I need not emphasise the fact that the three stages are often intermingled and not traceable with equal clearness in the life of every individual.  Many men never advance beyond the first stage and others are fragmentary and undeveloped; but certain phases are more or less distinguishable in every well-endowed male individual.  Lucka finds a perfect illustration of his theory in the life and works of Richard Wagner, whose operas The Fairies (based on Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure), Tannhauser, and Tristan und Isolde, successively illustrate the three stages through which the great poet-composer and impassioned lover passed, and reflect the principal halting-places in the erotic evolution of the race.  In Parsifal, Wagner’s last and maturest work, he conjectures a potential fourth stage, divined by the genius of the great musician and thinker, a sublimation of our modern ideal, a stage when love will be freed from all sexual feeling (a conception not unlike Otto Weininger’s), but to which we have not yet attained and which we are even unable fully to grasp.

I have not been able to do more than touch upon the principal features of this book, the fame of whose brilliant author has long spread beyond the boundaries of his own native country.  Emil Lucka was born in Vienna in 1877, and has already achieved a number of remarkably fine books, most of which have been translated into Russian, French, and other foreign languages.  He is as yet unknown in England, this being the first of his works to appear in English.

ELLIE SCHLEUSSNER.

FOOTNOTE: 

[1] cf. Hartland’s “Primitive Paternity” and Frazer’s “Golden Bough.”

THE EVOLUTION OF LOVE

THE FIRST STAGE:  THE SEXUAL INSTINCT

To the generations slowly rising from the dark abyss of time to the twilight of the Middle Ages, the satisfaction of the sexual instinct offered fewer difficulties than the gratification of any other need or desire.  With every unpremeditated and cursory indulgence the craving disappeared from consciousness and left the individual free to give his mind to the acquisition of the necessities of life which were far more difficult to obtain.  Primitive, prehistoric man lived in the moment.  When there was plenty of food he gorged to repletion, heedless of the starvation which might be his fate to-morrow or the day after.  His thought had neither breadth nor continuity.  It never occurred to him that there might be a connection between an abrupt and quickly forgotten embrace and the birth of a child by a woman of the tribe after what appeared to be an immeasurable lapse of time.  He suspected witchcraft in the phenomena of pregnancy and childbirth (to this day the aborigines of Central and Northern Australia do not realise the connection between generation and birth).  As a rule it was remembered that a certain woman had given birth to