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).
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