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+***The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring***
+#5 in our series by [George] Bernard Shaw
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+The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring
+
+by [George] Bernard Shaw
+
+October, 1998  [Etext #1487]
+
+
+***The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring***
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+The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring by
+by Bernard Shaw
+
+
+
+
+Preface to the First German Edition
+
+In reading through this German version of my book in the
+Manuscript of my friend Siegfried Trebitsch, I was struck by the
+inadequacy of the merely negative explanation given by me of the
+irrelevance of Night Falls On The Gods to the general philosophic
+scheme of The Ring. That explanation is correct as far as it
+goes; but, put as I put it, it now seems to me to suggest that
+the operatic character of Night Falls On The Gods was the result
+of indifference or forgetfulness produced by the lapse of
+twenty-five years between the first projection of the work and
+its completion. Now it is clear that in whatever other ways
+Wagner may have changed, he never became careless and he never
+became indifferent. I have therefore inserted a new section in
+which I show how the revolutionary history of Western Europe from
+the Liberal explosion of 1848 to the confused attempt at a
+socialist, military, and municipal administration in Paris in
+1871 (that is to say, from the beginning of The Niblung's Ring by
+Wagner to the long-delayed completion of Night Falls On The
+Gods), demonstrated practically that the passing away of the
+present order was going to be a much more complicated business
+than it appears in Wagner's Siegfried. I have therefore
+interpolated a new chapter which will perhaps induce some readers
+of the original English text to read the book again in German.
+
+For some time to come, indeed, I shall have to refer English
+readers to this German edition as the most complete in
+existence.
+
+My obligation to Herr Trebitsch for making me a living German
+author instead of merely a translated English one is so great
+that I am bound to point out that he is not responsible for my
+views or Wagner's, and that 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 criticisms which occasionally
+reflect on contemporary authorities with a European reputation
+for sensitiveness. And as the very sympathy which makes his
+translations so excellent may be regarded with suspicion, let me
+hasten to declare I am bound to Germany by the ties that hold my
+nature most strongly. Not that I like the average German: nobody
+does, even in his own country. But then the average man is not
+popular anywhere; and as no German considers himself an average
+one, each reader will, as an exceptional man, sympathize with my
+dislike of the common herd. And if I cannot love the typical
+modern German, I can at least pity and understand him. His worst
+fault is that he cannot see that it is possible to have too much
+of a good thing. Being convinced that duty, industry, education,
+loyalty, patriotism and respectability are good things (and I am
+magnanimous enough to admit that they are not altogether bad
+things when taken in strict moderation at the right time and in
+the right place), he indulges in them on all occasions
+shamelessly and excessively. He commits hideous crimes when crime
+is presented to him as part of his duty; his craze for work is
+more ruinous than the craze for drink; when he can afford
+secondary education for his sons you find three out of every five
+of them with their minds lamed for life by examinations which
+only a thoroughly wooden head could go through with impunity; and
+if a king is patriotic and respectable (few kings are) he puts up
+statues to him and exalts him above Charlemagne and Henry the
+Fowler. And when he meets a man of genius, he instinctively
+insults him, starves him, and, if possible, imprisons and kills
+him.
+
+Now I do not pretend to be perfect myself. Heaven knows I have to
+struggle hard enough every day with what the Germans call my
+higher impulses. I know too well the temptation to be moral, to
+be self-sacrificing, to be loyal and patriotic, to be respectable
+and well-spoken of. But I wrestle with it and--as far as human
+fraility will allow--conquer it, whereas the German abandons
+himself to it without scruple or reflection, and is actually
+proud of his pious intemperance and self-indulgence. Nothing will
+cure him of this mania. It may end in starvation, crushing
+taxation, suppression of all freedom to try new social
+experiments and reform obsolete institutions, in snobbery,
+jobbery, idolatry, and an omnipresent tyranny in which his doctor
+and his schoolmaster, his lawyer and his priest, coerce him worse
+than any official or drill sergeant: no matter: it is
+respectable, says the German, therefore it must be good, and
+cannot be carried too far; and everybody who rebels against it
+must be a rascal. Even the Social-Democrats in Germany differ
+from the rest only in carrying academic 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 in England. I
+am as conspicuous in English Socialism as Bebel is in German
+Socialism; but do you suppose that the German Social-Democrats
+tolerate me? Not a bit of it. I have begged again and again to be
+taken to the bosom of my German comrades. I have pleaded that the
+Super-Proletarians of all lands should unite. I have pointed out
+that the German Social-Democratic party has done nothing at its
+Congresses for the last ten years except the things I told them
+to do ten years before, and that its path is white with the bones
+of the Socialist superstitions I and my fellow Fabians have
+slain. Useless. They do not care a rap whether I am a Socialist
+or not. All they want to know is; Am I orthodox? Am I correct in
+my revolutionary views? Am I reverent to the revolutionary
+authorities? Because I am a genuine free-thinker they look at me
+as a policeman looks at a midnight prowler or as a Berlin
+bourgeois looks at a suspicious foreigner. They ask "Do you
+believe that Marx was omniscient and infallible; that Engels was
+his prophet; that Bebel and Singer are his inspired apostles; and
+that Das Kapital is the Bible?" Hastening in my innocence to
+clear myself of what I regard as an accusation of credulity and
+ignorance, I assure them earnestly that I know ten times as much
+of economics and a hundred times as much of practical
+administration as Marx did; that I knew Engels personally and
+rather liked him as a witty and amiable old 1848 veteran who
+despised modern Socialism; that I regard Bebel and Singer as men
+of like passions with myself, but considerably less advanced; and
+that I read Das Kapital in the year 1882 or thereabouts, and
+still consider it one of the most important books of the
+nineteenth century because of its power of changing the minds of
+those who read it, in spite of its unsound capitalist economics,
+its parade of quotations from books which the author had either
+not read or not understood, its affectation of algebraic
+formulas, and its general attempt to disguise a masterpiece of
+propagandist journalism and prophetic invective as a drily
+scientific treatise of the sort that used to impose on people in
+1860, when any book that pretended to be scientific was accepted
+as a Bible. In those days Darwin and Helmholtz were the real
+fathers of the Church; and nobody would listen to religion,
+poetry or rhetoric; so that even Socialism had to call itself
+"scientific," and predict the date of the revolution, as if it
+were a comet, by calculations founded on "historic laws."
+
+To my amazement these reasonable remarks were received as hideous
+blasphemies; none of the party papers were allowed to print any
+word of mine; the very Revisionists themselves found that the
+scandal of my heresy damaged them more than my support aided
+them; and I found myself an outcast from German Social-Democracy
+at the moment when, thanks to Trebitsch, the German bourgeoisie
+and nobility began to smile on me, seduced by the pleasure of
+playing with fire, and perhaps by Agnes Sorma'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 all allegiance to established religion, law,
+order, patriotism, and learning, he promptly uses his freedom to
+put on a headier set of chains; expels anti-militarists with the
+blood-thirstiest martial anti-foreign ardor; and gives the Kaiser
+reason to thank heaven that he was 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 ties that hold my nature most strongly? Very simply because I
+should have perished of despair in my youth but for the world
+created for me by that great German dynasty which began with Bach
+and will perhaps not end with Richard Strauss. Do not suppose for
+a moment that I learnt my art from English men of letters. True,
+they showed me how to handle English words; but if I had known no
+more than that, my works would never have crossed the Channel. My
+masters were the masters of a universal language: they were, to
+go from summit to summit, Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven
+and Wagner. Had the Germans understood any of these men, they
+would have hanged them. Fortunately they did not understand them,
+and therefore only neglected them until they were dead, after
+which they learnt to dance to their tunes with an easy
+conscience. For their sakes Germany stands consecrated as the
+Holy Land of the capitalist age, just as Italy, for its painters'
+sakes, is the Holy Land of the early unvulgarized Renascence;
+France, for its builders' sakes, of the age of Christian chivalry
+and faith; and Greece, for its sculptors' 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,
+industrious German 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 all sincerity--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
+most unexpected literary task that has ever been set me. When it
+first appeared I was ungrateful enough to remonstrate with its
+publisher for printing, as I thought, more copies than the most
+sanguine Wagnerite could ever hope to sell. But the result proved
+that exactly one person buys a copy on every day in the year,
+including Sundays; and so, in the process of the suns, a reprint
+has become necessary.
+
+Save a few verbal slips of no importance, I have found nothing to
+alter in this edition. As usual, the only protests the book has
+elicited are protests, not against the opinions it expresses, but
+against the facts it records. There are people who cannot bear to
+be told that their hero was associated with a famous Anarchist in
+a rebellion; that he was proclaimed as "wanted" by the police;
+that he wrote revolutionary pamphlets; and that his picture of
+Niblunghome under the reign of Alberic is a poetic vision of
+unregulated industrial capitalism as it was made known in Germany
+in the middle of the nineteenth century by Engels's Condition of
+the Laboring classes in England. They frantically deny these
+facts, and then declare that I have connected them with Wagner in
+a paroxysm of senseless perversity. I am sorry I have hurt them;
+and I appeal to charitable publishers to bring out a new life of
+Wagner, which shall describe him as a court musician of
+unquestioned fashion and orthodoxy, and a pillar of the most
+exclusive Dresden circles. Such a work, would, I believe, have a
+large sale, and be read with satisfaction and reassurance by many
+lovers of Wagner's music.
+
+As to my much demurred-to relegation of Night Falls On The Gods
+to the category of grand opera, I have nothing to add or
+withdraw. Such a classification is to me as much a matter of fact
+as the Dresden rising or the police proclamation; but I shall not
+pretend that it is a matter of such fact as everybody's judgment
+can grapple with. People who prefer grand opera to serious
+music-drama naturally resent my placing a very grand opera below
+a very serious music-drama. The ordinary lover of Shakespeare
+would equally demur to my placing his popular catchpenny plays,
+of which As You Like It is an avowed type, below true
+Shakespearean plays like Measure for Measure. I cannot help that.
+Popular dramas and operas may have overwhelming merits as
+enchanting make-believes; but a poet's sincerest vision of the
+world must always take precedence of his prettiest fool's
+paradise.
+
+As many English Wagnerites seem to be still under the impression
+that Wagner composed Rienzi in his youth, Tannhauser and
+Lohengrin in his middle age, and The Ring in his later years, may
+I again remind them that The Ring was the result of a political
+convulsion which occurred when Wagner was only thirty-six, and
+that the poem was completed when he was forty, with thirty more
+years of work before him? It is as much a first essay in
+political philosophy as Die Feen is a first essay in romantic
+opera. The attempt to recover its spirit twenty years later, when
+the music of Night Falls On The Gods was added, was an attempt to
+revive the barricades of Dresden in the Temple of the Grail. Only
+those who have never had any political enthusiasms to survive can
+believe that such 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
+chief work. I offer it to those enthusiastic admirers of Wagner
+who are unable to follow his ideas, and do not in the least
+understand the dilemma of Wotan, though they are filled with
+indignation at the irreverence of the Philistines who frankly
+avow that they find the remarks of the god too often tedious and
+nonsensical. Now to be devoted to Wagner merely as a dog is
+devoted to his master, sharing a few elementary ideas, appetites
+and emotions with him, and, for the rest, reverencing his
+superiority without understanding it, is no true Wagnerism. Yet
+nothing better is possible without a stock of ideas common to
+master and disciple. Unfortunately, the ideas of the
+revolutionary Wagner of 1848 are taught neither by the education
+nor the experience of English and American gentlemen-amateurs,
+who are almost always political mugwumps, and hardly ever
+associate with revolutionists. The earlier attempts to translate
+his numerous pamphlets and essays into English, resulted in
+ludicrous mixtures of pure nonsense with the absurdest   
+distorsions of his ideas into the ideas of the translators. We
+now have a translation which is a masterpiece of interpretation
+and an eminent addition to our literature; but that is not
+because its author, Mr. Ashton Ellis, knows the German dictionary
+better than his predecessors. He is simply in possession of
+Wagner's ideas, which were to them inconceivable.
+
+All I pretend to do in this book is to impart the ideas which are
+most likely to be lacking in the conventional Englishman's
+equipment. I came by them myself much as Wagner did, having
+learnt more about music than about anything else in my youth, and
+sown my political wild oats subsequently in the revolutionary
+school. This combination is not common in England; and as I seem,
+so far, to be the only publicly articulate result of it, I
+venture to add my commentary to what has already been written by
+musicians who are no revolutionists, and revolutionists who are
+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
+the theatre to satisfy his curiosity, or his desire to be in the
+fashion, by witnessing a representation of Richard Wagner's
+famous Ring of the Niblungs.
+
+First, The Ring, with all its gods and giants and dwarfs, its
+water-maidens and Valkyries, its wishing-cap, magic ring,
+enchanted sword, and miraculous treasure, is a drama of today,
+and not of a remote and fabulous antiquity. It could not have
+been written before the second half of the nineteenth century,
+because it deals with events which were only then consummating
+themselves. Unless the spectator recognizes in it an image of the
+life he is himself fighting his way through, it must needs appear
+to him a monstrous development of the Christmas pantomimes, spun
+out here and there into intolerable lengths of dull conversation
+by the principal baritone. Fortunately, even from this point of
+view, The Ring is full of extraordinarily attractive episodes,
+both orchestral and dramatic. The nature music alone--music of
+river and rainbow, fire and forest--is enough to bribe people
+with any love of the country in them to endure the passages of
+political philosophy in the sure hope of a prettier page to come.
+Everybody, too, can enjoy the love music, the hammer and anvil
+music, the clumping of the giants, the tune of the young
+woodsman's horn, the trilling of the bird, the dragon music and
+nightmare music and thunder and lightning music, the profusion of
+simple melody, the sensuous charm of the orchestration: in short,
+the vast extent of common ground between The Ring and the
+ordinary music we use for play and pleasure. Hence it is that the
+four separate music-plays of which it is built have become
+popular throughout Europe as operas. We shall presently see that
+one of them, Night Falls On The Gods, actually is an opera.
+
+It is generally understood, however, that there is an inner ring
+of superior persons to whom the whole work has a most urgent and
+searching philosophic and social significance. I profess to be
+such a superior person; and I write this pamphlet for the
+assistance of those who wish to be introduced to the work on
+equal terms with that inner circle of adepts.
+
+My second encouragement is addressed to modest citizens who may
+suppose themselves to be disqualified from enjoying The Ring by
+their technical ignorance of music. They may dismiss all such
+misgivings speedily and confidently. If the sound of music has
+any power to move them, they will find 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 point than the single
+direct point of giving musical expression to the drama. In
+classical music there are, as the analytical programs tell us,
+first subjects and second subjects, free fantasias,
+recapitulations, and codas; there are fugues, with
+counter-subjects, strettos, and pedal points; there are
+passacaglias on ground basses, canons ad hypodiapente, and other
+ingenuities, which have, after all, stood or fallen by their
+prettiness as much as the simplest folk-tune. Wagner is never
+driving at anything of this sort any more than Shakespeare in his
+plays is driving at 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 no academic teaching. The
+professors, when Wagner's music is played to them, exclaim at
+once "What is this? Is it aria, or recitative? Is there no
+cabaletta to it--not even a full close? Why was that discord not
+prepared; and why does he not resolve it correctly? How dare he
+indulge in those scandalous and illicit transitions into a key
+that has not one note in common with the key he has just left?
