Part 17 (1/2)
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; s.e.xuality which has become a cosmic law rules over humanity, G.o.d, 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 s.e.xuality 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 s.e.xual 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 s.e.xuality 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 s.e.xual 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 s.e.x. 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 relations.h.i.+p. s.e.xuality with its various manifestations has existed from the beginning; the ultimate object of s.e.xual intercourse is pleasure; but here and there, and parallel with s.e.xual 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 s.e.xual 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 s.e.xual 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 s.e.xual stage--no submission of man to woman--as in the stage of woman-wors.h.i.+p; it is the stage of the complete equality of the s.e.xes, a mutual giving and taking. If s.e.xuality 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 antic.i.p.ated or vaguely alluded to. Some of the early German minnesingers (such as Dietmar von Aist and Kurnberg) 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 n.o.ble (”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 friends.h.i.+p 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 s.e.xuality and spiritual love had been slackening in the course of the centuries, that s.e.xuality 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 wors.h.i.+pped with a purely spiritual love; but at all times he possessed her undivided love, unable in its nave 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 s.e.xual 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 wors.h.i.+p and undifferentiated s.e.xual 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 s.e.xuality, 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 s.e.xual 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, ill.u.s.trating 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 nave sentiment of these poems forms a delicious contrast to the contemporaneous mature and subtile art of Provence, and the entire erudite armoury of love.