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  The love of a man for a woman has been superseded by love for the absolute and supernatural.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 female 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.