The Evolution of Love Part 13

These e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.ns completely exhaust the emotional life of the self-destructive metaphysical erotic--he is conscious of nothing but his pa.s.sion of love which eclipses all else. With him the second form of metaphysical love, the love-death, is reached. Goethe, in creating this character, must have had in his mind the unique Jacopone da Todi. For this rapturous love was the keynote of Jacopone's character, his whole life was one great ecstasy:

My heart was all to broken, As prostrate I was lying, With dear love's fiery token Swift from the archer flying; Wounded, with sweet pain soaken, Peace became war--and dying, My soul with pain was soaken, Distraught with throes of love.

In transports I am dying, Oh! Love's astounding wonder!-- For love, his fell spear plying, Has cleft my heart asunder.

Around the blade are lying Sharp teeth, my life to sunder, In rapture I am dying, Distraught with throes of love.

And:

Oh, Love! oh, Love! oh, Jesus, my desire, Oh, Love! I hold thee clasped in sweet embrace!

Oh, Love! embracing thee, could I expire!

Oh, Love! I'd die to see thee face to face.

Oh, Love! oh, Love! I burn in rapture's fire, I die, enravished in the soul's embrace.

The legend has it that the heart of Jacopone broke with the intensity of love. This would have been a love-death of cosmic grandeur.

Before Jacopone St. Bernard, in whom all the radiations of metaphysical eroticism are traceable, was consumed by similar emotions. Some of his Latin poems very much resemble the poems of his successor:

Oh, most sweet Jesu, Saviour blest, My yearning spirit's hope and rest, To thee mine inmost nature cries, And seeks thy face with tears and sighs.

Thou, my heart's joy where'er I rove, Thou art the perfecting of love; Thou art my boast--all praise be thine, Jesu, the world's salvation, mine!

Then his embrace, his holy kiss, The honeycomb were naught to this!

'Twere bliss fast bound to Christ for aye, But in these joys is little stay.

This love with ceaseless ardour burns, How wondrous sweet no stranger learns; But tasted once, the enraptured wight, Is filled with ever new delight.

Now I behold what most I sought; Fulfilled at last my longing thought; Lovesick, my soul to Jesus turns, And all my heart within me burns.

(_Transl. by_ T.G. CRIPPEN.)

We read in his writings: "Blessed and sacred is he to whom it has been given to experience this in his earthly life; even if he have experienced it only once, for the s.p.a.ce of a fleeting minute. For to melt away completely, as it were, as if one had ceased to exist, to be emptied of self, dissolved in holy emotion, has not been given to mortal life, but is the state of the blessed."

I shall have to refer to both men in a future chapter, when I shall examine the degenerate growths of metaphysical eroticism; for the ardour of their souls was frequently kindled by s.e.xual imaginings; in the case of emotional mystics it is often difficult to distinguish between sensual conceptions and the pure love of G.o.d (a fact which does not, however, justify the superficial opinion that all mysticism is diverted s.e.xuality).

It is obvious that this love of G.o.d is not the original creation of the lover, as is the deifying love of woman, but the mystic love whose self-evident object is G.o.d or eternity. Jacopone's (and later on Zinzendorf's) love of Jesus, though projected on a historical personality, was fundamentally the same thing. The love of G.o.d also--and in this connection I might mention Jacob Boehme, Alphonso da Liguori, Novalis--is metaphysical eroticism; but I have restricted my subject to the metaphysical love of woman, and shall not overstep my limits. I will merely elucidate a little more the last scene of _Faust_.

_Pater seraphicus_, a t.i.tle given both to St. Francis and to Bonaventura--requires but a few words: he, too, praises metaphysical love, the essence of the supreme spirits.

Thus the spirits' nature stealing Through the ether's depths profound; Love eternal, self-revealing, Sheds beat.i.tude around.

But even the _more perfect angels_ cannot free themselves from the dualism of all things human (body and soul)--an unmistakable confession of metaphysical dualism:

Parts them G.o.d's love alone, Their union ending.

