THE PERFECT WAGNERITE: A COMMENTARY ON THE NIBLUNG'S RING

by Bernard Shaw

Preface to the First German Edition

In reading through this German version of my book in the Manuscript ofmy friend Siegfried Trebitsch, I was struck by the inadequacy of themerely negative explanation given by me of the irrelevance of NightFalls On The Gods to the general philosophic scheme of The Ring. Thatexplanation is correct as far as it goes; but, put as I put it, it nowseems to me to suggest that the operatic character of Night Falls OnThe Gods was the result of indifference or forgetfulness produced by thelapse of twenty-five years between the first projection of the work andits completion. Now it is clear that in whatever other ways Wagner mayhave changed, he never became careless and he never became indifferent. I have therefore inserted a new section in which I show how therevolutionary history of Western Europe from the Liberal explosion of1848 to the confused attempt at a socialist, military, and municipaladministration in Paris in 1871 (that is to say, from the beginning ofThe Niblung's Ring by Wagner to the long-delayed completion of NightFalls On The Gods), demonstrated practically that the passing away ofthe present order was going to be a much more complicated business thanit appears in Wagner's Siegfried. I have therefore interpolated a newchapter which will perhaps induce some readers of the original Englishtext to read the book again in German. 

For some time to come, indeed, I shall have to refer English readers tothis German edition as the most complete in existence. 

My obligation to Herr Trebitsch for making me a living German authorinstead of merely a translated English one is so great that I am boundto point out that he is not responsible for my views or Wagner's, andthat it is as an artist and a man of letters, and not as a propagandist, that he is conveying to the German speaking peoples political criticismswhich occasionally reflect on contemporary authorities with a Europeanreputation for sensitiveness. And as the very sympathy which makes histranslations so excellent may be regarded with suspicion, let me hastento declare I am bound to Germany by the ties that hold my nature moststrongly. Not that I like the average German: nobody does, even in hisown country. But then the average man is not popular anywhere; and asno German considers himself an average one, each reader will, as anexceptional man, sympathize with my dislike of the common herd. And ifI cannot love the typical modern German, I can at least pity andunderstand him. His worst fault is that he cannot see that it ispossible to have too much of a good thing. Being convinced that duty, industry, education, loyalty, patriotism and respectability aregood things (and I am magnanimous enough to admit that they are notaltogether bad things when taken in strict moderation at the righttime and in the right place), he indulges in them on all occasionsshamelessly and excessively. He commits hideous crimes when crime ispresented to him as part of his duty; his craze for work is more ruinousthan the craze for drink; when he can afford secondary education for hissons you find three out of every five of them with their minds lamedfor life by examinations which only a thoroughly wooden head could gothrough with impunity; and if a king is patriotic and respectable (fewkings are) he puts up statues to him and exalts him above Charlemagneand Henry the Fowler. And when he meets a man of genius, heinstinctively insults him, starves him, and, if possible, imprisons andkills him. 

Now I do not pretend to be perfect myself. Heaven knows I have tostruggle hard enough every day with what the Germans call myhigher impulses. I know too well the temptation to be moral, to beself-sacrificing, to be loyal and patriotic, to be respectable andwell-spoken of. But I wrestle with it and--as far as human fraility willallow--conquer it, whereas the German abandons himself to it withoutscruple or reflection, and is actually proud of his pious intemperanceand self-indulgence. Nothing will cure him of this mania. It may endin starvation, crushing taxation, suppression of all freedom to trynew social experiments and reform obsolete institutions, in snobbery, jobbery, idolatry, and an omnipresent tyranny in which his doctor andhis schoolmaster, his lawyer and his priest, coerce him worse thanany official or drill sergeant: no matter: it is respectable, says theGerman, therefore it must be good, and cannot be carried too far;and everybody who rebels against it must be a rascal. Even theSocial-Democrats in Germany differ from the rest only in carryingacademic orthodoxy beyond human endurance--beyond even German endurance. I am a Socialist and a Democrat myself, the hero of a hundred platforms, one of the leaders of the most notable Socialist organizations inEngland. I am as conspicuous in English Socialism as Bebel is in GermanSocialism; but do you suppose that the German Social-Democrats tolerateme? Not a bit of it. I have begged again and again to be taken to thebosom of my German comrades. I have pleaded that the Super-Proletariansof all lands should unite. I have pointed out that the GermanSocial-Democratic party has done nothing at its Congresses for the lastten years except the things I told them to do ten years before, and thatits path is white with the bones of the Socialist superstitions I and myfellow Fabians have slain. Useless. They do not care a rap whether Iam a Socialist or not. All they want to know is; Am I orthodox? Am Icorrect in my revolutionary views? Am I reverent to the revolutionaryauthorities? Because I am a genuine free-thinker they look at me as apoliceman looks at a midnight prowler or as a Berlin bourgeois looksat a suspicious foreigner. They ask "Do you believe that Marx wasomniscient and infallible; that Engels was his prophet; that Bebel andSinger are his inspired apostles; and that Das Kapital is the Bible?"Hastening in my innocence to clear myself of what I regard as anaccusation of credulity and ignorance, I assure them earnestly thatI know ten times as much of economics and a hundred times as much ofpractical administration as Marx did; that I knew Engels personally andrather liked him as a witty and amiable old 1848 veteran who despisedmodern Socialism; that I regard Bebel and Singer as men of like passionswith myself, but considerably less advanced; and that I read Das Kapitalin the year 1882 or thereabouts, and still consider it one of themost important books of the nineteenth century because of its powerof changing the minds of those who read it, in spite of its unsoundcapitalist economics, its parade of quotations from books which theauthor had either not read or not understood, its affectation ofalgebraic formulas, and its general attempt to disguise a masterpieceof propagandist journalism and prophetic invective as a drily scientifictreatise of the sort that used to impose on people in 1860, when anybook that pretended to be scientific was accepted as a Bible. In thosedays Darwin and Helmholtz were the real fathers of the Church; andnobody would listen to religion, poetry or rhetoric; so that evenSocialism had to call itself "scientific, " and predict the date of therevolution, as if it were a comet, by calculations founded on "historiclaws. "

To my amazement these reasonable remarks were received as hideousblasphemies; none of the party papers were allowed to print any wordof mine; the very Revisionists themselves found that the scandal of myheresy damaged them more than my support aided them; and I found myselfan outcast from German Social-Democracy at the moment when, thanks toTrebitsch, the German bourgeoisie and nobility began to smile on me, seduced by the pleasure of playing with fire, and perhaps by AgnesSorma's acting as Candida. 

Thus you may see that when a German, by becoming a Social-Democrat, throws off all the bonds of convention, and stands free from allallegiance to established religion, law, order, patriotism, andlearning, he promptly uses his freedom to put on a headier set ofchains; expels anti-militarists with the blood-thirstiest martialanti-foreign ardor; and gives the Kaiser reason to thank heaven that hewas born in the comparative freedom and Laodicean tolerance of Kingship, and not in the Calvinistic bigotry and pedantry of Marxism. 

Why, then, you may ask, do I say that I am bound to Germany by the tiesthat hold my nature most strongly? Very simply because I should haveperished of despair in my youth but for the world created for me by thatgreat German dynasty which began with Bach and will perhaps not end withRichard Strauss. Do not suppose for a moment that I learnt my art fromEnglish men of letters. True, they showed me how to handle Englishwords; but if I had known no more than that, my works would neverhave crossed the Channel. My masters were the masters of a universallanguage: they were, to go from summit to summit, Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner. Had the Germans understood any of thesemen, they would have hanged them. Fortunately they did not understandthem, and therefore only neglected them until they were dead, afterwhich they learnt to dance to their tunes with an easy conscience. For their sakes Germany stands consecrated as the Holy Land of thecapitalist age, just as Italy, for its painters' sakes, is the Holy Landof the early unvulgarized Renascence; France, for its builders'sakes, of the age of Christian chivalry and faith; and Greece, for itssculptors' sakes, of the Periclean age. 

These Holy Lands are my fatherlands: in them alone am I truly at home:all my work is but to bring the whole world under this sanctification. 

And so, O worthy, respectable, dutiful, patriotic, brave, industriousGerman reader, you who used to fear only God and your own conscience, and now fear nothing at all, here is my book for you; and--in allsincerity--much good may it do you!

London, 23rd. October 1907. 

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

The preparation of a Second Edition of this booklet is quite the mostunexpected literary task that has ever been set me. When it firstappeared I was ungrateful enough to remonstrate with its publisher forprinting, as I thought, more copies than the most sanguine Wagneritecould ever hope to sell. But the result proved that exactly one personbuys a copy on every day in the year, including Sundays; and so, in theprocess of the suns, a reprint has become necessary. 

Save a few verbal slips of no importance, I have found nothing to alterin this edition. As usual, the only protests the book has elicited areprotests, not against the opinions it expresses, but against the factsit records. There are people who cannot bear to be told that theirhero was associated with a famous Anarchist in a rebellion; that hewas proclaimed as "wanted" by the police; that he wrote revolutionarypamphlets; and that his picture of Niblunghome under the reign ofAlberic is a poetic vision of unregulated industrial capitalism as itwas made known in Germany in the middle of the nineteenth century byEngels's Condition of the Laboring classes in England. They franticallydeny these facts, and then declare that I have connected them withWagner in a paroxysm of senseless perversity. I am sorry I have hurtthem; and I appeal to charitable publishers to bring out a new life ofWagner, which shall describe him as a court musician of unquestionedfashion and orthodoxy, and a pillar of the most exclusive Dresdencircles. Such a work, would, I believe, have a large sale, and be readwith satisfaction and reassurance by many lovers of Wagner's music. 

As to my much demurred-to relegation of Night Falls On The Gods tothe category of grand opera, I have nothing to add or withdraw. Such aclassification is to me as much a matter of fact as the Dresden risingor the police proclamation; but I shall not pretend that it is a matterof such fact as everybody's judgment can grapple with. People who prefergrand opera to serious music-drama naturally resent my placing a verygrand opera below a very serious music-drama. The ordinary lover ofShakespeare would equally demur to my placing his popular catchpennyplays, of which As You Like It is an avowed type, below trueShakespearean plays like Measure for Measure. I cannot help that. Popular dramas and operas may have overwhelming merits as enchantingmake-believes; but a poet's sincerest vision of the world must alwaystake precedence of his prettiest fool's paradise. 

As many English Wagnerites seem to be still under the impression thatWagner composed Rienzi in his youth, Tannhauser and Lohengrin in hismiddle age, and The Ring in his later years, may I again remind themthat The Ring was the result of a political convulsion which occurredwhen Wagner was only thirty-six, and that the poem was completed whenhe was forty, with thirty more years of work before him? It is as mucha first essay in political philosophy as Die Feen is a first essay inromantic opera. The attempt to recover its spirit twenty years later, when the music of Night Falls On The Gods was added, was an attempt torevive the barricades of Dresden in the Temple of the Grail. Only thosewho have never had any political enthusiasms to survive can believe thatsuch an attempt could succeed. G. B. S. 

 London, 1901

Preface to the First Edition

This book is a commentary on The Ring of the Niblungs, Wagner's chiefwork. I offer it to those enthusiastic admirers of Wagner who are unableto follow his ideas, and do not in the least understand the dilemma ofWotan, though they are filled with indignation at the irreverence of thePhilistines who frankly avow that they find the remarks of the god toooften tedious and nonsensical. Now to be devoted to Wagner merely as adog is devoted to his master, sharing a few elementary ideas, appetitesand emotions with him, and, for the rest, reverencing his superioritywithout understanding it, is no true Wagnerism. Yet nothing betteris possible without a stock of ideas common to master and disciple. Unfortunately, the ideas of the revolutionary Wagner of 1848 are taughtneither by the education nor the experience of English and Americangentlemen-amateurs, who are almost always political mugwumps, and hardlyever associate with revolutionists. The earlier attempts to translatehis numerous pamphlets and essays into English, resulted in ludicrousmixtures of pure nonsense with the absurdest distorsions of his ideasinto the ideas of the translators. We now have a translation which is amasterpiece of interpretation and an eminent addition to our literature;but that is not because its author, Mr. Ashton Ellis, knows the Germandictionary better than his predecessors. He is simply in possession ofWagner's ideas, which were to them inconceivable. 

All I pretend to do in this book is to impart the ideas which are mostlikely to be lacking in the conventional Englishman's equipment. I cameby them myself much as Wagner did, having learnt more about musicthan about anything else in my youth, and sown my political wild oatssubsequently in the revolutionary school. This combination is not commonin England; and as I seem, so far, to be the only publicly articulateresult of it, I venture to add my commentary to what has already beenwritten by musicians who are no revolutionists, and revolutionists whoare no musicians. G. B. S. 

 Preliminary Encouragements The Ring of the Niblungs The Rhine Gold Wagner as Revolutionist The Valkyries Siegfried Siegfried as Protestant Night Falls On The Gods Why He Changed His Mind Wagner's Own Explanation The Music of The Ring The Old and the New Music The Nineteenth Century The Music of the Future Bayreuth

THE PERFECT WAGNERITE

PRELIMINARY ENCOURAGEMENTS

A few of these will be welcome to the ordinary citizen visiting thetheatre to satisfy his curiosity, or his desire to be in the fashion, by witnessing a representation of Richard Wagner's famous Ring of theNiblungs. 

First, The Ring, with all its gods and giants and dwarfs, itswater-maidens and Valkyries, its wishing-cap, magic ring, enchantedsword, and miraculous treasure, is a drama of today, and not of a remoteand fabulous antiquity. It could not have been written before the secondhalf of the nineteenth century, because it deals with events which wereonly then consummating themselves. Unless the spectator recognizes init an image of the life he is himself fighting his way through, it mustneeds appear to him a monstrous development of the Christmas pantomimes, spun out here and there into intolerable lengths of dull conversation bythe principal baritone. Fortunately, even from this point of view, TheRing is full of extraordinarily attractive episodes, both orchestral anddramatic. The nature music alone--music of river and rainbow, fire andforest--is enough to bribe people with any love of the country in themto endure the passages of political philosophy in the sure hope of aprettier page to come. Everybody, too, can enjoy the love music, thehammer and anvil music, the clumping of the giants, the tune of theyoung woodsman's horn, the trilling of the bird, the dragon music andnightmare music and thunder and lightning music, the profusion of simplemelody, the sensuous charm of the orchestration: in short, the vastextent of common ground between The Ring and the ordinary music we usefor play and pleasure. Hence it is that the four separate music-playsof which it is built have become popular throughout Europe as operas. Weshall presently see that one of them, Night Falls On The Gods, actuallyis an opera. 

It is generally understood, however, that there is an inner ring ofsuperior persons to whom the whole work has a most urgent and searchingphilosophic and social significance. I profess to be such a superiorperson; and I write this pamphlet for the assistance of those who wishto be introduced to the work on equal terms with that inner circle ofadepts. 

My second encouragement is addressed to modest citizens who may supposethemselves to be disqualified from enjoying The Ring by their technicalignorance of music. They may dismiss all such misgivings speedily andconfidently. If the sound of music has any power to move them, they willfind that Wagner exacts nothing further. There is not a single bar of"classical music" in The Ring--not a note in it that has any other pointthan the single direct point of giving musical expression to the drama. In classical music there are, as the analytical programs tell us, firstsubjects and second subjects, free fantasias, recapitulations, andcodas; there are fugues, with counter-subjects, strettos, and pedalpoints; there are passacaglias on ground basses, canons ad hypodiapente, and other ingenuities, which have, after all, stood or fallen by theirprettiness as much as the simplest folk-tune. Wagner is never driving atanything of this sort any more than Shakespeare in his plays is drivingat such ingenuities of verse-making as sonnets, triolets, and the like. And this is why he is so easy for the natural musician who has had noacademic teaching. The professors, when Wagner's music is played tothem, exclaim at once "What is this? Is it aria, or recitative? Is thereno cabaletta to it--not even a full close? Why was that discord notprepared; and why does he not resolve it correctly? How dare he indulgein those scandalous and illicit transitions into a key that has notone note in common with the key he has just left? Listen to those falserelations! What does he want with six drums and eight horns when Mozartworked miracles with two of each? The man is no musician. " The laymanneither knows nor cares about any of these things. If Wagner were toturn aside from his straightforward dramatic purpose to propitiate theprofessors with correct exercises in sonata form, his music would atonce become unintelligible to the unsophisticated spectator, upon whomthe familiar and dreaded "classical" sensation would descend like theinfluenza. Nothing of the kind need be dreaded. The unskilled, untaughtmusician may approach Wagner boldly; for there is no possibility of amisunderstanding between them: The Ring music is perfectly single andsimple. It is the adept musician of the old school who has everything tounlearn: and him I leave, unpitied, to his fate. 

THE RING OF THE NIBLUNGS

The Ring consists of four plays, intended to be performed on foursuccessive evenings, entitled The Rhine Gold (a prologue to the otherthree), The Valkyries, Siegfried, and Night Falls On The Gods; or, inthe original German, Das Rheingold, Die Walkure, Siegfried, and DieGotterdammerung. 

THE RHINE GOLD

Let me assume for a moment that you are a young and good-looking woman. Try to imagine yourself in that character at Klondyke five years ago. The place is teeming with gold. If you are content to leave the goldalone, as the wise leave flowers without plucking them, enjoying withperfect naivete its color and glitter and preciousness, no human beingwill ever be the worse for your knowledge of it; and whilst you remainin that frame of mind the golden age will endure. 

Now suppose a man comes along: a man who has no sense of the goldenage, nor any power of living in the present: a man with common desires, cupidities, ambitions, just like most of the men you know. Suppose youreveal to that man the fact that if he will only pluck this gold up, and turn it into money, millions of men, driven by the invisible whipof hunger, will toil underground and overground night and day to pileup more and more gold for him until he is master of the world! You willfind that the prospect will not tempt him so much as you might imagine, because it involves some distasteful trouble to himself to start with, and because there is something else within his reach involving nodistasteful toil, which he desires more passionately; and that isyourself. So long as he is preoccupied with love of you, the gold, andall that it implies, will escape him: the golden age will endure. Notuntil he forswears love will he stretch out his hand to the gold, andfound the Plutonic empire for himself. But the choice between love andgold may not rest altogether with him. He may be an ugly, ungracious, unamiable person, whose affections may seem merely ludicrous anddespicable to you. In that case, you may repulse him, and most bitterlyhumiliate and disappoint him. What is left to him then but to curse thelove he can never win, and turn remorselessly to the gold? With that, he will make short work of your golden age, and leave you lamenting itslost thoughtlessness and sweetness. 

In due time the gold of Klondyke will find its way to the great citiesof the world. But the old dilemma will keep continually reproducingitself. The man who will turn his back on love, and upon all thefruitful it, and will set himself single-heartedly to gather gold in anexultant dream of wielding its Plutonic powers, will find the treasureyielding quickly to his touch. But few men will make this sacrificevoluntarily. Not until the Plutonic power is so strongly set up that thehigher human impulses are suppressed as rebellious, and even the mereappetites are denied, starved, and insulted when they cannot purchasetheir satisfaction with gold, are the energetic spirits driven to buildtheir lives upon riches. How inevitable that course has become to us isplain enough to those who have the power of understanding what they seeas they look at the plutocratic societies of our modern capitals. 

First Scene

Here, then, is the subject of the first scene of The Rhine Gold. Asyou sit waiting for the curtain to rise, you suddenly catch the boomingground-tone of a mighty river. It becomes plainer, clearer: you getnearer to the surface, and catch the green light and the flights ofbubbles. Then the curtain goes up and you see what you heard--the depthsof the Rhine, with three strange fairy fishes, half water-maidens, singing and enjoying themselves exuberantly. They are not singingbarcarolles or ballads about the Lorely and her fated lovers, but simplytrolling any nonsense that comes into their heads in time to the dancingof the water and the rhythm of their swimming. It is the golden age; andthe attraction of this spot for the Rhine maidens is a lump of the Rhinegold, which they value, in an entirely uncommercial way, for its bodilybeauty and splendor. Just at present it is eclipsed, because the sun isnot striking down through the water. 

Presently there comes a poor devil of a dwarf stealing along theslippery rocks of the river bed, a creature with energy enough to makehim strong of body and fierce of passion, but with a brutish narrownessof intelligence and selfishness of imagination: too stupid to see thathis own welfare can only be compassed as part of the welfare of theworld, too full of brute force not to grab vigorously at his own gain. Such dwarfs are quite common in London. He comes now with a fruitfulimpulse in him, in search of what he lacks in himself, beauty, lightnessof heart, imagination, music. The Rhine maidens, representing all theseto him, fill him with hope and longing; and he never considers that hehas nothing to offer that they could possibly desire, being by naturallimitation incapable of seeing anything from anyone else's point ofview. With perfect simplicity, he offers himself as a sweetheart tothem. But they are thoughtless, elemental, only half real things, muchlike modern young ladies. That the poor dwarf is repulsive to theirsense of physical beauty and their romantic conception of heroism, thathe is ugly and awkward, greedy and ridiculous, disposes for them of hisclaim to live and love. They mock him atrociously, pretending to fall inlove with him at first sight, and then slipping away and making game ofhim, heaping ridicule and disgust on the poor wretch until he is besidehimself with mortification and rage. They forget him when the waterbegins to glitter in the sun, and the gold to reflect its glory. Theybreak into ecstatic worship of their treasure; and though they know theparable of Klondyke quite well, they have no fear that the gold will bewrenched away by the dwarf, since it will yield to no one who has notforsworn love for it, and it is in pursuit of love that he has come tothem. They forget that they have poisoned that desire in him by theirmockery and denial of it, and that he now knows that life will give himnothing that he cannot wrest from it by the Plutonic power. It is justas if some poor, rough, vulgar, coarse fellow were to offer to take hispart in aristocratic society, and be snubbed into the knowledge thatonly as a millionaire could he ever hope to bring that society to hisfeet and buy himself a beautiful and refined wife. His choice is forcedon him. He forswears love as thousands of us forswear it every day; andin a moment the gold is in his grasp, and he disappears in the depths, leaving the water-fairies vainly screaming "Stop thief!" whilst theriver seems to plunge into darkness and sink from us as we rise to thecloud regions above. 

And now, what forces are there in the world to resist Alberic, ourdwarf, in his new character of sworn plutocrat? He is soon atwork wielding the power of the gold. For his gain, hordes of hisfellow-creatures are thenceforth condemned to slave miserably, overground and underground, lashed to their work by the invisible whipof starvation. They never see him, any more than the victims of our"dangerous trades" ever see the shareholders whose power is neverthelesseverywhere, driving them to destruction. The very wealth they createwith their labor becomes an additional force to impoverish them; for asfast as they make it it slips from their hands into the hands of theirmaster, and makes him mightier than ever. You can see the process foryourself in every civilized country today, where millions of people toilin want and disease to heap up more wealth for our Alberics, laying upnothing for themselves, except sometimes horrible and agonizing diseaseand the certainty of premature death. All this part of the story isfrightfully real, frightfully present, frightfully modern; and itseffects on our social life are so ghastly and ruinous that we no longerknow enough of happiness to be discomposed by it. It is only thepoet, with his vision of what life might be, to whom these things areunendurable. If we were a race of poets we would make an end of thembefore the end of this miserable century. Being a race of moral dwarfsinstead, we think them highly respectable, comfortable and proper, andallow them to breed and multiply their evil in all directions. If therewere no higher power in the world to work against Alberic, the end of itwould be utter destruction. 

