THE LOVE-DEATH
(THE SECOND FORM OF METAPHYSICAL EROTICISM)
The craving for infinitude is latent in love; its essence is the longing
to reach beyond the attainable, to find the meaning of the world in
ecstasy. The great erotic is a man whose inward being rests on emotion,
who must bring this emotion to its climax--and who is wrecked on the
incompleteness of human feeling. We recognise in him one of the tragic
figures at the confines of humanity. For it is the final tragedy of a
soul impelled by the inexorable will to self-realisation, to be broken
on the wheel of human limitations.
The tragedy of the great man of action is less conditioned by principle
than the tragedy of other types of greatness, because he is not limited
by the universal restrictions of humanity, but by individual and
accidental ones. He recognises, partly because of his unmetaphysical
constitution, no limits to human activity, and in gaining his individual
object, he reaches a relative end. It is otherwise with the thinker, the
artist, the religious enthusiast and the lover. The thinker possesses
the highest intellectual endowments; he represents cognisant humanity,
and his portion is the anguish of realising that the essence of being
cannot be grasped by the intellect. The great artist creates a
masterpiece; his heart is aglow with the ideal of perfect beauty beheld
by none but him, but his ideal eternally eludes him; the saint has
achieved perfection as far as perfection is possible to humanity, and
stands aghast at the burden of insufficiency which weighs down mankind;
the great erotic is the hero in the world of feeling, his soul yearns
for the consummation of his love--and already he has reached the
confines of life.
There are various paths by which the erotic may travel towards
perfection; they correspond to the principal erotic types. I have
devoted a special chapter to the seeker of love, or the Don Juan; the
woman-worshipper who cannot find satisfaction on earth has been dealt
with already. The great and rare lover, however, the exponent of the
final form of love, who loves a woman of flesh and blood with every
fibre of his being, differs very essentially from either of these types.
The profounder the emotional depth of the soul, the greater is the
difficulty of finding a complementary being. The erotically
undifferentiated nature (whose intellectual level may, however, be a
high one) finds, and in case of loss replaces, the complementary being
comparatively easily. The difficulty both of finding and of substitution
increases in proportion to the differentiation and the intensity of
feeling. The true erotic, once he has found his complementary being, is
overwhelmed by the will to the perfect realisation of his passion. It
appears with the unanswerable logic of the unique and final, carrying in
its train supreme happiness and infinite sorrow. A love able to deliver
a soul from its solitude is rare; once there, the whole world is as
nothing to it. All life is embraced and brought under its spell. (In
this connection I need only mention Michelangelo.) A lover of this type
surrenders himself to love unconditionally--love shall completely
annihilate, completely renew him.
But it is just in this overwhelming love that the impassable barrier
becomes apparent. The lovers are two beings and not one indivisible
entity. The fundamental fact of individuality stands between them as the
last obstacle to their complete union. The more intense the emotion, the
more desperately it tilts against this barrier, against the
impossibility of complete mutual absorption, and the more passionately
it demands another common form of existence. Individuality and the
eternal duality of being is felt as a curse. The lovers cannot endure
the thought of continuing life as distinct personalities.
The great erotic who, against all expectation, finds the being to whom
he can surrender himself unreservedly and with a sense of immortality,
discovers within himself the supreme and only happiness, and by that
very fact has himself become the source of his unhappiness. Personality,
the greatest gift bestowed upon the children of man, has flashed its
light upon the tragedy of life: solitude, eternal duality. The soul
recognises with unspeakable dismay in its own fundamental principle the
cause of its isolation and the impossibility of final union with the
beloved. The supreme value of European civilisation, the value of
complete personality, into whose gradual development and perfecting all
human forces had been built, and in whose interest countless sacrifices
had been made, knows itself as the cause of supreme suffering, as an
element which ought on no account to exist. Not its completion, but its
annihilation is what should really be desired. We have here arrived at
the very confines of humanity. If the great thinker has found the
boundaries of all knowledge in the limitations of the intellect, and is
thus the representative of the human mind with its unattainable goal:
knowledge of the secret of being, the erotic has gone a step further. He
has found the boundary in the very perfection of 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.
