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 the impotent philosophy of the East which exalts non-existence above existence (that is to say, individual existence).  For the essence of the love-death is contained in the determination of personality to realise itself in a new and positive form of existence.  It is felt as the final synthesis, exactly as (in other spheres) the union of the ideal with the personal is seen as the perfection of human life.  How would it be possible at once to annihilate and to transcend the individual soul, the source of personal love, if this soul were not first presupposed as the essential and supreme value?  Where personal love does not exist, as in the Orient and Japan, the thought of the love-death would be an absurdity.  The burning of Indian widows is a phenomenon widely differing from the love-death.  The Indian widow slavishly abandons a life which has become aimless through her master’s death; she does not make a sacrifice in the true sense of the word, and is not actuated by love.

The complete unity of the lovers is possible on earth for a brief hour and it will, in most cases, satisfy erotic yearning.  It can be realised in two ways:  by the blissful rest of the lovers in each other, which silences all desires and apparently robs time of its tyranny.

     The heart is still, and nothing can disturb
     The deepest thought, the thought to be her own.

says Goethe; and a newer poet: 

     Close around me, wondrous being,
     Wind thy magic veil oblivion,
     All my heart from unrest freeing,
     Let there be untroubled calm.