When two hearts are so unitedThat their love can never wane,Then I ween no man should blight it,Death alone should part the twain.
When two hearts are so unitedThat their love can never wane,Then I ween no man should blight it,Death alone should part the twain.
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.
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.
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.
Love is the ecstasy of two fond hearts,If both share equally, then love is there.
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 eroticelements, 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 evolutionand 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, wemayfind 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 itcould 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. TheAlcestisof 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. TheLaisof 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 herlaistreats 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 doulourPuis en moururent en un jour.
De Tristan et de la reine,De leur amour qui tant fut fine,Dont ils eurent mainte doulourPuis en moururent en un jour.
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 ofa 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, theLove-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 dealmore," 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.
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.
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 asthe cursed desires of the flesh, the snare in whichthe 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 innothing 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 novelLes 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 theancien régime, and the beginning of the third stage of love. HisNouvelle Héloïse(1759) was probably the first work in which sentimental love found expression. In Goethe'sWerther(1774), which is a faithful portrayal of the poet's personal feelings, it was represented morepowerfully. 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 theNew HéloïseandWertherare, sentimentally, efforts to reach the synthesisviathe soul. Friedrich Schlegel, in his famousLucinda(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 inLucindaa 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 harmonywith the result of the work of past ages?" HisConfidential Letters on Schlegel's Lucindahave 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 andLucindacompletely 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! ohLove! 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 admitthat 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, entitledThe 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-dayaccepted 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 pureimagination, 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 asthe sexual troublehas 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 raceto 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 calledto be in loveit 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. Thedouble moralityhas, 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 whichwe 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.
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 theburden 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 desperatelyit 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 disturbThe deepest thought, the thought to be her own.
The heart is still, and nothing can disturbThe deepest thought, the thought to be her own.
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 skelterOf the wide world has gone by;And this narrow, silent shelterHolds the potent healing balm.
Close around me, wondrous being,Wind thy magic veil oblivion,All my heart from unrest freeing,Let there be untroubled calm.
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 skelterOf the wide world has gone by;And this narrow, silent shelterHolds the potent healing balm.
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 thelimitations 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 confessWhat sighs and joy and grief and happinessWould 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 rainAnd cannot quench its all-consuming fire.Oh! Now to break the spell—the storm to breastWith 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!
To open now my lips were vain indeed,Nor word nor even kiss could e'er confessWhat sighs and joy and grief and happinessWould flash from me to you with lightning speed.
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 rainAnd cannot quench its all-consuming fire.
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 breastWith 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!
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'sLucinda: "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 sofar 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 andthrough 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 wordand." 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 orchestrationphantoms 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 anindividual (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 toresponse 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 eachother 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.
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 orrevenges 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 forever 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: