ever merging into one. Those parts of the music which characterise Elizabeth are full of noble pathos and a little sentimental. At the beginning of the second act she is not yet herself; she can still laugh like a light-hearted girl, but when she again succumbs to Tannhäuser's unearthly (and to her fatal) charm, and realises how irrevocably he has surrendered himself to Venus, she rises to true greatness and resolutely faces the swords unsheathed to punish the offender. Before our eyes she is transformed into the saint who realises her mission and is ready to take her burden upon her; more heroic than Beatrice or Margaret, she points to him "who laughingly stabbed her heart," the road to salvation. Like her two predecessors Elizabeth prays to Mary for the salvation of her lover—the prayer for the beloved has ever been woman's truest and most fervent prayer.

The thought of achieving a man's salvation through a great and steadfast love, is the subject of the Flying Dutchman, and plays, as is well known, an important part with Wagner. Strange to say he has for this very reason frequently been scoffed at by those who call themselves admirers of Goethe. Dante-Goethe's great problem of salvation is represented in Tannhäuser with the utmost lucidity. The essence of it is that love can positively intervene in the life of a man whose soul is turned towards it, but who is confused and beset by temptations. His vacillating heart feels the love which is brooding over him and ultimately abandons itself to it, to be saved by its unswerving loyalty. Maybe this is as much a miracle as "grace," but it is also a psychical fact, because the love which yearns for the sinner awakens and increases not only his faith in its power to help, but also in his own strength; darkness and evil dismay him and he turns towards the light. In Tannhäuser this spiritual condition, which is of such primary importance in the last scene of Faust, is clearly expressed; his love for Elizabeth has been strong enough to kill desire kindled in his heart again and again by Venus; yet again he is on the point of succumbing to his senses. The vision of Venus appears before his eyes, but at Wolfram's exclamation, "Elizabeth!" he realises in a flash that Elizabeth has been praying for him day and night, and has given her life to save him. Before this sudden illumination the power of Venus sinks into nothing; divine love falls into his darkness like a ray of light—"Oh, sacred love's eternal power!"—it quickens his own love which is striving upwards, and with the words: "Saint Elizabeth, pray for me!" he sinks to the ground. His way, like Faust's, although one-sidedly emotional, leads from chaos and sin to pure love and salvation, not through his own strength but by the help vouchsafed to him in the love of his glorified mistress.

By the side of the struggling, suffering Tannhäuser, tossed hither and thither between God and the devil, between Elizabeth and Venus, stands Wolfram, the untempted woman-worshipper. The two extremes clash upon each other in the contest of the minnesingers. Tannhäuser, at war with himself, exasperated by the calm, matter-of-fact way in which Wolfram sings the praise of spiritual love, rushes to the other extreme and bursts into rapturous praise of the goddess of love and the pleasure of the senses. I need not lay stress on the fact that at that time of his life Wagner's own heart was the arena in which the conflict was fought out; a work like Tannhäuser is not made, it is conceived in the innermost soul of its creator. Every one of Wagner's great works bears the unmistakable stamp of sincerity and intensity, while with Goethe, on the other hand, it is not difficult to distinguish the genuine ones, that is to say, those which were written under the pressure of a compelling impulse, from those which owed their existence to the intellect rather than to the soul.

Tannhäuser immortalises the adolescence of the European races of mankind; the third stage is not even anticipated.

Lohengrin, the principal interest of which is other than erotic, represents a transitional phase between the second and the third stage; body and soul are no longer regarded as warring against each other; a greater harmony beyond either is dimly divined. Lohengrin has set out from a distant, transcendental kingdom to find earthly happiness in Elsa's love—but he is doomed to disappointment. I will not analyse the theme, but rather quote a few passages from Wagner: "Lohengrin is seeking the woman who is ready to believe in him; who will not ask him who he is and whence he comes, but love him as he is and because he is so.... Lohengrin's only desire is for love, to be loved, to be understood through love. In spite of the superior development of his senses, in spite of his intense consciousness, he desires nothing more than to live the life of an ordinary citizen of this earth, to love and be loved—to be a perfect specimen of humanity." Wagner further speaks of his longing to find "the woman"; the female principle, quite simply, for ever appearing to him under new forms; the woman for whom the Flying Dutchman longed in his unfathomable distress; the woman who, like a radiant star, guided Tannhäuser from the voluptuous caverns of the Venusberg to the pure regions of the spirit, and drew Lohengrin from his dazzling heights to the warm bosom of the earth. We find here the new form of love, not yet fully comprehended but desired and anticipated in art.

