nce more stretches out her arms to them, the dream of metaphysical
existence melts slowly away. In the orchestration _phantoms of the day,
dreams of morning_, suppress the new, the divined conception.

At the opening of the third act the motif for horns and violas gradually
ascending and dying away, expresses the unspeakable dreariness and
senselessness of material life, after its profound meaning, the
re-creation of the world by love, has been lost. This feeling of
absolute senselessness dominates the awakening sleeper; Tristan,
interpreting it in the sense of Schopenhauer as the universal
aimlessness of the world and of life, is merely expressing the doom of
his own longing for the supreme: he has divined and has lost the
loftiest value. Wagner intuitively perceives that sin is a component
part of the supreme sublimation of love and personality; Tristan must
curse himself and the beloved woman because love, as the last
consequence of sin, demands the love-death, which can never find
completion; "The terrible draught myself I have brewed it! A curse on
thee, terrible draught! A curse on him who brewed it!"

In the music at the end of the third act, which is known by the (not
quite relevant) title of "Isolde's Love-death," Wagner, after previously
expressing by Tristan's last words, "Do I near light?" the inadequacy of
the physical senses--attempts to describe the metaphysical condition of
the unity of love, which to our consciousness can only have the negative
characteristics of the unthinkable and intangible--the unconscious. This
he tried to accomplish artistically by making use of the senses, by
trying to convey in terms of sound, light, scent, what he understood by
this complete immersion in the swirling totality of cosmic life--"_in
des Weltatem's wehendem All_." The essence of this condition is that the
duality of the souls, and finally the multiplicity of the world, is
resolved in a higher unity. But as we are concerned with the emotional
life of the lovers and not with vague metaphysical propositions, we may
say that such a death is not a being dead, destroyed, annihilated,
dispersed, but a being transformed, perfected in love. The amazing
phenomenon of this complex of feeling is the fact that real life has
become unbearable, and that another life is created without the least
regard to possibility or truth; it is as if the emotion of the lovers
were endowed with divine, creative power.

Those who realise the