+Listen to those false relations! What does he want with six drums
+and eight horns when Mozart worked miracles with two of each? The
+man is no musician." The layman neither knows nor cares about any
+of these things. If Wagner were to turn aside from his
+straightforward dramatic purpose to propitiate the professors
+with correct exercises in sonata form, his music would at once
+become unintelligible to the unsophisticated spectator, upon whom
+the familiar and dreaded "classical" sensation would descend like
+the influenza. Nothing of the kind need be dreaded. The
+unskilled, untaught musician may approach Wagner boldly; for
+there is no possibility of a misunderstanding between them: The
+Ring music is perfectly single and simple. It is the adept
+musician of the old school who has everything to unlearn: and him
+I leave, unpitied, to his fate.
+
+
+
+THE RING OF THE NIBLUNGS
+
+The Ring consists of four plays, intended to be performed on four
+successive evenings, entitled The Rhine Gold (a prologue to the
+other three), The Valkyries, Siegfried, and Night Falls On The
+Gods; or, in the original German, Das Rheingold, Die Walkure,
+Siegfried, and Die Gotterdammerung.
+
+
+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 gold alone, as the wise leave flowers without plucking
+them, enjoying with perfect naivete its color and glitter and
+preciousness, no human being will ever be the worse for your
+knowledge of it; and whilst you remain in that frame of mind the
+golden age will endure.
+
+Now suppose a man comes along: a man who has no sense of the
+golden age, nor any power of living in the present: a man with
+common desires, cupidities, ambitions, just like most of the men
+you know. Suppose you reveal 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 whip of hunger, will toil underground and
+overground night and day to pile up more and more gold for him
+until he is master of the world! You will find 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 no
+distasteful toil, which he desires more passionately; and that is
+yourself. So long as he is preoccupied with love of you, the
+gold, and all that it implies, will escape him: the golden age
+will endure. Not until he forswears love will he stretch out his
+hand to the gold, and found the Plutonic empire for himself. But
+the choice between love and gold may not rest altogether with
+him. He may be an ugly, ungracious, unamiable person, whose
+affections may seem merely ludicrous and despicable to you. In
+that case, you may repulse him, and most bitterly humiliate and
+disappoint him. What is left to him then but to curse the love 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
+its lost thoughtlessness and sweetness.
+
+In due time the gold of Klondyke will find its way to the great
+cities of the world. But the old dilemma will keep continually
+reproducing itself. The man who will turn his back on love, and
+upon all the fruitful it, and will set himself single-heartedly
+to gather gold in an exultant dream of wielding its Plutonic
+powers, will find the treasure yielding quickly to his touch. But
+few men will make this sacrifice voluntarily. Not until the
+Plutonic power is so strongly set up that the higher human
+impulses are suppressed as rebellious, and even the mere
+appetites are denied, starved, and insulted when they cannot
+purchase their satisfaction with gold, are the energetic spirits
+driven to build their lives upon riches. How inevitable that
+course has become to us is plain enough to those who have the
+power of understanding what they see as 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.
+As you sit waiting for the curtain to rise, you suddenly catch
+the booming ground-tone of a mighty river. It becomes plainer,
+clearer: you get nearer to the surface, and catch the green light
+and the flights of bubbles. Then the curtain goes up and you see
+what you heard--the depths of the Rhine, with three strange fairy
+fishes, half water-maidens, singing and enjoying themselves
+exuberantly. They are not singing barcarolles or ballads about
+the Lorely and her fated lovers, but simply trolling any nonsense
+that comes into their heads in time to the dancing of the water
+and the rhythm of their swimming. It is the golden age; and the
+attraction of this spot for the Rhine maidens is a lump of the
+Rhine gold, which they value, in an entirely uncommercial way,
+for its bodily beauty and splendor. Just at present it is
+eclipsed, because the sun is not striking down through the
+water.
+
+Presently there comes a poor devil of a dwarf stealing along the
+slippery rocks of the river bed, a creature with energy enough to
+make him strong of body and fierce of passion, but with a brutish
+narrowness of intelligence and selfishness of imagination: too
+stupid to see that his own welfare can only be compassed as part
+of the welfare of the world, 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 fruitful impulse in him, in search of
+what he lacks in himself, beauty, lightness of heart,
+imagination, music. The Rhine maidens, representing all these to
+him, fill him with hope and longing; and he never considers that
+he has nothing to offer that they could possibly desire, being
+by natural limitation incapable of seeing anything from anyone
+else's point of view. With perfect simplicity, he offers himself
+as a sweetheart to them. But they are thoughtless, elemental,
+only half real things, much like modern young ladies. That the
+poor dwarf is repulsive to their sense of physical beauty and
+their romantic conception of heroism, that he is ugly and
+awkward, greedy and ridiculous, disposes for them of his claim to
+live and love. They mock him atrociously, pretending to fall in
+love with him at first sight, and then slipping away and making
+game of him, heaping ridicule and disgust on the poor wretch
+until he is beside himself with mortification and rage. They
+forget him when the water begins to glitter in the sun, and the
+gold to reflect its glory. They break into ecstatic worship of
+their treasure; and though they know the parable of Klondyke
+quite well, they have no fear that the gold will be wrenched away
+by the dwarf, since it will yield to no one who has not forsworn
+love for it, and it is in pursuit of love that he has come to
+them. They forget that they have poisoned that desire in him by
+their mockery and denial of it, and that he now knows that life
+will give him nothing that he cannot wrest from it by the
+Plutonic power. It is just as if some poor, rough, vulgar, coarse
+fellow were to offer to take his part in aristocratic society,
+and be snubbed into the knowledge that only as a millionaire
+could he ever hope to bring that society to his feet and buy
+himself a beautiful and refined wife. His choice is forced on
+him. He forswears love as thousands of us forswear it every day;
+and in a moment the gold is in his grasp, and he disappears in
+the depths, leaving the water-fairies vainly screaming "Stop
+thief!" whilst the river seems to plunge into darkness and sink
+from us as we rise to the cloud regions above.
+
+And now, what forces are there in the world to resist Alberic,
+our dwarf, in his new character of sworn plutocrat? He is soon at
+work wielding the power of the gold. For his gain, hordes of his
+fellow-creatures are thenceforth condemned to slave miserably,
+overground and underground, lashed to their work by the invisible
+whip of starvation. They never see him, any more than the victims
+of our "dangerous trades" ever see the shareholders whose power
+is nevertheless everywhere, driving them to destruction. The very
+wealth they create with their labor becomes an additional force
+to impoverish them; for as fast as they make it it slips from
+their hands into the hands of their master, and makes him
+mightier than ever. You can see the process for yourself in every
+civilized country today, where millions of people toil in want
+and disease to heap up more wealth for our Alberics, laying up
+nothing for themselves, except sometimes horrible and agonizing
+disease and the certainty of premature death. All this part of
+the story is frightfully real, frightfully present, frightfully
+modern; and its effects on our social life are so ghastly and
+ruinous that we no longer know enough of happiness to be
+discomposed by it. It is only the poet, with his vision of what
+life might be, to whom these things are unendurable. If we were a
+race of poets we would make an end of them before the end of this
+miserable century. Being a race of moral dwarfs instead, we think
+them highly respectable, comfortable and proper, and allow them
+to breed and multiply their evil in all directions. If there were
+no higher power in the world to work against Alberic, the end of
+it would be utter destruction.
+
+Such a force there is, however; and it is called Godhead. The
+mysterious thing we call life organizes itself into all living
+shapes, bird, beast, beetle and fish, rising to the human marvel
+in cunning dwarfs and in laborious muscular giants, capable,
+these last, of enduring toil, willing to buy love and life, not
+with suicidal curses and renunciations, but with patient manual
+drudgery in the service of higher powers. And these higher powers
+are called into existence by the same selforganization of life
+still more wonderfully into rare persons who may by comparison be
+called gods, creatures capable of thought, whose aims extend far
+beyond the satisfaction of their bodily appetites and personal
+affections, since they perceive that it is only by the
+establishment of a social order founded on common bonds of moral
+faith that the world can rise from mere savagery. But how is this
+order to be set up by Godhead in a world of stupid giants, since
+these thoughtless ones pursue only their narrower personal ends
+and can by no means understand the aims of a god? Godhead, face
+to face with Stupidity, must compromise. Unable to enforce on the
+world the pure law of thought, it must resort to a mechanical law
+of commandments to be enforced by brute punishments and the
+destruction of the disobedient. And however carefully these laws
+are framed to represent the highest thoughts of the framers at
+the moment of their promulgation, before a day has elapsed that
+thought has grown and widened by the ceaseless evolution of life;
+and lo! yesterday's law already fallen out with today's thought.
+Yet if the high givers of that law themselves set the example of
+breaking it before it is a week old, they destroy all its
+authority with their subjects, and so break the weapon they have
+forged to rule them for their own good. They must therefore
+maintain at all costs the sanctity of the law, even when it has
+ceased to represent their thought; so that at last they get
+entangled in a network of ordinances which they no longer believe
+in, and yet have made so sacred by custom and so terrible by
+punishment, that they cannot themselves escape from them. Thus
+Godhead's resort to law finally costs it half its integrity--as
+if a spiritual king, to gain temporal power, had plucked out one
+of his eyes--and it finally begins secretly to long for the
+advent of some power higher than itself which will destroy its
+artificial empire of law, and establish a true republic of free
+thought.
+
+This is by no means the only difficulty in the dominion of Law.
+The brute force for its execution must be purchased; and the mass
+of its subjects must be persuaded to respect the authority which
+employs this force. But how is such respect to be implanted in
+them if they are unable to comprehend the thought of the
+lawgiver? Clearly, only by associating the legislative power with
+such displays of splendor and majesty as will impress their
+senses and awe their imaginations. The god turned lawgiver, in
+short, must be crowned Pontiff and King. Since he cannot be known
+to the common folk as their superior in wisdom, he must be 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
+commander of armies, and the wielder of powers of life and death,
+of salvation and damnation after death. Something may be done in
+this way without corruption whilst the golden age still endures.
+Your gods may not prevail with the dwarfs; but they may go to
+these honest giants who will give a day's work for a day's pay,
+and induce them to build for Godhead a mighty fortress, complete
+with hall and chapel, tower and bell, for the sake of the
+homesteads that will grow up in security round that
+church-castle. This only, however, whilst the golden age lasts.
+The moment the Plutonic power is let loose, and the loveless
+Alberic comes into the field with his corrupting millions, the
+gods are face to face with destruction; since Alberic, able with
+invisible hunger-whip to force 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 bigger brains, can capture his
+gold. This, the dilemma of the Church today, is the situation
+created by the exploit of Alberic in the depths of the Rhine.
+
+Second Scene
+
+From the bed of the river we rise into cloudy regions, and
+finally come out into the clear in a meadow, where Wotan, the god
+of gods, and his consort Fricka lie sleeping. Wotan, you will
+observe, has lost one eye; and you will presently learn that he
+plucked it out voluntarily as the price to be paid for his
+alliance with Fricka, who in return has brought to him as her
+dowry all the powers of Law. The meadow is on the brink of a
+ravine, beyond which, towering on distant heights, stands
+Godhome, a mighty castle, newly built as a house of state for the
+one-eyed god and his all-ruling wife. Wotan has not yet seen this
+castle except in his dreams: two giants have just built it for
+him whilst he slept; and the reality is before him for the first
+time when Fricka wakes him. In that majestic burg he is to rule
+with her and through her over the humble giants, who have eyes to
+gape at the glorious castles their own hands have built from his
+design, but no brains to design castles for themselves, 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 no
+weaknesses, no respect for persons. All such sweet littlenesses
+must be left to the humble stupid giants to make their toil sweet
+to them; and the god must, after all, pay for Olympian power the
+same price the dwarf has paid for Plutonic power.
+
+Wotan has forgotten this in his dreams of greatness. Not so
+Fricka. What she 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 giants Fricka's sister, the goddess Freia, with
+her golden love-apples. When Fricka reproaches Wotan with having
+selfishly forgotten this, she finds that he, like herself, is not
+prepared to go through with his bargain, and that he is trusting
+to another great worldforce, the Lie (a European Power, as
+Lassalle said), to help him to trick the giants out of their
+reward. 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 to deliver him from his contract, and to cheat the
+giants for him; but he has not arrived to keep his word: indeed,
+as Fricka bitterly points out, why should not the Lie fail Wotan,
+since such failure is the very essence of him?
+
+The giants come soon enough; and Freia flies to Wotan for
+protection against them. Their purposes are quite honest; and
+they have no doubt of the god's faith. There stands their part of
+the contract fulfilled, stone on stone, port and pinnacle all
+faithfully finished from Wotan's design by their mighty labor.
+They have come undoubtingly for their agreed wage. Then there
+happens what is to them an incredible, inconceivable thing. The
+god begins to shuffle. There are no moments in life more tragic
+than those in which the humble common man, the manual worker,
+leaving with implicit trust all high affairs to his betters, and
+reverencing them wholly as worthy of that trust, even to the
+extent of accepting as his rightful function the saving of them
+from all roughening and coarsening drudgeries, first discovers
+that they are corrupt, greedy, unjust and treacherous. The shock
+drives a ray of prophetic light into one giant's mind, and gives
+him a momentary eloquence. In that moment he rises above his
+stupid gianthood, and earnestly warns the Son of Light that all
+his power and eminence of priesthood, godhood, and kingship must
+stand or fall with the unbearable cold greatness of the
+incorruptible law-giver. But Wotan, whose assumed character of
+law-giver is altogether false to his real passionate nature,
+despises the rebuke; and the giant's ray of insight is lost in
+the murk of his virtuous indignation.
+
+In the midst of the wrangle, Loki comes at last, excusing himself
+for being late on the ground that he has been detained by a
+matter of importance which he has promised to lay before Wotan.
+When pressed to give his mind to the business immediately in
+hand, and to extricate Wotan from his dilemma, he has nothing to
+say except that the giants are evidently altogether in the right.
+The castle has been duly built: he has tried every stone of it,
+and found the work first-rate: there is nothing to be done but
+pay the price agreed upon by handing over Freia to the giants.
+The gods are furious; and Wotan passionately declares that he
+only consented to the bargain on Loki's promise to find a way for
+him out of it. But Loki says no: he has promised to find a way
+out if any such way exist, but not to make a way if there is no
+way. He has wandered over the whole earth in search of some
+treasure great enough to buy Freia back from the giants; but in
+all the world he has found nothing for which Man will give up
+Woman. And this, by the way, reminds him of the matter he had
+promised to lay before Wotan. The Rhine maidens have complained
+to him of Alberic's theft of their gold; and he mentions it as a
+curious exception to his universal law of the unpurchasable
+preciousness of love, that this gold-robber has forsworn love for
+the sake of the fabulous riches of the Plutonic empire and the
+mastery of the 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 the instrument for cruelly murdering his self-respect. But
+the giants, with love within their reach, with Freia and her
+golden apples in their hands, offer to give her up for the
+treasure of Alberic. Observe, it is the treasure alone that they
+desire. They have no fierce dreams of dominion over their
+superiors, or of moulding the world to any conceptions of their
+own. They are neither clever nor ambitious: they simply covet
+money. Alberic's gold: that is their demand, or else Freia, as
+agreed upon, whom they now carry off as hostage, leaving Wotan to
+consider their ultimatum.
