While deification is universally creative, while it is fresh as the
spring and full of faith, the love-death with its gloomy pathos demands
the entire individual and destroys everything but itself. It has no
creative power, for there is nothing beyond it. One may justly maintain
that the love-death realises the mystico-ecstatic religious emotion,
while in the deification of woman the religious need to worship finds
satisfaction. Both are combinations of love and religion, both are
metaphysical eroticism, paradoxical and yet logical conclusions of human
emotion.
The overwhelming longing which is connected at least with the first
stages of a great love, may be interpreted in another, in a social
sense. Love is the intensest and most direct relationship which can
exist between two beings, and the impossibility of realising its final
longing represents the most genuine tragedy of life among men and women
of the social world. The need which impels two beings to each other
lacks, in this union too, the possibility of complete consummation.
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