Mary, who had been called Maris Stella, the morning star, gradually assumed the symbol of the all-conquering sun. Suso, in one of his poems, still clinging to the older epithet, makes use of a metaphor corresponding to the breaking of the sun through clouds. "When the radiant morning star, Mary, broke through the suffering of thy darkened heart, it was saluted with gladness and with these words: Greeting, beautiful, rising morning star, from the fathomless depths of all loving hearts!" But he also calls Mary: "Thou dazzling mirror of the Eternal Sun!" And his Biography contains the following beautiful passage: "And his eyes were opened and he fell on his knees, saluting the rising morning star, the tender queen of the light of heaven; as the little birds in the summer time salute the day, so he saluted the luminous bringer of the eternal day, and he spoke his salutation not mechanically, but with a sweet low singing of his soul." This is pure and genuine nature-worship mingled with the worship of Mary.

So much for Suso. In Goethe's Faust, Doctor Marianus prays:

In thy tent of azure blue, Queen supremely reigning, Let me now thy secret view, Vision high obtaining.

It is obvious that here the Queen of Heaven and the sun are conceived as one. Eichendorff makes use of the metaphor:

The sun is smiling languidly Like to a woman wondrous sweet.

The typically un-Teutonic modern poet, Alfred Mombert, on the other hand, conceives the sun as a youth, and contrary to all custom, calls a poem: Der Sonnengeist (the sun-spirit).

The great Italians, also, were not unaware of this change of the sex of the supreme value; at the conclusion of the Paradise there is a passage (in St. Bernard's prayer) which points to a connection in Dante's mind between the sun and the Queen of Heaven:

"The love that moves the sun in heaven!"

(d) Michelangelo.

In Michelangelo we meet the spirit of Plato and the plastic genius of Greece raised to a higher plane and lit by the peculiar glory of Christianity—the conception of the soul as an absolute value. Michelangelo was thrilled by a passionate love of beauty; beauty absolute, eternal and immutable. He felt profoundly the need of salvation, and he possessed an unprecedented power of spiritual vision. In the end, added to all these things, came consuming love for a woman, love raised to the pitch of self-destruction, an adoration which entitles us to regard him, next to Dante, as the greatest metaphysical lover of all times.

At the court of the Medici at Florence, Ficinio had founded a Platonic Academy, where Plato's works and the writings of Plotinus—his greatest pupil—were after two thousand years translated and elucidated. Many read and a few understood, but only in Michelangelo did the spirit of Platonic Hellenism revive and become productive; the Platonic ideal of a purely masculine culture, aesthetically and spiritually perfect, illumined his soul; once again the unconditional cult of beauty and the love of the perfect male form, which speaks to us from the Dialogues, quickened an imagination, and boyhood and youth were portrayed in a manner which has never since been equalled.

Nearly all Michelangelo's youthful male figures—with the exception, perhaps, of the gigantic David—deviate from the decidedly masculine and approach the mean, the human in the abstract; thus they seem to us imbued with a quality of femininity; they even exhibit decidedly female characteristics. I have in mind first and foremost the youths depicted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (the most soulful adolescent figures in the world), but also Bacchus, St. John, Adonis and the figures in the background of the Holy Family at Florence. Cupid and David Apollo (in the Bargello) are almost hermaphroditic, and even the Adam, and the unfinished Slaves in the Bobili Gardens exhibit female characteristics. Without going further into detail I would draw attention to the breasts and thighs, which positively raise a doubt on the question of sex. (I am referring to the two youths above the Erythrean Sybil.) Seen from a distance they create the impression of female figures, while the youth above Jeremiah is a perfect Hellenic ephebos. On the other hand—with the exception of two of his early Madonnas and, perhaps, Eve—he has not given us one glorified female figure; all his women are characterised by something careworn and unlovely; some of his old women—most strikingly the Cumaic Sybil—are depicted with absolutely masculine features, masculine figures and gigantic musculature. His ideal was the Hellenic ideal, was a human form neither man nor woman; all extremes, but also all peculiarities and everything personal, were, if not completely suppressed, at any rate pushed into the background. We regard this ideal, which is alien to our inherent nature, with a feeling akin to contempt, for the modern ideal is male and female, but it nevertheless was of great moment in the obliteration of sex and the accentuation of the purely human. The Platonic (and also Michelangelo's) love of young men was in its essence pure love of humanity, love of the perfect human body and the perfect human soul, whose greatest harmony was achieved in the adolescent. Moreover, the superior mental endowment of the boy made an intelligent conversation—so highly appreciated by Platonists and neo-Platonists— possible, whereas with a girl a man could only jest.