Such a force there is, however; and it is called Godhead. The mysteriousthing we call life organizes itself into all living shapes, bird, beast, beetle and fish, rising to the human marvel in cunning dwarfs andin laborious muscular giants, capable, these last, of enduringtoil, willing to buy love and life, not with suicidal curses andrenunciations, but with patient manual drudgery in the service of higherpowers. And these higher powers are called into existence by the sameself-organization of life still more wonderfully into rare persons whomay by comparison be called gods, creatures capable of thought, whoseaims extend far beyond the satisfaction of their bodily appetitesand personal affections, since they perceive that it is only by theestablishment of a social order founded on common bonds of moral faiththat the world can rise from mere savagery. But how is this order to beset up by Godhead in a world of stupid giants, since these thoughtlessones pursue only their narrower personal ends and can by no meansunderstand the aims of a god? Godhead, face to face with Stupidity, mustcompromise. Unable to enforce on the world the pure law of thought, itmust resort to a mechanical law of commandments to be enforced bybrute punishments and the destruction of the disobedient. And howevercarefully these laws are framed to represent the highest thoughts of theframers at the moment of their promulgation, before a day has elapsedthat thought has grown and widened by the ceaseless evolution of life;and lo! yesterday's law already fallen out with today's thought. Yet ifthe high givers of that law themselves set the example of breakingit before it is a week old, they destroy all its authority with theirsubjects, and so break the weapon they have forged to rule them fortheir own good. They must therefore maintain at all costs the sanctityof the law, even when it has ceased to represent their thought; so thatat last they get entangled in a network of ordinances which they nolonger believe in, and yet have made so sacred by custom and so terribleby punishment, that they cannot themselves escape from them. ThusGodhead's resort to law finally costs it half its integrity--as ifa spiritual king, to gain temporal power, had plucked out one of hiseyes--and it finally begins secretly to long for the advent of somepower higher than itself which will destroy its artificial empire oflaw, and establish a true republic of free thought. 

This is by no means the only difficulty in the dominion of Law. Thebrute force for its execution must be purchased; and the mass of itssubjects must be persuaded to respect the authority which employs thisforce. But how is such respect to be implanted in them if they areunable to comprehend the thought of the lawgiver? Clearly, only byassociating the legislative power with such displays of splendor andmajesty as will impress their senses and awe their imaginations. The godturned lawgiver, in short, must be crowned Pontiff and King. Since hecannot be known to the common folk as their superior in wisdom, he mustbe known to them as their superior in riches, as the dweller in castles, the wearer of gold and purple, the eater of mighty feasts, the commanderof armies, and the wielder of powers of life and death, of salvationand damnation after death. Something may be done in this way withoutcorruption whilst the golden age still endures. Your gods may notprevail with the dwarfs; but they may go to these honest giants who willgive a day's work for a day's pay, and induce them to build for Godheada mighty fortress, complete with hall and chapel, tower and bell, forthe sake of the homesteads that will grow up in security round thatchurch-castle. This only, however, whilst the golden age lasts. Themoment the Plutonic power is let loose, and the loveless Alberic comesinto the field with his corrupting millions, the gods are face to facewith destruction; since Alberic, able with invisible hunger-whip toforce the labor of the dwarfs and to buy the services of the giants, can outshine all the temporal shows and splendors of the golden age, and make himself master of the world, unless the gods, with their biggerbrains, can capture his gold. This, the dilemma of the Church today, is the situation created by the exploit of Alberic in the depths of theRhine. 

Second Scene

From the bed of the river we rise into cloudy regions, and finally comeout into the clear in a meadow, where Wotan, the god of gods, and hisconsort Fricka lie sleeping. Wotan, you will observe, has lost one eye;and you will presently learn that he plucked it out voluntarily as theprice to be paid for his alliance with Fricka, who in return has broughtto him as her dowry all the powers of Law. The meadow is on the brink ofa ravine, beyond which, towering on distant heights, stands Godhome, amighty castle, newly built as a house of state for the one-eyed god andhis all-ruling wife. Wotan has not yet seen this castle except in hisdreams: two giants have just built it for him whilst he slept; and thereality is before him for the first time when Fricka wakes him. In thatmajestic burg he is to rule with her and through her over the humblegiants, who have eyes to gape at the glorious castles their ownhands have built from his design, but no brains to design castles forthemselves, or to comprehend divinity. As a god, he is to be great, secure, and mighty; but he is also to be passionless, affectionless, wholly impartial; for Godhead, if it is to live with Law, must have noweaknesses, no respect for persons. All such sweet littlenesses must beleft to the humble stupid giants to make their toil sweet to them; andthe god must, after all, pay for Olympian power the same price the dwarfhas paid for Plutonic power. 

Wotan has forgotten this in his dreams of greatness. Not so Fricka. Whatshe is thinking of is this price that Wotan has consented to pay, in token whereof he has promised this day to hand over to the giantsFricka's sister, the goddess Freia, with her golden love-apples. WhenFricka reproaches Wotan with having selfishly forgotten this, she findsthat he, like herself, is not prepared to go through with his bargain, and that he is trusting to another great worldforce, the Lie (a EuropeanPower, as Lassalle said), to help him to trick the giants out of theirreward. But this force does not dwell in Wotan himself, but in another, a god over whom he has triumphed, one Loki, the god of Intellect, Argument, Imagination, Illusion, and Reason. Loki has promised todeliver him from his contract, and to cheat the giants for him; but hehas not arrived to keep his word: indeed, as Fricka bitterly pointsout, why should not the Lie fail Wotan, since such failure is the veryessence of him?

The giants come soon enough; and Freia flies to Wotan for protectionagainst them. Their purposes are quite honest; and they have no doubtof the god's faith. There stands their part of the contract fulfilled, stone on stone, port and pinnacle all faithfully finished from Wotan'sdesign by their mighty labor. They have come undoubtingly for theiragreed wage. Then there happens what is to them an incredible, inconceivable thing. The god begins to shuffle. There are no moments inlife more tragic than those in which the humble common man, the manualworker, leaving with implicit trust all high affairs to his betters, andreverencing them wholly as worthy of that trust, even to the extentof accepting as his rightful function the saving of them from allroughening and coarsening drudgeries, first discovers that they arecorrupt, greedy, unjust and treacherous. The shock drives a ray ofprophetic light into one giant's mind, and gives him a momentaryeloquence. In that moment he rises above his stupid gianthood, andearnestly warns the Son of Light that all his power and eminence ofpriesthood, godhood, and kingship must stand or fall with the unbearablecold greatness of the incorruptible law-giver. But Wotan, whose assumedcharacter of law-giver is altogether false to his real passionatenature, despises the rebuke; and the giant's ray of insight is lost inthe murk of his virtuous indignation. 

In the midst of the wrangle, Loki comes at last, excusing himselffor being late on the ground that he has been detained by a matter ofimportance which he has promised to lay before Wotan. When pressed togive his mind to the business immediately in hand, and to extricateWotan from his dilemma, he has nothing to say except that the giants areevidently altogether in the right. The castle has been duly built: hehas tried every stone of it, and found the work first-rate: there isnothing to be done but pay the price agreed upon by handing over Freiato the giants. The gods are furious; and Wotan passionately declaresthat he only consented to the bargain on Loki's promise to find a wayfor him out of it. But Loki says no: he has promised to find a way outif any such way exist, but not to make a way if there is no way. He haswandered over the whole earth in search of some treasure great enoughto buy Freia back from the giants; but in all the world he has foundnothing for which Man will give up Woman. And this, by the way, remindshim of the matter he had promised to lay before Wotan. The Rhine maidenshave complained to him of Alberic's theft of their gold; and he mentionsit as a curious exception to his universal law of the unpurchasablepreciousness of love, that this gold-robber has forsworn love for thesake of the fabulous riches of the Plutonic empire and the mastery ofthe world through its power. 

No sooner is the tale told than the giants stoop lower than the dwarf. Alberic forswore love only when it was denied to him and made theinstrument for cruelly murdering his self-respect. But the giants, with love within their reach, with Freia and her golden apples in theirhands, offer to give her up for the treasure of Alberic. Observe, itis the treasure alone that they desire. They have no fierce dreamsof dominion over their superiors, or of moulding the world to anyconceptions of their own. They are neither clever nor ambitious: theysimply covet money. Alberic's gold: that is their demand, or else Freia, as agreed upon, whom they now carry off as hostage, leaving Wotan toconsider their ultimatum. 

Freia gone, the gods begin to wither and age: her golden apples, whichthey so lightly bargained away, they now find to be a matter of life anddeath to them; for not even the gods can live on Law and Godhead alone, be their castles ever so splendid. Loki alone is unaffected: the Lie, with all its cunning wonders, its glistenings and shiftings and mirages, is a mere appearance: it has no body and needs no food. What is Wotanto do? Loki sees the answer clearly enough: he must bluntly rob Alberic. There is nothing to prevent him except moral scruple; for Alberic, afterall, is a poor, dim, dwarfed, credulous creature whom a god can outseeand a lie can outwit. Down, then, Wotan and Loki plunge into the minewhere Alberic's slaves are piling up wealth for him under the invisiblewhip. 

Third Scene

This gloomy place need not be a mine: it might just as well be amatch-factory, with yellow phosphorus, phossy jaw, a large dividend, andplenty of clergymen shareholders. Or it might be a whitelead factory, or a chemical works, or a pottery, or a railway shunting yard, or atailoring shop, or a little gin-sodden laundry, or a bakehouse, or a bigshop, or any other of the places where human life and welfare are dailysacrificed in order that some greedy foolish creature may be able tohymn exultantly to his Platonic idol:

Thou mak'st me eat whilst others starve, And sing while others dolament: Such untome Thy blessings are, As if I were Thine only care. 

In the mine, which resounds with the clinking anvils of the dwarfstoiling miserably to heap up treasure for their master, Alberic has sethis brother Mime--more familiarly, Mimmy--to make him a helmet. Mimmydimly sees that there is some magic in this helmet, and tries to keepit; but Alberic wrests it from him, and shows him, to his cost, that itis the veil of the invisible whip, and that he who wears it can appearin what shape he will, or disappear from view altogether. This helmet isa very common article in our streets, where it generally takes the formof a tall hat. It makes a man invisible as a shareholder, and changeshim into various shapes, such as a pious Christian, a subscriber tohospitals, a benefactor of the poor, a model husband and father, ashrewd, practical independent Englishman, and what not, when he isreally a pitiful parasite on the commonwealth, consuming a great deal, and producing nothing, feeling nothing, knowing nothing, believingnothing, and doing nothing except what all the rest do, and that onlybecause he is afraid not to do it, or at least pretend to do it. 

When Wotan and Loki arrive, Loki claims Alberic as an old acquaintance. But the dwarf has no faith in these civil strangers: Greed instinctivelymistrusts Intellect, even in the garb of Poetry and the company ofGodhead, whilst envying the brilliancy of the one and the dignity of theother. Alberic breaks out at them with a terrible boast of the power nowwithin his grasp. He paints for them the world as it will be when hisdominion over it is complete, when the soft airs and green mosses ofits valleys shall be changed into smoke, slag, and filth; when slavery, disease, and squalor, soothed by drunkenness and mastered by thepoliceman's baton, shall become the foundation of society; and whennothing shall escape ruin except such pretty places and pretty women ashe may like to buy for the slaking of his own lusts. In that kingdom ofevil he sees that there will be no power but his own. These gods, withtheir moralities and legalities and intellectual subtlety, will go underand be starved out of existence. He bids Wotan and Loki beware ofit; and his "Hab' Acht!" is hoarse, horrible, and sinister. Wotanis revolted to the very depths of his being: he cannot stifle theexecration that bursts from him. But Loki is unaffected: he has no moralpassion: indignation is as absurd to him as enthusiasm. He finds itexquisitely amusing--having a touch of the comic spirit in him--that thedwarf, in stirring up the moral fervor of Wotan, has removed his lastmoral scruple about becoming a thief. Wotan will now rob the dwarfwithout remorse; for is it not positively his highest duty to take thispower out of such evil hands and use it himself in the interests ofGodhead? On the loftiest moral grounds, he lets Loki do his worst. 

A little cunningly disguised flattery makes short work of Alberic. Lokipretends to be afraid of him; and he swallows that bait unhesitatingly. But how, enquires Loki, is he to guard against the hatred of his millionslaves? Will they not steal from him, whilst he sleeps, the magic ring, the symbol of his power, which he has forged from the gold of the Rhine?"You think yourself very clever, " sneers Alberic, and then begins toboast of the enchantments of the magic helmet. Loki refuses to believein such marvels without witnessing them. Alberic, only too glad toshow off his powers, puts on the helmet and transforms himself into amonstrous serpent. Loki gratifies him by pretending to be frightened outof his wits, but ventures to remark that it would be better still if thehelmet could transform its owner into some tiny creature that could hideand spy in the smallest cranny. Alberic promptly transforms himselfinto a toad. In an instant Wotan's foot is on him; Loki tears away thehelmet; they pinion him, and drag him away a prisoner up through theearth to the meadow by the castle. 

Fourth Scene

There, to pay for his freedom, he has to summon his slaves from thedepths to place all the treasure they have heaped up for him at the feetof Wotan. Then he demands his liberty; but Wotan must have the ringas well. And here the dwarf, like the giant before him, feels the veryfoundations of the world shake beneath him at the discovery of hisown base cupidity in a higher power. That evil should, in its lovelessdesperation, create malign powers which Godhead could not create, seemsbut natural justice to him. But that Godhead should steal those malignpowers from evil, and wield them itself, is a monstrous perversion; andhis appeal to Wotan to forego it is almost terrible in its convictionof wrong. It is of no avail. Wotan falls back again on virtuousindignation. He reminds Alberic that he stole the gold from theRhine maidens, and takes the attitude of the just judge compelling arestitution of stolen goods. Alberic knowing perfectly well that thejudge is taking the goods to put them in his own pocket, has the ringtorn from his finger, and is once more as poor as he was when he cameslipping and stumbling among the slimy rocks in the bed of the Rhine. 

This is the way of the world. In older times, when the Christian laborerwas drained dry by the knightly spendthrift, and the spendthrift wasdrained by the Jewish usurer, Church and State, religion and law, seizedon the Jew and drained him as a Christian duty. When the forces oflovelessness and greed had built up our own sordid capitalist systems, driven by invisible proprietorship, robbing the poor, defacing theearth, and forcing themselves as a universal curse even on the generousand humane, then religion and law and intellect, which would neverthemselves have discovered such systems, their natural bent beingtowards welfare, economy, and life instead of towards corruption, waste, and death, nevertheless did not scruple to seize by fraud and forcethese powers of evil on presence of using them for good. And itinevitably happens that when the Church, the Law, and all the Talentshave made common cause to rob the people, the Church is far morevitally harmed by that unfaithfulness to itself than its more mechanicalconfederates; so that finally they turn on their discredited ally androb the Church, with the cheerful co-operation of Loki, as in France andItaly for instance. 

The twin giants come back with their hostage, in whose presence Godheadblooms again. The gold is ready for them; but now that the moment hascome for parting with Freia the gold does not seem so tempting; andthey are sorely loth to let her go. Not unless there is gold enough toutterly hide her from them--not until the heap has grown so that theycan see nothing but gold--until money has come between them and everyhuman feeling, will they part with her. There is not gold enough toaccomplish this: however cunningly Loki spreads it, the glint of Freia'shair is still visible to Giant Fafnir, and the magic helmet must go onthe heap to shut it out. Even then Fafnir's brother, Fasolt, can catch abeam from her eye through a chink, and is rendered incapable thereby offorswearing her. There is nothing to stop that chink but the ring; andWotan is as greedily bent on keeping that as Alberic himself was; norcan the other gods persuade him that Freia is worth it, since forthe highest god, love is not the highest good, but only the universaldelight that bribes all living things to travail with renewed life. Lifeitself, with its accomplished marvels and its infinite potentialities, is the only force that Godhead can worship. Wotan does not yield untilhe is reached by the voice of the fruitful earth that before he or thedwarfs or the giants or the Law or the Lie or any of these things were, had the seed of them all in her bosom, and the seed perhaps of somethinghigher even than himself, that shall one day supersede him and cut thetangles and alliances and compromises that already have cost him oneof his eyes. When Erda, the First Mother of life, rises from hersleeping-place in the heart of the earth, and warns him to yield thering, he obeys her; the ring is added to the heap of gold; and all senseof Freia is cut off from the giants. 

But now what Law is left to these two poor stupid laborers whereby oneshall yield to the other any of the treasure for which they have eachpaid the whole price in surrendering Freia? They look by mere habitto the god to judge for them; but he, with his heart stirring towardshigher forces than himself, turns with disgust from these lower forces. They settle it as two wolves might; and Fafnir batters his brother deadwith his staff. It is a horrible thing to see and hear, to anyone whoknows how much blood has been shed in the world in just that way by itsbrutalized toilers, honest fellows enough until their betters betrayedthem. Fafnir goes off with his booty. It is quite useless to him. He hasneither the cunning nor the ambition to establish the Plutonic empirewith it. Merely to prevent others from getting it is the only purpose itbrings him. He piles it in a cave; transforms himself into a dragon bythe helmet; and devotes his life to guarding it, as much a slave to itas a jailor is to his prisoner. He had much better have thrown it allback into the Rhine and transformed himself into the shortest-livedanimal that enjoys at least a brief run in the sunshine. His case, however, is far too common to be surprising. The world is overstockedwith persons who sacrifice all their affections, and madly trample andbatter down their fellows to obtain riches of which, when they get them, they are unable to make the smallest use, and to which they become themost miserable slaves. 

The gods soon forget Fafnir in their rejoicing over Freia. Donner, the Thunder god, springs to a rocky summit and calls the clouds as ashepherd calls his flocks. They come at his summons; and he and thecastle are hidden by their black legions. Froh, the Rainbow god, hastensto his side. At the stroke of Donner's hammer the black murk is riven inall directions by darting ribbons of lightning; and as the air clears, the castle is seen in its fullest splendor, accessible now by therainbow bridge which Froh has cast across the ravine. In the gloryof this moment Wotan has a great thought. With all his aspirationsto establish a reign of noble thought, of righteousness, order, andjustice, he has found that day that there is no race yet in the worldthat quite spontaneously, naturally, and unconsciously realizes hisideal. He himself has found how far short Godhead falls of the thingit conceives. He, the greatest of gods, has been unable to control hisfate: he has been forced against his will to choose between evils, tomake disgraceful bargains, to break them still more disgracefully, andeven then to see the price of his disgrace slip through his fingers. His consort has cost him half his vision; his castle has cost him hisaffections; and the attempt to retain both has cost him his honor. Onevery side he is shackled and bound, dependent on the laws of Fricka andon the lies of Loki, forced to traffic with dwarfs for handicraft andwith giants for strength, and to pay them both in false coin. After all, a god is a pitiful thing. But the fertility of the First Mother is notyet exhausted. The life that came from her has ever climbed up to ahigher and higher organization. From toad and serpent to dwarf, frombear and elephant to giant, from dwarf and giant to a god with thoughts, with comprehension of the world, with ideals. Why should it stop there?Why should it not rise from the god to the Hero? to the creature in whomthe god's unavailing thought shall have become effective will and life, who shall make his way straight to truth and reality over the laws ofFricka and the lies of Loki with a strength that overcomes giants and acunning that outwits dwarfs? Yes: Erda, the First Mother, must travailagain, and breed him a race of heroes to deliver the world and himselffrom his limited powers and disgraceful bargains. This is the visionthat flashes on him as he turns to the rainbow bridge and calls his wifeto come and dwell with him in Valhalla, the home of the gods. 

They are all overcome with Valhalla's glory except Loki. He is behindthe scenes of this joint reign of the Divine and the Legal. He despisesthese gods with their ideals and their golden apples. "I am ashamed, " hesays, "to have dealings with these futile creatures. " And so he followsthem to the rainbow bridge. But as they set foot on it, from the riverbelow rises the wailing of the Rhine maidens for their lost gold. "Youdown there in the water, " cries Loki with brutal irony: "you used tobask in the glitter of your gold: henceforth you shall bask in thesplendor of the gods. " And they reply that the truth is in the depthsand the darkness, and that what blazes on high there is falsehood. Andwith that the gods pass into their glorious stronghold. 

WAGNER AS REVOLUTIONIST

Before leaving this explanation of The Rhine Gold, I must have a word ortwo about it with the reader. It is the least popular of the sections ofThe Ring. The reason is that its dramatic moments lie quite outsidethe consciousness of people whose joys and sorrows are all domesticand personal, and whose religions and political ideas are purelyconventional and superstitious. To them it is a struggle between half adozen fairytale personages for a ring, involving hours of scolding andcheating, and one long scene in a dark gruesome mine, with gloomy, uglymusic, and not a glimpse of a handsome young man or pretty woman. Onlythose of wider consciousness can follow it breathlessly, seeing in itthe whole tragedy of human history and the whole horror of the dilemmasfrom which the world is shrinking today. At Bayreuth I have seen a partyof English tourists, after enduring agonies of boredom from Alberic, rise in the middle of the third scene, and almost force their way outof the dark theatre into the sunlit pine-wood without. And I haveseen people who were deeply affected by the scene driven almost besidethemselves by this disturbance. But it was a very natural thing for theunfortunate tourists to do, since in this Rhine Gold prologue there isno interval between the acts for escape. Roughly speaking, people whohave no general ideas, no touch of the concern of the philosopher andstatesman for the race, cannot enjoy The Rhine Gold as a drama. They mayfind compensations in some exceedingly pretty music, at times even grandand glorious, which will enable them to escape occasionally from thestruggle between Alberic and Wotan; but if their capacity for musicshould be as limited as their comprehension of the world, they hadbetter stay away. 

And now, attentive Reader, we have reached the point at which somefoolish person is sure to interrupt us by declaring that The Rhine Goldis what they call "a work of art" pure and simple, and that Wagner neverdreamt of shareholders, tall hats, whitelead factories, and industrialand political questions looked at from the socialistic and humanitarianpoints of view. We need not discuss these impertinences: it is easierto silence them with the facts of Wagner's life. In 1843 he obtainedthe position of conductor of the Opera at Dresden at a salary of L225 ayear, with a pension. This was a first-rate permanent appointment in theservice of the Saxon State, carrying an assured professionalposition and livelihood with it In 1848, the year of revolutions, the discontented middle class, unable to rouse the Church-and-Stategovernments of the day from their bondage to custom, caste, and law byappeals to morality or constitutional agitation for Liberal reforms, made common cause with the starving wage-working class, and resorted toarmed rebellion, which reached Dresden in 1849. Had Wagner been the meremusical epicure and political mugwump that the term "artist" seems tosuggest to so many critics and amateurs--that is, a creature in theirown lazy likeness--he need have taken no more part in the politicalstruggles of his day than Bishop took in the English Reform agitation of1832, or Sterndale Bennett in the Chartist or Free Trade movements. Whathe did do was first to make a desperate appeal to the King to cast offhis bonds and answer the need of the time by taking true Kingship onhimself and leading his people to the redress of their intolerablewrongs (fancy the poor monarch's feelings!), and then, when the crashcame, to take his side with the right and the poor against the rich andthe wrong. When the insurrection was defeated, three leaders of it wereespecially marked down for vengeance: August Roeckel, an old friendof Wagner's to whom he wrote a well-known series of letters; MichaelBakoonin, afterwards a famous apostle of revolutionary Anarchism; andWagner himself. Wagner escaped to Switzerland: Roeckel and Bakooninsuffered long terms of imprisonment. Wagner was of course utterlyruined, pecuniarily and socially (to his own intense relief andsatisfaction); and his exile lasted twelve years. His first idea wasto get his Tannhauser produced in Paris. With the notion of explaininghimself to the Parisians he wrote a pamphlet entitled Art andRevolution, a glance through which will show how thoroughly thesocialistic side of the revolution had his sympathy, and how completelyhe had got free from the influence of the established Churches of hisday. For three years he kept pouring forth pamphlets--some of themelaborate treatises in size and intellectual rank, but still essentiallythe pamphlets and manifestoes of a born agitator--on social evolution, religion, life, art and the influence of riches. In 1853 the poem of TheRing was privately printed; and in 1854, five years after the Dresdeninsurrection, The Rhine Gold score was completed to the last drum tap. 

These facts are on official record in Germany, where the proclamationsumming up Wagner as "a politically dangerous person" may be consultedto this day. The pamphlets are now accessible to English readers in thetranslation of Mr. Ashton Ellis. This being so, any person who, havingperhaps heard that I am a Socialist, attempts to persuade you that myinterpretation of The Rhine Gold is only "my socialism" read into theworks of a dilettantist who borrowed an idle tale from an old saga tomake an opera book with, may safely be dismissed from your considerationas an ignoramus. 

