the race has passed,
in the psychical evolution of Richard Wagner, and their immortalisation
in his works. We shall recognise in him the erotic representative of
modern man, a personality in whom all that which as a rule is vague and
only half expressed, has become great and typical. Love has been the
_leitmotif_ of his life. The concluding phrase of the crude fairy tale
_Die Feen_ ("The Fairies"), composed by the youth of nineteen, is: _the
infinite power of love_, and the last words written down two days before
his death, were: _love--tragedy_.

The opera _Das Liebesverbot_ ("The Prohibition to Love"), written in
1834, is eminently symptomatic of the first stage. It is a coarser
rendering of that bluntest of all Shakespearean plays, _Measure for
Measure_; its sole subject is the pursuit of sensual pleasure, in which
all indulge, and the ridiculing of those who appear to yearn for
something higher. To detail the contents of the text--it cannot be
called a poem--would serve no purpose; biographically, but not
artistically interesting, it exhibits with amazing candour the first,
purely sexual, stage of the young man of twenty-one. It was the period
when "young Germany's" device was the emancipation of sensuality. Wagner
himself says that his "conception was mainly directed against Puritan
cant, and led to the bold glorification of unrestrained sensuality. I
was determined to understand the grave Shakespearean subject only in
this sense." And in his "Autobiographical Sketch" he says: "I learned to
love matter." In addition to this Wagner gives us the following synopsis
of a (lost) libretto, "_Die Hochzeit_" ("The Wedding"), written at an
earlier period: "A youth, madly in love with his friend's fiancee,
climbs through the window into her bedroom, where the latter is awaiting
the arrival of her lover; the fiancee struggles with the frenzied youth
and throws him down into the yard, where he expires."

The second, discordant, stage of love is embodied in _Tannhaeuser_,
composed when Wagner was twenty-nine years of age. There is probably no
modern work of art in which the mediaeval feeling of dualism in the
scheme of the universe has been expressed with greater pathos. We see
man tossed between heaven and hell, between the worshipped saint and
seductive sensuality, impersonated by a she-devil. A man of the Middle
Ages would have recognised in this work the tragedy of his soul. Wagner
had planned the opera before he had real