+
+Freia gone, the gods begin to wither and age: her golden apples,
+which they so lightly bargained away, they now find to be a
+matter of life and death 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 Wotan to do? Loki sees the
+answer clearly enough: he must bluntly rob Alberic. There is
+nothing to prevent him except moral scruple; for Alberic, after
+all, is a poor, dim, dwarfed, credulous creature whom a god can
+outsee and a lie can outwit. Down, then, Wotan and Loki plunge
+into the mine where Alberic's slaves are piling up wealth for him
+under the invisible whip.
+
+Third Scene
+
+This gloomy place need not be a mine: it might just as well be a
+match-factory, with yellow phosphorus, phossy jaw, a large
+dividend, and plenty of clergymen shareholders. Or it might be a
+whitelead factory, or a chemical works, or a pottery, or a
+railway shunting yard, or a tailoring shop, or a little
+gin-sodden laundry, or a bakehouse, or a big shop, or any other
+of the places where human life and welfare are daily sacrificed
+in order that some greedy foolish creature may be able to hymn
+exultantly to his Platonic idol:
+
+Thou mak'st me eat whilst others starve,
+And sing while others do lament:
+Such untome Thy blessings are,
+As if I were Thine only care.
+
+In the mine, which resounds with the clinking anvils of the
+dwarfs toiling miserably to heap up treasure for their master,
+Alberic has set his brother Mime--more familiarly, Mimmy--to make
+him a helmet. Mimmy dimly sees that there is some magic in this
+helmet, and tries to keep it; but Alberic wrests it from him, and
+shows him, to his cost, that it is the veil of the invisible
+whip, and that he who wears it can appear in what shape he will,
+or disappear from view altogether. This helmet is a very common
+article in our streets, where it generally takes the form of a
+tall hat. It makes a man invisible as a shareholder, and changes
+him into various shapes, such as a pious Christian, a subscriber
+to hospitals, a benefactor of the poor, a model husband and
+father, a shrewd, practical independent Englishman, and what not,
+when he is really a pitiful parasite on the commonwealth,
+consuming a great deal, and producing nothing, feeling nothing,
+knowing nothing, believing nothing, and doing nothing except what
+all the rest do, and that only because 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 instinctively mistrusts Intellect, even in the
+garb of Poetry and the company of Godhead, whilst envying the
+brilliancy of the one and the dignity of the other. Alberic
+breaks out at them with a terrible boast of the power now within
+his grasp. He paints for them the world as it will be when his
+dominion over it is complete, when the soft airs and green mosses
+of its valleys shall be changed into smoke, slag, and filth; when
+slavery, disease, and squalor, soothed by drunkenness and
+mastered by the policeman's baton, shall become the foundation of
+society; and when nothing shall escape ruin except such pretty
+places and pretty women as he may like to buy for the slaking of
+his own lusts. In that kingdom of evil he sees that there will be
+no power but his own. These gods, with their moralities and
+legalities and intellectual subtlety, will go under and be
+starved out of existence. He bids Wotan and Loki beware of it;
+and his "Hab' Acht!" is hoarse, horrible, and sinister. Wotan
+is revolted to the very depths of his being: he cannot stifle the
+execration that bursts from him. But Loki is unaffected: he has
+no moral passion: indignation is as absurd to him as enthusiasm.
+He finds it exquisitely amusing--having a touch of the comic
+spirit in him--that the dwarf, in stirring up the moral fervor of
+Wotan, has removed his last moral scruple about becoming a thief.
+Wotan will now rob the dwarf without remorse; for is it not
+positively his highest duty to take this power out of such evil
+hands and use it himself in the interests of Godhead? On the
+loftiest moral grounds, he lets Loki do his worst.
+
+A little cunningly disguised flattery makes short work of
+Alberic. Loki pretends to be afraid of him; and he swallows that
+bait unhesitatingly. But how, enquires Loki, is he to guard
+against the hatred of his million slaves? 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 to boast
+of the enchantments of the magic helmet. Loki refuses to believe
+in such marvels without witnessing them. Alberic, only too glad
+to show off his powers, puts on the helmet and transforms himself
+into a monstrous serpent. Loki gratifies him by pretending to be
+frightened out of his wits, but ventures to remark that it would
+be better still if the helmet could transform its owner into some
+tiny creature that could hide and spy in the smallest cranny.
+Alberic promptly transforms himself into a toad. In an instant
+Wotan's foot is on him; Loki tears away the helmet; they pinion
+him, and drag him away a prisoner up through the earth to the
+meadow by the castle.
+
+Fourth Scene
+
+There, to pay for his freedom, he has to summon his slaves from
+the depths to place all the treasure they have heaped up for him
+at the feet of Wotan. Then he demands his liberty; but Wotan must
+have the ring as well. And here the dwarf, like the giant before
+him, feels the very foundations of the world shake beneath him at
+the discovery of his own base cupidity in a higher power. That
+evil should, in its loveless desperation, create malign powers
+which Godhead could not create, seems but natural justice to him.
+But that Godhead should steal those malign powers from evil, and
+wield them itself, is a monstrous perversion; and his appeal to
+Wotan to forego it is almost terrible in its conviction of wrong.
+It is of no avail. Wotan falls back again on virtuous
+indignation. He reminds Alberic that he stole the gold from the
+Rhine maidens, and takes the attitude of the just judge
+compelling a restitution of stolen goods. Alberic knowing
+perfectly well that the judge is taking the goods to put them m
+his own pocket, has the ring torn from his finger, and is once
+more as poor as he was when he came slipping 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
+laborer was drained dry by the knightly spendthrift, and the
+spendthrift was drained by the Jewish usurer, Church and State,
+religion and law, seized on the Jew and drained him as a
+Christian duty. When the forces of lovelessness and greed had
+built up our own sordid capitalist systems, driven by invisible
+proprietorship, robbing the poor, defacing the earth, and forcing
+themselves as a universal curse even on the generous and humane,
+then religion and law and intellect, which would never themselves
+have discovered such systems, their natural bent being towards
+welfare, economy, and life instead of towards corruption, waste,
+and death, nevertheless did not scruple to seize by fraud and
+force these powers of evil on presence of using them for good.
+And it inevitably happens that when the Church, the Law, and all
+the Talents have made common cause to rob the people, the Church
+is far more vitally harmed by that unfaithfulness to itself than
+its more mechanical confederates; so that finally they turn on
+their discredited ally and rob the Church, with the cheerful
+co-operation of Loki, as in France and Italy for instance.
+
+The twin giants come back with their hostage, in whose presence
+Godhead blooms again. The gold is ready for them; but now that
+the moment has come for parting with Freia the gold
+does not seem so tempting; and they are sorely loth to let her
+go. Not unless there is gold enough to utterly hide her from
+them--not until the heap has grown so that they can see nothing
+but gold--until money has come between them and every human
+feeling, will they part with her. There is not gold enough to
+accomplish this: however cunningly Loki spreads it, the glint of
+Freia's hair is still visible to Giant Fafnir, and the magic
+helmet must go on the heap to shut it out. Even then Fafnir's
+brother, Fasolt, can catch a beam from her eye through a chink,
+and is rendered incapable thereby of forswearing her. There is
+nothing to stop that chink but the ring; and Wotan is as greedily
+bent on keeping that as Alberic himself was; nor can the other
+gods persuade him that Freia is worth it, since for the highest
+god, love is not the highest good, but only the universal delight
+that bribes all living things to travail with renewed life. Life
+itself, with its accomplished marvels and its infinite
+potentialities, is the only force that Godhead can worship. Wotan
+does not yield until he is reached by the voice of the fruitful
+earth that before he or the dwarfs 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 something higher even than
+himself, that shall one day supersede him and cut the tangles and
+alliances and compromises that already have cost him one of his
+eyes. When Erda, the First Mother of life, rises from her
+sleeping-place in the heart of the earth, and warns him to yield
+the ring, he obeys her; the ring is added to the heap of gold;
+and all sense of Freia is cut off from the giants.
+
+But now what Law is left to these two poor stupid laborers
+whereby one shall yield to the other any of the treasure for
+which they have each paid the whole price in surrendering Freia?
+They look by mere habit to the god to judge for them; but he,
+with his heart stirring towards higher forces than himself, turns
+with disgust from these lower forces. They settle it as two
+wolves might; and Fafnir batters his brother dead with his staff.
+It is a horrible thing to see and hear, to anyone who knows how
+much blood has been shed in the world in just that way by its
+brutalized toilers, honest fellows enough until their betters
+betrayed them. Fafnir goes off with his booty. It is quite
+useless to him. He has neither the cunning nor the ambition to
+establish the Plutonic empire with it. Merely to prevent others
+from getting it is the only purpose it brings him. He piles it in
+a cave; transforms himself into a dragon by the helmet; and
+devotes his life to guarding it, as much a slave to it as a
+jailor is to his prisoner. He had much better have thrown it all
+back into the Rhine and transformed himself into the
+shortest-lived animal that enjoys at least a brief run in the
+sunshine. His case, however, is far too common to be surprising.
+The world is overstocked with persons who sacrifice all their
+affections, and madly trample and batter 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 the most
+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 a shepherd calls his flocks. They come at his summons;
+and he and the castle are hidden by their black legions. Froh,
+the Rainbow god, hastens to his side. At the stroke of Donner's
+hammer the black murk is riven in all directions by darting
+ribbons of lightning; and as the air clears, the castle is seen m
+its fullest splendor, accessible now by the rainbow bridge which
+Froh has cast across the ravine. In the glory of this moment
+Wotan has a great thought. With all his aspirations to establish
+a reign of noble thought, of righteousness, order, and justice,
+he has found that day that there is no race yet in the world that
+quite spontaneously, naturally, and unconsciously realizes his
+ideal. He himself has found how far short Godhead falls of the
+thing it conceives. He, the greatest of gods, has been unable to
+control his fate: he has been forced against his will to choose
+between evils, to make disgraceful bargains, to break them still
+more disgracefully, and even 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 his affections; and the
+attempt to retain both has cost him his honor. On every side he
+is shackled and bound, dependent on the laws of Fricka and on the
+lies of Loki, forced to traffic with dwarfs for handicraft and
+with 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 not yet exhausted. The life that came from her
+has ever climbed up to a higher and higher organization. From
+toad and serpent to dwarf, from bear 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 whom the god's
+unavailing thought shall have become effective will and life, who
+shall make his way straight to truth and reality over the laws of
+Fricka and the lies of Loki with a strength that overcomes giants
+and a cunning that outwits dwarfs? Yes: Erda, the First Mother,
+must travail again, and breed him a race of heroes to deliver the
+world and himself from his limited powers and disgraceful
+bargains. This is the vision that flashes on him as he turns to
+the rainbow bridge and calls his wife to come and dwell with him
+in Valhalla, the home of the gods.
+
+They are all overcome with Valhalla's glory except Loki. He is
+behind the scenes of this joint reign of the Divine and the
+Legal. He despises these gods with their ideals and their golden
+apples. "I am ashamed," he says, "to have dealings with these
+futile creatures." And so he follows them to the rainbow bridge.
+But as they set foot on it, from the river below rises the
+wailing of the Rhine maidens for their lost gold. "You down there
+in the water," cries Loki with brutal irony: "you used to bask in
+the glitter of your gold: henceforth you shall bask in the
+splendor of the gods." And they reply that the truth is in the
+depths and the darkness, and that what blazes on high there is
+falsehood. And with that the gods pass into their glorious
+stronghold.
+
+
+
+WAGNER AS REVOLUTIONIST
+
+Before leaving this explanation of The Rhine Gold, I must have a
+word or two about it with the reader. It is the least popular of
+the sections of The Ring. The reason is that its dramatic moments
+lie quite outside the consciousness of people whose joys and
+sorrows are all domestic and personal, and whose religions and
+political ideas are purely conventional and superstitious. To
+them it is a struggle between half a dozen fairytale personages
+for a ring, involving hours of scolding and cheating, and one
+long scene in a dark gruesome mine, with gloomy, ugly music, and
+not a glimpse of a handsome young man or pretty woman. Only those
+of wider consciousness can follow it breathlessly, seeing in it
+the whole tragedy of human history and the whole horror of the
+dilemmas from which the world is shrinking today. At Bayreuth I
+have seen a party of English tourists, after enduring agonies of
+boredom from Alberic, rise in the middle of the third scene, and
+almost force their way out of the dark theatre into the sunlit
+pine-wood without. And I have seen people who were deeply
+affected by the scene driven almost beside themselves by this
+disturbance. But it was a very natural thing for the unfortunate
+tourists to do, since in this Rhine Gold prologue there is no
+interval between the acts for escape. Roughly speaking, people
+who have no general ideas, no touch of the concern of the
+philosopher and statesman for the race, cannot enjoy The Rhine
+Gold as a drama. They may find compensations in some exceedingly
+pretty music, at times even grand and glorious, which will enable
+them to escape occasionally from the struggle between Alberic and
+Wotan; but if their capacity for music should be as limited as
+their comprehension of the world, they had better stay away.
+
+And now, attentive Reader, we have reached the point at which
+some foolish person is sure to interrupt us by declaring that The
+Rhine Gold is what they call "a work of art" pure and simple, and
+that Wagner never dreamt of shareholders, tall hats, whitelead
+factories, and industrial and political questions looked at from
+the socialistic and humanitarian points of view. We need not
+discuss these impertinences: it is easier to silence them with
+the facts of Wagner's life. In 1843 he obtained the position of
+conductor of the Opera at Dresden at a salary of L225 a year,
+with a pension. This was a first-rate permanent appointment in
+the service of the Saxon State, carrying an assured professional
+position and livelihood with it In 1848, the year of revolutions,
+the discontented middle class, unable to rouse the
+Churchand-State governments of the day from their bondage to
+custom, caste, and law by appeals to morality or constitutional
+agitation for Liberal reforms, made common cause with the
+starving wage-working class, and resorted to armed rebellion,
+which reached Dresden in 1849. Had Wagner been the mere musical
+epicure and political mugwump that the term "artist" seems to
+suggest to so many critics and amateurs--that is, a creature in
+their own lazy likeness--he need have taken no more part in the
+political struggles of his day than Bishop took in the English
+Reform agitation of 1832, or Sterndale Bennett in the Chartist or
+Free Trade movements. What he did do was first to make a
+desperate appeal to the King to cast off his bonds and answer the
+need of the time by taking true Kingship on himself and leading
+his people to the redress of their intolerable wrongs (fancy the
+poor monarch's feelings!), and then, when the crash came, to take
+his side with the right and the poor against the rich and the
+wrong. When the insurrection was defeated, three leaders of it
+were especially marked down for vengeance: August Roeckel, an old
+friend of Wagner's to whom he wrote a well-known series of
+letters; Michael Bakoonin, afterwards a famous apostle of
+revolutionary Anarchism; and Wagner himself. Wagner escaped to
+Switzerland: Roeckel and Bakoonin suffered long terms of
+imprisonment. Wagner was of course utterly ruined, pecuniarily
+and socially (to his own intense relief and satisfaction); and
+his exile lasted twelve years. His first idea was to get his
+Tannhauser produced in Paris. With the notion of explaining
+himself to the Parisians he wrote a pamphlet entitled Art and
+Revolution, a glance through which will show how thoroughly the
+socialistic side of the revolution had his sympathy, and how
+completely he had got free from the influence of the established
+Churches of his day. For three years he kept pouring forth
+pamphlets--some of them elaborate treatises in size and
+intellectual rank, but still essentially the pamphlets and
+manifestoes of a born agitator--on social evolution, religion,
+life, art and the influence of riches. In 1853 the poem of The
+Ring was privately printed; and in 1854, five years after the
+Dresden insurrection, The Rhine Gold score was completed to the
+last drum tap.
