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 love-death as a necessity of their inmost being, resemble the great ecstatic whom earthly life can no longer satisfy, because he is conscious of a force compelling him to enter into a higher cosmic existence.  His inmost experience is the annihilation of the individual soul in God; he aspires to a direct pouring of the soul into the divine love.  Those who die in love are directly seeking complete unity with each other, and only indirectly, through this unity, the divined annihilation in metaphysical being.  The love-death is the erotic, bi-human form of mystic ecstasy, and could not be evolved until the highest form of love had been developed.

Metaphysical eroticism is a product of the spirit of Europe, for it is linked to personality whose will is the immortalisation of love.  Orientalism neither comprehends nor appreciates this emotion, for it lacks the foundation of the culture of personality.  The Semite, the Indian and the Japanese experience only the rapture of the senses; and gratification, restlessly revolving round itself between enjoyment and exhaustion, is condemned to eternal sterility.  All religio-sexual orgies of which history tells us are so many attempts of sensuality to possess itself of a higher intuition—­vain attempts, because casual intercourse and the annihilation of the individual can never produce new values.  According to Hegel the immanent sense of everything that happens in the world is the destiny of the individual to grow from slavery into freedom; but is it not rather the meaning of increased culture that man should realise himself as an individual (which is by no means a contradiction