Civilisations and individuals inclining to erotic male friendships are endowed with great plastic talent. Artists and poets whose genius lies in the direction of the plastic arts rather than in music, frequently have homo-sexual leanings. A musical talent, however, is as a rule accompanied by the love of woman. I know of no great musician, or great lyrical poet, inclined to erotic friendships with men. The simple song suggests the love of woman, the artificial metre, let us say the Greek rhythm, the love of man. I am, however, merely pointing out this connection, without drawing any conclusions.

The poems addressed by Michelangelo to Tommaso dei Cavalieri breathe a deep longing for friendship and complete surrender, but above all things for a return of affection; all barriers between the friends must be thrown down, "for one soul is living in two bodies."

These poems are calm and well-balanced, and differ greatly from the rest of his poetry.

If each the other love, himself foregoing, With such delight, such savour and so well That both to one sole end their wills combine.

(Transl. by J.A. SYMONDS.)

Michelangelo painted "Ganymede" for Tommaso, and even at a ripe old age he addressed poems to Cechino Bracci, who died at the age of seventeen.

His contempt of woman, without which the spirit of classical Greece, too, is unthinkable, formed a parallel to his male friendships.

In the prime of his life the Platonic element was superseded by the other great element which stirred his soul so profoundly. Exceeding the perfection of form of antique statuary, his later works throb with a spiritual and passionate life quite peculiar to him; an inward fire seems to consume his ardent figures. They are not creatures of this earth, a breath of eternity has touched them; they are an embodiment of the Platonic heritage which accounts all earthly things as symbols of eternal beauty, fertilised and glorified by a deep mourning over human destiny and a longing for deliverance. And when his years were already beginning to decline, Vittoria Colonna came into his life, a semblance and symbol of divine perfection. The love which took possession of him transformed his whole life and lifted it into religion. In his tempestuous soul this first love, coming so late in life, far exceeded human limits; it became adoration and religious ecstasy. Michelangelo, who could not tolerate in friendship any other relationship than that of complete self-surrender and equality, threw himself into the very dust before his love and debased himself almost to self-destruction.

His book of poems is filled with an unspeakable longing for the perfection of earthly beauty and for eternity; and his beloved mistress is the sole symbol of this metaphysical climax. Earthly beauty is but an imperfect semblance of the divine beauty, the embodiment of which is his love. We meet all the familiar motives; he is nothing before her; he is unworthy of existence; he is like the moon receiving her light from the sun; love has raised him from his base condition and is teaching him the futility of all he had hitherto valued.

Yea, well I see what folly 'twere to think That largess dropped from thee like dews from heaven Could ever be paid by work so frail as mine.

(Transl. by J.A. SYMONDS.)

And of love he says:

From loftiest stars shoots down a radiance all their own, Drawing the soul above, And such, we say, is love.

(Transl. by HARFORD.)

His poems, which would proclaim him a great poet if he were not an even greater sculptor, breathe an emotion unsurpassed in its intensity. They reveal to us in an almost unique manner the emotional process which culminated in the deification of the beloved. If we did not know that Vittoria Colonna was an historical individual, not much younger than Michelangelo himself, and (if we are to credit her portrait) a very plain woman with a large masculine nose, we might be tempted to believe her to be a mythical personage like Beatrice Portinari, or Margaret in Faust. But the conviction that all true perfection was centred only in her, now faced his art and threw its terrible shadow over it.

"Michelangelo conceived love in the Platonic sense," wrote his friend and biographer, Condivi; but this is only a part of the truth. In the heart of Michelangelo there took place the tremendous reconciliation between the Greek cult of beauty and the religion of the beyond; he blended the finest blossom of Hellenism with the profoundest spirit of Christianity; he sublimated Plato and Dante into a higher intuition; the eroico furore of his contemporary, Giordano, had found an embodiment. The two great rays which illuminated his life: the perfect earthly beauty to which destiny had called him, and the boundless religious longing, the last fundamental force of his soul, converged in the glorified woman. Vittoria appeared to him as the solution of the world-discord, a solution which he had no right to expect, a miracle. She was the greatest experience of his great life, an experience which almost broke him. More than once the thought of Vittoria filled him with sudden dread. In her he had seen God and the world in one. The powerful effect of this on so self-reliant a character, a man who had been unable to find much sympathy with patrons and friends, to whom women had meant nothing, may easily be imagined. All at once he had found a centre, and more than that—a solution of all the discords of life, of the eternal dualism of the earthly and the divine. His love was not the love of a youth stretching out feelers to the world beyond, but the final creed of a lonely life which had known nothing but beauty and divinity. With the passion characteristic of him, he threw himself into this new experience and made it his fate, flinging world and art aside. Before Vittoria he ceased to be a sculptor and became a worshipper.