In Tristan and Isolde it is attained completely and in its highest perfection. We possess in Wagner's letters to Matilda Wesendonk, and in the diary written for her, the documents of the personal experience out of which Tristan grew, and which unfold one of the most touching love-stories. As I have already discussed Tristan and Isolde in a previous chapter, I will here only quote a passage from a letter written by Wagner and addressed to Liszt at the time of his first meeting with Matilda; it fully expresses the harmony of the third stage. "Give me a heart, a mind, a woman's love in which I can plunge my whole being—who will fully understand me—how little else I should need in this world!"

It is very significant that side by side with Tristan we have Die Meistersinger, composed a little later on. Here the third stage of love is realised in its idyllic possibility; the synthesis has been given the shape of middle-class matter-of-factness, that is to say, the fulfilment of love in marriage: "I love a maid and claim her hand!" For this reason the work, although the fundamental idea is not erotic, is entitled to be placed by the side of Tristan with its demand for the absolute metaphysical consummation of love.

It is an amazing fact that the same genius should have experienced and portrayed both stages so perfectly. Doubtless Tannhäuser and Tristan are the most personal self-revelations of the great lover, pulsating with passion, and far remote from the colossal objective world of the Niebelungs, the lofty serenity of Lohengrin and the wisdom of Parsifal.

Wagner had finished the Ring before he conceived the idea of Tristan and Isolde. (It was printed in 1852.) In the former he intentionally raised the value of love and its position in the universe to a problem, embodying his knowledge of the world, and more especially of the modern world, in supernatural, mythical figures. The greatest ambition of man is power and wealth, the symbol of which is a golden ring. Gold in itself is innocent—elementary—a bauble at the bottom of the river, a toy for laughing children; but the insatiable thirst for power and wealth has robbed it of its harmlessness and made it the tool and symbol of tyranny. Only a being completely in the grip of the greed for riches and dominion, a being who looks upon the world and all men as objects to be bent to his will, and who has consequently renounced love, could have thus enslaved the world. Love does not impair the worth of a fellow-creature, but sets him above all things; a lover cannot be entirely selfish; his feeling at least for his mistress, and through her for the rest of the world, must be pure and unselfish. The struggle between these two most powerful instincts, both in the race and in the heart of the individual (Wotan), is the incomparable subject of this tragedy. The whole world-process is represented as a struggle between the apparently great, who are yet the slaves of gold and authority, and the truly free man who serves love, and on whom ambition has no hold.

The representatives of the petty, greedy, toiling human vermin, who readily renounced love for the sake of wealth, because the latter will always buy lust and pleasure, are the Niebelungs, the dwellers in the Netherworld who never see the sun. They have but one standard: money; one supreme value: power, the gift of wealth. Mime bewails his people (the small tradesmen as it were), as follows; "Light-hearted smiths we used to fashion gems and trinkets for our wives, gorgeous jewels, the Niebelungs' pretty trifles—we laughed at the labour." But Alberich, the capitalist, through the magic of the ring, has usurped the power and enslaved his fellows. "Now the felon compels us to creep in the heart of the mountains to labour for him. There we must delve and explore and despoil, plunder and smelt and hammer the metal, restlessly toiling to increase his treasure." The really daemonic property of the gold is that everybody succumbs to its seduction and strives to possess it. The former naïve joy of living, embodied in the Rhine-daughters, and their not yet humanised song, which seems to come direct from the heart of nature, is destroyed by the theft of the Rhine-gold. What till then had been a serenely shining "star of the deep," has been transformed into a means by which to win authority. The programme of the greedy and tyrannous never varies; Alberich proclaims it; "The whole world will I win," and it is his daemonic will to depreciate love and set up power as the only value, so that nobody shall doubt his greatness and unique genius. "As I renounce love, so all shall renounce it, with gold have I bought you, for gold shall you crave." Love shall die and lust shall take its place; he will force even the wives of the gods to do his will, for his wealth has made him master of the whole world. Compared to his restless activity, the giant "Fafner" is "stupid"; he is incapable of transforming gold into power; he merely enjoys its possession, content with the consciousness of his wealth.

But the curse of Alberich, the first who transmuted the shining metal into money, rests on gold and power. "It shall not bring gladness—who has it be seared by sorrow, who lacks it devoured by envy...." The curse of the eternal concatenation: tyranny—slavery, the care which accompanies wealth and the envy of the have-nots, can only be lifted from the world by a man who is inwardly free, who is neither master nor slave. Siegfried understands the song of the birds and the elementary beings, the Rhine-daughters; he is a stranger to human desires and passions. "I inherited nothing but my body—and living it is consumed." He is proof against the magic of the ring; the only value he knows is love. Alberich, his opponent, says, in speaking of him: "My curse has no sting for the mettlesome hero, for he knows not the worth of the ring; he squanders his prodigal strength, laughing and glowing with love his body is burning away." Half way between Alberich, the inwardly worthless wielder of power, and Siegfried, the truly free man, the embodiment of all virtue, who is murdered by the powers of darkness, stands Wotan, in whose heart both motives, authority and love, are struggling for supremacy, who will renounce neither love nor power. Artistically and symbolically the salvation of the world from the curse of greed and tyranny is brought about by the restitution of the ring, and its dissolution in the pure waters of the river from whence it had been taken; the gold is given back to the Rhine-daughters, to fulfil again its original purpose, namely, to delight the heart of man with its dazzling sheen.

