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."