Give me peace; the helter skelter
Of the wide world has gone by;
And this narrow, silent shelter
Holds the potent healing balm.
By the side of this idyllic consummation of the longing for love, there
is the other, the ecstatic consummation of mutual rapture. It almost
blots out individual consciousness in the singly (no longer doubly)
felt, body and soul entrancing ecstasy; it is such sheer delight that
pleasure is no longer perceived as a distinct element, but rather is
there the consciousness of a complete transformation of life. Pleasure,
which, a great psychologist maintains, "craves eternity" is annihilated
in its perfection, knows no more of itself, and is a part of the lovers'
sense of complete unity. It does not "crave eternity"; such a craving is
its last stage but one, the outer court (further than which Nietzsche as
far as eroticism is concerned never penetrated); in the innermost
sanctuary pleasure disappears; it has no longer any meaning, it becomes
void before the new consciousness. The supreme ecstasy of great love
proves that the summit of human emotion is beyond pleasure and pain, and
does not acknowledge the limitations of bodily existence. Thus, of
necessity, the rapture of love must engender the idea of its own
eternity, the destruction of individual consciousness. I will quote in
this connection a few verses by Erika Rheinsch:
To open now my lips were vain indeed,
Nor word nor even kiss could e'er confess
What sighs and joy and grief and happiness
Would flash from me to you with lightning speed.
Nor hope nor pray'r can still the soul's desire,
For God Himself can never join us twain;
My bitter tears fall on my heart like rain
And cannot quench its all-consuming fire.
Oh! Now to break the spell--the storm to breast
With broken heart and life-blood ebbing fast,
Bearing the pangs of death for you, at last,
Dark troubled love--at last thou wert at rest!
We perceive that love can no longer content itself with the
penultimate--it must dare the last heroic step which creates beyond body
and soul something new and final, for "God Himself can never join us
twain." The love-death is the last and inevitable conclusion of
reciprocal love which knows of no value but itself, and is resolved to
face eternity, so that no alien influence shall reach it. The two
powers, love and death, tower above human life fatefully and
mysteriously; an isolated experience cannot appease them, they involve
the whole existence. To the individual who loves with an all-absorbing
love, and to the individual on the point of death, everything dwindles
into insignificance. Before the majesty of the love-death life breaks
down, to be laid hold of and transcended in a new (divined) sphere.
The thought of the love-death, the will that the world should be
governed by love, is the most unconditional postulate of feeling ever
laid down. For the love-death is the definite and irrevocable victory of
emotion; it is ecstasy as a solution of the world-problem and the
world-process. It is human to regard love and death as antitheses; to
consider them far removed from each other; marriage and funeral are the
poles of social life. The ecstasy of the love-death, however, owing to
its all-transcending claim, unites the two poles. The climax of life
shall also be its end.
It is here, in the voluntary surrender of life in order to attain a
divined unity, and not in the union of begetting and destroying, that
the frequently assumed connection between love and death is to be found.
Voluptuousness and death are not interlinked, as is so frequently
asserted since Novalis (not on the higher plane of eroticism), but
voluptuousness has immolated itself, has been annihilated in the
love-death. The view that begetting and destroying are related
functions, is based on the supposition that love is bound up with
propagation. This is the fateful error of the modern theory of love, a
rationalistic, metaphysical abstraction, which touches no corresponding
chord in the human soul. To base the relationship of love and death on
an association of becoming and declining is a beautiful idea, but
nothing more. Modern synthetic love produces this relationship in its
metaphysical perfection out of itself; it is foreign alike to pure
sexuality and to spiritual love. (Wherever the desire to destroy is
found hand in hand with sensuality, morbid instincts are at play.)