Thus Wagner, the greatest and most inspired exponent of love among modern artists, declared that of all values love was the greatest. His intuitive genius left all the doctrines formulated by Schopenhauer and Buddha far behind and definitely rejected pessimism as a creed. There is an interesting letter from him to Matilda Wesendonk, written while he was composing the music of Tristan, and containing modifications of Schopenhauer's philosophy which he considered requisite. "It is a question of pointing out the road to salvation which no philosopher, not even Schopenhauer, discovered, the road which leads to the perfect pacification of the will through love; I do not mean abstract love for all humanity, but true love, based on sexual love, that is to say love between man and woman."

In Parsifal, the last and most mature of all his works, Wagner is breaking new ground. Here love between man and woman is deposed from the exalted position it hitherto held, subordinated to the metaphysical purpose of the world, that is to say, "the purpose of attaining to perfection," and absorbed in a higher association of ideas. Sexual love has undergone a change, it is no longer love in the true sense, but the unconditional love of the mystic. The enigmatical figure of Kundry is not the impersonation of one woman, she is woman herself. The incarnation of everything female, she embodies the sensuous, seductive and destructive element together with the contempt of the man who falls under her spell, as well as the motherly, and finally the humbly-administrative principle, which so far had not yet become a part of the erotic ideal. She is both positive and negative, a blind tool of the element of evil which prompts man to forget his higher mission (reminiscent of the second mediaeval period), and passionately yearning for salvation. She dies before the Holy Grail, the religious ideal made visible. Beside Kundry there are the flower-maidens, naïvely sensuous beings, who blossom like the flowers and fade again, unconscious and irresponsible. I refrain from a discussion of this work, which would lead too far, and only maintain that the music, corresponding to the text, is entirely unerotic and unsentimental, absolutely pure and religious. The love of a man for a woman has been superseded by love for the absolute and supernatural. Thus, after Wagner had experienced all the stages of love through which humanity has passed, and embodied them in his works, he reached a new point of view, a stage to which we have not yet attained and which, very likely, we are not even able fully to understand. This fourth stage—not unlike Weininger's ideal—is the overthrow of the female and earthly element in man by a voluntary surrender to the metaphysical.

Wagner's last position, taken up quite deliberately, permits of two explanations which I will point out without pressing either of them. Only a man possessing both the wisdom of the aged Wagner and a knowledge of the evolution of the race, and the road which still stretches out in front of it, would be entitled to speak a decisive word. The first obviously is that Wagner divined a last stage in the emotional life of man, a period which has outgrown sexual love and replaced it by mysticism. In conjecturing a potential fourth stage, the three previous ones must be regarded as one. The second explanation is that Wagner's feeling in his last work is no longer representative of the feeling of the race, but is, as it were, a personal matter, at least in so far as love is concerned. For although the principal subject in Parsifal is not love, yet it plays a very prominent part in it. I am only touching upon these two alternatives. But if the latter debatable point be omitted, my analysis of Wagner's emotional life must have shown in which sense the inspired man may be rightly regarded as typical of the race. He leads the broadest and at the same time the most personal life, and yet he manifests in it something which is far greater, far more universal and representative.

My argument proves that the evolution as well as the aberrations of love have affected man alone and, roughly speaking, to this day affect only him. He is the Odysseus, wandering through heaven and hell, ultimately to return home, perhaps, to where woman, the unchangeable, is awaiting him. That which has been woman's natural endowment from all beginning, the blending of spiritual and sensual love, man looks upon and desires to-day as his highest erotic ideal. His chaotic sexual impulse, the inheritance of the past, appears to him low and base in the presence of her in whom sexuality has always been blended with love; his worship, intensified until it reached the metaphysical, seems to him unfounded and eccentric before her who has ever been and ever will be entirely human, and who is perfect in his eyes because she possesses what he is striving after. This and nothing else is the meaning of the vague statement that in all matters pertaining to love woman occupies a higher position than man. She is always the same; he is always new and problematical; never perfect, he falls into error and sin where she cannot err, for her instinct is nature herself, and she knows not the meaning of sin. Whatever burden man has laid upon her, she has borne it patiently and silently; she has allowed him to worship her as a goddess and stigmatise her as a fiend, while all the time she remained problemless and natural, inwardly remote from the aberrations in which her intellect believed so readily. The conclusion which we have to draw, and which touches the foundation of the psychology of both sexes, is that only man's emotions have a history, while those of the woman have undergone no change.