If you are now satisfied that The Rhine Gold is an allegory, do notforget that an allegory is never quite consistent except when itis written by someone without dramatic faculty, in which case it isunreadable. There is only one way of dramatizing an idea; and that is byputting on the stage a human being possessed by that idea, yet none theless a human being with all the human impulses which make him akin andtherefore interesting to us. Bunyan, in his Pilgrim's Progress, doesnot, like his unread imitators, attempt to personify Christianity andValour: he dramatizes for you the life of the Christian and the ValiantMan. Just so, though I have shown that Wotan is Godhead and Kingship, and Loki Logic and Imagination without living Will (Brain without Heart, to put it vulgarly); yet in the drama Wotan is a religiously moral man, and Loki a witty, ingenious, imaginative and cynical one. As to Fricka, who stands for State Law, she does not assume her allegorical characterin The Rhine Gold at all, but is simply Wotan's wife and Freia's sister:nay, she contradicts her allegorical self by conniving at all Wotan'srogueries. That, of course, is just what State Law would do; but we mustnot save the credit of the allegory by a quip. Not until she reappearsin the next play (The Valkyries) does her function in the allegoricalscheme become plain. 

One preconception will bewilder the spectator hopelessly unless hehas been warned against it or is naturally free from it. In theold-fashioned orders of creation, the supernatural personages areinvariably conceived as greater than man, for good or evil. In themodern humanitarian order as adopted by Wagner, Man is the highest. In The Rhine Gold, it is pretended that there are as yet no men on theearth. There are dwarfs, giants, and gods. The danger is that you willjump to the conclusion that the gods, at least, are a higher order thanthe human order. On the contrary, the world is waiting for Man to redeemit from the lame and cramped government of the gods. Once grasp that;and the allegory becomes simple enough. Really, of course, the dwarfs, giants, and gods are dramatizations of the three main orders of men: towit, the instinctive, predatory, lustful, greedy people; the patient, toiling, stupid, respectful, money-worshipping people; and theintellectual, moral, talented people who devise and administer Statesand Churches. History shows us only one order higher than the highest ofthese: namely, the order of Heroes. 

Now it is quite clear--though you have perhaps never thought of it--thatif the next generation of Englishmen consisted wholly of Julius Caesars, all our political, ecclesiastical, and moral institutions wouldvanish, and the less perishable of their appurtenances be classed withStonehenge and the cromlechs and round towers as inexplicable relics ofa bygone social order. Julius Caesars would no more trouble themselvesabout such contrivances as our codes and churches than a fellow of theRoyal Society will touch his hat to the squire and listen to the villagecurate's sermons. This is precisely what must happen some day if lifecontinues thrusting towards higher and higher organization as it hashitherto done. As most of our English professional men are to Australianbushmen, so, we must suppose, will the average man of some future daybe to Julius Caesar. Let any man of middle age, pondering this prospectconsider what has happened within a single generation to the articlesof faith his father regarded as eternal nay, to the very scepticisms andblasphemies of his youth (Bishop Colenso's criticism of the Pentateuch, for example!); and he will begin to realize how much of our barbarousTheology and Law the man of the future will do without. Bakoonin, theDresden revolutionary leader with whom Wagner went out in 1849, putforward later on a program, often quoted with foolish horror, forthe abolition of all institutions, religious, political, juridical, financial, legal, academic, and so on, so as to leave the will of manfree to find its own way. All the loftiest spirits of that time wereburning to raise Man up, to give him self-respect, to shake him outof his habit of grovelling before the ideals created by his ownimagination, of attributing the good that sprang from the ceaselessenergy of the life within himself to some superior power in the clouds, and of making a fetish of self-sacrifice to justify his own cowardice. 

Farther on in The Ring we shall see the Hero arrive and make an endof dwarfs, giants, and gods. Meanwhile, let us not forget that godhoodmeans to Wagner infirmity and compromise, and manhood strength andintegrity. Above all, we must understand--for it is the key to much thatwe are to see--that the god, since his desire is toward a higher andfuller life, must long in his inmost soul for the advent of that greaterpower whose first work, though this he does not see as yet, must be hisown undoing. 

In the midst of all these far-reaching ideas, it is amusing to findWagner still full of his ingrained theatrical professionalism, andintroducing effects which now seem old-fashioned and stagey with as muchenergy and earnestness as if they were his loftiest inspirations. WhenWotan wrests the ring from Alberic, the dwarf delivers a lurid andbloodcurdling stage curse, calling down on its every future possessorcare, fear, and death. The musical phrase accompanying this outburst wasa veritable harmonic and melodic bogey to mid-century ears, though timehas now robbed it of its terrors. It sounds again when Fafnir slaysFasolt, and on every subsequent occasion when the ring brings death toits holder. This episode must justify itself purely as a piece of stagesensationalism. On deeper ground it is superfluous and confusing, as theruin to which the pursuit of riches leads needs no curse to explain it;nor is there any sense in investing Alberic with providential powers inthe matter. 

THE VALKYRIES

Before the curtain rises on the Valkyries, let us see what has happenedsince it fell on The Rhine Gold. The persons of the drama will tell uspresently; but as we probably do not understand German, that may nothelp us. 

Wotan is still ruling the world in glory from his giant-built castlewith his wife Fricka. But he has no security for the continuance of hisreign, since Alberic may at any moment contrive to recover the ring, the full power of which he can wield because he has forsworn love. Suchforswearing is not possible to Wotan: love, though not his highest need, is a higher than gold: otherwise he would be no god. Besides, as we haveseen, his power has been established in the world by and as a systemof laws enforced by penalties. These he must consent to be bound byhimself; for a god who broke his own laws would betray the fact thatlegality and conformity are not the highest rule of conduct--a discoveryfatal to his supremacy as Pontiff and Lawgiver. Hence he may not wrestthe ring unlawfully from Fafnir, even if he could bring himself toforswear love. 

In this insecurity he has hit on the idea of forming a heroic bodyguard. He has trained his love children as war-maidens (Valkyries) whose dutyit is to sweep through battle-fields and bear away to Valhalla the soulsof the bravest who fall there. Thus reinforced by a host of warriors, he has thoroughly indoctrinated them, Loki helping him asdialectician-in-chief, with the conventional system of law and duty, supernatural religion and self-sacrificing idealism, which they believeto be the essence of his godhood, but which is really only the machineryof the love of necessary power which is his mortal weakness. Thisprocess secures their fanatical devotion to his system of government, but he knows perfectly well that such systems, in spite of their moralpretensions, serve selfish and ambitious tyrants better than benevolentdespots, and that, if once Alberic gets the ring back, he will easilyout-Valhalla Valhalla, if not buy it over as a going concern. The onlychance of permanent security, then, is the appearance in the world of ahero who, without any illicit prompting from Wotan, will destroy Albericand wrest the ring from Fafnir. There will then, he believes, be nofurther cause for anxiety, since he does not yet conceive Heroism asa force hostile to Godhead. In his longing for a rescuer, it does notoccur to him that when the Hero comes, his first exploit must be tosweep the gods and their ordinances from the path of the heroic will. 

Indeed, he feels that in his own Godhead is the germ of such Heroism, and that from himself the Hero must spring. He takes to wandering, mostly in search of love, from Fricka and Valhalla. He seeks the FirstMother; and through her womb, eternally fertile, the inner true thoughtthat made him first a god is reborn as his daughter, uncorrupted by hisambition, unfettered by his machinery of power and his alliances withFricka and Loki. This daughter, the Valkyrie Brynhild, is his true will, his real self, (as he thinks): to her he may say what he must not say toanyone, since in speaking to her he but speaks to himself. "Was Keinemin Worten unausgesprochen, " he says to her, "bleib es ewig: mit mir nurrath' ich, red' ich zu dir. "

But from Brynhild no hero can spring until there is a man of Wotan'srace to breed with her. Wotan wanders further; and a mortal woman bearshim twins: a son and a daughter. He separates them by letting the girlfall into the hands of a forest tribe which in due time gives her as awife to a fierce chief, one Hunding. With the son he himself leads thelife of a wolf, and teaches him the only power a god can teach, thepower of doing without happiness. When he has given him this terribletraining, he abandons him, and goes to the bridal feast of his daughterSieglinda and Hunding. In the blue cloak of the wanderer, wearing thebroad hat that flaps over the socket of his forfeited eye, he appears inHunding's house, the middle pillar of which is a mighty tree. Into thattree, without a word, he strikes a sword up to the hilt, so that onlythe might of a hero can withdraw it. Then he goes out as silently as hecame, blind to the truth that no weapon from the armory of Godhead canserve the turn of the true Human Hero. Neither Hunding nor any of hisguests can move the sword; and there it stays awaiting the destinedhand. That is the history of the generations between The Rhine Gold andThe Valkyries. 

The First Act

This time, as we sit looking expectantly at the curtain, we hear, notthe deep booming of the Rhine, but the patter of a forest downpour, accompanied by the mutter of a storm which soon gathers into a roarand culminates in crashing thunderbolts. As it passes off, the curtainrises; and there is no mistaking whose forest habitation we are in; forthe central pillar is a mighty tree, and the place fit for the dwellingof a fierce chief. The door opens: and an exhausted man reels in: anadept from the school of unhappiness. Sieglinda finds him lying on thehearth. He explains that he has been in a fight; that his weapons notbeing as strong as his arms, were broken; and that he had to fly. Hedesires some drink and a moment's rest; then he will go; for he is anunlucky person, and does not want to bring his ill-luck on the womanwho is succoring him. But she, it appears, is also unhappy; and a strongsympathy springs up between them. When her husband arrives, he observesnot only this sympathy, but a resemblance between them, a gleam of thesnake in their eyes. They sit down to table; and the stranger tells themhis unlucky story. He is the son of Wotan, who is known to him only asWolfing, of the race of the Volsungs. The earliest thing he remembers isreturning from a hunt with his father to find their home destroyed, hismother murdered, and his twin-sister carried off. This was the work ofa tribe called the Neidings, upon whom he and Wolfing thenceforth wagedimplacable war until the day when his father disappeared, leaving notrace of himself but an empty wolfskin. The young Volsung was thus castalone upon the world, finding most hands against him, and bringing nogood luck even to his friends. His latest exploit has been the slayingof certain brothers who were forcing their sister to wed against herwill. The result has been the slaughter of the woman by her brothers'clansmen, and his own narrow escape by flight. 

His luck on this occasion is even worse than he supposes; for Hunding, by whose hearth he has taken refuge, is clansman to the slain brothersand is bound to avenge them. He tells the Volsung that in the morning, weapons or no weapons, he must fight for his life. Then he orders thewoman to bed, and follows her himself, taking his spear with him. 

The unlucky stranger, left brooding by the hearth, has nothing toconsole himself with but an old promise of his father's that he shallfind a weapon to his hand when he most needs one. The last flicker ofthe dying fire strikes on the golden hilt of the sword that sticks inthe tree; but he does not see it; and the embers sink into blackness. Then the woman returns. Hunding is safely asleep: she has drugged him. She tells the story of the one-eyed man who appeared at her forcedmarriage, and of the sword. She has always felt, she says, that hermiseries will end in the arms of the hero who shall succeed in drawingit forth. The stranger, diffident as he is about his luck, has nomisgivings as to his strength and destiny. He gives her his affection atonce, and abandons himself to the charm of the night and the season; forit is the beginning of Spring. They soon learn from their confidencesthat she is his stolen twin-sister. He is transported to find that theheroic race of the Volsungs need neither perish nor be corrupted by alower strain. Hailing the sword by the name of Nothung (or Needed), heplucks it from the tree as her bride-gift, and then, crying "Both brideand sister be of thy brother; and blossom the blood of the Volsungs!"clasps her as the mate the Spring has brought him. 

The Second Act

So far, Wotan's plan seems prospering. In the mountains he calls hiswar-maiden Brynhild, the child borne to him by the First Mother, andbids her see to it that Hunding shall fall in the approaching combat. But he is reckoning without his consort, Fricka. What will she, the Law, say to the lawless pair who have heaped incest on adultery? A hero mayhave defied the law, and put his own will in its place; but can a godhold him guiltless, when the whole power of the gods can enforce itselfonly by law? Fricka, shuddering with horror, outraged in every instinct, comes clamoring for punishment. Wotan pleads the general necessity ofencouraging heroism in order to keep up the Valhalla bodyguard; but hisremonstrances only bring upon him torrents of reproaches for his ownunfaithfulness to the law in roaming through the world and begettingwar-maidens, "wolf cubs, " and the like. He is hopelessly beaten in theargument. Fricka is absolutely right when she declares that the endingof the gods began when he brought this wolf-hero into the world;and now, to save their very existence, she pitilessly demands hisdestruction. Wotan has no power to refuse: it is Fricka's mechanicalforce, and not his thought, that really rules the world. He has torecall Brynhild; take back his former instructions; and ordain thatHunding shall slay the Volsung. 

But now comes another difficulty. Brynhild is the inner thought and willof Godhead, the aspiration from the high life to the higher that is itsdivine element, and only becomes separated from it when its resort tokingship and priestcraft for the sake of temporal power has made itfalse to itself. Hitherto, Brynhild, as Valkyrie or hero chooser, hasobeyed Wotan implicitly, taking her work as the holiest and bravest inhis kingdom; and now he tells her what he could not tell Fricka--whatindeed he could not tell to Brynhild, were she not, as she says, hisown will--the whole story of Alberic and of that inspiration about theraising up of a hero. She thoroughly approves of the inspiration; butwhen the story ends in the assumption that she too must obey Fricka, and help Fricka's vassal, Hunding, to undo the great work and strike thehero down, she for the first time hesitates to accept his command. Inhis fury and despair he overawes her by the most terrible threats of hisanger; and she submits. 

Then comes the Volsung Siegmund, following his sister bride, who hasfled into the mountains in a revulsion of horror at having allowedherself to bring her hero to shame. Whilst she is lying exhausted andsenseless in his arms, Brynhild appears to him and solemnly warns himthat he must presently leave the earth with her. He asks whither he mustfollow her. To Valhalla, to take his place there among the heroes. Heasks, shall he find his father there? Yes. Shall he find a wife there?Yes: he will be waited on by beautiful wishmaidens. Shall he meet hissister there? No. Then, says Siegmund, I will not come with you. 

She tries to make him understand that he cannot help himself. Being ahero, he will not be so persuaded: he has his father's sword, and doesnot fear Hunding. But when she tells him that she comes from his father, and that the sword of a god will not avail in the hands of a hero, heaccepts his fate, but will shape it with his own hand, both for himselfand his sister, by slaying her, and then killing himself with the laststroke of the sword. And thereafter he will go to Hell, rather than toValhalla. 

How now can Brynhild, being what she is, choose her side freely in aconflict between this hero and the vassal of Fricka? By instinct sheat once throws Wotan's command to the winds, and bids Siegmund nervehimself for the combat with Hunding, in which she pledges him theprotection of her shield. The horn of Hunding is soon heard; andSiegmund's spirits rise to fighting pitch at once. The two meet; andthe Valkyrie's shield is held before the hero. But when he delivers hissword-stroke at his foe, the weapon shivers on the spear of Wotan, whosuddenly appears between them; and the first of the race of heroesfalls with the weapon of the Law's vassal through his breast. Brynhildsnatches the fragments of the broken sword, and flies, carrying off thewoman with her on her war-horse; and Wotan, in terrible wrath, slays Hunding with a wave of his hand, and starts in pursuit of hisdisobedient daughter. 

The Third Act

On a rocky peak, four of the Valkyries are waiting for the rest. Theabsent ones soon arrive, galloping through the air with slain heroes, gathered from the battle-field, hanging over their saddles. Only, Brynhild, who comes last, has for her spoil a live woman. When her eightsisters learn that she has defied Wotan, they dare not help her; andBrynhild has to rouse Sieglinda to make an effort to save herself, byreminding her that she bears in her the seed of a hero, and mustface everything, endure anything, sooner than let that seed miscarry. Sieglinda, in a transport of exaltation, takes the fragments of thesword and flies into the forest. Then Wotan comes; the sisters fly interror at his command; and he is left alone with Brynhild. 

Here, then, we have the first of the inevitable moments which Wotan didnot foresee. Godhead has now established its dominion over the world bya mighty Church, compelling obedience through its ally the Law, with itsformidable State organization of force of arms and cunning of brain. It has submitted to this alliance to keep the Plutonic power incheck--built it up primarily for the sake of that soul in itself whichcares only to make the highest better and the best higher; and now hereis that very soul separated from it and working for the destructionof its indispensable ally, the lawgiving State. How is the rebel to bedisarmed? Slain it cannot be by Godhead, since it is still Godhead's ownvery dearest soul. But hidden, stifled, silenced it must be; or it willwreck the State and leave the Church defenseless. Not until it passescompletely away from Godhead, and is reborn as the soul of the hero, can it work anything but the confusion and destruction of the existingorder. How is the world to be protected against it in the meantime?Clearly Loki's help is needed here: it is the Lie that must, on thehighest principles, hide the Truth. Let Loki surround this mountain topwith the appearance of a consuming fire; and who will dare penetrate toBrynhild? It is true that if any man will walk boldly into that fire, he will discover it at once to be a lie, an illusion, a mirage throughwhich he might carry a sack of gunpowder without being a penny theworse. Therefore let the fire seem so terrible that only the hero, whenin the fulness of time he appears upon earth, will venture through it;and the problem is solved. Wotan, with a breaking heart, takes leaveof Brynhild; throws her into a deep sleep; covers her with her longwarshield; summons Loki, who comes in the shape of a wall of firesurrounding the mountain peak; and turns his back on Brynhild for ever. 

The allegory here is happily not so glaringly obvious to the youngergenerations of our educated classes as it was forty years ago. In thosedays, any child who expressed a doubt as to the absolute truth of theChurch's teaching, even to the extent of asking why Joshua told thesun to stand still instead of telling the earth to cease turning, or ofpointing out that a whale's throat would hardly have been large enoughto swallow Jonah, was unhesitatingly told that if it harboured suchdoubts it would spend all eternity after its death in horrible tormentsin a lake of burning brimstone. It is difficult to write or readthis nowadays without laughing; yet no doubt millions of ignorant andcredulous people are still teaching their children that. When Wagnerhimself was a little child, the fact that hell was a fiction devised forthe intimidation and subjection of the masses, was a well-kept secret ofthe thinking and governing classes. At that time the fires of Lokiwere a very real terror to all except persons of exceptional force ofcharacter and intrepidity of thought. Even thirty years after Wagnerhad printed the verses of The Ring for private circulation, we findhim excusing himself from perfectly explicit denial of currentsuperstitions, by reminding his readers that it would expose him toprosecution. In England, so many of our respectable voters are stillgrovelling in a gloomy devil worship, of which the fires of Loki arethe main bulwark, that no Government has yet had the conscience or thecourage to repeal our monstrous laws against "blasphemy. "

SIEGFRIED

Sieglinda, when she flies into the forest with the hero's son unborn inher womb, and the broken pieces of his sword in her hand, finds shelterin the smithy of a dwarf, where she brings forth her child and dies. This dwarf is no other than Mimmy, the brother of Alberic, the same whomade for him the magic helmet. His aim in life is to gain possession ofthe helmet, the ring, and the treasure, and through them to obtain thatPlutonic mastery of the world under the beginnings of which he himselfwrithed during Alberic's brief reign. Mimmy is a blinking, shambling, ancient creature, too weak and timid to dream of taking arms himself todespoil Fafnir, who still, transformed to a monstrous serpent, broodson the gold in a hole in the rocks. Mimmy needs the help of a hero forthat; and he has craft enough to know that it is quite possible, andindeed much in the ordinary way of the world, for senile avarice andcraft to set youth and bravery to work to win empire for it. He knowsthe pedigree of the child left on his hands, and nurses it to manhoodwith great care. 

His pains are too well rewarded for his comfort. The boy Siegfried, having no god to instruct him in the art of unhappiness, inherits noneof his father's ill luck, and all his father's hardihood. The fearagainst which Siegmund set his face like flint, and the woe which hewore down, are unknown to the son. The father was faithful and grateful:the son knows no law but his own humor; detests the ugly dwarf who hasnursed him; chafes furiously under his claims for some return forhis tender care; and is, in short, a totally unmoral person, a bornanarchist, the ideal of Bakoonin, an anticipation of the "overman" ofNietzsche. He is enormously strong, full of life and fun, dangerous anddestructive to what he dislikes, and affectionate to what he likes; sothat it is fortunate that his likes and dislikes are sane and healthy. Altogether an inspiriting young forester, a son of the morning, in whomthe heroic race has come out into the sunshine from the clouds of hisgrandfather's majestic entanglements with law, and the night of hisfather's tragic struggle with it. 

The First Act

Mimmy's smithy is a cave, in which he hides from the light like theeyeless fish of the American caverns. Before the curtain rises the musicalready tells us that we are groping in darkness. When it does riseMimmy is in difficulties. He is trying to make a sword for his nursling, who is now big enough to take the field against Fafnir. Mimmy can makemischievous swords; but it is not with dwarf made weapons that heroicman will hew the way of his own will through religions and governmentsand plutocracies and all the other devices of the kingdom of the fearsof the unheroic. As fast as Mimmy makes swords, Siegfried Bakooninsmashes them, and then takes the poor old swordsmith by the scruff ofthe neck and chastises him wrathfully. The particular day on which thecurtain rises begins with one of these trying domestic incidents. Mimmy has just done his best with a new sword of surpassing excellence. Siegfried returns home in rare spirits with a wild bear, to the extremeterror of the wretched dwarf. When the bear is dismissed, the new swordis produced. It is promptly smashed, as usual, with, also, the usualeffects on the temper of Siegfried, who is quite boundless in hiscriticisms of the smith's boasted skill, and declares that he wouldsmash the sword's maker too if he were not too disgusting to be handled. 

Mimmy falls back on his stock defence: a string of maudlin reminders ofthe care with which he has nursed the little boy into manhood. Siegfriedreplies candidly that the strangest thing about all this care is thatinstead of making him grateful, it inspires him with a lively desire towring the dwarf's neck. Only, he admits that he always comes back to hisMimmy, though he loathes him more than any living thing in the forest. On this admission the dwarf attempts to build a theory of filialinstinct. He explains that he is Siegfried's father, and that this iswhy Siegfried cannot do without him. But Siegfried has learned from hisforest companions, the birds and foxes and wolves, that mothers as wellas fathers go to the making of children. Mimmy, on the desperate groundthat man is neither bird nor fox, declares that he is Siegfried's fatherand mother both. He is promptly denounced as a filthy liar, becausethe birds and foxes are exactly like their parents, whereas Siegfried, having often watched his own image in the water, can testify that heis no more like Mimmy than a toad is like a trout. Then, to place theconversation on a plane of entire frankness, he throttles Mimmy until heis speechless. When the dwarf recovers, he is so daunted that he tellsSiegfried the truth about his birth, and for testimony thereof producesthe pieces of the sword that broke upon Wotan's spear. Siegfriedinstantly orders him to repair the sword on pain of an unmercifulthrashing, and rushes off into the forest, rejoicing in the discoverythat he is no kin of Mimmy's, and need have no more to do with him whenthe sword is mended. 

Poor Mimmy is now in a worse plight than ever; for he has long ago foundthat the sword utterly defies his skill: the steel will yield neitherto his hammer nor to his furnace. Just then there walks into his cave aWanderer, in a blue mantle, spear in hand, with one eye concealed by thebrim of his wide hat. Mimmy, not by nature hospitable, tries to drivehim away; but the Wanderer announces himself as a wise man, who can tellhis host, in emergency, what it most concerns him to know. Mimmy, takingthis offer in high dudgeon, because it implies that his visitor's witsare better than his own, offers to tell the wise one something that HEdoes not know: to wit, the way to the door. The imperturbable Wanderer'sreply is to sit down and challenge the dwarf to a trial of wit. Hewagers his head against Mimmy's that he will answer any three questionsthe dwarf can put to him. 