+
+These facts are on official record in Germany, where the
+proclamation summing up Wagner as "a politically dangerous
+person" may be consulted to this day. The pamphlets are now
+accessible to English readers in the translation of Mr. Ashton
+Ellis. This being so, any person who, having perhaps heard that I
+am a Socialist, attempts to persuade you that my interpretation
+of The Rhine Gold is only "my socialism" read into the works of a
+dilettantist who borrowed an idle tale from an old saga to make
+an opera book with, may safely be dismissed from your
+consideration as an ignoramus.
+
+If you are now satisfied that The Rhine Gold is an allegory, do
+not forget that an allegory is never quite consistent except when
+it is written by someone without dramatic faculty, in which case
+it is unreadable. There is only one way of dramatizing an idea;
+and that is by puttmg on the stage a human being possessed
+by that idea, yet none the less a human being with all the human
+impulses which make him akin and therefore interesting to us.
+Bunyan, in his Pilgrim's Progress, does not, like his unread
+imitators, attempt to personify Christianity and Valour: he
+dramatizes for you the life of the Christian and the Valiant Man.
+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 character in 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's
+rogueries. That, of course, is just what State Law would do; but
+we must not save the credit of the allegory by a quip. Not until
+she reappears in the next play (The Valkyries) does her function
+in the allegorical scheme become plain.
+
+One preconception will bewilder the spectator hopelessly unless
+he has been warned against it or is naturally free from it. In
+the old-fashioned orders of creation, the supernatural personages
+are invariably conceived as greater than man, for good or evil.
+In the modern 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 the earth. There are dwarfs, giants, and gods. The
+danger is that you will jump to the conclusion that the gods, at
+least, are a higher order than the human order. On the contrary,
+the world is waiting for Man to redeem it 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: to wit,
+the instinctive, predatory, lustful, greedy people; the patient,
+toiling, stupid, respectful, money-worshipping people; and the
+intellectual, moral, talented people who devise and administer
+States and Churches. History shows us only one order higher than
+the highest of these: namely, the order of Heroes.
+
+Now it is quite clear--though you have perhaps never thought of
+it--that if the next generation of Englishmen consisted wholly of
+Julius Caesars, all our political, ecclesiastical, and moral
+institutions would vanish, and the less perishable of their
+appurtenances be classed with Stonehenge and the cromlechs and
+round towers as inexplicable relics of a bygone social order.
+Julius Caesars would no more trouble themselves about such
+contrivances as our codes and churches than a fellow of the Royal
+Society will touch his hat to the squire and listen to the
+village curate's sermons. This is precisely what must happen some
+day if life continues thrusting towards higher and higher
+organization as it has hitherto done. As most of our English
+professional men are to Australian bushmen, so, we must suppose,
+will the average man of some future day be to Julius Caesar. Let
+any man of middle age, pondering this prospect consider what has
+happened within a single generation to the articles of faith his
+father regarded as eternal nay, to the very scepticisms and
+blasphemies of his youth (Bishop Colenso's criticism of the
+Pentateuch, for example!); and he will begin to realize how much
+of our barbarous Theology and Law the man of the future will do
+without. Bakoonin, the Dresden revolutionary leader with whom
+Wagner went out in 1849, put forward later on a program, often
+quoted with foolish horror, for the abolition of all
+institutions, religious, political, juridical, financial, legal,
+academic, and so on, so as to leave the will of man free to find
+its own way. All the loftiest spirits of that time were burning
+to raise Man up, to give him self-respect, to shake him out of
+his habit of grovelling before the ideals created by his own
+imagination, of attributmg the good that sprang from the
+ceaseless energy 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
+end of dwarfs, giants, and gods. Meanwhile, let us not forget
+that godhood means to Wagner infirmity and compromise, and
+manhood strength and integrity. Above all, we must understand--
+for it is the key to much that we are to see--that the god, since
+his desire is toward a higher and fuller life, must long in his
+inmost soul for the advent of that greater power whose first
+work, though this he does not see as yet, must be his own
+undoing.
+
+In the midst of all these far-reaching ideas, it is amusing to
+find Wagner still full of his ingrained theatrical
+professionalism, and introducing effects which now seem
+old-fashioned and stagey with as much energy and earnestness as
+if they were his loftiest inspirations. When Wotan wrests the
+ring from Alberic, the dwarf delivers a lurid and bloodcurdling
+stage curse, calling down on its every future possessor care,
+fear, and death. The musical phrase accompanying this outburst
+was a veritable harmonic and melodic bogey to mid-century ears,
+though time has now robbed it of its terrors. It sounds again
+when Fafnir slays Fasolt, and on every subsequent occasion when
+the ring brings death to its holder. This episode must justify
+itself purely as a piece of stage sensationalism. On deeper
+ground it is superfluous and confusing, as the ruin to which the
+pursuit of riches leads needs no curse to explain it; nor is
+there any sense in investing Alberic with providential powers in
+the matter.
+
+
+
+THE VALKYRIES
+
+Before the curtain rises on the Valkyries, let us see what has
+happened since it fell on The Rhine Gold. The persons of the
+drama will tell us presently; but as we probably do not
+understand German, that may not help us.
+
+Wotan is still ruling the world in glory from his giantbuilt
+castle with his wife Fricka. But he has no security for the
+continuance of his reign, since Alberic may at any moment
+contrive to recover the ring, the full power of which he can
+wield because he has forsworn love. Such forswearing 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 have
+seen, his power has been established in the world by and as a
+system of laws enforced by penalties. These he must consent to be
+bound by himself; for a god who broke his own laws would betray
+the fact that legality and conformity are not the highest rule of
+conduct--a discovery fatal to his supremacy as Pontiff and
+Lawgiver. Hence "he may not wrest the ring unlawfully from
+Fafnir, even if he could bring himself to forswear 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 duty it is to sweep through battle-fields and
+bear away to Valhalla the souls of the bravest who fall there.
+Thus reinforced by a host of warriors, he has thoroughly
+indoctrinated them, Loki helping him as dialectician-in-chief,
+with the conventional system of law and duty, supernatural
+religion and self-sacrificing idealism, which they believe to be
+the essence of his godhood, but which is really only the
+machinery of the love of necessary power which is his mortal
+weakness. This process secures their fanatical devotion to his
+system of government, but he knows perfectly well that such
+systems, in spite of their moral pretensions, serve selfish and
+ambitious tyrants better than benevolent despots, and that, if
+once Alberic gets the ring back, he will easily out-Valhalla
+Valhalla, if not buy it over as a going concern. The only chance
+of permanent security, then, is the appearance in the world of a
+hero who, without any illicit prompting from Wotan, will destroy
+Alberic and wrest the ring from Fafnir. There will then, he
+believes, be no further cause for anxiety, since he does not yet
+conceive Heroism as a force hostile to Godhead. In his longing
+for a rescuer, it does not occur to him that when the Hero comes,
+his first exploit must be to sweep 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 First Mother; and through her womb, eternally fertile,
+the inner true thought that made him first a god is reborn as his
+daughter, uncorrupted by his ambition, unfettered by his
+machinery of power and his alliances with Fricka 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 to
+anyone, since in speaking to her he but speaks to himself. "Was
+Keinem in Worten unausgesprochen," he says to her, "bleib es
+ewig: mit mir nur rath' ich, red' ich zu dir."
+
+But from Brynhild no hero can spring until there is a man of
+Wotan's race to breed with her. Wotan wanders further; and a
+mortal woman bears him twins: a son and a daughter. He separates
+them by letting the girl fall into the hands of a forest tribe
+which in due time gives her as a wife to a fierce chief, one
+Hunding. With the son he himself leads the life of a wolf, and
+teaches him the only power a god can teach, the power of doing
+without happiness. When he has given him this terrible training,
+he abandons him, and goes to the bridal feast of his daughter
+Sieglinda and Hunding. In the blue cloak of the wanderer, wearing
+the broad hat that flaps over the socket of his forfeited eye, he
+appears in Hunding's house, the middle pillar of which is a
+mighty tree. Into that tree, without a word, he strikes a sword
+up to the hilt, so that only the might of a hero can withdraw
+it. Then he goes out as silently as he came, blind to the truth
+that no weapon from the armory of Godhead can serve the turn of
+the true Human Hero. Neither Hunding nor any of his guests can
+move the sword; and there it stays awaiting the destined hand.
+That is the history of the generations between The Rhine Gold and
+The Valkyries.
+
+The First Act
+
+This time, as we sit looking expectantly at the curtain, we hear,
+not the deep booming of the Rhine, but the patter of a forest
+downpour, accompanied by the mutter of a storm which soon gathers
+into a roar and culminates in crashing thunderbolts. As it
+passes off, the curtain rises; and there is no mistaking whose
+forest habitation we are in; for the central pillar is a mighty
+tree, and the place fit for the dwelling of a fierce chief. The
+door opens: and an exhausted man reels in: an adept from the
+school of unhappiness. Sieglinda finds him lying on the hearth.
+He explains that he has been in a fight; that his weapons not
+being as strong as his arms, were broken; and that he had to fly.
+He desires some drink and a moment's rest; then he will go; for
+he is an unlucky person, and does not want to bring his ill-luck
+on the woman who is succoring him. But she, it appears, is also
+unhappy; and a strong sympathy springs up between them. When her
+husband arrives, he observes not only this sympathy, but a
+resemblance between them, a gleam of the snake in their eyes.
+They sit down to table; and the stranger tells them his unlucky
+story. He is the son of Wotan, who is known to him only as
+Wolfing, of the race of the Volsungs. The earliest thing he
+remembers is returning from a hunt with his father to find their
+home destroyed, his mother murdered, and his twin-sister carried
+off. This was the work of a tribe called the Neidings, upon whom
+he and Wolfing thenceforth waged implacable war until the day
+when his father disappeared, leaving no trace of himself but an
+empty wolfskin. The young Volsung was thus cast alone upon the
+world, finding most hands against him, and bringing no good luck
+even to his friends. His latest exploit has been the slaying of
+certain brothers who were forcing their sister to wed against her
+will. 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 brothers and 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 the woman to bed, and follows her himself,
+taking his spear with him.
+
+The unlucky stranger, left brooding by the hearth, has nothing to
+console himself with but an old promise of his father's that he
+shall find a weapon to his hand when he most needs one. The last
+flicker of the dying fire strikes on the golden hilt of the sword
+that sticks in the 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 forced marriage, and of the sword. She
+has always felt, she says, that her miseries will end in the arms
+of the hero who shall succeed in drawing it forth. The stranger,
+diffident as he is about his luck, has no misgivings as to his
+strength and destiny. He gives her his affection at once, and
+abandons himself to the charm of the night and the season; for it
+is the beginning of Spring. They soon learn from their
+confidences that she is his stolen twin-sister. He is transported
+to find that the heroic race of the Volsungs need neither perish
+nor be corrupted by a lower strain. Hailing the sword by the name
+of Nothung (or Needed), he plucks it from the tree as her
+bride-gift, and then, crying "Both bride and 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
+his war-maiden Brynhild, the child borne to him by the First
+Mother, and bids 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 may have defied the law, and
+put his own will in its place; but can a god hold him guiltless,
+when the whole power of the gods can enforce itself only by law?
+Fricka, shuddering with horror, outraged in every instinct, comes
+clamoring for punishment. Wotan pleads the general necessity of
+encouraging heroism in order to keep up the Valhalla bodyguard;
+but his remonstrances only bring upon him torrents of reproaches
+for his own unfaithfulness to the law in roaming through the
+world and begetting war-maidens, "wolf cubs," and the like. He is
+hopelessly beaten in the argument. Fricka is absolutely right
+when she declares that the ending of the gods began when he
+brought this wolf-hero into the world; and now, to save their
+very existence, she pitilessly demands his destruction. Wotan has
+no power to refuse: it is Fricka's mechanical force, and not his
+thought, that really rules the world. He has to recall Brynhild;
+take back his former instructions; and ordain that Hunding shall
+slay the Volsung.
+
+But now comes another difficulty. Brynhild is the inner thought
+and will of Godhead, the aspiration from the high life to the
+higher that is its divine element, and only becomes separated
+from it when its resort to kingship and priestcraft for the sake
+of temporal power has made it false to itself. Hitherto,
+Brynhild, as Valkyrie or hero chooser, has obeyed Wotan
+implicitly, taking her work as the holiest and bravest in his
+kingdom; and now he tells her what he could not tell Fricka--what
+indeed he could not tell to Brynhild, were she not, as she says,
+his own will--the whole story of Alberic and of that inspiration
+about the raising up of a hero. She thoroughly approves of the
+inspiration; but when 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 the hero down, she for the first time
+hesitates to accept his command. In his fury and despair he
+overawes her by the most terrible threats of his anger; and she
+submits.
+
+Then comes the Volsung Siegmund, following his sister bride, who
+has fled into the mountains in a revulsion of horror at having
+allowed herself to bring her hero to shame. Whilst she is lying
+exhausted and senseless in his arms, Brynhild appears to him and
+solemnly warns him that he must presently leave the earth with
+her. He asks whither he must follow her. To Valhalla, to take his
+place there among the heroes. He asks, 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 his sister there? No.
+Then, says Siegmund, I will not come with you.
+
+She tries to make him understand that he cannot help himself.
+Being a hero, he will not be so persuaded: he has his father's
+sword, and does not 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, he accepts his fate, but will shape it
+with his own hand, both for himself and his sister, by slaying
+her, and then killing himself with the last stroke of the sword.
+And thereafter he will go to Hell, rather than to Valhalla.
+
+How now can Brynhild, being what she is, choose her side freely
+in a conflict between this hero and the vassal of Fricka? By
+instinct she at once throws Wotan's command to the winds, and
+bids Siegmund nerve himself for the combat with Hunding, in which
+she pledges him the protection of her shield. The horn of Hunding
+is soon heard; and Siegmund's spirits rise to fighting pitch at
+once. The two meet; and the Valkyrie's shield is held before the
+hero. But when he delivers his sword-stroke at his foe, the
+weapon shivers on the spear of Wotan, who suddenly appears
+between them; and the first of the race of heroes falls with the
+weapon of the Law's vassal through his breast. Brynhild snatches
+the fragments of the broken sword, and flies, carrying off the
+woman with her on her war-horse; and Wotan, in terrible wrath,
+slays Hunding with a wave of his hand, and starts in pursuit of
+his disobedient daughter.
+
+The Third Act
+
+On a rocky peak, four of the Valkyries are waiting for the rest.
+The absent 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 eight sisters learn that she has defied Wotan,
+they dare not help her; and Brynhild has to rouse Sieglinda to
+make an effort to save herself, by reminding her that she bears
+in her the seed of a hero, and must face everything, endure
+anything, sooner than let that seed miscarry. Sieglinda, in a
+transport of exaltation, takes the fragments of the sword and
+flies into the forest. Then Wotan comes; the sisters fly in
+terror at his command; and he is left alone with Brynhild.
