unhappiness. Personality,
the greatest gift bestowed upon the children of man, has flashed its
light upon the tragedy of life: solitude, eternal duality. The soul
recognises with unspeakable dismay in its own fundamental principle the
cause of its isolation and the impossibility of final union with the
beloved. The supreme value of European civilisation, the value of
complete personality, into whose gradual development and perfecting all
human forces had been built, and in whose interest countless sacrifices
had been made, knows itself as the cause of supreme suffering, as an
element which ought on no account to exist. Not its completion, but its
annihilation is what should really be desired. We have here arrived at
the very confines of humanity. If the great thinker has found the
boundaries of all knowledge in the limitations of the intellect, and is
thus the representative of the human mind with its unattainable goal:
knowledge of the secret of being, the erotic has gone a step further. He
has found the boundary in the very perfection of his personality and, to
him, the barrier is unendurable. In the rare love of the rare
personality is discovered the eternal separateness of the ego; only the
destruction of its origin, the annihilation of itself, might, perhaps,
throw down the barrier which separates the lovers. Inevitably there
arises in the soul the desire and the will to escape, together with the
beloved, the insufferable solitude of existence; to achieve in death
what life denies; to realise another, a higher condition, divined in
dreams and seen in visions; to become one with the beloved, to transform
all human existence into a new, divine universal existence: "Then I
myself am the world!" Everything individual, all life, is blotted out;
the death of the lovers from love and through love is the mystic portal
of a higher state of being. It is the last ecstasy of unity--the
love-death--an ecstasy which life cannot give because it must always be
wrecked on duality. It is the despairing attempt to escape from
separateness, to effect a delivery which to human understanding seems
final, and it is characteristic that Wagner, who made the problem of
redemption peculiarly his own, should have expressed this attempt
uniquely and with unparalleled grandeur.

It would be a mistake to read into the idea of the love-death a
rejection of the European view of life, a denial of the world-feeling of
personality, and a victory of