Now here were Mimmy's opportunity, had he only the wit to ask what hewants to know, instead of pretending to know everything already. Itis above all things needful to him at this moment to find out how thatsword can be mended; and there has just dropped in upon him in his needthe one person who can tell him. In such circumstances a wise man wouldhasten to show to his visitor his three deepest ignorances, and ask himto dispel them. The dwarf, being a crafty fool, desiring only to detectignorance in his guest, asks him for information on the three points onwhich he is proudest of being thoroughly well instructed himself. Histhree questions are, Who dwell under the earth? Who dwell on the earth?and Who dwell in the cloudy heights above? The Wanderer, in reply, tellshim of the dwarfs and of Alberic; of the earth, and the giants Fasoltand Fafnir; of the gods and of Wotan: himself, as Mimmy now recognizeswith awe. 

Next, it is Mimmy's turn to face three questions. What is that race, dearest to Wotan, against which Wotan has nevertheless done his worst?Mimmy can answer that: he knows the Volsungs, the race of heroes bornof Wotan's infidelities to Fricka, and can tell the Wanderer the wholestory of the twins and their son Siegfried. Wotan compliments him on hisknowledge, and asks further with what sword Siegfried will slay Fafnir?Mimmy can answer that too: he has the whole history of the sword at hisfingers' ends. Wotan hails him as the knowingest of the knowing, andthen hurls at him the question he should himself have asked: Whowill mend the sword? Mimmy, his head forfeited, confesses withloud lamentations that he cannot answer. The Wanderer reads him anappropriate little lecture on the folly of being too clever to ask whathe wants to know, and informs him that a smith to whom fear is unknownwill mend Nothung. To this smith he leaves the forfeited head of hishost, and wanders off into the forest. Then Mimmy's nerves give waycompletely. He shakes like a man in delirium tremens, and has a horriblenightmare, in the supreme convulsion of which Siegfried, returning fromthe forest, presently finds him. 

A curious and amusing conversation follows. Siegfried himself does notknow fear, and is impatient to acquire it as an accomplishment. Mimmyis all fear: the world for him is a phantasmagoria of terrors. It is notthat he is afraid of being eaten by bears in the forest, or of burninghis fingers in the forge fire. A lively objection to being destroyedor maimed does not make a man a coward: on the contrary, it is thebeginning of a brave man's wisdom. But in Mimmy, fear is not the effectof danger: it is natural quality of him which no security can allay. He is like many a poor newspaper editor, who dares not print the truth, however simple, even when it is obvious to himself and all his readers. Not that anything unpleasant would happen to him if he did--not, indeedthat he could fail to become a distinguished and influential leaderof opinion by fearlessly pursuing such a course, but solely becausehe lives in a world of imaginary terrors, rooted in a modest andgentlemanly mistrust of his own strength and worth, and consequently ofthe value of his opinion. Just so is Mimmy afraid of anything that cando him any good, especially of the light and the fresh air. He is alsoconvinced that anybody who is not sufficiently steeped in fear to beconstantly on his guard, must perish immediately on his first sallyinto the world. To preserve Siegfried for the enterprise to which he hasdestined him he makes a grotesque attempt to teach him fear. He appealsto his experience of the terrors of the forest, of its dark places, ofits threatening noises its stealthy ambushes, its sinister flickeringlights its heart-tightening ecstasies of dread. 

All this has no other effect than to fill Siegfried with wonder andcuriosity; for the forest is a place of delight for him. He is as eagerto experience Mimmy's terrors as a schoolboy to feel what an electricshock is like. Then Mimmy has the happy idea of describing Fafnir to himas a likely person to give him an exemplary fright. Siegfried jumps atthe idea, and, since Mimmy cannot mend the sword for him, proposes toset to work then and there to mend it for himself. Mimmy shakes hishead, and bids him see now how his youthful laziness and frowardnesshave found him out--how he would not learn the smith's craft fromProfessor Mimmy, and therefore does not know how even to begin mendingthe sword. Siegfried Bakoonin's retort is simple and crushing. He pointsout that the net result of Mimmy's academic skill is that he can neithermake a decent sword himself nor even set one to rights when it isdamaged. Reckless of the remonstrances of the scandalized professor, heseizes a file, and in a few moments utterly destroys the fragments ofthe sword by rasping them into a heap of steel filings. Then he putsthe filings into a crucible; buries it in the coals; and sets to at thebellows with the shouting exultation of the anarchist who destroys onlyto clear the ground for creation. When the steel is melted he runs itinto a mould; and lo! a sword-blade in the rough. Mimmy, amazed at thesuccess of this violation of all the rules of his craft, hails Siegfriedas the mightiest of smiths, professing himself barely worthy to be hiscook and scullion; and forthwith proceeds to poison some soup for him sothat he may murder him safely when Fafnir is slain. Meanwhile Siegfriedforges and tempers and hammers and rivets, uproariously singing thewhile as nonsensically as the Rhine maidens themselves. Finally heassails the anvil on which Mimmy's swords have been shattered, andcleaves it with a mighty stroke of the newly forged Nothung. 

The Second Act

In the darkest hour before the dawn of that night, we find ourselvesbefore the cave of Fafnir, and there we find Alberic, who can findnothing better to do with himself than to watch the haunt of the dragon, and eat his heart out in vain longing for the gold and the ring. Thewretched Fafnir, once an honest giant, can only make himself terribleenough to keep his gold by remaining a venomous reptile. Why he shouldnot become an honest giant again and clear out of his cavern, leavingthe gold and the ring and the rest of it for anyone fool enough to takethem at such a price, is the first question that would occur to anyoneexcept a civilized man, who would be too accustomed to that sort ofmania to be at all surprised at it. 

To Alberic in the night comes the Wanderer, whom the dwarf, recognizinghis despoiler of old, abuses as a shameless thief, taunting him with thehelpless way in which all his boasted power is tied up with the laws andbargains recorded on the heft of his spear, which, says Alberic truly, would crumble like chaff in his hands if he dared use it for his ownreal ends. Wotan, having already had to kill his own son with it, knowsthat very well; but it troubles him no more; for he is now at lastrising to abhorrence of his own artificial power, and looking to thecoming hero, not for its consolidation but its destruction. When Albericbreaks out again with his still unquenched hope of one day destroyingthe gods and ruling the world through the ring, Wotan is no longershocked. He tells Alberic that Brother Mime approaches with a hero whomGodhead can neither help nor hinder. Alberic may try his luck againsthim without disturbance from Valhalla. Perhaps, he suggests, if Albericwarns Fafnir, and offers to deal with the hero for him, Fafnir, may givehim the ring. They accordingly wake up the dragon, who condescendsto enter into bellowing conversation, but is proof against theirproposition, strong in the magic of property. "I have and hold, " hesays: "leave me to sleep. " Wotan, with a wise laugh, turns to Alberic. "That shot missed, " he says: "no use abusing me for it. And now let metell you one thing. All things happen according to their nature; and youcan't alter them. " And so he leaves him Alberic, raging with the sensethat his old enemy has been laughing at him, and yet propheticallyconvinced that the last word will not be with the god, hides himself asthe day breaks, and his brother approaches with Siegfried. 

Mimmy makes a final attempt to frighten Siegfried by discoursing of thedragon's terrible jaws, poisonous breath, corrosive spittle, and deadly, stinging tail. Siegfried is not interested in the tail: he wants to knowwhether the dragon has a heart, being confident of his ability to stickNothung into it if it exists. Reassured on this point, he drives Mimmyaway, and stretches himself under the trees, listening to the morningchatter of the birds. One of them has a great deal to say to him; buthe cannot understand it; and after vainly trying to carry on theconversation with a reed which he cuts, he takes to entertaining thebird with tunes on his horn, asking it to send him a loving mate suchas all the other creatures of the forest have. His tunes wake up thedragon; and Siegfried makes merry over the grim mate the bird hassent him. Fafnir is highly scandalized by the irreverence of the youngBakoonin. He loses his temper; fights; and is forthwith slain, to hisown great astonishment. 

In such conflicts one learns to interpret the messages of Nature alittle. When Siegfried, stung by the dragon's vitriolic blood, pops hisfinger into his mouth and tastes it, he understands what the bird issaying to him, and, instructed by it concerning the treasures within hisreach, goes into the cave to secure the gold, the ring and the wishingcap. Then Mimmy returns, and is confronted by Alberic. The two quarrelfuriously over the sharing of the booty they have not yet secured, untilSiegfried comes from the cave with the ring and the helmet, not muchimpressed by the heap of gold, and disappointed because he has not yetlearned to fear. 

He has, however, learnt to read the thoughts of such a creature as poorMimmy, who, intending to overwhelm him with flattery and fondness, only succeeds in making such a self-revelation of murderous envythat Siegfried smites him with Nothung and slays him, to the keensatisfaction of the hidden Alberic. Caring nothing for the gold, whichhe leaves to the care of the slain; disappointed in his fancy forlearning fear; and longing for a mate, he casts himself wearily down, and again appeals to his friend the bird, who tells him of a womansleeping on a mountain peak within a fortress of fire that only thefearless can penetrate. Siegfried is up in a moment with all the tumultof spring in his veins, and follows the flight of the bird as it pilotshim to the fiery mountain. 

The Third Act

To the root of the mountain comes also the Wanderer, now nearing hisdoom. He calls up the First Mother from the depths of the earth, andbegs counsel from her. She bids him confer with the Norns (the Fates). But they are of no use to him: what he seeks is some foreknowledge ofthe way of the Will in its perpetual strife with these helpless Fateswho can only spin the net of circumstance and environment round the feetof men. Why not, says Erda then, go to the daughter I bore you, and takecounsel with her? He has to explain how he has cut himself off from her, and set the fires of Loki between the world and her counsel. In thatcase the First Mother cannot help him: such a separation is part ofthe bewilderment that is ever the first outcome of her eternal workof thrusting the life energy of the world to higher and higherorganization. She can show him no way of escape from the destruction heforesees. Then from the innermost of him breaks the confession that herejoices in his doom, and now himself exults in passing away with allhis ordinances and alliances, with the spear-sceptre which he has onlywielded on condition of slaying his dearest children with it, with thekingdom, the power and the glory which will never again boast themselvesas "world without end. " And so he dismisses Erda to her sleep in theheart of the earth as the forest bird draws near, piloting the slainson's son to his goal. 

Now it is an excellent thing to triumph in the victory of the new orderand the passing away of the old; but if you happen to be part of theold order yourself, you must none the less fight for your life. It seemshardly possible that the British army at the battle of Waterloo did notinclude at least one Englishman intelligent enough to hope, for thesake of his country and humanity, that Napoleon might defeat the alliedsovereigns; but such an Englishman would kill a French cuirassier ratherthan be killed by him just as energetically as the silliest soldier, ever encouraged by people who ought to know better, to call hisignorance, ferocity and folly, patriotism and duty. Outworn life mayhave become mere error; but it still claims the right to die a naturaldeath, and will raise its hand against the millennium itself inself-defence if it tries to come by the short cut of murder. Wotan findsthis out when he comes face to face with Siegfried, who is brought to astandstill at the foot of the mountain by the disappearance of the bird. Meeting the Wanderer there, he asks him the way to the mountain wherea woman sleeps surrounded by fire. The Wanderer questions him, andextracts his story from him, breaking into fatherly delight whenSiegfried, describing the mending of the sword, remarks that all he knewabout the business was that the broken bits of Nothung would be of nouse to him unless he made a new sword out of them right over again fromthe beginning. But the Wanderer's interest is by no means reciprocatedby Siegfried. His majesty and elderly dignity are thrown away on theyoung anarchist, who, unwilling to waste time talking, bluntly bidshim either show him the way to the mountain, or else "shut his muzzle. "Wotan is a little hurt. "Patience, my lad, " he says: "if you were an oldman I should treat you with respect. " "That would be a precious notion, "says Siegfried. "All my life long I was bothered and hampered by anold man until I swept him out of my way. I will sweep you in the samefashion if you don't let me pass. Why do you wear such a big hat; andwhat has happened to one of your eyes? Was it knocked out by somebodywhose way you obstructed?" To which Wotan replies allegorically that theeye that is gone--the eye that his marriage with Fricka cost him--is nowlooking at him out of Siegfried's head. At this, Siegfried gives up theWanderer as a lunatic, and renews his threats of personal violence. ThenWotan throws off the mask of the Wanderer; uplifts the world-governingspear; and puts forth all his divine awe and grandeur as the guardian ofthe mountain, round the crest of which the fires of Loki now break intoa red background for the majesty of the god. But all this is lost onSiegfried Bakoonin. "Aha!" he cries, as the spear is levelled againsthis breast: "I have found my father's foe"; and the spear falls in twopieces under the stroke of Nothung. "Up then, " says Wotan: "I cannotwithhold you, " and disappears forever from the eye of man. The firesroll down the mountain; but Siegfried goes at them as exultantly ashe went at the forging of the sword or the heart of the dragon, andshoulders his way through them, joyously sounding his horn to theaccompaniment of their crackling and seething. And never a hair of hishead is singed. Those frightful flames which have scared mankind forcenturies from the Truth, have not heat enough in them to make a childshut its eyes. They are mere phantasmagoria, highly creditable to Loki'simaginative stage-management; but nothing ever has perished or willperish eternally in them except the Churches which have been so poor andfaithless as to trade for their power on the lies of a romancer. 

BACK TO OPERA AGAIN

And now, O Nibelungen Spectator, pluck up; for all allegories come to anend somewhere; and the hour of your release from these explanations isat hand. The rest of what you are going to see is opera, and nothingbut opera. Before many bars have been played, Siegfried and the wakenedBrynhild, newly become tenor and soprano, will sing a concertedcadenza; plunge on from that to a magnificent love duet; and end witha precipitous allegro a capella, driven headlong to its end by theimpetuous semiquaver triplets of the famous finales to the first act ofDon Giovanni or the coda to the Leonore overture, with a specificallycontrapuntal theme, points d'orgue, and a high C for the soprano allcomplete. 

What is more, the work which follows, entitled Night Falls On The Gods, is a thorough grand opera. In it you shall see what you have so farmissed, the opera chorus in full parade on the stage, not presumingto interfere with the prima donna as she sings her death song over thefootlights. Nay, that chorus will have its own chance when it firstappears, with a good roaring strain in C major, not, after all, so verydifferent from, or at all less absurd than the choruses of courtiersin La Favorita or "Per te immenso giubilo" in Lucia. The harmony is nodoubt a little developed, Wagner augmenting his fifths with a G sharpwhere Donizetti would have put his fingers in his ears and screamed forG natural. But it is an opera chorus all the same; and along with itwe have theatrical grandiosities that recall Meyerbeer and Verdi: pezzid'insieme for all the principals in a row, vengeful conjurations fortrios of them, romantic death song for the tenor: in short, all mannerof operatic conventions. 

Now it is probable that some of us will have been so talked by the moresuperstitious Bayreuth pilgrims into regarding Die Gotterdammerung asthe mighty climax to a mighty epic, more Wagnerian than all the otherthree sections put together, as not to dare notice this startlingatavism, especially if we find the trio-conjurations more exhilaratingthan the metaphysical discourses of Wotan in the three true musicdramas of The Ring. There is, however, no real atavism involved. Die Gotterdammerung, though the last of The Ring dramas in order ofperformance, was the first in order of conception and was indeed theroot from which all the others sprang. 

The history of the matter is as follows. All Wagner's works prior to TheRing are operas. The last of them, Lohengrin, is perhaps the best knownof modern operas. As performed in its entirety at Bayreuth, it is evenmore operatic than it appears at Covent Garden, because it happens thatits most old-fashioned features, notably some of the big set concertedpieces for principals and chorus (pezzi d'insieme as I have calledthem above), are harder to perform than the more modern andcharacteristically Wagnerian sections, and for that reason were cut outin preparing the abbreviated fashionable version. Thus Lohengrin cameupon the ordinary operatic stage as a more advanced departure fromcurrent operatic models than its composer had made it. Still, it isunmistakably an opera, with chorus, concerted pieces, grand finales, and a heroine who, if she does not sing florid variations withflute obbligato, is none the less a very perceptible prima donna. Ineverything but musical technique the change from Lohengrin to The RhineGold is quite revolutionary. 

The explanation is that Night Falls On The Gods came in between them, although its music was not finished until twenty years after that ofThe Rhine Gold, and thus belongs to a later and more masterful phase ofWagner's harmonic style. It first came into Wagner's head as an operato be entitled Siegfried's Death, founded on the old Niblung Sagas, whichoffered to Wagner the same material for an effective theatrical tragedyas they did to Ibsen. Ibsen's Vikings in Helgeland is, in kind, whatSiegfried's Death was originally intended to be: that is, a heroic piecefor the theatre, without the metaphysical or allegorical complicationsof The Ring. Indeed, the ultimate catastrophe of the Saga cannot by anyperversion of ingenuity be adapted to the perfectly clear allegoricaldesign of The Rhine Gold, The Valkyries, and Siegfried. 

SIEGFRIED AS PROTESTANT

The philosophically fertile element in the original project ofSiegfried's Death was the conception of Siegfried himself as a type ofthe healthy man raised to perfect confidence in his own impulses byan intense and joyous vitality which is above fear, sickliness ofconscience, malice, and the makeshifts and moral crutches of law andorder which accompany them. Such a character appears extraordinarilyfascinating and exhilarating to our guilty and conscience-riddengenerations, however little they may understand him. The world hasalways delighted in the man who is delivered from conscience. From Punchand Don Juan down to Robert Macaire, Jeremy Diddler and the pantomimeclown, he has always drawn large audiences; but hitherto he has beendecorously given to the devil at the end. Indeed eternal punishment issometimes deemed too high a compliment to his nature. When the late LordLytton, in his Strange Story, introduced a character personifying thejoyousness of intense vitality, he felt bound to deny him the immortalsoul which was at that time conceded even to the humblest characters infiction, and to accept mischievousness, cruelty, and utter incapacityfor sympathy as the inevitable consequence of his magnificent bodily andmental health. 

In short, though men felt all the charm of abounding life andabandonment to its impulses, they dared not, in their deepself-mistrust, conceive it otherwise than as a force making forevil--one which must lead to universal ruin unless checked and literallymortified by self-renunciation in obedience to superhuman guidance, orat least to some reasoned system of morals. When it became apparent tothe cleverest of them that no such superhuman guidance existed, andthat their secularist systems had all the fictitiousness of "revelation"without its poetry, there was no escaping the conclusion that all thegood that man had done must be put down to his arbitrary will as well asall the evil he had done; and it was also obvious that if progress werea reality, his beneficent impulses must be gaining on his destructiveones. It was under the influence of these ideas that we began to hearabout the joy of life where we had formerly heard about the grace of Godor the Age of Reason, and that the boldest spirits began to raise thequestion whether churches and laws and the like were not doing a greatdeal more harm than good by their action in limiting the freedom of thehuman will. Four hundred years ago, when belief in God and in revelationwas general throughout Europe, a similar wave of thought led thestrongest-hearted peoples to affirm that every man's private judgmentwas a more trustworthy interpreter of God and revelation than theChurch. This was called Protestantism; and though the Protestants werenot strong enough for their creed, and soon set up a Church of theirown, yet the movement, on the whole, has justified the direction ittook. Nowadays the supernatural element in Protestantism has perished;and if every man's private judgment is still to be justified as the mosttrustworthy interpreter of the will of Humanity (which is not amore extreme proposition than the old one about the will of God)Protestantism must take a fresh step in advance, and become Anarchism. Which it has accordingly done, Anarchism being one of the notable newcreeds of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 

The weak place which experience finds out in the Anarchist theory isits reliance on the progress already achieved by "Man. " There is no suchthing as Man in the world: what we have to deal with is a multitude ofmen, some of them great rascals, some of them greet statesmen, othersboth, with a vast majority capable of managing their personal affairs, but not of comprehending social organization, or grappling with theproblems created by their association in enormous numbers. If "Man"means this majority, then "Man" has made no progress: he has, onthe contrary, resisted it. He will not even pay the cost of existinginstitutions: the requisite money has to be filched from him by"indirect taxation. " Such people, like Wagner's giants; must begoverned by laws; and their assent to such government must be securedby deliberately filling them with prejudices and practicing on theirimaginations by pageantry and artificial eminences and dignities. The government is of course established by the few who are capable ofgovernment, though its mechanism once complete, it may be, and generallyis, carried on unintelligently by people who are incapable of it thecapable people repairing it from time to time when it gets too farbehind the continuous advance or decay of civilization. All thesecapable people are thus in the position of Wotan, forced to maintain assacred, and themselves submit to, laws which they privately know to beobsolescent makeshifts, and to affect the deepest veneration for creedsand ideals which they ridicule among themselves with cynical scepticism. No individual Siegfried can rescue them from this bondage and hypocrisy;in fact, the individual Siegfried has come often enough, only to findhimself confronted with the alternative of governing those who are notSiegfrieds or risking destruction at their hands. And this dilemma willpersist until Wotan's inspiration comes to our governors, and they seethat their business is not the devising of laws and institutions to propup the weaknesses of mobs and secure the survival of the unfittest, butthe breeding of men whose wills and intelligences may be depended on toproduce spontaneously the social well-being our clumsy laws now aim atand miss. The majority of men at present in Europe have no businessto be alive; and no serious progress will be made until we addressourselves earnestly and scientifically to the task of producingtrustworthy human material for society. In short, it is necessary tobreed a race of men in whom the life-giving impulses predominate, beforethe New Protestantism becomes politically practicable. [*]

 * The necessity for breeding the governing class from a selected stock has always been recognized by Aristocrats, however erroneous their methods of selection. We have changed our system from Aristocracy to Democracy without considering that we were at the same time changing, as regards our governing class, from Selection to Promiscuity. Those who have taken a practical part in modern politics best know how farcical the result is. 

The most inevitable dramatic conception, then, of the nineteenthcentury, is that of a perfectly naive hero upsetting religion, law andorder in all directions, and establishing in their place the unfetteredaction of Humanity doing exactly what it likes, and producing orderinstead of confusion thereby because it likes to do what is necessaryfor the good of the race. This conception, already incipient in AdamSmith's Wealth of Nations, was certain at last to reach some greatartist, and be embodied by him in a masterpiece. It was also certainthat if that master happened to be a German, he should take delightin describing his hero as the Freewiller of Necessity, thereby beyondmeasure exasperating Englishmen with a congenital incapacity formetaphysics. 

PANACEA QUACKERY, OTHERWISE IDEALISM

Unfortunately, human enlightenment does not progress by nicer and niceradjustments, but by violent corrective reactions which invariably sendus clean over our saddle and would bring us to the ground on the otherside if the next reaction did not send us back again with equallyexcessive zeal. Ecclesiasticism and Constitutionalism send us one way, Protestantism and Anarchism the other; Order rescues us from confusionand lands us in Tyranny; Liberty then saves the situation and ispresently found to be as great a nuisance as Despotism. A scientificallybalanced application of these forces, theoretically possible, ispractically incompatible with human passion. Besides, we have the sameweakness in morals as in medicine: we cannot be cured of running afterpanaceas, or, as they are called in the sphere of morals, ideals. Onegeneration sets up duty, renunciation, self-sacrifice as a panacea. Thenext generation, especially the women, wake up at the age of forty orthereabouts to the fact that their lives have been wasted in the worshipof this ideal, and, what is still more aggravating, that the elders whoimposed it on them did so in a fit of satiety with their own experimentsin the other direction. Then that defrauded generation foams at themouth at the very mention of duty, and sets up the alternative panaceaof love, their deprivation of which seems to them to have been the mostcruel and mischievous feature of their slavery to duty. It is useless towarn them that this reaction, if prescribed as a panacea, will prove asgreat a failure as all the other reactions have done; for they do notrecognize its identity with any reaction that ever occurred before. Take for instance the hackneyed historic example of the austerity ofthe Commonwealth being followed by the licence of the Restoration. You cannot persuade any moral enthusiast to accept this as a pureoscillation from action to reaction. If he is a Puritan he looks uponthe Restoration as a national disaster: if he is an artist he regards itas the salvation of the country from gloom, devil worship and starvationof the affections. The Puritan is ready to try the Commonwealth againwith a few modern improvements: the Amateur is equally ready to try theRestoration with modern enlightenments. And so for the present we mustbe content to proceed by reactions, hoping that each will establish somepermanently practical and beneficial reform or moral habit that willsurvive the correction of its excesses by the next reaction. 