It frequently occurs that lovers commit suicide together because
external circumstances prevent their union. This is a step corresponding
to suicide from offended vanity or incurable disease; life has become
unbearable to the individual haunted by a fixed idea, and he throws it
away. But this has nothing whatever to do with the love-death; it is a
purely negative act of despair, whereas the love-death is an altogether
positive act, namely, the will to win to a higher (and to the intellect
inconceivable and paradoxical) metaphysical unity. The love-death
aspires to perform a miracle. It has, possibly, never been realised in
its full greatness; the evidence of the common death of Heinrich von
Kleist and Henrietta Vogel must be rejected. During the last days of his
life Kleist was wrapped up in the idea of their common death, and in a
letter to his cousin, Marie von Kleist, he says: "If you could only
realise how death and love strive to beautify these last moments of my
life with heavenly and earthly roses, you would be content to let me
die. I swear to you I am supremely happy." In the same letter he speaks
of "the most voluptuous of deaths." And yet it was no real love-death,
that is to say, death following as a necessary corollary in order that
love may be consummated. Kleist as well as Henrietta had separately
resolved to commit suicide, and when they--almost accidentally--heard of
this mutual intention, they conceived the idea of the new voluptuousness
of a common death. Love did not play a very great part in this. Kleist
further says in the same letter: "Her resolution to die with me drew me,
I cannot tell you with what unspeakable and irresistible power, into her
arms. Do you remember that I asked you more than once to die with me.
But you always said 'No.'" From this and other passages it is clear that
Kleist would have taken his life in any case, and that he only seized
this specific opportunity to plunge into the ecstasy of a common death.
The thought of the love-death is often present in the hearts of
individuals who are genuinely in love. We read in Schlegel's _Lucinda_:
"There (in a transcendental life) our longings may perhaps be
satisfied." And in Lenau's letters to Sophy the same thought is more
than once apparent.
The idea reached perfection and immortality in Wagner's "Tristan and
Isolde." It is Wagner's world-famous deed to have lived through and
embodied this complex of emotion for the first, and so far for the last
time; his lovers are in a superlative degree representative of human
love; they typify the climaxes of human emotion. Wagner has immortalised
the metaphysical form of synthetic love; his importance to synthetic
love surpasses Dante's importance to deification.
Already in the first act the exchange of love-potion and death-draught
is profoundly significant: both Tristan and Isolde seek death because
they are alarmed by the external obstacles to their love. But the
thought of death and love, the foreboding that their love can find rest
only in the ultimate, in finality, has been in their hearts from the
outset. Together they receive new life from love, and together love
leads them, step by step, to death. In the profoundest sense no exchange
of potions has taken place, but the power of the love-potion has made
them conscious of what was latent in their souls, waiting to burst into
life. At the very moment when Isolde proffers Tristan the death-draught,
the conviction flashes into his soul that she is giving him death
through love: "When thy dear hand the goblet raised, I recognised that
death thou gav'st." And in the same way Isolde: "From golden day I
sought to flee, in darkest night draw thee with me, where my heart
divined the end of deceit, where illusion's haunting dream should fade,
to drink eternal love to thee, joined everlastingly, to death I doom'd
thee."
The second act leads them further and further into the coils of their
love; they are more and more convinced that death alone is left to them,
step by step they discover the secret of the mystical union--and yet
they are still completely imprisoned within the limits of their
personalities and cannot quite understand the miracle: "How to grasp it,
how to grasp it, this great gladness, far from daylight, far from
sadness, far from parting?" For it is the profoundest secret of the
world which here must be guessed by love--the final unity of two souls
and through it unity with all life. Clearer and clearer and more and
more compelling looms the thought of a common death, until it is grasped
and comprehended; the lovers realise that to be completely one they must
surrender their lives, and that by losing life they can lose nothing
essential. "All death can destroy is that which divides us." Ultimately
Tristan pronounces the final decision, and Isolde repeats it word by
word, follows it step by step like a sleep-walker, so as to make it
quite her own. "Thus should we die no more to part, in endless joy, one
soul, one heart, never waking, never haunted by pale fear, in love
undaunted, each to each united aye, dream of love's eternity." The
grand, artistic symbol for this state of consciousness touches
metaphysic. Wagner introduces night as the visible emblem of an
existence in a world--inconceivable by our senses--beyond the grave, in
contrast to the earthly day, to "the day's deceptive glamour."
