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.