DRAMATIC ORIGIN OF WOTAN

We can now see how a single drama in which Wotan does not appear, and ofwhich Siegfried is the hero, expanded itself into a great fourfolddrama of which Wotan is the hero. You cannot dramatize a reaction bypersonifying the reacting force only, any more than Archimedes couldlift the world without a fulcrum for his lever. You must also personifythe established power against which the new force is reacting; andin the conflict between them you get your drama, conflict being theessential ingredient in all drama. Siegfried, as the hero of DieGotterdammerung, is only the primo tenore robusto of an opera book, deferring his death, after he has been stabbed in the last act, tosing rapturous love strains to the heroine exactly like Edgardo inDonizetti's Lucia. In order to make him intelligible in the widersignificance which his joyous, fearless, conscienceless heroism soonassumed in Wagner's imagination, it was necessary to provide him with amuch vaster dramatic antagonist than the operatic villain Hagen. HenceWagner had to create Wotan as the anvil for Siegfried's hammer; andsince there was no room for Wotan in the original opera book, Wagnerhad to work back to a preliminary drama reaching primarily to the verybeginnings of human society. And since, on this world-embracing scale, it was clear that Siegfried must come into conflict with many baserand stupider forces than those lofty ones of supernatural religion andpolitical constitutionalism typified by Wotan and his wife Fricka, theseminor antagonists had to be dramatized also in the persons of Alberic, Mime, Fafnir, Loki, and the rest. None of these appear in Night Falls OnThe Gods save Alberic, whose weird dream-colloquy with Hagen, effectiveas it is, is as purely theatrical as the scene of the Ghost in Hamlet, or the statue in Don Giovanni. Cut the conference of the Norns and thevisit of Valtrauta to Brynhild out of Night Falls On The Gods, and thedrama remains coherent and complete without them. Retain them, and theplay becomes connected by conversational references with the three musicdramas; but the connection establishes no philosophic coherence, noreal identity between the operatic Brynhild of the Gibichung episode(presently to be related) and the daughter of Wotan and the FirstMother. 

THE LOVE PANACEA

We shall now find that at the point where The Ring changes frommusic drama into opera, it also ceases to be philosophic, and becomesdidactic. The philosophic part is a dramatic symbol of the world asWagner observed it. In the didactic part the philosophy degenerates intothe prescription of a romantic nostrum for all human ills. Wagner, onlymortal after all, succumbed to the panacea mania when his philosophy wasexhausted, like any of the rest of us. 

The panacea is by no means an original one. Wagner was anticipated inthe year 1819 by a young country gentleman from Sussex named Shelley, ina work of extraordinary artistic power and splendor. Prometheus Unboundis an English attempt at a Ring; and when it is taken into account thatthe author was only 27 whereas Wagner was 40 when he completed the poemof The Ring, our vulgar patriotism may find an envious satisfaction ininsisting upon the comparison. Both works set forth the same conflictbetween humanity and its gods and governments, issuing in the redemptionof man from their tyranny by the growth of his will into perfectstrength and self-confidence; and both finish by a lapse intopanacea-mongering didacticism by the holding up of Love as the remedyfor all evils and the solvent of all social difficulties. 

The differences between Prometheus Unbound and The Ring are asinteresting as the likenesses. Shelley, caught in the pugnacity of hisyouth and the first impetuosity of his prodigious artistic power bythe first fierce attack of the New Reformation, gave no quarter tothe antagonist of his hero. His Wotan, whom he calls Jupiter, is thealmighty fiend into whom the Englishman's God had degenerated during twocenturies of ignorant Bible worship and shameless commercialism. He isAlberic, Fafnir Loki and the ambitious side of Wotan all rolled intoone melodramatic demon who is finally torn from his throne and hurledshrieking into the abyss by a spirit representing that conceptionof Eternal Law which has been replaced since by the conception ofEvolution. Wagner, an older, more experienced man than the Shelley of1819, understood Wotan and pardoned him, separating him tenderly fromall the compromising alliances to which Shelley fiercely held him;making the truth and heroism which overthrow him the children of hisinmost heart; and representing him as finally acquiescing in and workingfor his own supersession and annihilation. Shelley, in his later works, is seen progressing towards the same tolerance, justice, and humilityof spirit, as he advanced towards the middle age he never reached. Butthere is no progress from Shelley to Wagner as regards the panacea, except that in Wagner there is a certain shadow of night and death comeon it: nay, even a clear opinion that the supreme good of love is thatit so completely satisfies the desire for life, that after it the Willto Live ceases to trouble us, and we are at last content to achieve thehighest happiness of death. 

This reduction of the panacea to absurdity was not forced upon Shelley, because the love which acts as a universal solvent in his PrometheusUnbound is a sentiment of affectionate benevolence which has nothing todo with sexual passion. It might, and in fact does exist in the absenceof any sexual interest whatever. The words mercy and kindness connote itless ambiguously than the word love. But Wagner sought always for somepoint of contact between his ideas and the physical senses, so thatpeople might not only think or imagine them in the eighteenth centuryfashion, but see them on the stage, hear them from the orchestra, andfeel them through the infection of passionate emotion. Dr. Johnsonkicking the stone to confute Berkeley is not more bent on common-senseconcreteness than Wagner: on all occasions he insists on the needfor sensuous apprehension to give reality to abstract comprehension, maintaining, in fact, that reality has no other meaning. Now he couldapply this process to poetic love only by following it back to itsalleged origin in sexual passion, the emotional phenomena of which hehas expressed in music with a frankness and forcible naturalism whichwould possibly have scandalized Shelley. The love duet in the first actof The Valkyries is brought to a point at which the conventions of oursociety demand the precipitate fall of the curtain; whilst the preludeto Tristan and Isolde is such an astonishingly intense and faithfultranslation into music of the emotions which accompany the union of apair of lovers, that it is questionable whether the great popularity ofthis piece at our orchestral concerts really means that our audiencesare entirely catholic in their respect for life in all its beneficentlycreative functions, or whether they simply enjoy the music withoutunderstanding it. 

But however offensive and inhuman may be the superstition which brandssuch exaltations of natural passion as shameful and indecorous, there isat least as much common sense in disparaging love as in setting it up asa panacea. Even the mercy and loving-kindness of Shelley do not hold goodas a universal law of conduct: Shelley himself makes extremely shortwork of Jupiter, just as Siegfried does of Fafnir, Mime, and Wotan; andthe fact that Prometheus is saved from doing the destructive part ofhis work by the intervention of that very nebulous personification ofEternity called Demogorgon, does not in the least save the situation, because, flatly, there is no such person as Demogorgon, and ifPrometheus does not pull down Jupiter himself, no one else will. Itwould be exasperating, if it were not so funny, to see these poetsleading their heroes through blood and destruction to the conclusionthat, as Browning's David puts it (David of all people!), "All's Love;yet all's Law. "

Certainly it is clear enough that such love as that implied bySiegfried's first taste of fear as he cuts through the mailed coat ofthe sleeping figure on the mountain, and discovers that it is a woman;by her fierce revolt against being touched by him when his terror givesway to ardor; by his manly transports of victory; and by the womanlymixture of rapture and horror with which she abandons herself to thepassion which has seized on them both, is an experience which it is muchbetter, like the vast majority of us, never to have passed through, thanto allow it to play more than a recreative holiday part in our lives. Itdid not play a very large part in Wagner's own laborious life, and doesnot occupy more than two scenes of The Ring. Tristan and Isolde, whollydevoted to it, is a poem of destruction and death. The Mastersingers, a work full of health, fun and happiness, contains not a single barof love music that can be described as passionate: the hero of it isa widower who cobbles shoes, writes verses, and contents himself withlooking on at the sweetheartings of his customers. Parsifal makes an endof it altogether. The truth is that the love panacea in Night Falls OnThe Gods and in the last act of Siegfried is a survival of the firstcrude operatic conception of the story, modified by an anticipation ofWagner's later, though not latest, conception of love as the fulfillerof our Will to Live and consequently our reconciler to night and death. 

NOT LOVE, BUT LIFE

The only faith which any reasonable disciple can gain from The Ring isnot in love, but in life itself as a tireless power which is continuallydriving onward and upward--not, please observe, being beckoned or drawnby Das Ewig Weibliche or any other external sentimentality, but growingfrom within, by its own inexplicable energy, into ever higher andhigher forms of organization, the strengths and the needs of which arecontinually superseding the institutions which were made to fit ourformer requirements. When your Bakoonins call out for the demolition ofall these venerable institutions, there is no need to fly into a panicand lock them up in prison whilst your parliament is bit by bit doingexactly what they advised you to do. When your Siegfrieds melt down theold weapons into new ones, and with disrespectful words chop in twainthe antiquated constable's staves in the hands of their elders, the endof the world is no nearer than it was before. If human nature, whichis the highest organization of life reached on this planet, is reallydegenerating, then human society will decay; and no panic-begotten penalmeasures can possibly save it: we must, like Prometheus, set to work tomake new men instead of vainly torturing old ones. On the other hand, ifthe energy of life is still carrying human nature to higher and higherlevels, then the more young people shock their elders and deride anddiscard their pet institutions the better for the hopes of the world, since the apparent growth of anarchy is only the measure of the rate ofimprovement. History, as far as we are capable of history (which isnot saying much as yet), shows that all changes from crudity of socialorganization to complexity, and from mechanical agencies in governmentto living ones, seem anarchic at first sight. No doubt it is naturalto a snail to think that any evolution which threatens to do away withshells will result in general death from exposure. Nevertheless, themost elaborately housed beings today are born not only without houses ontheir backs but without even fur or feathers to clothe them. 

ANARCHISM NO PANACEA

One word of warning to those who may find themselves attracted bySiegfried's Anarchism, or, if they prefer a term with more respectableassociations, his neo-Protestantism. Anarchism, as a panacea, is just ashopeless as any other panacea, and will still be so even if we breeda race of perfectly benevolent men. It is true that in the sphere ofthought, Anarchism is an inevitable condition of progressiveevolution. A nation without Freethinkers--that is, without intellectualAnarchists--will share the fate of China. It is also true that ourcriminal law, based on a conception of crime and punishment which isnothing but our vindictiveness and cruelty in a virtuous disguise, isan unmitigated and abominable nuisance, bound to be beaten out ofus finally by the mere weight of our experience of its evil anduselessness. But it will not be replaced by anarchy. Applied to theindustrial or political machinery of modern society, anarchy must alwaysreduce itself speedily to absurdity. Even the modified form of anarchyon which modern civilization is based: that is, the abandonmentof industry, in the name of individual liberty, to the upshot ofcompetition for personal gain between private capitalists, is adisastrous failure, and is, by the mere necessities of the case, givingway to ordered Socialism. For the economic rationale of this, I mustrefer disciples of Siegfried to a tract from my hand published by theFabian Society and entitled The Impossibilities of Anarchism, whichexplains why, owing to the physical constitution of our globe, societycannot effectively organize the production of its food, clothes andhousing, nor distribute them fairly and economically on any anarchicplan: nay, that without concerting our social action to a much higherdegree than we do at present we can never get rid of the wasteful andiniquitous welter of a little riches and a deal of poverty which currentpolitical humbug calls our prosperity and civilization. Liberty is anexcellent thing; but it cannot begin until society has paid its dailydebt to Nature by first earning its living. There is no liberty beforethat except the liberty to live at somebody else's expense, a libertymuch sought after nowadays, since it is the criterion of gentility, butnot wholesome from the point of view of the common weal. 

SIEGFRIED CONCLUDED

In returning now to the adventures of Siegfried there is little moreto be described except the finale of an opera. Siegfried, having passedunharmed through the fire, wakes Brynhild and goes through all thefancies and ecstasies of love at first sight in a duet which ends withan apostrophe to "leuchtende Liebe, lachender Tod!", which has beenromantically translated into "Love that illumines, laughing at Death, "whereas it really identifies enlightening love and laughing death asinvolving each other so closely as to be usually one and the same thing. 

NIGHT FALLS ON THE GODS

PROLOGUE

Die Gottrerdammerung begins with an elaborate prologue. The three Nornssit in the night on Brynhild's mountain top spinning their thread ofdestiny, and telling the story of Wotan's sacrifice of his eye, andof his breaking off a bough from the World Ash to make a heft for hisspear, also how the tree withered after suffering that violence. Theyhave also some fresher news to discuss. Wotan, on the breaking of hisspear by Siegfried, has called all his heroes to cut down the witheredWorld Ash and stack its faggots in a mighty pyre about Valhalla. Then, with his broken spear in his hand, he has seated himself in state inthe great hall, with the Gods and Heroes assembled about him as ifin council, solemnly waiting for the end. All this belongs to the oldlegendary materials with which Wagner began The Ring. 

The tale is broken by the thread snapping in the hands of the thirdNorn; for the hour has arrived when man has taken his destiny in hisown hands to shape it for himself, and no longer bows to circumstance, environment, necessity (which he now freely wills), and all the rest ofthe inevitables. So the Norns recognize that the world has no furtheruse for them, and sink into the earth to return to the First Mother. Then the day dawns; and Siegfried and Brynhild come, and have anotherduet. He gives her his ring; and she gives him her horse. Away then hegoes in search of more adventures; and she watches him from her craguntil he disappears. The curtain falls; but we can still hear thetrolling of his horn, and the merry clatter of his horse's shoestrotting gaily down the valley. The sound is lost in the grander rhythmof the Rhine as he reaches its banks. We hear again an echo of thelament of the Rhine maidens for the ravished gold; and then, finally, anew strain, which does not surge like the mighty flood of the river, buthas an unmistakable tramp of hardy men and a strong land flavor aboutit. And on this the opera curtain at last goes up--for please rememberthat all that has gone before is only the overture. 

The First Act

We now understand the new tramping strain. We are in the Rhineside hallof the Gibichungs, in the presence of King Gunther, his sister Gutrune, and Gunther's grim half brother Hagen, the villain of the piece. Guntheris a fool, and has for Hagen's intelligence the respect a fool alwayshas for the brains of a scoundrel. Feebly fishing for compliments, heappeals to Hagen to pronounce him a fine fellow and a glory to therace of Gibich. Hagen declares that it is impossible to contemplatehim without envy, but thinks it a pity that he has not yet found awife glorious enough for him. Gunther doubts whether so extraordinarya person can possibly exist. Hagen then tells him of Brynhild and herrampart of fire; also of Siegfried. Gunther takes this rather in badpart, since not only is he afraid of the fire, but Siegfried, accordingto Hagen, is not, and will therefore achieve this desirable matchhimself. But Hagen points out that since Siegfried is riding aboutin quest of adventures, he will certainly pay an early visit to therenowned chief of the Gibichungs. They can then give him a philtre whichwill make him fall in love with Gutrune and forget every other woman hehas yet seen. 

Gunther is transported with admiration of Hagen's cunning when he takesin this plan; and he has hardly assented to it when Siegfried, withoperatic opportuneness, drops in just as Hagen expected, and is dulydrugged into the heartiest love for Gutrune and total oblivion ofBrynhild and his own past. When Gunther declares his longing for thebride who lies inaccessible within a palisade of flame, Siegfried atonce offers to undertake the adventure for him. Hagen then explainsto both of them that Siegfried can, after braving the fire, appear toBrynhild in the semblance of Gunther through the magic of the wishingcap (or Tarnhelm, as it is called throughout The Ring), the use of whichSiegfried now learns for the first time. It is of course part of thebargain that Gunther shall give his sister to Siegfried in marriage. On that they swear blood-brotherhood; and at this opportunity the oldoperatic leaven breaks out amusingly in Wagner. With tremendous exordiumof brass, the tenor and baritone go at it with a will, showing offthe power of their voices, following each other in canonic imitation, singing together in thirds and sixths, and finishing with a luridunison, quite in the manner of Ruy Gomez and Ernani, or Othello andIago. Then without further ado Siegfried departs on his expedition, taking Gunther with him to the foot of the mountain, and leaving Hagento guard the hall and sing a very fine solo which has often figured inthe programs of the Richter concerts, explaining that his interest inthe affair is that Siegfried will bring back the Ring, and that he, Hagen, will presently contrive to possess himself of that Ring andbecome Plutonic master of the world. 

And now it will be asked how does Hagen know all about the Plutonicempire; and why was he able to tell Gunther about Brynhild andSiegfried, and to explain to Siegfried the trick of the Tarnhelm. Theexplanation is that though Hagen's mother was the mother of Gunther, hisfather was not the illustrious Gibich, but no less a person than our oldfriend Alberic, who, like Wotan, has begotten a son to do for him whathe cannot do for himself. 

In the above incidents, those gentle moralizers who find the seriousphilosophy of the music dramas too terrifying for them, may allegorizepleasingly on the philtre as the maddening chalice of passion which, once tasted, causes the respectable man to forget his lawfully weddedwife and plunge into adventures which eventually lead him headlong todestruction. 

We now come upon a last relic of the tragedy of Wotan. Returningto Brynhild's mountain, we find her visited by her sister ValkyrieValtrauta, who has witnessed Wotan's solemn preparations with terror. She repeats to Brynhild the account already given by the Norns. Clingingin anguish to Wotan's knees, she has heard him mutter that were the ringreturned to the daughters of the deep Rhine, both Gods and world wouldbe redeemed from that stage curse off Alberic's in The Rhine Gold. Onthis she has rushed on her warhorse through the air to beg Brynhild togive the Rhine back its ring. But this is asking Woman to give up lovefor the sake of Church and State. She declares that she will see themboth perish first; and Valtrauta returns to Valhalla in despair. WhilstBrynhild is watching the course of the black thundercloud that marks hersister's flight, the fires of Loki again flame high round the mountain;and the horn of Siegfried is heard as he makes his way through them. But the man who now appears wears the Tarnhelm: his voice is a strangevoice: his figure is the unknown one of the king of the Gibichungs. Hetears the ring from her finger, and, claiming her as his wife, drivesher into the cave without pity for her agony of horror, and sets Nothungbetween them in token of his loyalty to the friend he is impersonating. No explanation of this highway robbery of the ring is offered. Clearly, this Siegfried is not the Siegfried of the previous drama. 

The Second Act

In the second act we return to the hall of Gibich, where Hagen, in thelast hours of that night, still sits, his spear in his hand, and hisshield beside him. At his knees crouches a dwarfish spectre, his fatherAlberic, still full of his old grievances against Wotan, and urging hisson in his dreams to win back the ring for him. This Hagen swears todo; and as the apparition of his father vanishes, the sun rises andSiegfried suddenly comes from the river bank tucking into his belt theTarnhelm, which has transported him from the mountain like the enchantedcarpet of the Arabian tales. He describes his adventures to Gutruneuntil Gunther's boat is seen approaching, when Hagen seizes a cowhornand calls the tribesmen to welcome their chief and his bride. It is mostexhilarating, this colloquy with the startled and hastily armed clan, ending with a thundering chorus, the drums marking the time with mightypulses from dominant to tonic, much as Rossini would have made them doif he had been a pupil of Beethoven's. 

A terrible scene follows. Gunther leads his captive bride straight intothe presence of Siegfried, whom she claims as her husband by the ring, which she is astonished to see on his finger: Gunther, as she supposes, having torn it from her the night before. Turning on Gunther, she says"Since you took that ring from me, and married me with it, tell him ofyour right to it; and make him give it back to you. " Gunther stammers, "The ring! I gave him no ring--er--do you know him?" The rejoinder isobvious. "Then where are you hiding the ring that you had from me?"Gunther's confusion enlightens her; and she calls Siegfried tricksterand thief to his face. In vain he declares that he got the ring from nowoman, but from a dragon whom he slew; for he is manifestly puzzled;and she, seizing her opportunity, accuses him before the clan of havingplayed Gunther false with her. 

Hereupon we have another grandiose operatic oath, Siegfried attestinghis innocence on Hagen's spear, and Brynhild rushing to the footlightsand thrusting him aside to attest his guilt, whilst the clansmen callupon their gods to send down lightnings and silence the perjured. Thegods do not respond; and Siegfried, after whispering to Gunther that theTarnhelm seems to have been only half effectual after all, laughs hisway out of the general embarrassment and goes off merrily to prepare forhis wedding, with his arm round Gutrune's waist, followed by theclan. Gunther, Hagen and Brynhild are left together to plot operaticvengeance. Brynhild, it appears, has enchanted Siegfried in such afashion that no weapon can hurt him. She has, however, omitted toprotect his back, since it is impossible that he should ever turn thatto a foe. They agree accordingly that on the morrow a great hunt shalltake place, at which Hagen shall thrust his spear into the hero'svulnerable back. The blame is to be laid on the tusk of a wild boar. Gunther, being a fool, is remorseful about his oath of blood-brotherhoodand about his sister's bereavement, without having the strength of mindto prevent the murder. The three burst into a herculean trio, similarin conception to that of the three conspirators in Un Ballo in Maschera;and the act concludes with a joyous strain heralding the appearance ofSiegfried's wedding procession, with strewing of flowers, sacrificing tothe gods, and carrying bride and bridegroom in triumph. 

It will be seen that in this act we have lost all connection with theearlier drama. Brynhild is not only not the Brynhild of The Valkyries, she is the Hiordis of Ibsen, a majestically savage woman, in whomjealousy and revenge are intensified to heroic proportions. That is theinevitable theatrical treatment of the murderous heroine of the Saga. Ibsen's aim in The Vikings was purely theatrical, and not, as in hislater dramas, also philosophically symbolic. Wagner's aim in Siegfried'sDeath was equally theatrical, and not, as it afterwards became in thedramas of which Siegfried's antagonist Wotan is the hero, likewisephilosophically symbolic. The two master-dramatists therefore producepractically the same version of Brynhild. Thus on the second evening ofThe Ring we see Brynhild in the character of the truth-divining instinctin religion, cast into an enchanted slumber and surrounded by the firesof hell lest she should overthrow a Church corrupted by its alliancewith government. On the fourth evening, we find her swearing a maliciouslie to gratify her personal jealousy, and then plotting a treacherousmurder with a fool and a scoundrel. In the original draft of Siegfried'sDeath, the incongruity is carried still further by the conclusion, atwhich the dead Brynhild, restored to her godhead by Wotan, and again aValkyrie, carries the slain Siegfried to Valhalla to live there happilyever after with its pious heroes. 

As to Siegfried himself, he talks of women, both in this second act andthe next, with the air of a man of the world. "Their tantrums, " hesays, "are soon over. " Such speeches do not belong to the novice of thepreceding drama, but to the original Siegfried's Tod, with its leadingcharacters sketched on the ordinary romantic lines from the old Sagas, and not yet reminted as the original creations of Wagner's genius whoseacquaintance we have made on the two previous evenings. The verytitle "Siegfried's Death" survives as a strong theatrical point in thefollowing passage. Gunther, in his rage and despair, cries, "Save me, Hagen: save my honor and thy mother's who bore us both. " "Nothing cansave thee, " replies Hagen: "neither brain nor hand, but SIEGFRIED'SDEATH. " And Gunther echoes with a shudder, "SIEGFRIED'S DEATH!"

A WAGNERIAN NEWSPAPER CONTROVERSY

The devotion which Wagner's work inspires has been illustrated latelyin a public correspondence on this very point. A writer in The DailyTelegraph having commented on the falsehood uttered by Brynhild inaccusing Siegfried of having betrayed Gunther with her, a correspondencein defence of the beloved heroine was opened in The Daily Chronicle. Theimputation of falsehood to Brynhild was strongly resented and combated, in spite of the unanswerable evidence of the text. It was contended thatBrynhild's statement must be taken as establishing the fact that sheactually was ravished by somebody whom she believed to be Siegfried, and that since this somebody cannot have been Siegfried, he being asincapable of treachery to Gunther as she of falsehood, it must have beenGunther himself after a second exchange of personalities not mentionedin the text. The reply to this--if so obviously desperate a hypothesisneeds a reply--is that the text is perfectly explicit as to Siegfried, disguised as Gunther, passing the night with Brynhild with Nothungdividing them, and in the morning bringing her down the mountain THROUGHTHE FIRE (an impassable obstacle to Gunther) and there transportinghimself in a single breath, by the Tarnhelm's magic, back to the hallof the Gibichungs, leaving the real Gunther to bring Brynhild downthe river after him. One controversialist actually pleaded for theexpedition occupying two nights, on the second of which the allegedoutrage might have taken place. But the time is accounted for to thelast minute: it all takes place during the single night watch ofHagen. There is no possible way out of the plain fact that Brynhild'saccusation is to her own knowledge false; and the impossible ways justcited are only interesting as examples of the fanatical worshipwhich Wagner and his creations have been able to inspire in minds ofexceptional power and culture. 