The ident.i.ty of the last scene of _Faust_, Goethe's masterpiece, and the conclusion of Dante's _Divine Comedy_, is so obvious that I do not think any one could deny it. I have pointed out the thought underlying both works, and could easily advance further proof of their similarity, but I will keep within the limits of the last scene which contains the totality of metaphysico-erotic yearning, and I contend that it is very remarkable that a lifetime after the composition of Margaret, Faust (and with him Goethe) very old, very wise, and a little cold, having had love-affairs with demi-G.o.ddesses, and having finally renounced the love of woman, found his mission and his happiness in uninterrupted, productive activity. He has discovered the final value in work. But the long-forgotten heaven opens and the love of his youth comes to meet him.

Stripped of everything earthly, a divine being, she still loves him and shows him the way to salvation, presented under the aspect of the _Eternal-Feminine_--exactly as in the _Divine Comedy_. There must be a reason for the uniformity of feeling in the case of the two greatest subjective poets of Europe (Shakespeare was greater than either, but he was quite impersonal), for the logical possibility that Goethe imitated Dante, and borrowed his supreme values from him, cannot be maintained for a moment. Their mutual characteristic is the longing for metaphysical love. When these great lovers experienced for the first time the sensation of love, their hearts were thrown open to the universe, they had the first powerful experience of eternity, and they became poets. The first love and the cosmic consciousness of genius were simultaneously present, they were one in their inmost soul. (With the philosopher it is a different matter, for to him the love of woman is not fraught with the same tremendous significance.) This experience of first love, awakening the consciousness of eternity, remained to them for all time interwoven with religion and metaphysics--interwoven, that is to say, with all transcendent longing. And though the aged Faust had believed it to be buried in the dark night of forgotten things, it was still alive in his inmost heart, and the dying man's vision of the Divine took colour and shape from it.

The source of both great poems was the poet's will to a.s.similate the world and recreate it, impregnated with his own soul; the secret motive powers were the mystic love of eternity and the love of woman which had outgrown this world and aspired to the next. To Goethe, thirsting to give a concrete shape to his yearning, G.o.d and eternity were too intangible, too remote and incomprehensible--but the woman he loved with religio-erotic intensity was familiar to him. The Eternal-Feminine is thus not fraught with incomprehensibility, but is rather, and this necessarily, the final conclusion. For this conclusion is a profession of metaphysical eroticism, that is to say, the _Eternal-Feminine_ in contradistinction to the _Transitory-Feminine_. Both Dante, the devout son of the Middle Ages, and Goethe, the champion of modern culture, demand, in virtue of the inherent right of their genius, the consummation of their mystic yearning for love in another life, and achieve the creation of the divine woman. Precisely because Margaret was nothing but a little provincial, Goethe could sublimate her into a new being, for the greater the tension between reality and the vision of the soul, the greater is the task and the more gigantic the creative power which such a task may develop. It has been said that, in this scene, Goethe revealed leanings towards Catholicism. I do not pretend to deny it offhand, but I must insist on these leanings being understood in the sense of my premises. Goethe took from tradition those elements which were able to materialise his spiritual life and gave them a new interpretation. We are justified in believing that he accepted nothing but what was conformable to his nature; the Madonna represented his profoundest feeling and, like Dante (I attribute the greatest importance to this), he created a new deity, moulded in the shape of his first love, and placed it by the side of the universal Queen of Heaven, the Madonna of the Catholic Church, transformed by love.

The emotional life of both poets agrees fundamentally. They differ not so much in feeling as in thought and in faith. Dante possessed unshakable faith in the reality of his visions; eternal love in the shape of Beatrice was awaiting him; his vision was pure, eternal truth.

The vision of Goethe, on the other hand, was poetic longing, tragical, because the vision of the transcendent came to the modern poet only in rare hours. Where Dante possessed, Goethe must seek, strive and err.

The deifying love of woman is, as we have seen, the extreme development of the second stage, in which s.e.xual impulse and spiritual love are strictly separated, in which man despises and fights his natural instinct, or abandons himself to it--which is the same in principle--while his soul, wors.h.i.+pping love, soars heavenward. This dualism of feeling corresponds to the persistent dualism of Christianity and the whole mediaeval period. But as Goethe is frequently looked upon as a _monist_, my proposition that he was a dualist _in eroticis_ will possibly be rejected, in spite of the fact that his emotional life is revealed to us with great lucidity. His first important work, his _Werther_, which is also one of the most important monuments of sentimental love, contains the germs of love as we understand it; the love which is no longer content to look upon s.e.xuality and soul as two opposed principles, but strives to blend them in the person of the beloved. I will revert to _Werther_ later on. This third stage, love in the modern sense, is programmatically established (as it were) in _Elective Affinities_, but all the rest of the very abundant evidence of his emotional life exhibits the typically dualistic feeling. Many of his early poems evidence s.e.xuality pure and simple; in the _Venetian Epigrams_ and in the _Roman Elegies_ it is even held up as a positive value. In the third Elegy, for instance, the poet's sensuality is linked directly to the famous lovers of antiquity, and everything which aspires beyond it is rejected. In the same way his _West-Eastern Divan_ is characterised by a gay sensuality with h.o.m.o-s.e.xual tendencies.