(Nietzsche later on adopted this symbol "midnight" as the emblem of
everything lofty.) The lovers who in their day-consciousness believed
that they hated each other, now that they are walking towards eternal
night divine that which is beyond the reach of their separated selves,
beyond all illusion and duality. The duality is outwardly expressed by
their different names, separated and united "by the little word _and_."
All at once the knowledge dawns upon them that great love cannot be
consummated in the day of the world, but that it points to a life
beyond. They have discovered the final meaning of life and the
world--the annihilation of individual life and death through
love--analogous to the last wisdom of the mystic: "To become God." "I
myself am the world." Death is the inevitable corollary of supreme love.
But as they tremblingly yearn for and await the inconceivable, earth
once 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 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 to the first proposition)? Metaphysical eroticism is the
completion of personality in love. Simultaneously with the birth of
personality originated the deification of woman; the destruction of the
most highly evolved personality, the last painful consequence of its
blessed-unblessed nature, gives birth to the conception of the
love-death. Like antique torch-bearing genii the two metaphysical forms
of love stand at the head and the feet of self-conscious man. Here and
there erotic emotion, transcending all limitations, becomes the pathway
leading to the ultimate secrets of life: deification creates a
supernatural female being as the erotic representative of everything
divine. This is a productive act, erotic, artistic and religious at the
same time. It produces out of its own fulness new forces for the service
of higher ideals; it creates a new world of emotion with new contents.
Simultaneously with the projection of the love of woman into eternity
were sown the seeds of those great things on which the higher spiritual
life of to-day is based. Deification demands shape and individuality
beyond the earthly sphere, in eternity. But from one side it is love,
love without response (unless the lover finds response in and through
artistic expression), the eroticism of the solitary man, and it occurs
as such to this day in rare minds. Woman-worship is the natural and the
highest form of love for the man who does not seek his own perfection in
duality--a reciprocal relationship with another being--but solitarily,
and yet not, as the mystic, shapelessly, but rather in a love definitely
projected on another being. The dream of the perfect woman is the only
erotic dream which reality can never disappoint, for it makes no claim
on reality. Doubtless it is to some extent paradoxical that the
inherently social feeling, anchored in duality, should be experienced
and perfected solitarily, that it should waive all claim to response
and reciprocity, to all appearances the most important elements of love.
The love-death corresponds more completely to the erotic ideal inasmuch
as it is founded on absolute equality in reciprocity. It finds its
climax not in solitude but in the company of the beloved. The idea of
complete abandonment is revolting to the solitarily loving individual;
the lover whose whole soul turns to the beloved cannot understand the
love of the solitary soul; it appears to him unnatural and cold, perhaps
meaningless and crazy. Woman does not know true solitude, the thought of
deification is foreign to her nature; she attains to the supreme only
with and through man; it is easier to her to give herself to her lover
entirely, and even to follow him into death. But in this connection I am
unable to suppress a doubt as to whether the fundamental emotion of the
mystical world-union is altogether present in woman, whether she really
divines behind her lover--eternity.
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. And
if the most powerful of all social emotions (and as many believe the
root of all others) suffers from an inner duality, to how much greater
an extent must the less intense feelings which unite individuals share
the same lot! Humanity, wherever it is comprehended profoundly and
spiritually, not economically, carries within itself the germ of its
tragical imperfection. Whatever social relationship we may enter, we
find that it has a flaw, and the more genuine and profound the
relationship, the less dictated by utilitarian considerations (which in
this connection correspond to the element of sensuality in eroticism),
the more painfully does this flaw make itself felt,--whether it be in
friendship, in the relationship of master and man, or in free
companionship. Every relationship between individuals is stricken with
the curse of incompleteness--even love cannot escape this fate. Love
enforces in the deification of woman a transcending of earthly life--and
it throws itself into the last embrace of a common death--that is to
say, it shudderingly admits the impossibility of its consummation.