If there is a law by which the human race is reproduced in the individual, then the so-called atavism in the shape of abnormality cannot be the sudden, or apparently sudden reappearance of conditions which once were normal and then disappeared; rather must it be the final arrest of an individual on a previous and lower stage, preventing him from reaching our standard in one or the other emotional sphere. The more humanity a man has in him, the more perfectly will he repeat in his life the stages through which the race has passed, or, in other words: the oftener that which once quickened the heart of man is repeated and surpassed, the greater is the possibility that new things may grow out of it. Atavism therefore is not so much the persistence of the earlier as the absence of the later stages. (This agrees with Freud's conception of the neurotic subject.)

It is obvious that the three stages of love are merely the expression of a period in one definite direction. The emotions of antiquity were entirely earthly, obvious and impersonal; the Middle Ages, on the other hand, attached value only to the world beyond the grave and matters pertaining to the soul. The beauty of spring was to them but a reflexion of another beauty.

"How glorious is life below!

What greater glories may the heavens hold!"

sings Brother John characteristically. But our period is conscious of the need of realising all our desires, and attaining to the highest possible spiritual perfection in this earthly life, and this not by destroying the transcendent ideals, but by stripping them of their metaphysical character, and bringing them to bear on this life, so that it may become a higher and holier one. The will of our intellectual heroes is not the rejection of the doctrine of the survival of the soul, but the comprehension of past transcendental values, so that they may become a safe guide to us in this earthly life; a more perfect blending of realism and idealism; the glorification of life under the aspect of eternity. This applies to love as well: the thought of the infinite, eternal love must transfigure and ennoble all that which is natural and human.

If my theories are correct, they prove the ontological character of historical evolution and the value of the study of history for the comprehension of the human soul. I have shown in a specific and highly important domain that that which we are fond of regarding as the characteristic quality of man was not present from the beginning, but has gradually been evolved in historical time. In other words: history can and must teach us the origin and evolution of the spirit and soul of man, as anthropology teaches us the construction of the body. In philosophically approaching history, it must not be our object to discover "what has been," but "what has become, how we became and what we are." The science of history which loses sight of its bearing on our time, content with its knowledge of the past, is antiquarian and dead; at the most it has aesthetic value, but it is worthless as far as the history of civilisation is concerned. Only that which has been productive in the past, which has had a quickening influence, producing new values, is historical in the highest sense. It creates a new and close relationship between psychology and history. The principal purpose, or one of the principal purposes of psychology, that is the knowledge of the construction of the normal human being, has received a new possibility of solution: every essential quality which the human race has evolved in the course of history must be present in every normally developed individual of our time. The normal man of to-day is not the normal man of the past; every successive century finds him richer and more complex, but he can always be discovered intuitively in history. In this sense history is an auxiliary science of psychology, or rather, the psychology of the human race, for the evolution of the psychology of the individual—which has been studied very little—is merely an abbreviated history of the evolution of the psychology of the species. A past period of civilisation can be traced in the life of every fully developed man, and vice versa the stages in the life of the individual point the way in history.

If it can be established that the fundamental emotions of the human heart originated in historical time, the widely spread, but unproved, theory that everything great and decisive existed from the beginning will be contradicted. The other complementary assertion that nothing which once existed ever quite disappears, must be admitted; nothing perishes in the soul of man; its position with regard to the whole is merely shifted by newly intervening motives and values; and even when it does not change its fundamental character, it becomes a different thing in the whole complex of the soul. Sexuality, which in the remote past was a matter of course, unassailable by doubt, became problematical and demoniacal as soon as it entered into relationship with the new factors of erotic life. An existence in harmony with nature was possible as long as the human race was still in evolution, and not yet conscious of itself. But as soon as intellect and self-consciousness had been evolved, civilisation became possible. Nature has no history in the sense of the origin of values; in the case of still uncivilised tribes every new generation is a faithful reproduction of the preceding one. Certainly there is modification caused by adaptation to the environment, but there are no moral values, and consequently there is no history.

I have attempted to explain why tragedy is inseparable from love in its highest intensity, to show the limits which check all deep emotion and the yearning which would overstep them. The emotional life of man, which is capable of infinite evolution, can only find satisfaction on its lower, animal stages. Hunger, thirst, and sexual craving can be satisfied without much difficulty, and therefore no tragic shadow falls on the first stage. But the emotion which overwhelms the soul cannot be appeased. Not only the great thinker's thirst for knowledge, the mystic's religious yearning, the aesthetic will of the rare artist, but also the love and longing of the passionate lover must reach beyond the attainable to the infinite. This earth is the kingdom of "mean" actions, "mean" emotions and "mean" men. And the lover, unable to bear its limits, creates for himself a new world—the world of metaphysical love.