+
+Here, then, we have the first of the inevitable moments which
+Wotan did not foresee. Godhead has now established its dominion
+over the world by a mighty Church, compelling obedience through
+its ally the Law, with its formidable State organization of force
+of arms and cunning of brain. It has submitted to this alliance
+to keep the Plutonic power in check--built it up primarily for
+the sake of that soul in itself which cares only to make the
+highest better and the best higher; and now here is that very
+soul separated from it and working for the destruction of its
+indispensable ally, the lawgiving State. How is the rebel to be
+disarmed? Slain it cannot be by Godhead, since it is still
+Godhead's own very dearest soul. But hidden, stifled, silenced it
+must be; or it will wreck the State and leave the Church
+defenseless. Not until it passes completely away from Godhead,
+and is reborn as the soul of the hero, can it work anything but
+the confusion and destruction of the existing order. 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 the highest
+principles, hide the Truth. Let Loki surround this mountain top
+with the appearance of a consuming fire; and who will dare
+penetrate to Brynhild? 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 through which he might carry a sack of
+gunpowder without being a penny the worse. Therefore let the fire
+seem so terrible that only the hero, when in the fulness of time
+he appears upon earth, will venture through it; and the problem
+is solved. Wotan, with a breaking heart, takes leave of Brynhild;
+throws her into a deep sleep; covers her with her long warshield;
+summons Loki, who comes in the shape of a wall of fire
+surrounding the mountain peak; and turns his back on Brynhild for
+ever.
+
+The allegory here is happily not so glaringly obvious to the
+younger generations of our educated classes as it was forty years
+ago. In those days, any child who expressed a doubt as to the
+absolute truth of the Church's teaching, even to the extent of
+asking why Joshua told the sun to stand still instead of telling
+the earth to cease turning, or of pointing out that a whale's
+throat would hardly have been large enough to swallow Jonah, was
+unhesitatingly told that if it harboured such doubts it would
+spend all eternity after its death in horrible torments in a lake
+of burning brimstone. It is difficult to write or read this
+nowadays without laughing; yet no doubt millions of ignorant and
+credulous people are still teaching their children that. When
+Wagner himself was a little child, the fact that hell was a
+fiction devised for the intimidation and subjection of the
+masses, was a well-kept secret of the thinking and governing
+classes. At that time the fires of Loki were a very real terror
+to all except persons of exceptional force of character and
+intrepidity of thought. Even thirty years after Wagner had
+printed the verses of The Ring for private circulation, we find
+him excusing himself from perfectly explicit denial of current
+superstitions, by reminding his readers that it would expose him
+to prosecution. In England, so many of our respectable voters are
+still grovelling in a gloomy devil worship, of which the fires of
+Loki are the main bulwark, that no Government has yet had the
+conscience or the courage to repeal our monstrous laws against
+"blasphemy." 
+
+
+
+SIEGFRIED
+
+Sieglinda, when she flies into the forest with the hero's son
+unborn in her womb, and the broken pieces of his sword in her
+hand, finds shelter in 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 who made for him the magic helmet.
+His aim in life is to gain possession of the helmet, the ring,
+and the treasure, and through them to obtain that Plutonic
+mastery of the world under the beginnings of which he himself
+writhed during Alberic's brief reign. Mimmy is a blinking,
+shambling, ancient creature, too weak and timid to dream of
+taking arms himself to despoil Fafnir, who still, transformed to
+a monstrous serpent, broods on the gold in a hole in the rocks.
+Mimmy needs the help of a hero for that; and he has craft enough
+to know that it is quite possible, and indeed much in the
+ordinary way of the world, for senile avarice and craft to set
+youth and bravery to work to win empire for it. He knows the
+pedigree of the child left on his hands, and nurses it to manhood
+with 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 none of his father's ill luck, and all his
+father's hardihood. The fear against which Siegmund set his face
+like flint, and the woe which he wore 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 ho has nursed him;
+chafes furiously under his claims some return for his tender
+care; and is, in short, a totally unmoral person, a born
+anarchist, the ideal of Bakoonin, an anticipation of the
+"overman" of Nietzsche. He is enormously strong, full of life and
+fun, dangerous and destructive to what he dislikes, and
+affectionate to what he likes; so that it is fortunate that his
+likes and dislikes are sane and healthy. Altogether an
+inspiriting young forester, a son of the morning, in whom the
+heroic race has come out into the sunshine from the clouds of his
+grandfather's majestic entanglements with law, and the night of
+his father's tragic struggle with it.
+
+The First Act
+
+Mimmy's smithy is a cave, in which he hides from the light like
+the eyeless fish of the American caverns. Before the curtain
+rises the music already tells us that we are groping in darkness.
+When it does rise Mimmy 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 make mischievous swords; but it is not
+with dwarf made weapons that heroic man will hew the way of his
+own will through religions and governments and plutocracies and
+all the other devices of the kingdom of the fears of the
+unheroic. As fast as Mimmy makes swords, Siegfried Bakoonin
+smashes them, and then takes the poor old swordsmith by the
+scruff of the neck and chastises him wrathfully. The particular
+day on which the curtain 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 extreme terror of the wretched dwarf.
+When the bear is dismissed, the new sword is produced. It is
+promptly smashed, as usual, with, also, the usual effects on the
+temper of Siegfried, who is quite boundless in his criticisms of
+the smith's boasted skill, and declares that he would smash 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 of the care with which he has nursed the little boy
+into manhood. Siegfried replies candidly that the strangest thing
+about all this care is that instead of making him grateful, it
+inspires him with a lively desire to wring the dwarf's neck.
+Only, he admits that he always comes back to his Mimmy, though he
+loathes him more than any living thing in the forest. On this
+admission the dwarf attempts to build a theory of filial
+instinct. He explains that he is Siegfried's father, and that
+this is why Siegfried cannot do without him. But Siegfried has
+learned from his forest companions, the birds and foxes and
+wolves, that mothers as well as fathers go to the making of
+children. Mimmy, on the desperate ground that man is neither bird
+nor fox, declares that he is Siegfried's father and mother both.
+He is promptly denounced as a filthy liar, because the birds and
+foxes are exactly like their parents, whereas Siegfried, having
+often watched his own image in the water, can testify that he is
+no more like Mimmy than a toad is like a trout. Then, to place
+the conversation on a plane of entire frankness, he throttles
+Mimmy until he is speechless. When the dwarf recovers, he is so
+daunted that he tells Siegfried the truth about his birth, and
+for testimony thereof produces the pieces of the sword that broke
+upon Wotan's spear. Siegfried instantly orders him to repair the
+sword on pain of an unmerciful thrashing, and rushes off into the
+forest, rejoicing in the discovery that he is no kin of Mimmy's,
+and need have no more to do with him when the sword is mended.
+
+Poor Mimmy is now in a worse plight than ever; for he has long
+ago found that the sword utterly defies his skill: the steel will
+yield neither to his hammer nor to his furnace. Just then there
+walks into his cave a Wanderer, in a blue mantle, spear in hand,
+with one eye concealed by the brim of his wide hat. Mimmy, not by
+nature hospitable, tries to drive him away; but the Wanderer
+announces himself as a wise man, who can tell his host, in
+emergency, what it most concerns him to know. Mimmy, taking this
+offer in high dudgeon, because it implies that his visitor's wits
+are better than his own, offers to tell the wise one something
+that HE does not know: to wit, the way to the door. The
+imperturbable Wanderer's reply is to sit down and challenge the
+dwarf to a trial of wit. He wagers his head against Mimmy's that
+he will answer any three questions the dwarf can put to him.
+
+Now here were Mimmy's opportunity, had he only the wit to ask
+what he wants to know, instead of pretending to know everything
+already. It is above all things needful to him at this moment to
+find out how that sword can be mended; and there has just dropped
+in upon him in his need the one person who can tell him. In such
+circumstances a wise man would hasten to show to his visitor his
+three deepest ignorances, and ask him to dispel them. The dwarf,
+being a crafty fool, desiring only to detect ignorance in his
+guest, asks him for information on the three points on which he
+is proudest of being thoroughly well instructed himself. His
+three questions are, Who dwell under the earth? Who dwell on the
+earth? and Who dwell in the cloudy heights above? The Wanderer,
+in reply, tells him of the dwarfs and of Alberic; of the earth,
+and the giants Fasolt and Fafnir; of the gods and of Wotan:
+himself, as Mimmy now recognizes with 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 born of Wotan's infidelities to Fricka, and can tell
+the Wanderer the whole story of the twins and their son
+Siegfried. Wotan compliments him on his knowledge, and asks
+further with what sword Siegfried will slay Fafnir? Mimmy can
+answer that too: he has the whole history of the sword at his
+fingers' ends. Wotan hails him as the knowingest of the knowing,
+and then hurls at him the question he should himself have asked:
+Who will mend the sword? Mimmy, his head forfeited, confesses
+with loud lamentations that he cannot answer. The Wanderer reads
+him an appropriate little lecture on the folly of being too
+clever to ask what he wants to know, and informs him that a smith
+to whom fear is unknown will mend Nothung. To this smith he
+leaves the forfeited head of his host, and wanders off into the
+forest. Then Mimmy's nerves give way completely. He shakes like a
+man in delirium tremens, and has a horrible nightmare, in the
+supreme convulsion of which Siegfried, returning from the forest,
+presently finds him.
+
+A curious and amusing conversation follows. Siegfried himself
+does not know fear, and is impatient to acquire it as an
+accomplishment. Mimmy is all fear: the world for him is a
+phantasmagoria of terrors. It is not that he is afraid of being
+eaten by bears in the forest, or of burning his fingers in the
+forge fire. A lively objection to being destroyed or maimed does
+not make a man a coward: on the contrary, it is the beginning of
+a brave man's wisdom. But in Mimmy, fear is not the effect of
+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, indeed that he could fail to become a distinguished
+and influential leader of opinion by fearlessly pursuing such a
+course, but solely because he lives in a world of imaginary
+terrors, rooted in a modest and gentlemanly mistrust of his own
+strength and worth, and consequently of the value of his opinion.
+Just so is Mimmy afraid of anything that can do him any good,
+especially of the light and the fresh air. He is also convinced
+that anybody who is not sufficiently steeped in fear to be
+constantly on his guard, must perish immediately on his first
+sally into the world. To preserve Siegfried for the enterprise to
+which he has destined him he makes a grotesque attempt to teach
+him fear. He appeals to his experience of the terrors of the
+forest, of its dark places, of its threatening noises its
+stealthy ambushes, its sinister flickering lights its
+heart-tightening ecstasies of dread.
+
+All this has no other effect than to fill Siegfried with wonder
+and curiosity; for the forest is a place of delight for him. He
+is as eager to experience Mimmy's terrors as a schoolboy to feel
+what an electric shock is like. Then Mimmy has the happy idea of
+describing Fafnir to him as a likely person to give him an
+exemplary fright. Siegfried jumps at the idea, and, since Mimmy
+cannot mend the sword for him, proposes to set to work then and
+there to mend it for himself. Mimmy shakes his head, and bids him
+see now how his youthful laziness and frowardness have found him
+out--how he would not learn the smith's craft from Professor
+Mimmy, and therefore does not know how even to begin mending the
+sword. Siegfried Bakoonin's retort is simple and crushing. He
+points out that the net result of Mimmy's academic skill is that
+he can neither make a decent sword himself nor even set one to
+rights when it is damaged. Reckless of the remonstrances of the
+scandalized professor, he seizes a file, and in a few moments
+utterly destroys the fragments of the sword by rasping them into
+a heap of steel filings. Then he puts the filings into a
+crucible; buries it in the coals; and sets to at the bellows with
+the shouting exultation of the anarchist who destroys only to
+clear the ground for creation. When the steel is melted he runs
+it into a mould; and lo! a sword-blade in the rough. Mimmy,
+amazed at the success of this violation of all the rules of his
+craft, hails Siegfried as the mightiest of smiths, professing
+himself barely worthy to be his cook and scullion; and forthwith
+proceeds to poison some soup for him so that he may murder him
+safely when Fafnir is slain. Meanwhile Siegfned forges and
+tempers and hammers and rivets, uproariously singing the while as
+nonsensically as the Rhine maidens themselves. Finally he assails
+the anvil on which Mimmy's swords have been shattered, and
+cleaves 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
+ourselves before the cave of Fafnir, and there we find Alberic,
+who can find nothing 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. The wretched Fafnir, once an honest giant,
+can only make himself terrible enough to keep his gold by
+remaining a venomous reptile. Why he should not become an honest
+giant again and clear out of his cavern, leaving the gold and the
+ring and the rest of it for anyone fool enough to take them at
+such a price, is the first question that would occur to anyone
+except a civilized man, who would be too accustomed to that sort
+of mania to be at all surprised at it.
+
+To Alberic in the night comes the Wanderer, whom the dwarf,
+recognizing his despoiler of old, abuses as a shameless thief,
+taunting him with the helpless way in which all his boasted power
+is tied up with the laws and bargains 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 own real ends. Wotan, having
+already had to kill his own son with it, knows that very well;
+but it troubles him no more; for he is now at last rising to
+abhorrence of his own artificial power, and looking to the coming
+hero, not for its consolidation but its destruction. When Alberic
+breaks out again with his still unquenched hope of one day
+destroying the gods and ruling the world through the ring, Wotan
+is no longer shocked. He tells Alberic that Brother Mime
+approaches with a hero whom Godhead can neither help nor hinder.
+Alberic may try his luck against him without disturbance from
+Valhalla. Perhaps, he suggests, if Alberic warns Fafnir, and
+offers to deal with the hero for him, Fafnir, may give him the
+ring. They accordingly wake up the dragon, who condescends to
+enter into bellowing conversation, but is proof against their
+proposition, strong in the magic of property. "I have and hold,"
+he says: "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 me tell you one thing. All things happen according to
+their nature; and you can't alter them." And so he leaves him
+Alberic, raging with the sense that his old enemy has been
+laughing at him, and yet prophetically convinced that the last
+word will not be with the god, hides himself as the day breaks,
+and his brother approaches with Siegfried.
+
+Mimmy makes a final attempt to frighten Siegfried by discoursing
+of the dragon's terrible jaws, poisonous breath, corrosive
+spittle, and deadly, stinging tail. Siegfried is not interested
+in the tail: he wants to know whether the dragon has a heart,
+being confident of his ability to stick Nothung into it if it
+exists. Reassured on this point, he drives Mimmy away, and
+stretches himself under the trees, listening to the morning
+chatter of the birds. One of them has a great deal to say to him;
+but he cannot understand it; and after vainly trying to carry on
+the conversation with a reed which he cuts, he takes to
+entertaining the bird with tunes on his horn, asking it to send
+him a loving mate such as all the other creatures of the forest
+have. His tunes wake up the dragon; and Siegfried makes merry
+over the grim mate the bird has sent him. Fafnir is highly
+scandalized by the irreverence of the young Bakoonin. He loses
+his temper; fights; and is forthwith slain, to his own great
+astonishment.
+
+In such conflicts one learns to interpret the messages of Nature
+a little. When Siegfried, stung by the dragon's vitriolic blood,
+pops his finger into his mouth and tastes it, he understands what
+the bird is saying to him, and, instructed by it concerning the
+treasures within his reach, goes into the cave to secure the
+gold, the ring and the wishing cap. Then Mimmy returns, and is
+confronted by Alberic. The two quarrel furiously over the sharing
+of the booty they have not yet secured, until Siegfried comes
+from the cave with the ring and the helmet, not much impressed by
+the heap of gold, and disappointed because he has not yet learned
+to fear.
