This extensive plan remained unachieved, and only the first two parts,
_Love_ and _Property_, were completed. Of the other sections only
fragments remain. The present novel, _Venus in Furs_, forms the fifth
in the series, _Love_.

The best of Sacher-Masoch's work is characterized by a swift
narration and a graphic representation of character and scene and a
rich humor. The latter has made many of his shorter stories dealing
with his native Galicia little masterpieces of local color.

There is, however, another element in his work which has caused his
name to become as eponym for an entire series of phenomena at one end
of the psycho-sexual scale. This gives his productions a peculiar
psychological value, though it cannot be denied also a morbid tinge
that makes them often repellent. However, it is well to remember that
nature is neither good nor bad, neither altruistic nor egoistic, and
that it operates through the human psyche as well as through crystals
and plants and animals with the same inexorable laws.

Sacher-Masoch was the poet of the anomaly now generally known as
_masochism_. By this is meant the desire on the part of the individual
affected of desiring himself completely and unconditionally subject to
the will of a person of the opposite sex, and being treated by this
person as by a master, to be humiliated, abused, and tormented, even
to the verge of death. This motive is treated in all its innumerable
variations. As a creative artist Sacher-Masoch was, of course, on the
quest for the absolute, and sometimes, when impulses in the human
being assume an abnormal or exaggerated form, there is just for a
moment a flash that gives a glimpse of the thing in itself.