The sensual quality of Goethe's eroticism was partly spent in his relations.h.i.+p with Christiane Vulpius. The following pa.s.sage, which forms an interesting counterpart to Goethe's famous correspondence with Charlotte von Stein, is taken from a letter written to Christiane Vulpius during his absence from home. "The beds everywhere are very wide, and you would have no reason for complaint, as you sometimes have at home. Oh, my sweet heart! There is no such happiness on earth as being together."

If Christiane represented sensuality, unrelieved by any other feeling, Frau von Stein represented the most important object of Goethe's craving for spiritual love. These two liaisons were to some extent contemporaneous; the _Roman Elegies_ and the famous letters to Charlotte von Stein were written at the same period. When she reproached him with his love-affair with Christiane, he replied with consistent dualism: "And what sort of an affair is it? Whose interests are suffering by it?"

Frau von Stein, his senior by seven years, was thirty-four years old, and mother of seven children when Goethe first met her. According to Schiller she "can never have been beautiful," and in a letter to Koerner the latter says: "They say that their relations.h.i.+p (Goethe's and Charlotte von Stein's) is absolutely pure and irreproachable." It was a great mistake ever to regard this relations.h.i.+p as anything but a purely spiritual one; Goethe never felt any pa.s.sion for Charlotte; he called her "his sister," the "guide of his soul"; he told her of his little love-affairs and was never jealous of her husband. The following are a few typical pa.s.sages culled from his letters, arranged chronologically: "My only love whom I can love without torment!" Then, quite in the spirit of the _dolce stil nuovo_: "Your soul, in which thousands believe in order to win happiness," "The purest, truest and most beautiful relations.h.i.+p which (with the exception of my sister) ever existed between me and any woman." "The relations.h.i.+p between us is so strange and sacred, that I strongly felt, on that occasion, that it cannot be expressed in words, that men cannot realise it." The following pa.s.sage written by Goethe when he was thirty, might have been written by Guinicelli or by Dante: "You appeared to me like the Madonna ascending into heaven; in vain did the abandoned mourner stretch out his arms, in vain did his tearful glance plead for a last return--she was absorbed in the splendour surrounding her, longing only for the crown hovering above her head." "I long to be purified in triple fire so as to be worthy of you." He addresses a prayer to her and says: "On my knees I implore you to complete your work and make a good man of me." "While writing Ta.s.so, I wors.h.i.+pped you." Charlotte knew intuitively what he desired of her, and remained silent and pa.s.sive like the Madonna. Not a single sensual, or even pa.s.sionate word, replied to all these utterances.

In the course of time the relations.h.i.+p between the lovers became one of equality; the note of adoration disappeared, and the keynote of his letters became friends.h.i.+p and familiarity. "Farewell, sweet friend and beloved, whose love alone makes me happy." In another letter he said that all the world held no further prize for him, since he had found everything in her. And just as spiritual love approached more and more the mean of a familiar friends.h.i.+p, so was his s.e.xuality concentrated on a single woman, on Christiane, in this connection, too, seeking a mean.

But it is an important point that the fundamental dualistic feeling remained unchanged. There was no woman in Goethe's life in regard to whom he arrived at, or even aspired to, the blending of both emotions in a higher intuition.

Even before his friends.h.i.+p with Frau von Stein, at the time of his engagement to Lili Schoenemann, Goethe experienced a spiritual love for a girl he had never seen. He calls Countess Auguste s...o...b..rg "his angel," "his only, only maiden," "his golden child," and says: "I have an intuition that you will save me from great tribulation, and that no other being on earth could do it." These letters also contain the significant pa.s.sage: "Miserable fate which has denied me a happy mean."

