nd 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, naively 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 The love of a man for a woman has been superseded by love for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 fem