+
+He has, however, learnt to read the thoughts of such a creature
+as poor Mimmy, who, intending to overwhelm him with flattery and
+fondness, only succeeds in making such a self-revelation of
+murderous envy that Siegfried smites him with Nothung and slays
+him, to the keen satisfaction of the hidden Alberic. Caring
+nothing for the gold, which he leaves to the care of the slain;
+disappointed in his fancy for learning fear; and longing for a
+mate, he casts himself wearily down, and again appeals to his
+friend the bird, who tells him of a woman sleeping on a mountain
+peak within a fortress of fire that only the fearless can
+penetrate. Siegfried is up in a moment with all the tumult of
+spring in his veins, and follows the flight of the bird as it
+pilots him to the fiery mountain.
+
+The Third Act
+
+To the root of the mountain comes also the Wanderer, now nearing
+his doom. He calls up the First Mother from the depths of the
+earth, and begs 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 of the way of the Will in its perpetual
+strife with these helpless Fates who can only spin the net of
+circumstance and environment round the feet of men. Why not, says
+Erda then, go to the daughter I bore you, and take counsel 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 that
+case the First Mother cannot help him: such a separation is part
+of the bewilderment that is ever the first outcome of her eternal
+work of thrusting the life energy of the world to higher and
+higher organization. She can show him no way of escape from the
+destruction he foresees. Then from the innermost of him breaks
+the confession that he rejoices in his doom, and now himself
+exults in passing away with all his ordinances and alliances,
+with the spear-sceptre which he has only wielded on condition of
+slaying his dearest children with it, with the kingdom, the power
+and the glory which will never again boast themselves as "world
+without end." And so he dismisses Erda to her sleep in the heart
+of the earth as the forest bird draws near, piloting the slain
+son's son to his goal.
+
+Now it is an excellent thing to triumph in the victory of the new
+order and the passing away of the old; but if you happen to be
+part of the old order yourself, you must none the less fight for
+your life. It seems hardly possible that the British army at the
+battle of Waterloo did not include at least one Englishman
+intelligent enough to hope, for the sake of his country and
+humanity, that Napoleon might defeat the allied sovereigns; but
+such an Englishman would kill a French cuirassier rather than be
+killed by him just as energetically as the silliest soldier, ever
+encouraged by people who ought to know better, to call his
+ignorance, ferocity and folly, patriotism and duty. Outworn life
+may have become mere error; but it still claims the right to die
+a natural death, and will raise its hand against the millennium
+itself in self-defence if it tries to come by the short cut of
+murder. Wotan finds this out when he comes face to face with
+Siegfried, who is brought to a standstill at the foot of the
+mountain by the disappearance of the bird. Meeting the Wanderer
+there, he asks him the way to the mountain where a woman sleeps
+surrounded by fire. The Wanderer questions him, and extracts his
+story from him, breaking into fatherly delight when Siegfried,
+describing the mending of the sword remarks, that all he knew
+about the business was that the broken bits of Nothung would be
+of no use to him unless he made a new sword out of them right
+over again from the beginning. But the Wanderer's interest is by
+no means reciprocated by Siegfried. His majesty and elderly
+dignity are thrown away on the young anarchist, who, unwilling to
+waste time talking, bluntly bids him 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 old man I should
+treat you with respect." "That would be a precious notion," says
+Siegfried. "All my life long I was bothered and hampered by an
+old man until I swept him out of my way. I will sweep you in the
+same fashion if you don't let me pass. Why do you wear such a big
+hat; and what has happened to one of your eyes? Was it knocked
+out by somebody whose way you obstructed?" To which Wotan replies
+allegorically that the eye that is gone--the eye that his
+marriage with Fricka cost him--is now looking at him out of
+Siegfried's head. At this, Siegfried gives up the Wanderer as a
+lunatic, and renews his threats of personal violence. Then Wotan
+throws off the mask of the Wanderer; uplifts the world-governing
+spear; and puts forth all his divine awe and grandeur as the
+guardian of the mountain, round the crest of which the fires of
+Loki now break into a red background for the majesty of the god.
+But all this is lost on Siegfried Bakoonin. "Aha!" he cries, as
+the spear is levelled against his breast: "I have found my
+father's foe"; and the spear falls in two pieces under the stroke
+of Nothung. "Up then," says Wotan: "I cannot withhold you," and
+disappears forever from the eye of man. The fires roll down the
+mountain; but Siegfried goes at them as exultantly as he went at
+the forging of the sword or the heart of the dragon, and
+shoulders his way through them, joyously sounding his horn to the
+accompaniment of their crackling and seething. And never a hair
+of his head is singed. Those frightful flames which have scared
+mankind for centuries from the Truth, have not heat enough in
+them to make a child shut its eyes. They are mere phantasmagoria,
+highly creditable to Loki's imaginative stage-management; but
+nothing ever has perished or will perish eternally in them except
+the Churches which nave been so poor and faithless 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 an end somewhere; and the hour of your release from these
+explanations is at hand. The rest of what you are going to see is
+opera, and nothing but opera. Before many bars have been played,
+Siegfried and the wakened Brynhild, newly become tenor and
+soprano, will sing a concerted cadenza; plunge on from that to a
+magnificent love duet; and end with a precipitous allegro a
+capella, driven headlong to its end by the impetuous semiquaver
+triplets of the famous finales to the first act of Don
+Giovanni or the coda to the Leonore overture, with a specifically
+contrapuntal theme, points d'orgue, and a high C for the soprano
+all complete.
+
+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 far missed, the opera chorus in full parade on the stage,
+not presuming to interfere with the prima donna as she sings her
+death song over the footlights. Nay, that chorus will have its
+own chance when it first appears, with a good roaring strain in C
+major, not, after all, so very different from, or at all less
+absurd than the choruses of courtiers in La Favorita or "Per te
+immenso giubilo" in Lucia. The harmony is no doubt a little
+developed, Wagner augmenting his fifths with a G sharp where
+Donizetti would have put his fingers in his ears and screamed for
+G natural. But it is an opera chorus all the same; and along with
+it we have theatrical grandiosities that recall Meyerbeer and
+Verdi: pezzi d'insieme for all the principals in a row, vengeful
+conjurations for trios of them, romantic death song for the
+tenor: in short, all manner of operatic conventions.
+
+Now it is probable that some of us will have been so talked by
+the more superstitious Bayreuth pilgrims into regarding Die
+Gotterdammerung as the mighty climax to a mighty epic, more
+Wagnerian than all the other three sections put together, as not
+to dare notice this startling atavism, especially if we find the
+trio-conjurations more exhilarating than the metaphysical
+discourses of Wotan in the three true music dramas of The Ring.
+There is, however, no real atavism involved. Die Gotterdammerung,
+though the last of The Ring dramas in order of performance, was
+the first in order of conception and was indeed the root from
+which all the others sprang.
+
+The history of the matter is as follows. All Wagner's works prior
+to The Ring are operas. The last of them, Lohengrin, is perhaps
+the best known of modern operas. As performed in its entirety at
+Bayreuth, it is even more operatic than it appears at Covent
+Garden, because it happens that its most old-fashioned features,
+notably some of the big set concerted pieces for principals and
+chorus (pezzi  d'insieme as I have called them above), are
+harder to perform than the more modern and characteristically
+Wagnerian sections, and for that reason were cut out in preparing
+the abbreviated fashionable version. Thus Lohengrin came upon the
+ordinary operatic stage as a more advanced departure from current
+operatic models than its composer had made it. Still, it is
+unmistakably an opera, with chorus, concerted pieces, grand
+finales, and a heroine who, if she does not sing florid
+variations with flute obbligato, is none the less a very
+perceptible prima donna. In everything but musical technique the
+change from Lohengrin to The Rhine Gold 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 of The Rhine Gold, and thus belongs to a later and
+more masterful phase of Wagner's harmonic style. It first came
+into Wagner's head as an opera to be entitled Siegfied's Death,
+founded on the old Niblung Sagas, which offered to Wagner the
+same material for an effective theatrical tragedy as they did to
+Ibsen. Ibsen's Vikings in Helgeland is, in kind, what Siegfied's
+Death was originally intended to be: that is, a heroic piece for
+the theatre, without the metaphysical or allegorical
+complications of The Ring. Indeed, the ultimate catastrophe of
+the Saga cannot by any perversion of ingenuity be adapted to the
+perfectly clear allegorical design of The Rhine Gold, The
+Valkyries, and Siegfried.
+
+
+
+SIEGFRIED AS PROTESTANT
+
+The philosophically fertile element in the original project of
+Siegfried's Death was the conception of Siegfried himself as a
+type of the healthy man raised to perfect confidence in his own
+impulses by an intense and joyous vitality which is above fear,
+sickliness of conscience, malice, and the makeshifts and moral
+crutches of law and order which accompany them. Such a character
+appears extraordinarily fascinating and exhilarating to our
+guilty and conscience-ridden generations, however little they may
+understand him. The world has always delighted in the man who is
+delivered from conscience. From Punch and Don Juan down to Robert
+Macaire, Jeremy Diddler and the pantomime clown, he has always
+drawn large audiences; but hitherto he has been decorously given
+to the devil at the end. Indeed eternal punishment is sometimes
+deemed too high a compliment to his nature. When the late Lord
+Lytton, in his Strange Story, introduced a character personifying
+the joyousness of intense vitality, he felt bound to deny him the
+immortal soul which was at that time conceded even to the
+humblest characters in fiction, and to accept mischievousness,
+cruelty, and utter incapacity for sympathy as the inevitable
+consequence of his magnificent bodily and mental health.
+
+In short, though men felt all the charm of abounding life and
+abandonment to its impulses, they dared not, in their deep
+self-mistrust, conceive it otherwise than as a force making for
+evil--one which must lead to universal ruin unless checked and
+literally mortified by selfrenunciation in obedience to
+superhuman guidance, or at least to some reasoned system of
+morals. When it became apparent to the cleverest of them that no
+such superhuman guidance existed, and that their secularist
+systems had all the fictitiousness of "revelation" without its
+poetry, there was no escaping the conclusion that all the good
+that man had done must be put down to his arbitrary will as well
+as all the evil he had done; and it was also obvious that if
+progress were a reality, his beneficent impulses must be gaining
+on his destructive ones. It was under the influence of these
+ideas that we began to hear about the joy of life where we had
+formerly heard about the grace of God or the Age of Reason, and
+that the boldest spirits began to raise the question whether
+churches and laws and the like were not doing a great deal more
+harm than good by their action in limiting the freedom of the
+human will. Four hundred years ago, when belief in God and in
+revelation was general throughout Europe, a similar wave of
+thought led the strongest-hearted peoples to affirm that every
+man's private judgment was a more trustworthy interpreter of God
+and revelation than the Church. This was called Protestantism;
+and though the Protestants were not strong enough for their
+creed, and soon set up a Church of their own, yet the movement,
+on the whole, has justified the direction it took. Nowadays the
+supernatural element in Protestantism has perished; and if every
+man's private judgment is still to be justified as the most
+trustworthy interpreter of the will of Humanity (which is not a
+more 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 new creeds of the eighteenth and nineteenth
+centuries.
+
+The weak place which experience finds out in the Anarchist theory
+is its reliance on the progress already achieved by "Man." There
+is no such thing as Man in the world: what we have to deal with
+is a multitude of men, some of them great rascals, some of them
+greet statesmen, others both, with a vast majority capable of
+managing their personal affairs, but not of comprehending social
+organization, or grappling with the problems created by their
+association in enormous numbers. If "Man" means this majority,
+then "Man" has made no progress: he has, on the contrary,
+resisted it. He will not even pay the cost of existing
+institutions: the requisite money has to be filched from him by
+"indirect taxation." Such people, like Wagner's giants; must be
+governed by laws; and their assent to such government must be
+secured by deliberately filling them with prejudices and
+practicing on their imaginations by pageantry and artificial
+eminences and dignities. The government is of course established
+by the few who are capable of government, though its mechanism
+once complete, it may be, and generally is, carried on
+unintelligently by people who are incapable of it the capable
+people repairing it from time to time when it gets too far behind
+the continuous advance or decay of civilization. All these
+capable people are thus in the position of Wotan, forced to
+maintain as sacred, and themselves submit to, laws which they
+privately know to be obsolescent makeshifts, and to affect the
+deepest veneration for creeds and 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 find himself
+confronted with the alternative of governing those who are not
+Siegfrieds or risking destruction at their hands. And this
+dilemma will persist until Wotan's inspiration comes to our
+governors, and they see that their business is not the devising
+of laws and institutions to prop up the weaknesses of mobs and
+secure the survival of the unfittest, but the breeding of men
+whose wills and intelligences may be depended on to produce
+spontaneously the social wellbeing our clumsy laws now aim at and
+miss. The majority of men at present in Europe have no business
+to be alive; and no serious progress will be made until we
+address ourselves earnestly and scientifically to the task of
+producing trustworthy human materialfor society. In short, it is
+necessary to breed a race of men in whom the life-giving impulses
+predominate, before the 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 nineteenth
+century, is that of a perfectly naive hero upsetting religion,
+law and order in all directions, and establishing in their place
+the unfettered action of Humanity doing exactly what it likes,
+and producing order instead of confusion thereby because it likes
+to do what is necessary for the good of the race. This
+conception, already incipient in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations,
+was certain at last to reach some great artist, and be embodied
+by him in a masterpiece. It was also certain that if that master
+happened to be a German, he should take delight in describing his
+hero as the Freewiller of Necessity, thereby beyond measure
+exasperating Englishmen with a congenital incapacity for
+metaphysics.
+
+PANACEA QUACKERY, OTHERWISE IDEALISM
+
+Unfortunately, human enlightenment does not progress by nicer and
+nicer adjustments, but by violent corrective reactions which
+invariably send us clean over our saddle and would bring us to
+the ground on the other side if the next reaction did not send us
+back again with equally excessive zeal. Ecclesiasticism and
+Constitutionalism send us one way, Protestantism and Anarchism
+the other; Order rescues us from confusion and lands us in
+Tyranny; Liberty then saves the situation and is presently found
+to be as great a nuisance as Despotism. A scientifically balanced
+application of these forces, theoretically possible, is
+practically incompatible with human passion. Besides, we have the
+same weakness in morals as in medicine: we cannot be cured of
+running after panaceas, or, as they are called in the sphere of
+morals, ideals. One generation sets up duty, renunciation,
+self-sacrifice as a panacea. The next generation, especially the
+women, wake up at the age of forty or thereabouts to the fact
+that their lives have been wasted in the worship of this ideal,
+and, what is still more aggravating, that the elders who imposed
+it on them did so in a fit of satiety with their own experiments
+in the other direction. Then that defrauded generation foams at
+the mouth at the very mention of duty, and sets up the
+alternative panacea of love, their deprivation of which seems to
+them to have been the most cruel and mischievous feature of their
+slavery to duty. It is useless to warn them that this reaction,
+if prescribed as a panacea, will prove as great a failure as all
+the other reactions have done; for they do not recognize its
+identity with any reaction that ever occurred before. Take for
+instance the hackneyed historic example of the austerity of the
+Commonwealth being followed by the licence of the Restoration.
+You cannot persuade any moral enthusiast to accept this as a pure
+oscillation from action to reaction. If he is a Puritan he looks
+upon the Restoration as a national disaster: if he is an artist
+he regards it as the salvation of the country from gloom, devil
+worship and starvation of the affections. The Puritan is ready to
+try the Commonwealth again with a few modern improvements: the
+Amateur is equally ready to try the Restoration with modern
+enlightenments. And so for the present we must be content to
+proceed by reactions, hoping that each will establish some
+permanently practical and beneficial reform or moral habit that
+will survive 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 of which Siegfried is the hero, expanded itself into a great
+fourfold drama of which Wotan is the hero. You cannot dramatize a
+reaction by personifying the reacting force only, any more than
+Archimedes could lift the world without a fulcrum for his lever.