And touching the love of his youth, Lotte, Goethe wrote to Kestner: "I really had no idea that all that was in her, for I always loved her far too much to observe her."

The Princess in "Ta.s.so" and "Iphigenia" who delivers Orestes from unrest and insanity, are modelled on Charlotte. Ta.s.so is unmistakably a fantastic woman-wors.h.i.+pper, a fact of which Leonore is fully aware:

Now he exalts her to the starry heavens, In radiant glory, and before that form Bows down like angels in the realms above.

Then, stealing after her, through silent fields, He garlands in his wreath each beauteous flower.

He loves not us--forgive me what I say-- His lov'd ideal from the spheres he brings And does invest it with the name we bear.

He has relinquished pa.s.sion's fickle sway, He clings no longer with delusion sweet To outward form and beauty to atone For brief excitement by disgust and hate.[4]

And Ta.s.so says:

My very knees Trembled beneath me and my spirit's strength Was all required to hold myself erect, And curb the strong desire to throw myself Prostrate before her. Scarcely could I quell The giddy rapture.

The significant avowal addressed by Dante to Beatrice: "Into a free man thou transform'st a slave," the seal of all great spiritual love, was repeated by Goethe in his letters to Charlotte, and is again repeated in Ta.s.so:

Over my spirit's depths there comes a change; Relieved from dark perplexity I feel, Free as a G.o.d, and all I owe to you.

Very interesting is also a remark which Goethe made to Eckermann: "Woman is a silver vessel in which we men lay golden apples. I did not deduce my idea of woman from reality, but I was born with it, or I conceived it--G.o.d knows how." These notable words, deliberately p.r.o.nounced, reveal Goethe's feeling very clearly; he knows that there is a little self-deception in his att.i.tude towards woman, but he consciously and lovingly clings to it. His p.r.o.nouncements are not contradictions; it is natural, almost essential, that in the soul of the highly-gifted and highly-developed representative of a mature civilisation the whole wealth of human emotions should be revivified. He possesses all psychical qualities--at least potentially--and one element after the other regains life and becomes productive. We shall see this with startling clearness when we come to examine the emotional life of Richard Wagner. The intimate connection between the individual and the entire evolutionary process of the race will then become evident.

It is remarkable that Dante, too, wrote a poem clearly expressive of the fact that the beloved woman does not actually possess the qualities ascribed to her, but that she has been endowed with them by the imagination of her lover.

I shall discuss the emotional life of only one other poet in detail, and that one is Michelangelo. For the most part the poets whose emotions were akin to that of Dante and Goethe were men who created their ideal woman because reality left them unsatisfied. In pa.s.sing I will mention Beethoven, and his touching letter to his "immortal love" ("My angel, my all, my I!"), whose name, in spite of all the strenuous attempts to discover it, is to this day not known with any certainty; even if it should ever be discovered, Beethoven's "immortal love" will yet remain a figment of his brain, based on a human woman.

Together with Beethoven, we may notice the other great "old bachelor"

Grillparzer, and his eternal fiancee Kathi Frohlich, and the critical Hebbel, who at the time of composing "Genovefa" wrote in his diary: "All earthly love is merely the road to the heavenly love."

Before closing this chapter, I must draw attention to a strange fact in connection with the psychology of races. All nations endowed with fair mental gifts and a sympathetic understanding of nature, have in the period of their youth and anthropomorphistic and animistic thought wors.h.i.+pped light, and its source, the sun, as the supreme deity, the giver of joy and abundance. All the benevolent deities of the Arians were celestial beings, all the malevolent divinities spirits of darkness: Olympian G.o.ds and the demons of the netherworld--Aesir and Giants. To the nave mind of the Indo-Germanic races it appeared a matter of course that the sun, the conqueror of night and winter, the fertilizing, life-giving deity, should be wors.h.i.+pped as the active male principle, and represented as a G.o.d, while on the other hand the moon was usually conceived as a female deity. In primitive Christianity Christ, as the bringer of light, was wors.h.i.+pped under the symbol of the sun. Thus we naturally find in the old and new Indo-Germanic languages the designation of the sun--or the sun-G.o.d--of the masculine gender. In the following words our word _sun_ is easily recognisable:

Savar and svari (the oldest Indo-Germanic tongue).

svar and surya (Sanscrit; savitar--the sunG.o.d).

saval (the oldest European language).

savel (Gracco-Italian).