We realise the great difference between this worship and the worship of Dante. The latter formed the consciousness of eternity, and became a poet, early in life. He never doubted the profoundest truth, the metaphysical importance of his love; but in the case of Michelangelo, the love of an old man was the last event in a life consumed by restlessness. The adoration of this mysogynist was almost an act of despair; not a sweet delivery from doubt, but a source of fresh shocks. It problematised his whole previous existence and nullified the work of his life. For before this new experience—perfection, met in the flesh—art broke down. The greatest of sculptors never made an attempt to imprison the beauty which had appeared to his soul in marble or in canvas, deeply convinced that such an achievement was beyond the power of earthly endeavour.

Before Vittoria Michelangelo became deeply conscious of his inmost self; she gave direction to his longing and was its symbol; she was the perfection for which he had always striven—and he despaired of his art.

Thy beauty it befell in yonder spheres: A symbol of salvation, bright'ning heaven Th' Eternal Artist sent it down to earth; If it diminish, years succeeding years, My love will lend it but a greater worth. Age cannot fade the beauty God has given.

And the conviction that only the idea of eternal beauty has any value, and that all earthly things are as nothing before it, became stronger and more tormenting. One instance from many:

As heat from fire, from loveliness divine The mind that worships what recalls the sun, From whence she sprang, can be divided never.

(Transl. by J.A. SYMONDS.)

In the same way he realised the futility of earthly love compared to metaphysical love:

The one love soars, the other downward tends, The soul lights this while that the senses stir.

And:

The highest beauty only I desire.

It is extraordinary, however, that even this ecstatic adorer vaguely suspected that he himself might be the creator of the beauty which he saw in his mistress. In a sonnet he asks Cupid whether her beauty really exists, or whether it is a delusion of his senses, and he receives the reply:

The beauty thou discernest all is hers; But grows in radiance as it soars on high.

(J.A. SYMONDS.)

It is indescribably tragic to watch Michelangelo slowly despairing of his own genius and art, and becoming more and more dominated by the thought of the futility of all earthly things and all earthly beauty. The religious conception of eternity and transcendent beauty, the forma universale became his last refuge. After Vittoria's death Michelangelo said to Condivi: "I have only one regret and that is that I never kissed Vittoria's brow or lips when she lay dying." More and more he brooded on sin and salvation, incarnation and crucifixion. The beloved mistress had become the sole herald of eternal truths. Melancholy and mourning took possession of his soul with an iron grip; he could conceive of only one happiness, death closely following on birth. But the thought of death again was seized and symbolised with the old artistic passion:

And cleansed by fire, I shall live for ever.

And as the flames are soaring to the sky, I, changed and purified, shall soar to heaven.

Oh, blissful day! When in a single flash Time slips away into eternity— The sun no longer rides across the skies....

Michelangelo was conscious of his near kinship with Dante; he illustrated a copy of the Divine Comedy which, unfortunately, is lost, and wrote a poem on Dante in which the following lines occur:

Were I but he! Born for like lingering pains, Against his exile, coupled with his good, I'd gladly change the world's inheritage.

(Transl. by J.A. SYMONDS.)