More plausible was the line taken by those who admitted the falsehood. Their contention was that when Wotan deprived Brynhild of her Godhead, he also deprived her of her former high moral attributes; so thatSiegfried's kiss awakened an ordinary mortal jealous woman. But agoddess can become mortal and jealous without plunging at once intoperjury and murder. Besides, this explanation involves the sacrifice ofthe whole significance of the allegory, and the reduction of The Ring tothe plane of a child's conception of The Sleeping Beauty. Whoever doesnot understand that, in terms of The Ring philosophy, a change fromgodhead to humanity is a step higher and not a degradation, misses thewhole point of The Ring. It is precisely because the truthfulness ofBrynhild is proof against Wotan's spells that he has to contrive thefire palisade with Loki, to protect the fictions and conventions ofValhalla against her. 

The only tolerable view is the one supported by the known history ofThe Ring, and also, for musicians of sufficiently fine judgment, by theevidence of the scores; of which more anon. As a matter of fact Wagnerbegan, as I have said, with Siegfried's Death. Then, wanting to developthe idea of Siegfried as neo-Protestant, he went on to The YoungSiegfried. As a Protestant cannot be dramatically projected without apontifical antagonist. The Young Siegfried led to The Valkyries, andthat again to its preface The Rhine Gold (the preface is always writtenafter the book is finished). Finally, of course, the whole was revised. The revision, if carried out strictly, would have involved the cuttingout of Siegfried's Death, now become inconsistent and superfluous; andthat would have involved, in turn, the facing of the fact that The Ringwas no longer a Niblung epic, and really demanded modern costumes, tallhats for Tarnhelms, factories for Nibelheims, villas for Valhallas, andso on--in short, a complete confession of the extent to which the oldNiblung epic had become the merest pretext and name directory in thecourse of Wagner's travail. But, as Wagner's most eminent Englishinterpreter once put it to me at Bayreuth between the acts of NightFalls On The Gods, the master wanted to "Lohengrinize" again after hislong abstention from opera; and Siegfried's Death (first sketched in1848, the year before the rising in Dresden and the subsequent eventswhich so deepened Wagner's sense of life and the seriousness of art)gave him exactly the libretto he required for that outbreak of theold operatic Adam in him. So he changed it into Die Gotterdammerung, retaining the traditional plot of murder and jealousy, and with it, necessarily, his original second act, in spite of the incongruity of itsSiegfried and Brynhild with the Siegfried and Brynhild of the allegory. As to the legendary matter about the world-ash and the destruction ofValhalla by Loki, it fitted in well enough; for though, allegorically, the blow by which Siegfried breaks the god's spear is the end of Wotanand of Valhalla, those who do not see the allegory, and take the storyliterally, like children, are sure to ask what becomes of Wotan afterSiegfried gets past him up the mountain; and to this question the oldtale told in Night Falls On The Gods is as good an answer as another. The very senselessness of the scenes of the Norns and of Valtrauta inrelation to the three foregoing dramas, gives them a highly effectiveair of mystery; and no one ventures to challenge their consequentiality, because we are all more apt to pretend to understand great works of artthan to confess that the meaning (if any) has escaped us. Valtrauta, however, betrays her irrelevance by explaining that the gods canbe saved by the restoration of the ring to the Rhine maidens. This, considered as part of the previous allegory, is nonsense; so that eventhis scene, which has a more plausible air of organic connection withThe Valkyries than any other in Night Falls On The Gods, is as clearlypart of a different and earlier conception as the episode whichconcludes it, in which Siegfried actually robs Brynhild of her ring, though he has no recollection of having given it to her. Night Falls OnThe Gods, in fact, was not even revised into any real coherence with theworld-poem which sprang from it; and that is the authentic solution ofall the controversies which have arisen over it. 

The Third Act

The hunting party comes off duly. Siegfried strays from it and meetsthe Rhine maidens, who almost succeed in coaxing the ring from him. Hepretends to be afraid of his wife; and they chaff him as to her beatinghim and so forth; but when they add that the ring is accursed and willbring death upon him, he discloses to them, as unconsciously as JuliusCaesar disclosed it long ago, that secret of heroism, never to let yourlife be shaped by fear of its end. [*] So he keeps the ring; and they leavehim to his fate. The hunting party now finds him; and they all sitdown together to make a meal by the river side, Siegfried telling themmeanwhile the story of his adventures. When he approaches the subject ofBrynhild, as to whom his memory is a blank, Hagen pours an antidoteto the love philtre into his drinking horn, whereupon, his memoryreturning, he proceeds to narrate the incident of the fiery mountain, toGunther's intense mortification. Hagen then plunges his spear into theback of Siegfried, who falls dead on his shield, but gets up again, after the old operatic custom, to sing about thirty bars to his lovebefore allowing himself to be finally carried off to the strains of thefamous Trauermarsch. 

 * "We must learn to die, and to die in the fullest sense of the word. The fear of the end is the source of all lovelessness; and this fear is generated only when love begins to wane. How came it that this loves the highest blessedness to all things living, was so far lost sight of by the human race that at last it came to this: all that mankind did, ordered, and established, was conceived only in fear of the end? My poem sets this forth. "--Wagner to Roeckel, 25th Jan. 1854. 

The scene then changes to the hall of the Gibichungs by the Rhine. It isnight; and Gutrune, unable to sleep, and haunted by all sorts of vagueterrors, is waiting for the return of her husband, and wonderingwhether a ghostly figure she has seen gliding down to the river bank isBrynhild, whose room is empty. Then comes the cry of Hagen, returningwith the hunting party to announce the death of Siegfried by the tusk ofa wild boar. But Gutrune divines the truth; and Hagen does not deny it. Siegfried's body is brought in; Gunther claims the ring; Hagen willnot suffer him to take it; they fight; and Gunther is slain. Hagen thenattempts to take it; but the dead man's hand closes on it and raisesitself threateningly. Then Brynhild comes; and a funeral pyre is raisedwhilst she declaims a prolonged scene, extremely moving and imposing, but yielding nothing to resolute intellectual criticism except a verypowerful and elevated exploitation of theatrical pathos, psychologicallyidentical with the scene of Cleopatra and the dead Antony inShakespeare's tragedy. Finally she flings a torch into the pyre, andrides her war-horse into the flames. The hall of the Gibichungs catchesfire, as most halls would were a cremation attempted in the middleof the floor (I permit myself this gibe purposely to emphasize theexcessive artificiality of the scene); but the Rhine overflows itsbanks to allow the three Rhine maidens to take the ring from Siegfried'sfinger, incidentally extinguishing the conflagration as it does so. Hagen attempts to snatch the ring from the maidens, who promptly drownhim; and in the distant heavens the Gods and their castle are seenperishing in the fires of Loki as the curtain falls. 

FORGOTTEN ERE FINISHED

In all this, it will be observed, there is nothing new. The musicalfabric is enormously elaborate and gorgeous; but you cannot say, as youmust in witnessing The Rhine Gold, The Valkyries, and the first two actsof Siegfried, that you have never seen anything like it before, and thatthe inspiration is entirely original. Not only the action, but mostof the poetry, might conceivably belong to an Elizabethan drama. Thesituation of Cleopatra and Antony is unconsciously reproduced withoutbeing bettered, or even equalled in point of majesty and musicalexpression. The loss of all simplicity and dignity, the impossibilityof any credible scenic presentation of the incidents, and the extremestaginess of the conventions by which these impossibilities are gotover, are no doubt covered from the popular eye by the overwhelmingprestige of Die Gotterdammerung as part of so great a work as The Ring, and by the extraordinary storm of emotion and excitement which the musickeeps up. But the very qualities that intoxicate the novice in musicenlighten the adept. In spite of the fulness of the composer's technicalaccomplishment, the finished style and effortless mastery of harmony andinstrumentation displayed, there is not a bar in the work which movesus as the same themes moved us in The Valkyries, nor is anything butexternal splendor added to the life and humor of Siegfried. 

In the original poem, Brynhild delays her self-immolation on the pyre ofSiegfried to read the assembled choristers a homily on the efficacy ofthe Love panacea. "My holiest wisdom's hoard, " she says, "now I makeknown to the world. I believe not in property, nor money, nor godliness, nor hearth and high place, nor pomp and peerage, nor contract andcustom, but in Love. Let that only prevail; and ye shall be blest inweal or woe. " Here the repudiations still smack of Bakoonin; but thesaviour is no longer the volition of the full-grown spirit of Man, theFree Willer of Necessity, sword in hand, but simply Love, and not evenShelleyan love, but vehement sexual passion. It is highly significantof the extent to which this uxorious commonplace lost its hold of Wagner(after disturbing his conscience, as he confesses to Roeckel, for years)that it disappears in the full score of Night Falls On The Gods, whichwas not completed until he was on the verge of producing Parsifal, twenty years after the publication of the poem. He cut the homily out, and composed the music of the final scene with a flagrant recklessnessof the old intention. The rigorous logic with which representativemusical themes are employed in the earlier dramas is here abandonedwithout scruple; and for the main theme at the conclusion he selects arapturous passage sung by Sieglinda in the third act of The Valkyrieswhen Brynhild inspires her with a sense of her high destiny as themother of the unborn hero. There is no dramatic logic whatever in therecurrence of this theme to express the transport in which Brynhildimmolates herself. There is of course an excuse for it, inasmuch as bothwomen have an impulse of self-sacrifice for the sake of Siegfried; butthis is really hardly more than an excuse; since the Valhalla thememight be attached to Alberic on the no worse ground that both he andWotan are inspired by ambition, and that the ambition has the sameobject, the possession of the ring. The common sense of the matter isthat the only themes which had fully retained their significance inWagner's memory at the period of the composition of Night Falls On TheGods are those which are mere labels of external features, such asthe Dragon, the Fire, the Water and so on. This particular theme ofSieglinda's is, in truth, of no great musical merit: it might easilybe the pet climax of a popular sentimental ballad: in fact, the gushingeffect which is its sole valuable quality is so cheaply attained thatit is hardly going too far to call it the most trumpery phrase in theentire tetralogy. Yet, since it undoubtedly does gush very emphatically, Wagner chose, for convenience' sake, to work up this final scene with itrather than with the more distinguished, elaborate and beautiful themesconnected with the love of Brynhild and Siegfried. 

He would certainly not have thought this a matter of no consequence hadhe finished the whole work ten years earlier. It must always be bornein mind that the poem of The Ring was complete and printed in 1853, and represents the sociological ideas which, after germinating in theEuropean atmosphere for many years, had been brought home to Wagner, who was intensely susceptible to such ideas, by the crash of 1849 atDresden. Now no man whose mind is alive and active, as Wagner's was tothe day of his death, can keep his political and spiritual opinions, much less his philosophic consciousness, at a standstill for quarterof a century until he finishes an orchestral score. When Wagner firstsketched Night Falls On The Gods he was 35. When he finished the scorefor the first Bayreuth festival in 1876 he had turned 60. No wonder hehad lost his old grip of it and left it behind him. He eventampered with The Rhine Gold for the sake of theatrical effect whenstage-managing it, making Wotan pick up and brandish a sword to givevisible point to his sudden inspiration as to the raising up of ahero. The sword had first to be discovered by Fafnir among the Niblungtreasures and thrown away by him as useless. There is no sense in thisdevice; and its adoption shows the same recklessness as to the originalintention which we find in the music of the last act of The Dusk of theGods. [*]

 * Die Gotterdammerung means literally Godsgloaming. The English versions of the opera are usually called The Dusk of the Gods, or The Twilight of the Gods. I have purposely introduced the ordinary title in the sentence above for the reader's information. 

WHY HE CHANGED HIS MIND

Wagner, however, was not the man to allow his grip of a greatphilosophic theme to slacken even in twenty-five years if the themestill held good as a theory of actual life. If the history of Germanyfrom 1849 to 1876 had been the history of Siegfried and Wotan transposedinto the key of actual life Night Falls On The Gods would have been thelogical consummation of Das Rheingold and The Valkyrie instead of theoperatic anachronism it actually is. 

But, as a matter of fact, Siegfried did not succeed and Bismarck did. Roeckel was a prisoner whose imprisonment made no difference; Bakooninbroke up, not Walhall, but the International, which ended in anundignified quarrel between him and Karl Marx. The Siegfrieds of 1848were hopeless political failures, whereas the Wotans and Alberics andLokis were conspicuous political successes. Even the Mimes held their ownas against Siegfried. With the single exception of Ferdinand Lassalle, there was no revolutionary leader who was not an obvious impossibilistin practical politics; and Lassalle got himself killed in a romanticand quite indefensible duel after wrecking his health in a titanicoratorical campaign which convinced him that the great majority of theworking classes were not ready to join him, and that the minority whowere ready did not understand him. The International, founded in 1861by Karl Marx in London, and mistaken for several years by nervousnewspapers for a red spectre, was really only a turnip ghost. Itachieved some beginnings of International Trade Unionism by inducingEnglish workmen to send money to support strikes on the continent, andrecalling English workers who had been taken across the North Sea todefeat such strikes; but on its revolutionary socialistic side it was aromantic figment. The suppression of the Paris Commune, one of themost tragic examples in history of the pitilessness with which capablepractical administrators and soldiers are forced by the pressure offacts to destroy romantic amateurs and theatrical dreamers, made an endof melodramatic Socialism. It was as easy for Marx to hold up Thiersas the most execrable of living scoundrels and to put upon Gallifet thebrand that still makes him impossible in French politics as it was forVictor Hugo to bombard Napoleon III from his paper battery in Jersey. It was also easy to hold up Felix Pyat and Delescluze as men of muchloftier ideals than Thiers and Gallifet; but the one fact that could notbe denied was that when it came to actual shooting, it was Gallifet whogot Delescluze shot and not Delescluze who got Gallifet shot, and thatwhen it came to administering the affairs of France, Thiers could inone way or another get it done, whilst Pyat could neither do it nor stoptalking and allow somebody else to do it. True, the penalty of followingThiers was to be exploited by the landlord and capitalist; but then thepenalty of following Pyat was to get shot like a mad dog, or at best getsent to New Caledonia, quite unnecessarily and uselessly. 

To put it in terms of Wagner's allegory, Alberic had got the ring backagain and was marrying into the best Walhall families with it. He hadthought better of his old threat to dethrone Wotan and Loki. He hadfound that Nibelheim was a very gloomy place and that if he wanted tolive handsomely and safely, he must not only allow Wotan and Loki toorganize society for him, but pay them very handsomely for doing it. Hewanted splendor, military glory, loyalty, enthusiasm, and patriotism;and his greed and gluttony were wholly unable to create them, whereasWotan and Loki carried them all to a triumphant climax in Germany in1871, when Wagner himself celebrated the event with his Kaisermarsch, which sounded much more convincing than the Marseillaise or theCarmagnole. 

How, after the Kaisermarsch, could Wagner go back to his idealization ofSiegfried in 1853? How could he believe seriously in Siegfried slayingthe dragon and charging through the mountain fire, when the immediateforeground was occupied by the Hotel de Ville with Felix Pyat endlesslydiscussing the principles of Socialism whilst the shells of Thiers werealready battering the Arc de Triomphe, and ripping up the pavement ofthe Champs Elysees? Is it not clear that things had taken an altogetherunexpected turn--that although the Ring may, like the famous CommunistManifesto of Marx and Engels, be an inspired guest at the historic lawsand predestined end of our capitalistic-theocratic epoch, yetWagner, like Marx, was too inexperienced in technical governmentand administration and too melodramatic in his hero-contra-villainconception of the class struggle, to foresee the actual process by whichhis generalization would work out, or the part to be played in it by theclasses involved?

Let us go back for a moment to the point at which the Niblung legendfirst becomes irreconcilable with Wagner's allegory. Fafnir in theallegory becomes a capitalist; but Fafnir in the legend is a merehoarder. His gold does not bring him in any revenue. It does not evensupport him: he has to go out and forage for food and drink. In fact, he is on the way to his drinking-pool when Siegfried kills him. AndSiegfried himself has no more use for gold than Fafnir: the onlydifference between them in this respect is that Siegfried does not wastehis time in watching a barren treasure that is no use to him, whereasFafnir sacrifices his humanity and his life merely to prevent anybodyelse getting it. This contrast is true to human nature; but it shuntsThe Ring drama off the economic lines of the allegory. In real life, Fafnir is not a miser: he seeks dividends, comfortable life, andadmission to the circles of Wotan and Loki. His only means of procuringthese is to restore the gold to Alberic in exchange for scrip inAlberic's enterprises. Thus fortified with capital, Alberic exploits hisfellow dwarfs as before, and also exploits Fafnir's fellow giants whohave no capital. What is more, the toil, forethought and self-controlwhich the exploitation involves, and the self-respect and social esteemwhich its success wins, effect an improvement in Alberic's own characterwhich neither Marx nor Wagner appear to have foreseen. He discovers thatto be a dull, greedy, narrow-minded money-grubber is not the way to makemoney on a large scale; for though greed may suffice to turn tensinto hundreds and even hundreds into thousands, to turn thousands intohundreds of thousands requires magnanimity and a will to power ratherthan to pelf. And to turn thousands into millions, Alberic must makehimself an earthly providence for masses of workmen: he must createtowns and govern markets. In the meantime, Fafnir, wallowing individends which he has done nothing to earn, may rot, intellectuallyand morally, from mere disuse of his energies and lack of incentive toexcel; but the more imbecile he becomes, the more dependent he is uponAlberic, and the more the responsibility of keeping the world-machine inworking order falls upon Alberic. Consequently, though Alberic in 1850may have been merely the vulgar Manchester Factory-owner portrayed byEngels, in 1876 he was well on the way towards becoming Krupp of Essenor Carnegie of Homestead. 

Now, without exaggerating the virtues of these gentlemen, it willbe conceded by everybody except perhaps those veteran GermanSocial-Democrats who have made a cult of obsolescence under the nameof Marxism, that the modern entrepreneur is not to be displaced anddismissed so lightly as Alberic is dismissed in The Ring. They arereally the masters of the whole situation. Wotan is hardly lessdependent on them than Fafnir; the War-Lord visits their work, acclaimsthem in stirring speeches, and casts down their enemies; whilst Lokimakes commercial treaties for them and subjects all his diplomacy totheir approval. 

The end cannot come until Siegfried learns Alberic's trade and shouldersAlberic's burden. Not having as yet done so, he is still completelymastered by Alberic. He does not even rebel against him except when heis too stupid and ignorant, or too romantically impracticable, to seethat Alberic's work, like Wotan's work and Loki's work, is necessarywork, and that therefore Alberic can never be superseded by a warrior, but only by a capable man of business who is prepared to continue hiswork without a day's intermission. Even though the proletarians of alllands were to become "class conscious, " and obey the call of Marx byuniting to carry the Class struggle to a proletarian victory inwhich all capital should become common property, and all Monarchs, Millionaires, Landlords and Capitalists become common citizens, thetriumphant proletarians would have either to starve in Anarchy the nextday or else do the political and industrial work which is now beingdone tant bien que mal by our Romanoffs, our Hohenzollerns, our Krupps, Carnegies, Levers, Pierpont Morgans, and their political retinues. Andin the meantime these magnates must defend their power and propertywith all their might against the revolutionary forces until theseforces become positive, executive, administrative forces, instead of theconspiracies of protesting, moralizing, virtuously indignant amateurswho mistook Marx for a man of affairs and Thiers for a stage villain. But all this represents a development of which one gathers no forecastfrom Wagner or Marx. Both of them prophesied the end of our epoch, and, so far as one can guess, prophesied it rightly. They also brought itsindustrial history up to the year 1848 far more penetratingly than theacademic historians of their time. But they broke off there and lefta void between 1848 and the end, in which we, who have to live in thatperiod, get no guidance from them. The Marxists wandered for yearsin this void, striving, with fanatical superstition, to suppress theRevisionists who, facing the fact that the Social-Democratic party waslost, were trying to find the path by the light of contemporary historyinstead of vainly consulting the oracle in the pages of Das Kapital. Marx himself was too simpleminded a recluse and too full of thevalidity of his remoter generalizations, and the way in which the rapidintegration of capital in Trusts and Kartels was confirming them, to beconscious of the void himself. 

Wagner, on the other hand, was comparatively a practical man. It ispossible to learn more of the world by producing a single opera, or evenconducting a single orchestral rehearsal, than by ten years reading inthe Library of the British Museum. Wagner must have learnt between DasRheingold and the Kaisermarsch that there are yet several dramas to beinterpolated in The Ring after The Valkyries before the allegory cantell the whole story, and that the first of these interpolated dramaswill be much more like a revised Rienzi than like Siegfried. Ifanyone doubts the extent to which Wagner's eyes had been opened to theadministrative-childishness and romantic conceit of the heroes ofthe revolutionary generation that served its apprenticeship on thebarricades of 1848-9, and perished on those of 1870 under Thiers'mitrailleuses, let him read Eine Kapitulation, that scandalous burlesquein which the poet and composer of Siegfried, with the levity of aschoolboy, mocked the French republicans who were doing in 1871 what hehimself was exiled for doing in 1849. He had set the enthusiasm of theDresden Revolution to his own greatest music; but he set the enthusiasmof twenty years later in derision to the music of Rossini. There isno mistaking the tune he meant to suggest by his doggerel of Republik, Republik, Republik-lik-lik. The Overture to William Tell is there asplainly as if it were noted down in full score. 

In the case of such a man as Wagner, you cannot explain this volte-faceas mere jingoism produced by Germany's overwhelming victory in theFranco-Prussian War, nor as personal spite against the Parisians for theTannhauser fiasco. Wagner had more cause for personal spite againsthis own countrymen than he ever had against the French. No doubt hisoutburst gratified the pettier feelings which great men have in commonwith small ones; but he was not a man to indulge in such gratifications, or indeed to feel them as gratifications, if he had not arrived at aprofound philosophical contempt for the inadequacy of the men who weretrying to wield Nothung, and who had done less work for Wagner's ownart than a single German King and he, too, only a mad one. Wagner had bythat time done too much himself not to know that the world is ruled bydeeds, not by good intentions, and that one efficient sinner is worthten futile saints and martyrs. 

I need not elaborate the point further in these pages. Like all men ofgenius, Wagner had exceptional sincerity, exceptional respect for facts, exceptional freedom from the hypnotic influence of sensational popularmovements, exceptional sense of the realities of political power asdistinguished from the presences and idolatries behind which the realmasters of modern States pull their wires and train their guns. When hescored Night Falls On The Gods, he had accepted the failure of Siegfriedand the triumph of the Wotan-Loki-Alberic-trinity as a fact. He hadgiven up dreaming of heroes, heroines, and final solutions, and hadconceived a new protagonist in Parsifal, whom he announced, not asa hero, but as a fool; who was armed, not with a sword which cutirresistibly, but with a spear which he held only on condition that hedid not use it; and who instead of exulting in the slaughter of adragon was frightfully ashamed of having shot a swan. The change in theconception of the Deliverer could hardly be more complete. It reflectsthe change which took place in Wagner's mind between the compositionof The Rhine Gold and Night Falls On The Gods; and it explains whyhe dropped The Ring allegory and fell back on the status quo ante byLohengrinizing. 

If you ask why he did not throw Siegfried into the waste paper basketand rewrite The Ring from The Valkyries onwards, one must reply that thetime had not come for such a feat. Neither Wagner nor anyone else thenliving knew enough to achieve it. Besides, what he had already done hadreached the limit of even his immense energy and perseverance and sohe did the best he could with the unfinished and for ever unfinishablework, rounding it off with an opera much as Rossini rounded off some ofhis religious compositions with a galop. Only, Rossini on such occasionswrote in his score "Excusez du peu, " but Wagner left us to find out thechange for ourselves, perhaps to test how far we had really followed hismeaning. 

