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.
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.