The paintings in the Sistine Chapel, with their materialised thoughts of destiny, retribution and eternity, originated in a feeling akin to the feeling underlying the Divine Comedy. Both here and there the creation of celestial and infernal spirits was the outcome of the infinite longing of the artistic imagination. Both men could spend the human and creative passions with which their souls were thrilled only on the supreme and universal. The eternal destiny of man, fate, sin, the futility of all earthly things, the relationship of the world to God, love surpassing all human limits and aspiring to the eternal—these are the common objects over which they brooded. But while it was given to Dante to create his picture of the world in harmony with his own soul, and account it a true representation of the world-system; while his world was a definite place with a beginning and an end, and his life-work remained in harmony with his own soul, and the universe, Michelangelo's lacerated soul could find peace only in the ultimate truth, which filled his heart, and to which he yearned to give plastic life, only to be unsatisfied after achieving it. George Simmel, in a profound work, draws our attention to the infinite melancholy which overshadows all Michelangelo's figures, because his genius aspired to express the inexpressible. Even the supremest plastic representation of the passion and longing for the transcendental which thrilled his soul did not satisfy him. This tragedy is the tragedy of the metaphysical erotic overflowing its own specific domain. Dante's faith in the absolute value of his work and in the truth of the consummation of his love in eternity—which was the sustaining power of his life—remained unshaken, but Michelangelo lost his faith in his work; art and love forsook him and withdrew into a transcendental world which he could divine, but could not grasp. His faith was no blissful certainty; he knew no more than the dark aspect of things; the imperfection of even the sublimest, of his art and his love.

Shakespeare's genius could breathe life into all things human, and he found satisfaction in doing so. Michelangelo's creative, plastic power seemed illimitable; he possessed all the gifts an artist could possibly have, but from year to year his conviction of the futility of all earthly things grew to a profounder certainty. He had knocked at the iron gate of humanity with his hammer and his chisel; they had broken into fragments and sorrow made him dumb. There is a stage in the life of every genius when he comes to this gate, when he has to show his credentials and reveal the inmost kernel of his being. Dante attempted to grasp the transcendental in one gigantic vision, Goethe timidly shrank back from it.

In examining the prophets and youths in the Sistine Chapel, or the chained men in the Louvre, who seem unable to bear existence, and are therefore "slaves" of the earth; or in contemplating the half-finished slaves in the Boboli Gardens, who seem almost to burst the stone in their wild longing for a higher life; or in reading his last sonnets, we can conceive a vague idea of the deep melancholy darkening the life of this man, a gloom which was not the melancholy of the individual, but of all humanity, unable and unwilling to deceive itself further. Can there be a greater tragedy than the tragedy of this incomparable artist, looking back at the work of his lifetime with despair?

For art and wit and passion fade and vanish, Countless achievements, ever new and great, Are naught but dross within the sight of heaven.

To Vasari he sent a sonnet denouncing the artistic passion which abandons itself completely to art:

Now know I well that that fond phantasy Which made my soul the worshipper and thrall Of earthly art is vain.

(Transl. by J.A. SYMONDS.)

Faith, is to him "the mercy of mercies," for he has never possessed its deepest conviction.

But the passion which burned in him remained unquelled to the last: his soul is torn between love and the thought of death.

Flames of love And chill of death are battling in my heart.

He longed to break away from love and find peace, and he called on death for delivery, but in vain:

Burdened with years and full of sinfulness With evil customs grown inveterate, Both deaths I dread that both before me wait, Yet feed my heart on poisonous thoughts no less.

(Transl. by J.A. SYMONDS.)

And later on he thanks love again for being his deliverer, and not death.

Michelangelo poured all his heart into these last sonnets. We see his solitary and heroic age overshadowed by the thought of death. His whole soul is wrapped in gloom; art is vanity, love is sorrow, the thought of the futility of all things frames the portrait of his love with a wreath of black laurel. He ponders on his life, and comes to the conclusion that

Among the many years not one was his.

This man, the supremest creative genius the world has known, accused himself of having wasted his life.

No song of praise ever rose to the Deity from Michelangelo's heart, as it did at least once or twice during his lifetime from the heart of Beethoven. He never had one hour of true inward peace. He represents the metaphysical world-feeling which (in addition to love) is the foundation of the deification of woman, but it has grown into immensity, and has been lifted to a higher plane; not only love, but all life is felt as fragmentary and pointing to a world beyond. If at an earlier stage it was the love of woman which could not find its consummation on earth, it is now the whole of our earthly life and all our aspirations which can only attain to their highest meaning and to final truth in a metaphysical existence. The tragedy of metaphysical love has deepened into the supreme tragedy of life.

FOOTNOTES:

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

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

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



CHAPTER III

PERVERSIONS OF METAPHYSICAL EROTICISM

(a) The Brides of Christ

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

Hence all my songs will be with sadness fraught. My lover fills my soul with bitter woe, And yet is all the happiness I know. My grace and favour all avail me naught. My sparkling wit, my loveliness supreme, They cannot hold his love and tender thought, Of all my lofty worth bereft I seem.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(b) SEXUAL MYSTICS.