+You must also personify the established power against which the
+new force is reacting; and in the conflict between them you get
+your drama, conflict being the essential ingredient in all drama.
+Siegfried, as the hero of Die Gotterdammerung, is only the primo
+tenore robusto of an opera book, deferring his death, after he
+has been stabbed in the last act, to sing rapturous love strains
+to the heroine exactly like Edgardo in Donizetti's Lucia. In
+order to make him intelligible in the wider significance which
+his joyous, fearless, conscienceless heroism soon assumed in
+Wagner's imagination, it was necessary to provide him with a much
+vaster dramatic antagonist than the operatic villain Hagen. Hence
+Wagner had to create Wotan as the anvil for Siegfried's hammer;
+and since there was no room for Wotan in the original opera book,
+Wagner had to work back to a preliminary drama reaching primarily
+to the very beginnings of human society. And since, on this
+world-embracing scale, it was clear that Siegfried must come into
+conflict with many baser and stupider forces than those lofty
+ones of supernatural religion and political constitutionalism
+typified by Wotan and his wife Fricka, these minor antagonists
+had to be dramatized also in the persons of Alberic, Mime,
+Fafnir, Loki, and the rest. None of these appear in Night Falls
+On The Gods save Alberic, whose weird dream-colloquy with Hagen,
+effective as 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 the visit of Valtrauta to Brynhild
+out of Night Falls On The Gods, and the drama remains coherent
+and complete without them. Retain them, and the play becomes
+connected by conversational references with the three music
+dramas; but the connection establishes no philosophic coherence,
+no real identity between the operatic Brynhild of the Gibichung
+episode (presently to be related) and the daughter of Wotan and
+the First Mother.
+
+THE LOVE PANACEA
+
+We shall now find that at the point where The Ring changes from
+music drama into opera, it also ceases to be philosophic, and
+becomes didactic. The philosophic part is a dramatic symbol of
+the world as Wagner observed it. In the didactic part the
+philosophy degenerates into the prescription of a romantic
+nostrum for all human ills. Wagner, only mortal after all,
+succumbed to the panacea mania when his philosophy was exhausted,
+like any of the rest of us.
+
+The panacea is by no means an original one. Wagner was
+anticipated in the year 1819 by a young country gentleman from
+Sussex named Shelley, in a work of extraordinary artistic power
+and splendor. Prometheus Unbound is an English attempt at a Ring;
+and when it is taken into account that the author was only 27
+whereas Wagner was 40 when he completed the poem of The Ring, our
+vulgar patriotism may find an envious satisfaction in insisting
+upon the comparison. Both works set forth the same conflict
+between humanity and its gods and governments, issuing in the
+redemption of man from their tyranny by the growth of his will
+into perfect strength and self-confidence; and both finish by a
+lapse into panacea-mongering didacticism by the holding up of
+Love as the remedy for all evils and the solvent of all social
+difficulties.
+
+The differences between Prometheus Unbound and The Ring are as
+interesting as the likenesses. Shelley, caught in the pugnacity
+of his youth and the first impetuosity of his prodigious artistic
+power by the first fierce attack of the New Reformation, gave no
+quarter to the antagonist of his hero. His Wotan, whom he calls
+Jupiter, is the almighty fiend into whom the Englishman's God had
+degenerated during two centuries of ignorant Bible worship and
+shameless commercialism. He is Alberic, Fafnir Loki and the
+ambitious side of Wotan all rolled into one melodramatic demon
+who is finally torn from his throne and hurled shrieking into the
+abyss by a spirit representing that conception of Eternal Law
+which has been replaced since by the conception of Evolution.
+Wagner, an older, more experienced man than the Shelley of 1819,
+understood Wotan and pardoned him, separating him tenderly from
+all the compromising alliances to which Shelley fiercely held
+him; making the truth and heroism which overthrow him the
+children of his inmost heart; and representing him as finally
+acquiescing in and working for his own supersession and
+annihilation. Shelley, in his later works, is seen progressing
+towards the same tolerance, justice, and humility of spirit, as
+he advanced towards the middle age he never reached. But there is
+no progress from Shelley to Wagner as regards the panacea, except
+that in Wagner there is a certain shadow of night and death come
+on it: nay, even a clear opinion that the supreme good of love is
+that it so completely satisfies the desire for life, that after
+it the Will to Live ceases to trouble us, and we are at last
+content to achieve the highest 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 Prometheus Unbound is a sentiment of affectionate benevolence
+which has nothing to do with sexual passion. It might, and in
+fact does exist in the absence of any sexual interest whatever.
+The words mercy and kindness connote it less ambiguously than the
+word love. But Wagner sought always for some point of contact
+between his ideas and the physical senses, so that people might
+not only think or imagine them in the eighteenth century fashion,
+but see them on the stage, hear them from the orchestra, and feel
+them through the infection of passionate emotion. Dr. Johnson
+kicking the stone to confute Berkeley is not more bent on
+common-sense concreteness than Wagner: on all occasions he
+insists on the need for sensuous apprehension to give reality to
+abstract comprehension, maintaining, in fact, that reality has no
+other meaning. Now he could apply this process to poetic love
+only by following it back to its alleged origin in sexual
+passion, the emotional phenomena of which he has expressed in
+music with a frankness and forcible naturalism which would
+possibly have scandalized Shelley. The love duet in the first act
+of The Valkyries is brought to a point at which the conventions
+of our society demand the precipitate fall of the curtain; whilst
+the prelude to Tristan and Isolde is such an astonishingly
+intense and faithful translation into music of the emotions which
+accompany the union of a pair of lovers, that it is questionable
+whether the great popularity of this piece at our orchestral
+concerts really means that our audiences are entirely catholic in
+their respect for life in all itits beneficently creative
+functions, or whether they simply enjoy the music without
+understanding it.
+
+But however offensive and inhuman may be the superstition which
+brands such exaltations of natural passion as shameful and
+indecorous, there is at least as much common sense in disparaging
+love as in setting it up as a panacea. Even the mercy and
+lovingkindness of Shelley do not hold good as a universal law of
+conduct: Shelley himself makes extremely short work of Jupiter,
+just as Siegfried does of Fafnir, Mime, and Wotan; and the fact
+that Prometheus is saved from doing the destructive part of his
+work by the intervention of that very nebulous personification of
+Eternity called Demogorgon, does not in the least save the
+situation, because, flatly, there is no such person as
+Demogorgon, and if Prometheus does not pull down Jupiter himself,
+no one else will. It would be exasperating, if it were not so
+funny, to see these poets leading their heroes through blood and
+destruction to the conclusion that, 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 by
+Siegfried's first taste of fear as he cuts through the mailed
+coat of the sleeping figure on the mountain, and discovers that
+it is a woman; by her fierce revolt against being touched by him
+when his terror gives way to ardor; by his manly transports of
+victory; and by the womanly mixture of rapture and horror with
+which she abandons herself to the passion which has seized on
+them both, is an experience which it is much better, like the
+vast majority of us, never to have passed through, than to allow
+it to play more than a recreative holiday part in our lives. It
+did not play a very large part in Wagner's own laborious life,
+and does not occupy more than two scenes of The Ring. Tristan and
+Isolde, wholly devoted to it, is a poem of destruction and death.
+The Mastersingers, a work full of health, fun and happiness,
+contains not a single bar of love music that can be described as
+passionate: the hero of it is a widower who cobbles shoes, writes
+verses, and contents himself with looking on at the
+sweetheartings of his customers. Parsifal makes an end of it
+altogether. The truth is that the love panacea in Night Falls On
+The Gods and in the last act of Siegfried is a survival of the
+first crude operatic conception of the story, modified by an
+anticipation of Wagner's later, though not latest, conception of
+love as the fulfiller of 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 is not in love, but in life itself as a tireless power which
+is continually driving onward and upward--not, please observe,
+being beckoned or drawn by Das Ewig Weibliche or any other
+external sentimentality, but growing-from within, by its own
+inexplicable energy, into ever higher and higher forms of
+organization, the strengths and the needs of which are
+continually superseding the institutions which were made to fit
+our former requirements. When your Bakoonins call out for the
+demolition of all these venerable institutions, there is no need
+to fly into a panic and lock them up in prison whilst your
+parliament is bit by bit doing exactly what they advised you to
+do. When your Siegfrieds melt down the old weapons into new ones,
+and with disrespectful words chop in twain the antiquated
+constable's staves in the hands of their elders, the end of the
+world is no nearer than it was before. If human nature, which is
+the highest organization of life reached on this planet, is
+really degenerating, then human society will decay; and no
+panic-begotten penal measures can possibly save it: we must, like
+Prometheus, set to work to make new men instead of vainly
+torturing old ones. On the other hand, if the energy of life is
+still carrying human nature to higher and higher levels, then the
+more young people shock their elders and deride and discard their
+pet institutions the better for the hopes of the world, since the
+apparent growth of anarchy is only the measure of the rate of
+improvement. History, as far as we are capable of history (which
+is not saying much as yet), shows that all changes from crudity
+of social organization to complexity, and from mechanical
+agencies in government to living ones, seem anarchic at first
+sight. No doubt it is natural to a snail to think that any
+evolution which threatens to do away with shells will result in
+general death from exposure. Nevertheless, the most elaborately
+housed beings today are born not only without houses on their
+backs but without even fur or feathers to clothe them.
+
+ANARCHISM NO PANACEA
+
+One word of warning to those who may find themselves attracted by
+Siegfried's Anarchism, or, if they prefer a term with more
+respectable associations, his neo-Protestantism. Anarchism, as a
+panacea, is just as hopeless as any other panacea, and will still
+be so even if we breed a race of perfectly benevolent men. It is
+true that in the sphere of thought, Anarchism is an inevitable
+condition of progressive evolution. A nation without
+Freethinkers--that is, without intellectual Anarchists--will
+share the fate of China. It is also true that our criminal law,
+based on a conception of crime and punishment which is nothing
+but our vindictiveness and cruelty in a virtuous disguise, is an
+unmitigated and abominable nuisance, bound to be beaten out of us
+finally by the mere weight of our experience of its evil and
+uselessness. But it will not be replaced by anarchy. Applied to
+the industrial or political machinery of modern society, anarchy
+must always reduce itself speedily to absurdity. Even the
+modified form of anarchy on which modern civilization is based:
+that is, the abandonment of industry, in the name of individual
+liberty, to the upshot of competition for personal gain between
+private capitalists, is a disastrous failure, and is, by the
+mere necessities of the case, giving way to ordered Socialism.
+For the economic rationale of this, I must refer disciples of
+Siegfried to a tract from my hand published by the Fabian Society
+and entitled The Impossibilities of Anarchism, which explains
+why, owing to the physical constitution of our globe, society
+cannot effectively organize the production of its food, clothes
+and housing, nor distribute them fairly and economically on any
+anarchic plan: nay, that without concerting our social action to
+a much higher degree than we do at present we can never get rid
+of the wasteful and iniquitous welter of a little riches and a
+deal of poverty which current political humbug calls our
+prosperity and civilization. Liberty is an excellent thing; but
+it cannot begin until society has paid its daily debt to Nature
+by first earning its living. There is no liberty before that
+except the liberty to live at somebody else's expense, a liberty
+much sought after nowadays, since it is the criterion of
+gentility, but not wholesome from the point of view of the common
+weal.
+
+SIEGFRIED CONCLUDED
+
+In returning now to the adventures of Siegfried there is little
+more to be described except the finale of an opera. Siegfried,
+having passed unharmed through the fire, wakes Brynhild and goes
+through all the fancies and ecstasies of love at first sight in a
+duet which ends with an apostrophe to "leuchtende Liebe,
+lachender Tod!", which has been romantically translated into
+"Love that illumines, laughing at Death," whereas it really
+identifies enlightening love and laughing death as involving 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
+Norns sit in the night on Brynhild's mountain top spinning their
+thread of destiny, and telling the story of Wotan's sacrifice of
+his eye, and of his breaking off a bough from the World Ash to
+make a heft for his spear, also how the tree withered after
+suffering that violence. They have also some fresher news to
+discuss. Wotan, on the breaking of his spear by Siegfried, has
+called all his heroes to cut down the withered World 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 in the
+great hall, with the Gods and Heroes assembled about him as if in
+council, solemnly waiting for the end. All this belongs to the
+old legendary materials with which Wagner began The Ring.
+
+The tale is broken by the thread snapping in the hands of the
+third Norn; for the hour has arrived when man has taken his
+destiny in his own hands to shape it for himself, and no longer
+bows to circumstance, environment, necessity (which he now freely
+wills), and all the rest of the inevitables. So the Norns
+recognize that the world has no further use for them, and sink
+into the earth to return to the First Mother. Then the day dawns;
+and Siegfried and Brynhild come, and have another duet. He gives
+her his ring; and she gives him her horse. Away then he goes in
+search of more adventures; and she watches him from her crag
+until he disappears. The curtain falls; but we can still hear the
+trolling of his horn, and the merry clatter of his horse's shoes
+trotting gaily down the valley. The sound is lost in the grander
+rhythm of the Rhine as he reaches its banks. We hear again an
+echo of the lament of the Rhine maidens for the ravished gold;
+and then, finally, a new strain, which does not surge like the
+mighty flood of the river, but has an unmistakable tramp of hardy
+men and a strong land flavor about it. And on this the opera
+curtain at last goes up--for please remember that all that has
+gone before is only the overture.
+
+The First Act
+
+We now understand the new tramping strain. We are in the
+Rhineside hall of the Gibichungs, in the resence of King Gunther,
+his sister Gutrune, and unther's grim half brother Hagen, the
+villain of the piece. Gunther is a fool, and has for Hagen's
+intelligence the respect a fool always has for the brains of a
+scoundrel. Feebly fishing for compliments, he appeals to Hagen to
+pronounce him a fine fellow and a glory to the race of Gibich.
+Hagen declares that it is impossible to contemplate him without
+envy, but thinks it a pity that he has not yet found a wife
+glorious enough for him. Gunther doubts whether so extraordinary
+a person can possibly exist. Hagen then tells him of Brynhild and
+her rampart of fire; also of Siegfried. Gunther takes this rather
+in bad part, since not only is he afraid of the fire, but
+Siegfried, according to Hagen, is not, and will therefore achieve
+this desirable match himself. But Hagen points out that since
+Siegfried is riding about in quest of adventures, he will
+certainly pay an early visit to the renowned chief of the
+Gibichungs. They can then give him a philtre which will make him
+fall in love with Gutrune and forget every other woman he has yet
+seen.
+
+Gunther is transported with admiration of Hagen's cunning when he
+takes in this plan; and he has hardly assented to it when
+Siegfried, with operatic opportuneness, drops in just as Hagen
+expected, and is duly drugged into the heartiest love for Gutrune
+and total oblivion of Brynhild and his own past. When Gunther
+declares his longing for the bride who lies inaccessible within a
+palisade of flame, Siegfried at once offers to undertake the
+adventure for him. Hagen then explains to both of them that
+Siegfried can, after braving the fire, appear to Brynhild in the
+semblance of Gunther through the magic of the wishing cap (or
+Tarnhelm, as it is called throughout The Ring), the use of which
+Siegfried now learns for the first time. It is of course part of
+the bargain that Gunther shall give his sister to Siegfried in
+marriage. On that they swear blood-brotherhood; and at this
+opportunity the old operatic leaven breaks out amusingly in
+Wagner. With tremendous exordium of brass, the tenor and baritone
+go at it with a will, showing off the power of their voices,
+following each other in canonic imitation, singing together in
+thirds and sixths, and finishing with a lurid unison, quite in
+the manner of Ruy Gomez and Ernani, or Othello and Iago. Then
+without further ado Siegfried departs on his expedition, taking
+Gunther with him to the foot of the mountain, and leaving Hagen
+to guard the hall and sing a very fine solo which has often
+figured in the programs of the Richter concerts, explaining that
+his interest in the affair is that Siegfried will bring back the
+Ring, and that he, Hagen, will presently contrive to possess
+himself of that Ring and become Plutonic master of the world.