WAGNER'S OWN EXPLANATION

And now, having given my explanation of The Ring, can I give Wagner'sexplanation of it? If I could (and I can) I should not by any meansaccept it as conclusive. Nearly half a century has passed since thetetralogy was written; and in that time the purposes of many halfinstinctive acts of genius have become clearer to the common man thanthey were to the doers. Some years ago, in the course of an explanationof Ibsen's plays, I pointed out that it was by no means certain or evenlikely that Ibsen was as definitely conscious of his thesis as I. Allthe stupid people, and some critics who, though not stupid, had notthemselves written what the Germans call "tendency" works, saw nothingin this but a fantastic affectation of the extravagant self-conceitof knowing more about Ibsen than Ibsen himself. Fortunately, in takingexactly the same position now with regard to Wagner, I can claim his ownauthority to support me. "How, " he wrote to Roeckel on the 23rd. August1856, "can an artist expect that what he has felt intuitively shouldbe perfectly realized by others, seeing that he himself feels in thepresence of his work, if it is true Art, that he is confronted by ariddle, about which he, too, might have illusions, just as anothermight?"

The truth is, we are apt to deify men of genius, exactly as we deify thecreative force of the universe, by attributing to logical design whatis the result of blind instinct. What Wagner meant by "true Art" is theoperation of the artist's instinct, which is just as blind as any otherinstinct. Mozart, asked for an explanation of his works, said frankly"How do I know?" Wagner, being a philosopher and critic as well asa composer, was always looking for moral explanations of what he hadcreated and he hit on several very striking ones, all different. In thesame way one can conceive Henry the Eighth speculating very brilliantlyabout the circulation of his own blood without getting as near the truthas Harvey did long after his death. 

None the less, Wagner's own explanations are of exceptional interest. Tobegin with, there is a considerable portion of The Ring, especially theportraiture of our capitalistic industrial system from the socialist'spoint of view in the slavery of the Niblungs and the tyranny of Alberic, which is unmistakable, as it dramatizes that portion of human activitywhich lies well within the territory covered by our intellectualconsciousness. All this is concrete Home Office business, so to speak:its meaning was as clear to Wagner as it is to us. Not so that partof the work which deals with the destiny of Wotan. And here, as ithappened, Wagner's recollection of what he had been driving at wascompletely upset by his discovery, soon after the completion of TheRing poem, of Schopenhaur's famous treatise "The World as Will andRepresentation. " So obsessed did he become with this masterpiece ofphilosophic art that he declared that it contained the intellectualdemonstration of the conflict of human forces which he himself haddemonstrated artistically in his great poem. "I must confess, " he writesto Roeckel, "to having arrived at a clear understanding of my ownworks of art through the help of another, who has provided me with thereasoned conceptions corresponding to my intuitive principles. "

Schopenhaur, however, had done nothing of the sort. Wagner'sdetermination to prove that he had been a Schopenhaurite all alongwithout knowing it only shows how completely the fascination of thegreat treatise on The Will had run away with his memory. It is easy tosee how this happened. Wagner says of himself that "seldom has theretaken place in the soul of one and the same man so profound a divisionand estrangement between the intuitive or impulsive part of his natureand his consciously or reasonably formed ideas. " And since Schopenhaur'sgreat contribution to modern thought was to educate us into clearconsciousness of this distinction--a distinction familiar, in a fancifulway, to the Ages of Faith and Art before the Renascence, but afterwardsswamped in the Rationalism of that movement--it was inevitable thatWagner should jump at Schopenhaur's metaphysiology (I use a word lesslikely to be mistaken than metaphysics) as the very thing for him. Butmetaphysiology is one thing, political philosophy another. The politicalphilosophy of Siegfried is exactly contrary to the political philosophyof Schopenhaur, although the same clear metaphysiological distinctionbetween the instinctive part of man (his Will) and his reasoning faculty(dramatized in The Ring as Loki) is insisted on in both. The differenceis that to Schopenhaur the Will is the universal tormentor of man, theauthor of that great evil, Life; whilst reason is the divine gift thatis finally to overcome this life-creating will and lead, through itsabnegation, to cessation and peace, annihilation and Nirvana. This isthe doctrine of Pessimism. Now Wagner was, when he wrote The Ring, amost sanguine revolutionary Meliorist, contemptuous of the reasoningfaculty, which he typified in the shifty, unreal, delusive Loki, andfull of faith in the life-giving Will, which he typified in the gloriousSiegfried. Not until he read Schopenhaur did he become bent on provingthat he had always been a Pessimist at heart, and that Loki was the mostsensible and worthy adviser of Wotan in The Rhine Gold. 

Sometimes he faces the change in his opinions frankly enough. "MyNiblung drama, " he writes to Roeckel, "had taken form at a time when Ihad built up with my reason an optimistic world on Hellenic principles, believing that nothing was necessary for the realization of such a worldbut that men should wish it. I ingeniously set aside-the problem whythey did not wish it. I remember that it was with this definitecreative purpose that I conceived the personality of Siegfried, with theintention of representing an existence free from pain. " But he appealsto his earlier works to show that behind all these artificial optimisticideas there was always with him an intuition of "the sublime tragedy ofrenunciation, the negation of the will. " In trying to explain this, heis full of ideas philosophically, and full of the most amusingcontradictions personally. Optimism, as an accidental excursion into thebarren paths of reason on his own part, he calls "Hellenic. " In othershe denounces it as rank Judaism, the Jew having at that time become forhim the whipping boy for all modern humanity. In a letter from Londonhe expounds Schopenhaur to Roeckel with enthusiasm, preaching therenunciation of the Will to Live as the redemption from all error andvain pursuits: in the next letter he resumes the subject with unabatedinterest, and finishes by mentioning that on leaving London he went toGeneva and underwent "a most beneficial course of hydropathy. " Sevenmonths before this he had written as follows: "Believe me, I too wasonce possessed by the idea of a country life. In order to become aradically healthy human being, I went two years ago to a HydropathicEstablishment, prepared to give up Art and everything if I could oncemore become a child of Nature. But, my good friend, I was obliged tolaugh at my own naivete when I found myself almost going mad. None ofus will reach the promised land: we shall all die in the wilderness. Intellect is, as some one has said, a sort of disease: it is incurable. "

Roeckel knew his man of old, and evidently pressed him for explanationsof the inconsistencies of The Ring with Night Falls On The Gods. Wagnerdefended himself with unfailing cleverness and occasional petulances, ranging from such pleas as "I believe a true instinct has kept me from atoo great definiteness; for it has been borne in on me that an absolutedisclosure of the intention disturbs true insight, " to a volley ofexplanations and commentaries on the explanations. He gets excited andannoyed because Roeckel will not admire the Brynhild of Night Falls OnThe Gods; re-invents the Tarnhelm scene; and finally, the case beingdesperate, exclaims, "It is wrong of you to challenge me to explain itin words: you must feel that something is being enacted that is not tobe expressed in mere words. "

THE PESSIMIST AS AMORIST

Sometimes he gets very far away from Pessimism indeed, and recommendsRoeckel to solace his captivity, not by conquering the will to live atliberty, but by "the inspiring influences of the Beautiful. " The nextmoment he throws over even Art for Life. "Where life ends, " he says, very wittily, "Art begins. In youth we turn to Art, we know not why; andonly when we have gone through with Art and come out on the other side, we learn to our cost that we have missed Life itself. " His only comfortis that he is beloved. And on the subject of love he lets himself loosein a manner that would have roused the bitterest scorn in Schopenhaur, though, as we have seen (Love Panacea), it is highly characteristic ofWagner. "Love in its most perfect reality, " he says, "is only possiblebetween the sexes: it is only as man and woman that human beings cantruly love. Every other manifestation of love can be traced back to thatone absorbingly real feeling, of which all other affections are but anemanation, a connection, or an imitation. It is an error to look on thisas only one of the forms in which love is revealed, as if there wereother forms coequal with it, or even superior to it. He who after themanner of metaphysicians prefers UNREALITY to REALITY, and derives theconcrete from the abstract--in short, puts the word before the fact--maybe right in esteeming the idea of love as higher than the expressionof love, and may affirm that actual love made manifest in feelingis nothing but the outward and visible sign of a pre-existent, non-sensuous, abstract love; and he will do well to despise thatsensuous function in general. In any case it were safe to bet that sucha man had never loved or been loved as human beings can love, or hewould have understood that in despising this feeling, what he condemnedwas its sensual expression, the outcome of man's animal nature, andnot true human love. The highest satisfaction and expression of theindividual is only to be found in his complete absorption, and that isonly possible through love. Now a human being is both MAN and WOMAN: itis only when these two are united that the real human being exists; andthus it is only by love that man and woman attain to the full measureof humanity. But when nowadays we talk of a human being, such heartlessblockheads are we that quite involuntarily we only think of man. It isonly in the union of man and woman by love (sensuous and supersensuous)that the human being exists; and as the human being cannot rise to theconception of anything higher than his own existence--his own being--sothe transcendent act of his life is this consummation of his humanitythrough love. "

It is clear after this utterance from the would-be Schopenhaurian, thatWagner's explanations of his works for the most part explain nothing butthe mood in which he happened to be on the day he advanced them, orthe train of thought suggested to his very susceptible imagination andactive mind by the points raised by his questioner. Especially in hisprivate letters, where his outpourings are modified by his dramaticconsciousness of the personality of his correspondent, do we find himtaking all manner of positions, and putting forward all sorts of caseswhich must be taken as clever and suggestive special pleadings, andnot as serious and permanent expositions of his works. These works mustspeak for themselves: if The Ring says one thing, and a letter writtenafterwards says that it said something else, The Ring must be taken toconfute the letter just as conclusively as if the two had been writtenby different hands. However, nobody fairly well acquainted with Wagner'sutterances as a whole will find any unaccountable contradictions inthem. As in all men of his type, our manifold nature was so marked inhim that he was like several different men rolled into one. When he hadexhausted himself in the character of the most pugnacious, aggressive, and sanguine of reformers, he rested himself as a Pessimist andNirvanist. In The Ring the quietism of Brynhild's "Rest, rest, thou God"is sublime in its deep conviction; but you have only to turn back thepages to find the irrepressible bustle of Siegfried and the revelry ofthe clansmen expressed with equal zest. Wagner was not a Schopenhauriteevery day in the week, nor even a Wagnerite. His mind changes asoften as his mood. On Monday nothing will ever induce him to return toquilldriving: on Tuesday he begins a new pamphlet. On Wednesday heis impatient of the misapprehensions of people who cannot see howimpossible it is for him to preside as a conductor over platformperformances of fragments of his works, which can only be understoodwhen presented strictly according to his intention on the stage: onThursday he gets up a concert of Wagnerian selections, and when it isover writes to his friends describing how profoundly both bandsmen andaudience were impressed. On Friday he exults in the self-assertionof Siegfried's will against all moral ordinances, and is full of arevolutionary sense of "the universal law of change and renewal": onSaturday he has an attack of holiness, and asks, "Can you conceive amoral action of which the root idea is not renunciation?" In short, Wagner can be quoted against himself almost without limit, much asBeethoven's adagios could be quoted against his scherzos if a disputearose between two fools as to whether he was a melancholy man or a merryone. 

THE MUSIC OF THE RING

THE REPRESENTATIVE THEMES

To be able to follow the music of The Ring, all that is necessary is tobecome familiar enough with the brief musical phrases out of which itis built to recognize them and attach a certain definite significanceto them, exactly as any ordinary Englishman recognizes and attaches adefinite significance to the opening bars of God Save the King. There isno difficulty here: every soldier is expected to learn and distinguishbetween different bugle calls and trumpet calls; and anyone who cando this can learn and distinguish between the representative themes or"leading motives" (Leitmotifs) of The Ring. They are the easier to learnbecause they are repeated again and again; and the main ones are soemphatically impressed on the ear whilst the spectator is looking forthe first time at the objects, or witnessing the first strong dramaticexpression of the ideas they denote, that the requisite association isformed unconsciously. The themes are neither long, nor complicated, nordifficult. Whoever can pick up the flourish of a coach-horn, the note ofa bird, the rhythm of the postman's knock or of a horse's gallop, willbe at no loss in picking up the themes of The Ring. No doubt, when itcomes to forming the necessary mental association with the theme, itmay happen that the spectator may find his ear conquering the tune moreeasily than his mind conquers the thought. But for the most part thethemes do not denote thoughts at all, but either emotions of a quitesimple universal kind, or the sights, sounds and fancies common enoughto be familiar to children. Indeed some of them are as frankly childishas any of the funny little orchestral interludes which, in Haydn'sCreation, introduce the horse, the deer, or the worm. We have both thehorse and the worm in The Ring, treated exactly in Haydn's manner, andwith an effect not a whit less ridiculous to superior people who declineto take it good-humoredly. Even the complaisance of good Wagneritesis occasionally rather overstrained by the way in which Brynhild'sallusions to her charger Grani elicit from the band a little rum-ti-tumtriplet which by itself is in no way suggestive of a horse, although acontinuous rush of such triplets makes a very exciting musical gallop. 

Other themes denote objects which cannot be imitatively suggested bymusic: for instance, music cannot suggest a ring, and cannot suggestgold; yet each of these has a representative theme which pervades thescore in all directions. In the case of the gold the association isestablished by the very salient way in which the orchestra breaks intothe pretty theme in the first act of The Rhine Gold at the moment whenthe sunrays strike down through the water and light up the glitteringtreasure, hitherto invisible. The reference of the strange littletheme of the wishing cap is equally manifest from the first, since thespectator's attention is wholly taken up with the Tarnhelm and its magicwhen the theme is first pointedly uttered by the orchestra. The swordtheme is introduced at the end of The Rhine Gold to express Wotan's heroinspiration; and I have already mentioned that Wagner, unable, when itcame to practical stage management, to forego the appeal to the eye aswell as to the thought, here made Wotan pick up a sword and brandishit, though no such instruction appears in the printed score. When thissacrifice to Wagner's scepticism as to the reality of any appeal to anaudience that is not made through their bodily sense is omitted, theassociation of the theme with the sword is not formed until that pointin the first act of The Valkyries at which Siegmund is left alone byHunding's hearth, weaponless, with the assurance that he will have tofight for his life at dawn with his host. He recalls then how his fatherpromised him a sword for his hour of need; and as he does so, a flickerfrom the dying fire is caught by the golden hilt of the sword in thetree, when the theme immediately begins to gleam through the quiver ofsound from the orchestra, and only dies out as the fire sinks and thesword is once more hidden by the darkness. Later on, this theme, whichis never silent whilst Sieglinda is dwelling on the story of the sword, leaps out into the most dazzling splendor the band can give it whenSiegmund triumphantly draws the weapon from the tree. As it consists ofseven notes only, with a very marked measure, and a melody like a simpleflourish on a trumpet or post horn, nobody capable of catching a tunecan easily miss it. 

The Valhalla theme, sounded with solemn grandeur as the home of the godsfirst appears to us and to Wotan at the beginning of the second sceneof The Rhine Gold, also cannot be mistaken. It, too, has a memorablerhythm; and its majestic harmonies, far from presenting those novel orcurious problems in polyphony of which Wagner still stands suspected bysuperstitious people, are just those three simple chords which festivestudents who vamp accompaniments to comic songs "by ear" soon findsufficient for nearly all the popular tunes in the world. 

On the other hand, the ring theme, when it begins to hurtle throughthe third scene of The Rhine Gold, cannot possibly be referred to anyspecial feature in the general gloom and turmoil of the den of thedwarfs. It is not a melody, but merely the displaced metric accent whichmusicians call syncopation, rung on the notes of the familiar chordformed by piling three minor thirds on top of one another (technically, the chord of the minor ninth, ci-devant diminished seventh). One soonpicks it up and identifies it; but it does not get introduced in theunequivocally clear fashion of the themes described above, or of thatmalignant monstrosity, the theme which denotes the curse on the gold. Consequently it cannot be said that the musical design of the work isperfectly clear at the first hearing as regards all the themes; butit is so as regards most of them, the main lines being laid down asemphatically and intelligibly as the dramatic motives in a Shakespeareanplay. As to the coyer subtleties of the score, their discovery providesfresh interest for repeated hearings, giving The Ring a Beethovenianinexhaustibility and toughness of wear. 

The themes associated with the individual characters get stamped on thememory easily by the simple association of the sound of the theme withthe appearance of the person indicated. Its appropriateness is generallypretty obvious. Thus, the entry of the giants is made to a vigorousstumping, tramping measure. Mimmy, being a quaint, weird old creature, has a quaint, weird theme of two thin chords that creep down eerily oneto the other. Gutrune's theme is pretty and caressing: Gunther's bold, rough, and commonplace. It is a favorite trick of Wagner's, when oneof his characters is killed on the stage, to make the theme attachedto that character weaken, fail, and fade away with a broken echo intosilence. 

THE CHARACTERIZATION

All this, however, is the mere child's play of theme work. The morecomplex characters, instead of having a simple musical label attachedto them, have their characteristic ideas and aspirations identified withspecial representative themes as they come into play in the drama; andthe chief merit of the thematic structure of The Ring is the masterywith which the dramatic play of the ideas is reflected in thecontrapuntal play of the themes. We do not find Wotan, like the dragonor the horse, or, for the matter of that, like the stage demon inWeber's Freischutz or Meyerbeer's Robert the Devil, with one fixed themeattached to him like a name plate to an umbrella, blaring unalteredfrom the orchestra whenever he steps on the stage. Sometimes we have theValhalla theme used to express the greatness of the gods as an idea ofWotan's. Again, we have his spear, the symbol of his power, identifiedwith another theme, on which Wagner finally exercises his favoritedevice by making it break and fail, cut through, as it were, by thetearing sound of the theme identified with the sword, when Siegfriedshivers the spear with the stroke of Nothung. Yet another themeconnected with Wotan is the Wanderer music which breaks with such amajestic reassurance on the nightmare terror of Mimmy when Wotan appearsat the mouth of his cave in the scene of the three riddles. Thus notonly are there several Wotan themes, but each varies in its inflexionsand shades of tone color according to its dramatic circumstances. So, too, the merry ham tune of the young Siegfried changes its measure, loads itself with massive harmonies, and becomes an exordium of the mostimposing splendor when it heralds his entry as full-fledged hero in theprologue to Night Falls On The Gods. Even Mimmy has his two or threethemes: the weird one already described; the little one in triplemeasure imitating the tap of his hammer, and fiercely mocked in thesavage laugh of Alberic at his death; and finally the crooning tune inwhich he details all his motherly kindnesses to the little foundlingSiegfried. Besides this there are all manner of little musical blinkingsand shamblings and whinings, the least hint of which from the orchestraat any moment instantly brings Mimmy to mind, whether he is on the stageat the time or not. 

In truth, dramatic characterization in music cannot be carried very farby the use of representative themes. Mozart, the greatest of all mastersof this art, never dreamt of employing them; and, extensively as theyare used in The Ring, they do not enable Wagner to dispense with theMozartian method. Apart from the themes, Siegfried and Mimmy are stillas sharply distinguished from one another by the character of theirmusic as Don Giovanni from Leporello, Wotan from Gutrune as Sarastrofrom Papagena. It is true that the themes attached to the charactershave the same musical appropriateness as the rest of the music: forexample, neither the Valhalla nor the spear themes could, without themost ludicrous incongruity, be used for the forest bird or the unstable, delusive Loki; but for all that the musical characterization mustbe regarded as independent of the specific themes, since the entireelimination of the thematic system from the score would leave thecharacters as well distinguished musically as they are at present. 

One more illustration of the way in which the thematic system is worked. There are two themes connected with Loki. One is a rapid, sinuous, twisting, shifty semiquaver figure suggested by the unsubstantial, elusive logic-spinning of the clever one's braincraft. The other is thefire theme. In the first act of Siegfried, Mimmy makes his unavailingattempt to explain fear to Siegfried. With the horror fresh upon him ofthe sort of nightmare into which he has fallen after the departureof the Wanderer, and which has taken the form, at once fanciful andsymbolic, of a delirious dread of light, he asks Siegfried whether hehas never, whilst wandering in the forest, had his heart set hammeringin frantic dread by the mysterious lights of the gloaming. To this, Siegfried, greatly astonished, replies that on such occasions his heartis altogether healthy and his sensations perfectly normal. Here Mimmy'squestion is accompanied by the tremulous sounding of the fire theme withits harmonies most oppressively disturbed and troubled; whereas withSiegfried's reply they become quite clear and straightforward, makingthe theme sound bold, brilliant, and serene. This is a typical instanceof the way in which the themes are used. 

The thematic system gives symphonic interest, reasonableness, and unityto the music, enabling the composer to exhaust every aspect and qualityof his melodic material, and, in Beethoven's manner, to work miraclesof beauty, expression and significance with the briefest phrases. As aset-off against this, it has led Wagner to indulge in repetitions thatwould be intolerable in a purely dramatic work. Almost the first thingthat a dramatist has to learn in constructing a play is that the personsmust not come on the stage in the second act and tell one another atgreat length what the audience has already seen pass before its eyesin the first act. The extent to which Wagner has been seduced intoviolating this rule by his affection for his themes is startling toa practiced playwright. Siegfried inherits from Wotan a mania forautobiography which leads him to inflict on every one he meets thestory of Mimmy and the dragon, although the audience have spent a wholeevening witnessing the events he is narrating. Hagen tells the storyto Gunther; and that same night Alberic's ghost tells it over again toHagen, who knows it already as well as the audience. Siegfried tellsthe Rhine maidens as much of it as they will listen to, and then keepstelling it to his hunting companions until they kill him. Wotan'sautobiography on the second evening becomes his biography in the mouthsof the Norns on the fourth. The little that the Norns add to it isrepeated an hour later by Valtrauta. How far all this repetition istolerable is a matter of individual taste. A good story will bearrepetition; and if it has woven into it such pretty tunes as the Rhinemaidens' yodel, Mimmy's tinkling anvil beat, the note of the forestbird, the call of Siegfried's horn, and so on, it will bear a good dealof rehearing. Those who have but newly learnt their way through The Ringwill not readily admit that there is a bar too much repetition. 

But how if you find some anti-Wagnerite raising the question whether thethematic system does not enable the composer to produce a music dramawith much less musical fertility than was required from his predecessorsfor the composition of operas under the old system!

Such discussions are not within the scope of this little book. But asthe book is now finished (for really nothing more need be said aboutThe Ring), I am quite willing to add a few pages of ordinary musicalcriticism, partly to please the amateurs who enjoy that sort of reading, and partly for the guidance of those who wish to obtain some hints tohelp them through such critical small talk about Wagner and Bayreuth asmay be forced upon them at the dinner table or between the acts. 

THE OLD AND THE NEW MUSIC

In the old-fashioned opera every separate number involved thecomposition of a fresh melody; but it is quite a mistake to suppose thatthis creative-effort extended continuously throughout the number fromthe first to the last bar. When a musician composes according to a setmetrical pattern, the selection of the pattern and the compositionof the first stave (a stave in music corresponds to a line in verse)generally completes the creative effort. All the rest follows moreor less mechanically to fill up the pattern, an air being very like awall-paper design in this respect. Thus the second stave is usually aperfectly obvious consequence of the first; and the third and fourth anexact or very slightly varied repetition of the first and second. Forexample, given the first line of Pop Goes the Weasel or Yankee Doodle, any musical cobbler could supply the remaining three. There is verylittle tune turning of this kind in The Ring; and it is noteworthy thatwhere it does occur, as in Siegmund's spring song and Mimmy's croon, "Ein zullendes Kind, " the effect of the symmetrical staves, recurringas a mere matter of form, is perceptibly poor and platitudinous comparedwith the free flow of melody which prevails elsewhere. 

