The evolution of love by emil lucka translated by ellie schleussner

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"How glorious is life below! What greater glories may the heavens hold!"

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

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

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

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

This concludes this public domain work.

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