Borkman (impatiently):  Stop your high falutin’ nonsense!

     Foldal (hurt):  High falutin’ nonsense?  You call my most sacred
     belief high falutin’ nonsense?

In conclusion I should like to mention here that I look upon Otto Weininger as a tragic victim of the second stage of love which—­in our days—­is sick with an almost insurmountable inner insufficiency.

There is no need to elaborate my subject further and point out that—­the first stage passed—­the prime of life brings with it the fusion of sexuality and love.  This union is the inner meaning of marriage in the modern sense—­whether it is rarely or frequently realised is beside the point.

In previous chapters I have illustrated various phenomena of the emotional life by showing their reflections on the lives of two or three distinguished men.  In conclusion I will endeavour to point out the reproduction of all the erotic stages through which 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.”