The other and harder way of composing is to take a strain of freemelody, and ring every variety of change of mood upon it as if it werea thought that sometimes brought hope, sometimes melancholy, sometimesexultation, sometimes raging despair and so on. To take several themesof this kind, and weave them together into a rich musical fabricpassing panoramically before the ear with a continually varying flow ofsentiment, is the highest feat of the musician: it is in this way thatwe get the fugue of Bach and the symphony of Beethoven. The admittedlyinferior musician is the one who, like Auber and Offenbach, not tomention our purveyors of drawing-room ballads, can produce an unlimitedquantity of symmetrical tunes, but cannot weave themes symphonically. 

When this is taken into account, it will be seen that the fact thatthere is a great deal of repetition in The Ring does not distinguish itfrom the old-fashioned operas. The real difference is that in them therepetition was used for the mechanical completion of conventionalmetric patterns, whereas in The Ring the recurrence of the theme isan intelligent and interesting consequence of the recurrence of thedramatic phenomenon which it denotes. It should be remembered alsothat the substitution of symphonically treated themes for tunes withsymmetrical eight-bar staves and the like, has always been the rule inthe highest forms of music. To describe it, or be affected by it, asan abandonment of melody, is to confess oneself an ignoramus conversantonly with dance tunes and ballads. 

The sort of stuff a purely dramatic musician produces when he hampershimself with metric patterns in composition is not unlike what mighthave resulted in literature if Carlyle (for example) had been compelledby convention to write his historical stories in rhymed stanzas. Thatis to say, it limits his fertility to an occasional phrase, and threequarters of the time exercises only his barren ingenuity in fittingrhymes and measures to it. In literature the great masters of the arthave long emancipated themselves from metric patterns. Nobody claimsthat the hierarchy of modern impassioned prose writers, from Bunyanto Ruskin, should be placed below the writers of pretty lyrics, fromHerrick to Mr. Austin Dobson. Only in dramatic literature do we find thedevastating tradition of blank verse still lingering, giving factitiousprestige to the platitudes of dullards, and robbing the dramatic styleof the genuine poet of its full natural endowment of variety, force andsimplicity. 

This state of things, as we have seen, finds its parallel in musicalart, since music can be written in prose themes or in versified tunes;only here nobody dreams of disputing the greater difficulty of the proseforms, and the comparative triviality of versification. Yet in dramaticmusic, as in dramatic literature, the tradition of versification clingswith the same pernicious results; and the opera, like the tragedy, isconventionally made like a wall paper. The theatre seems doomed to bein all things the last refuge of the hankering after cheap prettiness inart. 

Unfortunately this confusion of the decorative with the dramatic elementin both literature and music is maintained by the example of greatmasters in both arts. Very touching dramatic expression can be combinedwith decorative symmetry of versification when the artist happens topossess both the decorative and dramatic gifts, and to have cultivatedboth hand in hand. Shakespeare and Shelley, for instance, far from beinghampered by the conventional obligation to write their dramas in verse, found it much the easiest and cheapest way of producing them. But ifShakespeare had been compelled by custom to write entirely in prose, allhis ordinary dialogue might have been as good as the first scene of AsYou Like It; and all his lofty passages as fine as "What a piece ofwork is Man!", thus sparing us a great deal of blank verse in which thethought is commonplace, and the expression, though catchingly turned, absurdly pompous. The Cent might either have been a serious drama ormight never have been written at all if Shelley had not been allowed tocarry off its unreality by Elizabethan versification. Still, bothpoets have achieved many passages in which the decorative and dramaticqualities are not only reconciled, but seem to enhance one another to apitch otherwise unattainable. 

Just so in music. When we find, as in the case of Mozart, a prodigiouslygifted and arduously trained musician who is also, by a happy accident, a dramatist comparable to Moliere, the obligation to compose operas inversified numbers not only does not embarrass him, but actually saveshim trouble and thought. No matter what his dramatic mood may be, heexpresses it in exquisite musical verses more easily than a dramatist ofordinary singleness of talent can express it in prose. Accordingly, hetoo, like Shakespeare and Shelley, leaves versified airs, like Dalla suapace, or Gluck's Che fare senza Euridice, or Weber's Leise, leise, whichare as dramatic from the first note to the last as the untrammelledthemes of The Ring. In consequence, it used to be professoriallydemanded that all dramatic music should present the same double aspect. The demand was unreasonable, since symmetrical versification is no meritin dramatic music: one might as well stipulate that a dinner fork shouldbe constructed so as to serve also as a tablecloth. It was an ignorantdemand too, because it is not true that the composers of theseexceptional examples were always, or even often, able to combinedramatic expression with symmetrical versification. Side by sidewith Dalla sua pace we have Il mio tesoro and Non mi dir, in whichexquisitely expressive opening phrases lead to decorative passages whichare as grotesque from the dramatic point of view as the music whichAlberic sings when he is slipping and sneezing in the Rhine mud is fromthe decorative point of view. Further, there is to be considered themass of shapeless "dry recitative" which separates these symmetricalnumbers, and which might have been raised to considerable dramatic andmusical importance had it been incorporated into a continuous musicalfabric by thematic treatment. Finally, Mozart's most dramatic finalesand concerted numbers are more or less in sonata form, like symphonicmovements, and must therefore be classed as musical prose. And sonataform dictates repetitions and recapitulations from which the perfectlyunconventional form adopted by Wagner is free. On the whole, there ismore scope for both repetition and convention in the old form than inthe new; and the poorer a composer's musical gift is, the surer he is toresort to the eighteenth century patterns to eke out his invention. 

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

When Wagner was born in 1813, music had newly become the mostastonishing, the most fascinating, the most miraculous art in the world. Mozart's Don Giovanni had made all musical Europe conscious of theenchantments of the modern orchestra and of the perfect adaptability ofmusic to the subtlest needs of the dramatist. Beethoven had shown howthose inarticulate mood-poems which surge through men who have, likehimself, no exceptional command of words, can be written down in musicas symphonies. Not that Mozart and Beethoven invented these applicationsof their art; but they were the first whose works made it clear that thedramatic and subjective powers of sound were enthralling enough to standby themselves quite apart from the decorative musical structures ofwhich they had hitherto been a mere feature. After the finales in Figaroand Don Giovanni, the possibility of the modern music drama lay bare. After the symphonies of Beethoven it was certain that the poetry thatlies too deep for words does not lie too deep for music, and thatthe vicissitudes of the soul, from the roughest fun to the loftiestaspiration, can make symphonies without the aid of dance tunes. As much, perhaps, will be claimed for the preludes and fugues of Bach; butBach's method was unattainable: his compositions were wonderful websof exquisitely beautiful Gothic traceries in sound, quite beyond allordinary human talent. Beethoven's far blunter craft was thoroughlypopular and practicable: not to save his soul could he have drawn onelong Gothic line in sound as Bach could, much less have woven severalof them together with so apt a harmony that even when the composer isunmoved its progressions saturate themselves with the emotion which (asmodern critics are a little apt to forget) springs as warmly from ourdelicately touched admiration as from our sympathies, and sometimesmakes us give a composer credit for pathetic intentions which he doesnot entertain, just as a boy imagines a treasure of tenderness and noblewisdom in the beauty of a woman. Besides, Bach set comic dialogue tomusic exactly as he set the recitatives of the Passion, there being forhim, apparently, only one recitative possible, and that the musicallybest. He reserved the expression of his merry mood for the regularset numbers in which he could make one of his wonderful contrapuntaltraceries of pure ornament with the requisite gaiety of line andmovement. Beethoven bowed to no ideal of beauty: he only sought theexpression for his feeling. To him a joke was a joke; and if it soundedfunny in music he was satisfied. Until the old habit of judging allmusic by its decorative symmetry had worn out, musicians were shocked byhis symphonies, and, misunderstanding his integrity, openly questionedhis sanity. But to those who were not looking for pretty new soundpatterns, but were longing for the expression of their moods in music, he achieved revelation, because, being single in his aim to express hisown moods, he anticipated with revolutionary courage and frankness allthe moods of the rising generations of the nineteenth century. 

The result was inevitable. In the nineteenth century it was no longernecessary to be a born pattern designer in sound to be a composer. One had but to be a dramatist or a poet completely susceptible tothe dramatic and descriptive powers of sound. A race of literary andtheatrical musicians appeared; and Meyerbeer, the first of them, madean extraordinary impression. The frankly delirious description of hisRobert the Devil in Balzac's short story entitled Gambra, and Goethe'sastonishingly mistaken notion that he could have composed music forFaust, show how completely the enchantments of the new dramatic musicupset the judgment of artists of eminent discernment. Meyerbeer was, people said (old gentlemen still say so in Paris), the successor ofBeethoven: he was, if a less perfect musician than Mozart, a profoundergenius. Above all, he was original and daring. Wagner himself ravedabout the duet in the fourth act of Les Huguenots as wildly as anyone. 

Yet all this effect of originality and profundity was produced by aquite limited talent for turning striking phrases, exploiting certaincurious and rather catching rhythms and modulations, and devisingsuggestive or eccentric instrumentation. On its decorative side, it wasthe same phenomenon in music as the Baroque school in architecture: anenergetic struggle to enliven organic decay by mechanical oddities andnovelties. Meyerbeer was no symphonist. He could not apply the thematicsystem to his striking phrases, and so had to cobble them into metricpatterns in the old style; and as he was no "absolute musician" either, he hardly got his metric patterns beyond mere quadrille tunes, whichwere either wholly undistinguished, or else made remarkable by certainbrusqueries which, in the true rococo manner, owed their singularity totheir senselessness. He could produce neither a thorough music dramanor a charming opera. But with all this, and worse, Meyerbeer had somegenuine dramatic energy, and even passion; and sometimes rose to theoccasion in a manner which, whilst the imagination of his contemporariesremained on fire with the novelties of dramatic music, led them tooverrate him with an extravagance which provoked Wagner to conduct along critical campaign against his leadership. Thirty years ago thiscampaign was mentably ascribed to the professional jealousy of adisappointed rival. Nowadays young people cannot understand how anyonecould ever have taken Meyerbeer's influence seriously. Those whoremember how his reputation stood half a century ago, and who realizewhat a nothoroughfare the path he opened proved to be, even to himself, know how inevitable and how impersonal Wagner's attack was. 

Wagner was the literary musician par excellence. He could not, likeMozart and Beethoven, produce decorative tone structures independentlyof any dramatic or poetic subject matter, because, that craft beingno longer necessary for his purpose, he did not cultivate it. AsShakespeare, compared with Tennyson, appears to have an exclusivelydramatic talent, so exactly does Wagner compared with Mendelssohn. On the other hand, he had not to go to third rate literary hacks for"librettos" to set to music: he produced his own dramatic poems, thusgiving dramatic integrity to opera, and making symphony articulate. ABeethoven symphony (except the articulate part of the ninth) expressesnoble feeling, but not thought: it has moods, but no ideas. Wagner addedthought and produced the music drama. Mozart's loftiest opera, his Ring, so to speak, The Magic Flute, has a libretto which, though none theworse for seeming, like The Rhine Gold, the merest Christmas tomfooleryto shallow spectators, is the product of a talent immeasurably inferiorto Mozart's own. The libretto of Don Giovanni is coarse and trivial:its transfiguration by Mozart's music may be a marvel; but nobody willventure to contend that such transfigurations, however seductive, canbe as satisfactory as tone poetry or drama in which the musician andthe poet are at the same level. Here, then, we have the simple secret ofWagner's preemminence as a dramatic musician. He wrote the poems as wellas composed the music of his "stage festival plays, " as he called them. 

Up to a certain point in his career Wagner paid the penalty ofundertaking two arts instead of one. Mozart had his trade as a musicianat his fingers' ends when he was twenty, because he had served anarduous apprenticeship to that trade and no other. Wagner was very farfrom having attained equal mastery at thirty-five: indeed he himself hastold us that not until he had passed the age at which Mozart died did hecompose with that complete spontaneity of musical expression which canonly be attained by winning entire freedom from all preoccupation withthe difficulties of technical processes. But when that time came, he wasnot only a consummate musician, like Mozart, but a dramatic poet and acritical and philosophical essayist, exercising a considerable influenceon his century. The sign of this consummation was his ability at last toplay with his art, and thus to add to his already famous achievements insentimental drama that lighthearted art of comedy of which the greatestmasters, like Moliere and Mozart, are so much rarer than the tragediansand sentimentalists. It was then that he composed the first two acts ofSiegfried, and later on The Mastersingers, a professedly comedic work, and a quite Mozartian garden of melody, hardly credible as the work ofthe straining artifices of Tanehauser. Only, as no man ever learns to doone thing by doing something else, however closely allied the two thingsmay be, Wagner still produced no music independently of his poems. Theoverture to The Mastersingers is delightful when you know what it isall about; but only those to whom it came as a concert piece without anysuch clue, and who judged its reckless counterpoint by the standard ofBach and of Mozart's Magic Flute overture, can realize how atrociousit used to sound to musicians of the old school. When I first heard it, with the clear march of the polyphony in Bach's B minor Mass fresh in mymemory, I confess I thought that the parts had got dislocated, and thatsome of the band were half a bar behind the others. Perhaps they were;but now that I am familiar with the work, and with Wagner's harmony, Ican still quite understand certain passages producing that effect organadmirer of Bach even when performed with perfect accuracy. 

THE MUSIC OF THE FUTURE

The success of Wagner has been so prodigious that to his dazzleddisciples it seems that the age of what he called "absolute" musicmust be at an end, and the musical future destined to be an exclusivelyWagnerian one inaugurated at Bayreuth. All great geniuses produce thisillusion. Wagner did not begin a movement: he consummated it. He was thesummit of the nineteenth century school of dramatic music in the samesense as Mozart was the summit (the word is Gounod's) of the eighteenthcentury school. And those who attempt to carry on his Bayreuth traditionwill assuredly share the fate of the forgotten purveyors of second-handMozart a hundred years ago. As to the expected supersession of absolutemusic, it is sufficient to point to the fact that Germany produced twoabsolute musicians of the first class during Wagner's lifetime: one, thegreatly gifted Goetz, who died young; the other, Brahms, whose absolutemusical endowment was as extraordinary as his thought was commonplace. Wagner had for him the contempt of the original thinker for the man ofsecond-hand ideas, and of the strenuously dramatic musician for merebrute musical faculty; but though his contempt was perhaps deserved bythe Triumphlieds, and Schicksalslieds, and Elegies and Requiems inwhich Brahms took his brains so seriously, nobody can listen to Brahms'natural utterance of the richest absolute music, especially in hischamber compositions, without rejoicing in his amazing gift. A reactionto absolute music, starting partly from Brahms, and partly from suchrevivals of medieval music as those of De Lange in Holland and Mr. Arnold Dolmetsch in England, is both likely and promising; whereas thereis no more hope in attempts to out-Wagner Wagner in music drama thanthere was in the old attempts--or for the matter of that, the newones--to make Handel the starting point of a great school of oratorio. 

BAYREUTH

When the Bayreuth Festival Playhouse was at last completed, and openedin 1876 with the first performance of The Ring, European society wascompelled to admit that Wagner was "a success. " Royal personages, detesting his music, sat out the performances in the row of boxes setapart for princes. They all complimented him on the astonishing "push"with which, in the teeth of all obstacles, he had turned a fabulous andvisionary project into a concrete commercial reality, patronized bythe public at a pound a head. It is as well to know that thesecongratulations had no other effect upon Wagner than to open his eyesto the fact that the Bayreuth experiment, as an attempt to evade theordinary social and commercial conditions of theatrical enterprise, was a failure. His own account of it contrasts the reality with hisintentions in a vein which would be bitter if it were not so humorous. The precautions taken to keep the seats out of the hands of thefrivolous public and in the hands of earnest disciples, banded togetherin little Wagner Societies throughout Europe, had ended in theirforestalling by ticket speculators and their sale to just the sort ofidle globe-trotting tourists against whom the temple was to have beenstrictly closed. The money, supposed to be contributed by the faithful, was begged by energetic subscription-hunting ladies from people who musthave had the most grotesque misconceptions of the composer's aims--amongothers, the Khedive of Egypt and the Sultan of Turkey!

The only change that has occurred since then is that subscriptions areno longer needed; for the Festival Playhouse apparently pays its own waynow, and is commercially on the same footing as any other theatre. Theonly qualification required from the visitor is money. A Londoner spendstwenty pounds on a visit: a native Bayreuther spends one pound. Ineither case "the Folk, " on whose behalf Wagner turned out in 1849, are effectually excluded; and the Festival Playhouse must therefore beclassed as infinitely less Wagnerian in its character than Hampton CourtPalace. Nobody knew this better than Wagner; and nothing can be furtheroff the mark than to chatter about Bayreuth as if it had succeeded inescaping from the conditions of our modern civilization any more thanthe Grand Opera in Paris or London. 

Within these conditions, however, it effected a new departure in thatexcellent German institution, the summer theatre. Unlike our operahouses, which are constructed so that the audience may present asplendid pageant to the delighted manager, it is designed to securean uninterrupted view of the stage, and an undisturbed hearing of themusic, to the audience. The dramatic purpose of the performances istaken with entire and elaborate seriousness as the sole purpose ofthem; and the management is jealous for the reputation of Wagner. Thecommercial success which has followed this policy shows that the publicwants summer theatres of the highest class. There is no reason why theexperiment should not be tried in England. If our enthusiasm for Handelcan support Handel Festivals, laughably dull, stupid and anti-Handelianas these choral monstrosities are, as well as annual provincialfestivals on the same model, there is no likelihood of a Wagner Festivalfailing. Suppose, for instance, a Wagner theatre were built at HamptonCourt or on Richmond Hill, not to say Margate pier, so that we couldhave a delightful summer evening holiday, Bayreuth fashion, passing thehours between the acts in the park or on the river before sunset, isit seriously contended that there would be any lack of visitors? If alittle of the money that is wasted on grand stands, Eiffel towers, anddismal Halls by the Sea, all as much tied to brief annual seasons asBayreuth, were applied in this way, the profit would be far more certainand the social utility prodigiously greater. Any English enthusiasm forBayreuth that does not take the form of clamor for a Festival Playhousein England may be set aside as mere pilgrimage mania. 

Those who go to Bayreuth never repent it, although the performancesthere are often far from delectable. The singing is sometimes tolerable, and sometimes abominable. Some of the singers are mere animated beercasks, too lazy and conceited to practise the self-control and physicaltraining that is expected as a matter of course from an acrobat, ajockey or a pugilist. The women's dresses are prudish and absurd. Itis true that Kundry no longer wears an early Victorian ball dress with"ruchings, " and that Fresh has been provided with a quaintly modish copyof the flowered gown of Spring in Botticelli's famous picture; but themailclad Brynhild still climbs the mountains with her legs carefullyhidden in a long white skirt, and looks so exactly like Mrs. Leo Hunteras Minerva that it is quite impossible to feel a ray of illusion whilstlooking at her. The ideal of womanly beauty aimed at reminds Englishmenof the barmaids of the seventies, when the craze for golden hair wasat its worst. Further, whilst Wagner's stage directions are sometimesdisregarded as unintelligently as at Covent Garden, an intolerablyold-fashioned tradition of half rhetorical, half historical-pictorialattitude and gesture prevails. The most striking moments of the dramaare conceived as tableaux vivants with posed models, instead of aspassages of action, motion and life. 

I need hardly add that the supernatural powers of control attributedby credulous pilgrims to Madame Wagner do not exist. Prima donnas andtenors are as unmanageable at Bayreuth as anywhere else. Casts arecapriciously changed; stage business is insufficiently rehearsed; thepublic are compelled to listen to a Brynhild or Siegfried of fifty whenthey have carefully arranged to see one of twenty-five, much as inany ordinary opera house. Even the conductors upset the arrangementsoccasionally. On the other hand, if we leave the vagaries of the starsout of account, we may safely expect always that in thoroughness ofpreparation of the chief work of the season, in strenuous artisticpretentiousness, in pious conviction that the work is of such enormousimportance as to be worth doing well at all costs, the Bayreuthperformances will deserve their reputation. The band is placed out ofsight of the audience, with the more formidable instruments beneaththe stage, so that the singers have not to sing THROUGH the brass. Theeffect is quite perfect. 

BAYREUTH IN ENGLAND

I purposely dwell on the faults of Bayreuth in order to show that thereis no reason in the world why as good and better performances of TheRing should not be given in England. Wagner's scores are now before theworld; and neither his widow nor his son can pretend to handle them withgreater authority than any artist who feels the impulse to interpretthem. Nobody will ever know what Wagner himself thought of the artistswho established the Bayreuth tradition: he was obviously not in aposition to criticize them. For instance, had Rubini survived to createSiegmund, it is quite certain that we should not have had from Wagner'spen so amusing and vivid a description as we have of his Ottavio in theold Paris days. Wagner was under great obligations to the heroes andheroines of 1876; and he naturally said nothing to disparage theirtriumphs; but there is no reason to believe that all or indeed any ofthem satisfied him as Schnorr of Carolsfeld satisfied him as Tristan, orSchroder Devrient as Fidelio. It is just as likely as not that thenext Schnorr or Schroder may arise in England. If that should actuallyhappen, neither of them will need any further authority than their owngenius and Wagner's scores for their guidance. Certainly the less theirspontaneous impulses are sophisticated by the very stagey traditionswhich Bayreuth is handing down from the age of Crummles, the better. 

WAGNERIAN SINGERS

No nation need have much difficulty in producing a race of Wagneriansingers. With the single exception of Handel, no composer has writtenmusic so well calculated to make its singers vocal athletes as Wagner. Abominably as the Germans sing, it is astonishing how they thrivephysically on his leading parts. His secret is the Handelian secret. Instead of specializing his vocal parts after the manner of Verdi andGounod for high sopranos, screaming tenors, and high baritones withan effective compass of about a fifth at the extreme tiptop of theirranges, and for contraltos with chest registers forced all over theircompass in the manner of music hall singers, he employs the entire rangeof the human voice freely, demanding from everybody very nearly twoeffective octaves, so that the voice is well exercised all over, andone part of it relieves the other healthily and continually. He usesextremely high notes very sparingly, and is especially considerate inthe matter of instrumental accompaniment. Even when the singer appearsto have all the thunders of the full orchestra raging against him, aglance at the score will show that he is well heard, not because of anyexceptionally stentorian power in his voice, but because Wagner meanthim to be heard and took the greatest care not to overwhelm him. Suchbrutal opacities of accompaniment as we find in Rossini's Stabat orVerdi's Trovatore, where the strings play a rum-tum accompanimentwhilst the entire wind band blares away, fortissimo, in unison with theunfortunate singer, are never to be found in Wagner's work. Even in anordinary opera house, with the orchestra ranged directly between thesingers and the audience, his instrumentation is more transparent tothe human voice than that of any other composer since Mozart. At theBayreuth Buhnenfestspielhaus, with the brass under the stage, it isperfectly so. 

On every point, then, a Wagner theatre and Wagner festivals are muchmore generally practicable than the older and more artificial formsof dramatic music. A presentable performance of The Ring is a bigundertaking only in the sense in which the construction of a railwayis a big undertaking: that is, it requires plenty of work and plenty ofprofessional skill; but it does not, like the old operas and oratorios, require those extraordinary vocal gifts which only a few individualsscattered here and there throughout Europe are born with. Singers whocould never execute the roulades of Semiramis, Assur, and Arsaces inRossini's Semiramide, could sing the parts of Brynhild, Wotan andErda without missing a note. Any Englishman can understand this if heconsiders for a moment the difference between a Cathedral service andan Italian opera at Covent Garden. The service is a much more seriousmatter than the opera. Yet provincial talent is sufficient for it, ifthe requisite industry and devotion are forthcoming. Let us admit thatgeniuses of European celebrity are indispensable at the Opera (thoughI know better, having seen lusty troopers and porters, without art ormanners, accepted by fashion as principal tenors at that institutionduring the long interval between Mario and Jean de Reszke); but let usremember that Bayreuth has recruited its Parsifals from the peasantry, and that the artisans of a village in the Bavarian Alps are capable of afamous and elaborate Passion Play, and then consider whether England isso poor in talent that its amateurs must journey to the centre of Europeto witness a Wagner Festival. 

The truth is, there is nothing wrong with England except the wealthwhich attracts teachers of singing to her shores in sufficient numbersto extinguish the voices of all natives who have any talent as singers. Our salvation must come from the class that is too poor to have lessons.