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

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

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

TO THE SIDE-WOUND OF CHRIST.

Lord, with my mouth I touch and worship Thee, With all the strength I have I cling to Thee, With all my love I plunge my heart in Thee, My very life blood would I draw from Thee, Oh, Jesus! Jesus! Draw me unto Thee!

How sweet Thy savour is! Who tastes of Thee, Oh, Jesus Christ, can relish naught but Thee! Who tastes Thy living sweetness lives by Thee; All else is void; the soul must die for Thee, So faints my heart—so would I die for Thee!

(Transl. by EMILY MARY SHAPCOTE.)

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

Other Virgins far transcending, Virgin, be not thou unbending, To thy humble suppliant's suit.

Grant me then, to thee united, By the love of Christ excited, Here to sing my jubilee.

But he is undoubtedly the author of the following stanzas:

Soaring upwards love-enkindled, Does the soul rejoice, afire In her glad triumphant flight. Earthly cares to naught have dwindled, Love's sweet footfall's drawing nigh her To espouse his heart's delight. All transformed and naked quite, Laughing low, with joy imbued, Pure, and like a snake renewed, Love divine will ever tend her.

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

Enwrapt in love thine arms Him fast enfolding, So closely clasp Him that they loose Him never; And in thy heart His sacred image holding, Far from the path of sin thou'lt journey ever. His death in twain shall blast thy callous heart As once the solid rock He rent apart.

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

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

In infinite space. Thou'dst dissolve, If it held thee not, If it bound thee not, And thrilled thee, That afire Thou begettest the world. Verily before thou art I was, With my sex The mother sent me To live in thy world, And to hallow it With love.

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

Lo! Love has burst its prison. No parting now shall be, And life's full tide has risen Like to a boundless sea. One night of love supernal, Only one golden song, And the face of the Eternal To light our path along.

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

Oh, Mary! At thy altar A thousand hearts lie prone, In this drear life of shadows They yearn for thee alone. All hoping to recover From life's distress and smart, If thou, oh holy Mother, Wilt take them to thy heart.

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

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

Praise to the Queen of the World! The lofty herald Of the sacred world. The patroness Of rapturous love! Thou art coming, beloved— Night has descended— My soul is ravished— Over is this earthly journey And thou art mine again. I gaze into thy dark, deep eyes, And see naught but love and happiness. We sink down on the altar of the night, The soft couch— The veil falls, And kindled by the rapturous embrace, Glows the pure fire Of the sweet sacrifice.

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

Would that the ocean Blushed! And in fragrant flesh Melted the rock! Infinite is the sweet repast, Never satisfied is love; Nor close, nor fast enough Can it hold the beloved. By ever more tender lips Transformed, the past ecstasy Grows closer, more intimate. Rapturous love Thrills the soul; Hungrier and thirstier Grows the heart. And thus the transports of love Endure for ever.

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

In time to come all will be body One body; In celestial blood, Float the enraptured twain.

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

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

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



THE THIRD STAGE

(The Unity of Sexual Impulse and Love)

CHAPTER I.

THE LONGING FOR THE SYNTHESIS.

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

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

When two hearts are so united That their love can never wane, Then I ween no man should blight it, Death alone should part the twain.

Even more modern in sentiment are the following stanzas:

This is love's measure: Two hearts and one pleasure, Two loves one love, nor more nor less, And both right full of happiness. In woe one woe, And neither from the other go.

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

Love is the ecstasy of two fond hearts, If both share equally, then love is there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

De Tristan et de la reine, De leur amour qui tant fut fine, Dont ils eurent mainte doulour Puis en moururent en un jour.

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

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

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

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

Thou to me and I to thee, Knit for all eternity. In my heart art thou imprisoned, And I threw away the key. Nevermore canst thou be free.

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

But the most touching testimony from the Middle Ages is the famous love story of Abelard and Heloise. 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 Heloise. Abelard 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." Abelard's replies are pious sermons and theological treatises; he thinks of the love of the past only as the cursed desires of the flesh, the snare in which the devil had caught them, and urges Heloise 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 Heloise 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 naively as substance? In the light of this higher intuition sensuousness was bound to appear base and degrading.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



CHAPTER II

THE LOVE-DEATH

(THE SECOND FORM OF METAPHYSICAL EROTICISM)