ale 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 err