+
+And now it will be asked how does Hagen know all about the
+Plutonic empire; and why was he able to tell Gunther about
+Brynhild and Siegfried, and to explain to Siegfried the trick of
+the Tarnhelm. The explanation is that though Hagen's mother was
+the mother of Gunther, his father was not the illustrious Gibich,
+but no less a person than our old friend Alberic, who, like
+Wotan, has begotten a son to do for him what he cannot do for
+himself.
+
+In the above incidents, those gentle moralizers who find the
+serious philosophy of the music dramas too terrifying for them,
+may allegorize pleasingly on the philtre as the maddening chalice
+of passion which, once tasted, causes the respectable man to
+forget his lawfully wedded wife and plunge into adventures which
+eventually lead him headlong to destruction.
+
+We now come upon a last relic of the tragedy of Wotan. Returning
+to Brynhild's mountain, we find her visited by her sister
+Valkyrie Valtrauta, who has witnessed Wotan's solemn preparations
+with terror. She repeats to Brynhild the account already given by
+the Noms. Clinging in anguish to Wotan's knees, she has heard him
+mutter that were the ring returned to the daughters of the deep
+Rhine, both Gods and world would be redeemed from that stage
+curse off Alberic's in The Rhine Gold. On this she has rushed on
+her warhorse through the air to beg Brynhild to give the Rhine
+back its ring. But this is asking Woman to give up love for the
+sake of Church and State. She declares that she will see them
+both perish first; and Valtrauta returns to Valhalla in despair.
+Whilst Brynhild is watching the course of the black thundercloud
+that marks her sister'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 strange voice: his figure is the unknown
+one of the king of the Gibichungs. He tears the ring from her
+finger, and, claiming her as his wife, drives her into the cave
+without pity for her agony of horror, and sets Nothung between
+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 the last hours of that night, still sits, his spear in his
+hand, and his shield beside him. At his knees crouches a dwarfish
+spectre, his father Alberic, still full of his old grievances
+against Wotan, and urging his son in his dreams to win back the
+ring for him. This Hagen swears to do; and as the apparition of
+his father vanishes, the sun rises and Siegfried suddenly comes
+from the river bank tucking into his belt the Tarnhelm, which has
+transported hi from the mountain like the enchanted carpet of the
+Arabian tales. He describes his adventures to Gutrune until
+Gunther's boat is seen approaching, when Hagen seizes a cowhorn
+and calls the tribesmen to welcome their chief and his bride. It
+is most exhilarating, this colloquy with the startled and hastily
+armed clan, ending with a thundering chorus, the drums marking
+the time with mighty pulses from dominant to tonic, much as
+Rossini would have made them do if he had been a pupil of
+Beethoven's.
+
+A terrible scene follows. Gunther leads his captive bride
+straight into the presence of Siegfried, whom she claims as her
+husband by the ring, which she is astomshed 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 of your 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 is
+obvious. "Then where are you hiding the ring that you had from
+me?" Gunther's confusion enlightens her; and she calls Siegfried
+trickster and thief to his face. In vain he declares that he got
+the ring from no woman, but from a dragon whom he slew; for he is
+manifestly puzzled; and she, seizing her opportunity, accuses him
+before the clan of having played Gunther false with her.
+
+Hereupon we have another grandiose operatic oath, Siegfried
+attesting his innocence on Hagen's spear, and Brynhild rushing to
+the footlights and thrusting him aside to attest his guilt,
+whilst the clansmen call upon their gods to send down lightnings
+and silence the perjured. The gods do not respond; and Siegfried,
+after whispering to Gunther that the Tarnhelm seems to have been
+only half effectual after all, laughs his way out of the general
+embarrassment and goes off merrily to prepare for his wedding,
+with his arm round Gutrune's waist, followed by the clan.
+Gunther, Hagen and Brynhild are left together to plot operatic
+vengeance. Brynhild, it appears, has enchanted Siegfried in such
+a fashion that no weapon can hurt him. She has, however, omitted
+to protect his back, since it is impossible that he should ever
+turn that to a foe. They agree accordingly that on the morrow a
+great hunt shall take place, at which Hagen shall thrust his
+spear into the hero's vulnerable 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-brotherhood and about his sister's
+bereavement, without having the strength of mind to prevent the
+murder. The three burst into a herculean trio, similar in
+conception to that of the three conspirators in Un Ballo in
+Maschera; and the act concludes with a joyous strain heralding
+the appearance of SiegEried's wedding procession, with strewing
+of flowers, sacrificing to the gods, and carrying bride and
+bridegroom in triumph.
+
+It will be seen that in this act we have lost all connection with
+the earlier drama. Brynhild is not only not the Brynhild of The
+Valkyries, she is the Hiordis of Ibsen, a majestically savage
+woman, in whom jealousy and revenge are intensified to heroic
+proportions. That is the inevitable theatrical treatment of the
+murderous heroine of the Saga. Ibsen's aim in The Vikings was
+purely theatrical, and not, as in his later dramas, also
+philosophically symbolic. Wagner's aim in Siegfried's Death was
+equally theatrical, and not, as it afterwards became in the
+dramas of which Siegfried s antagonist Wotan is the hero,
+likewise philosophically symbolic. The two master-dramatists
+therefore produce practically the same version of Brynhild. Thus
+on the second evening of The Ring we see Brynhild in the
+character of the truth-divining instinct in religion, cast into
+an enchanted slumber and surrounded by the fires of hell lest she
+should overthrow a Church corrupted by its alliance with
+government. On the fourth evening, we find her swearing a
+malicious lie to gratify her personal jealousy, and then plotting
+a treacherous murder with a fool and a scoundrel. In the original
+draft of Siegfried's Death, the incongruity is carried still
+further by the conclusion, at which the dead Brynhild, restored
+to her godhead by Wotan, and again a Valkyrie, carries the slain
+Siegfried to Valhalla to live there happily ever after with its
+pious heroes.
+
+As to Siegfried himself, he talks of women, both in this second
+act and the next, with the air of a man of the world. "Their
+tantrums," he says, "are soon over." Such speeches do not belong
+to the novice of the preceding drama, but to the original
+Siegfried's Tod, with its leading characters sketched on the
+ordinary romantic lines from the old Sagas, and not yet reminted
+as the original creations of Wagner's genius whose acquaintance
+we have made on the two previous evenings. The very title
+"Siegfried's Death" survives as a strong theatrical point in the
+following passage. Gunther, in his rage and despair, cries, "Save
+me, Hagen: save my honor and thy mother's who bore us both."
+"Nothing can save thee," replies Hagen: "neither brain nor hand,
+but SIEGFRIED'S DEATH." And Gunther echoes with a shudder,
+"SIEGFRIED'S DEATH!"
+
+A WAGNERIAN NEWSPAPER CONTROVERSY
+
+The devotion which Wagner's work inspires has been illustrated
+lately in a public correspondence on this very point. A writer in
+The Daily Telegraph having commented on the falsehood uttered by
+Brynhild in accusing Siegfried of having betrayed Gunther with
+her, a correspondence in defence of the beloved heroine was
+opened in The Daily Chronicle. The imputation of falsehood to
+Brynhild was strongly resented and combated, in spite of the
+unanswerable evidence of the text. It was contended that
+Brynhild's statement must be taken as establishing the fact that
+she actually was ravished by somebody whom she believed to be
+Siegfried, and that since this somebody cannot have been
+Siegfried, he being as incapable of treachery to Gunther as she
+of falsehood, it must have been Gunther himself after a second
+exchange of personalities not mentioned in the text. The reply to
+this--if so obviously desperate a hypothesis needs a reply--is
+that the text is perfectly explicit as to Siegfried, disguised as
+Gunther, passing the night with Brynhild with Nothung dividing
+them, and in the morning bringing her down the mountain THROUGH
+THE FIRE (an impassable obstacle to Gunther) and there
+transporting himself in a single breath, by the Tarnhelm's magic,
+back to the hall of the Gibichungs, leaving the real Gunther to
+bring Brynhild down the river after him. One controversialist
+actually pleaded for the expedition occupying two nights, on the
+second of which the alleged outrage might have taken place. But
+the time is accounted for to the last minute: it all takes place
+during the single night watch of Hagen. There is no possible way
+out of the plain fact that Brynhild's accusation is to her own
+knowledge false; and the impossible ways just cited are only
+interesting as examples of the fanatical worship which Wagner and
+his creations have been able to inspire in minds of exceptional
+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 that Siegfried's kiss awakened an ordinary mortal
+jealous woman. But a goddess can become mortal and jealous
+without plunging at once into perjury and murder. Besides, this
+explanation involves the sacrifice of the whole significance of
+the allegory, and the reduction of The Ring to the plane of a-
+child's conception of The Sleeping Beauty. Whoever does not
+understand that, in terms of The Ring philosophy, a change from
+godhead to humanity is a step higher and not a degradation,
+misses the whole point of The Ring. It is precisely because the
+truthfulness of Brynhild is proof against Wotan's spells that he
+has to contrive the fire palisade with Loki, to protect the
+fictions and conventions of Valhalla against her.
+
+The only tolerable view is the one supported by the known history
+of The Ring, and also, for musicians of sufficiently fine
+judgment, by the evidence of the scores; of which more anon. As a
+matter of fact Wagner began, as I have said, with Siegfried's
+Death. Then, wanting to develop the idea of Siegfried as
+neoProtestant, he went on to The Young Siegfried. As a Protestant
+cannot be dramatically projected without a pontifical antagonist.
+The Young Siegfried led to The Valkyries, and that again to its
+preface The Rhine Gold (the preface is always written after the
+book is finished). Finally, of course, the whole was revised. The
+revision, if carried out strictly, would have involved the cuttmg
+out of Siegfried's Death, now become inconsistent and
+superfluous; and that would have involved, in turn, the facing of
+the fact that The Ring was no longer a Niblung epic, and really
+demanded modern costumes, tall hats for Tarnhelms, factories for
+Nibelheims, villas for Valhallas, and so on--in short, a complete
+confession of the extent to which the old Niblung epic had become
+the merest pretext and name directory in the course of Wagner's
+travail. But, as Wagner's most eminent English interpreter once
+put it to me at Bayreuth between the acts of Night Falls On The
+Gods, the master wanted to "Lohengrinize" again after his long
+abstention from opera; and Siegfried's Death (first sketched in
+1848, the year before the rising in Dresden and the subsequent
+events which so deepened Wagner's sense of life and the
+seriousness of art) gave him exactly the libretto he required for
+that outbreak of the old operatic Adam in him. So he changed it
+into Die Gotterdammerung, retaining the traditional plot of
+murder and jealousy, and with it, necessarily, his or~gmal second
+act, in spite of the incongruity of its Siegfried and Brynhild
+with the Siegfried and Brynhild of the allegory. As to the
+legendary matter about the world-ash and the destruction of
+Valhalla by Loki, it fitted in well enough; for though,
+allegorically, the blow by which Siegfried breaks the god's spear
+is the end of Wotan and of Valhalla, those who do not see the
+allegory, and take the story literally, like children, are sure
+to ask what becomes of Wotan after Siegfried gets past him up the
+mountain; and to this question the old tale 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 in
+relation to the three foregoing dramas, gives them a highly
+effective air of mystery; and no one ventures to challenge their
+consequentiality, because we are all more apt to pretend to
+understand great works of art than to confess that the meaning
+(if any) has escaped us. Valtrauta, however, betrays her
+irrelevance by explaining that the gods can be saved by the
+restoration of the ring to the Rhine maidens. This, considered as
+part of the previous allegory, is nonsense; so that even this
+scene, which has a more plausible air of organic connection with
+The Valkyries than any other in Night Falls On The Gods, is as
+clearly part of a different and earlier conception as the episode
+which concludes it, in which Siegfried actually robs Brynhild of
+her ring, though he has no recollection of having given it to
+her. Night Falls On The Gods, in fact, was not even revised into
+any real coherence with the world-poem which sprang from it; and
+that is the authentic solution of all the controversies which
+have arisen over it.
+
+The Third Act
+
+The hunting party comes off duly. Siegfried strays from it and
+meets the Rhine maidens, who almost succeed in coaxing the ring
+from him. He pretends to be afraid of his wife; and they chaff
+him as to her beating him and so forth; but when they add that
+the ring is accursed and will bring death upon him, he discloses
+to them, as unconsciously as Julius Caesar disclosed it long ago,
+that secret of heroism, never to let your life be shaped by fear
+of its end.* So he keeps the ring; and they leave him to his
+fate. The hunting party now finds him; and they all sit down
+together to make a meal by the river side, Siegfried telling them
+meanwhile the story of his adventures. When he approaches the
+subject of Brynhild, as to whom his memory is a blank, Hagen
+pours an antidote to the love philtre into his drinking horn,
+whereupon, his memory returning, he proceeds to narrate the
+incident of the fiery mountain, to Gunther's intense
+mortification. Hagen then plunges his spear into the back of
+Siegfried, who falls dead on his shield, but gets up again, after
+the old operatic custom, to sing about thirty bars to his love
+before allowing himself to be finally carried off to the strains
+of the famous 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 is night; and Gutrune, unable to sleep, and haunted by
+all sorts of vague terrors, is waiting for the return of her
+husband, and wondering whether a ghostly figure she has seen
+gliding down to the river bank is Brynhild, whose room is empty.
+Then comes the cry of Hagen, returning with the hunting party to
+announce the death of Siegfried by the tusk of a wild boar. But
+Gutrune divines the truth; and Hagen does not deny it.
+Siegfried's body is brought in; Gunther claims the ring; Hagen
+will not suffer him to take it; they fight; and Gunther is slain.
+Hagen then attempts to take it; but the dead man's hand closes on
+it and raises itself threateningly. Then Brynhild comes; and a
+funeral pyre is raised whilst she declaims a prolonged scene,
+extremely moving and imposing, but yielding nothing to resolute
+intellectual criticism except a very powerful and elevated
+exploitation of theatrical pathos, psychologically identical with
+the scene of Cleopatra and the dead Antony in Shakespeare's
+tragedy. Finally she flings a torch into the pyre, and rides her
+war-horse into the flames. The hall of the Gibichungs catches
+fire, as most halls would were a cremation attempted in the
+middle of the floor (I permit myself this gibe purposely to
+emphasize the excessive artificiality of the scene); but the
+Rhine overflows its banks to allow the three Rhine maidens to
+take the ring from Siegfried's finger, incidentally extinguishing
+the conflagration as it does so. Hagen attempts to snatch the
+ring from the maidens, who promptly drown him; and in the distant
+heavens the Gods and their castle are seen perishing in the fires
+of Loki as the curtain falls.
+
+FORGOTTEN ERE FINISHED
+
+In all this, it will be observed, there is nothing new. The
+musical fabric is enormously elaborate and gorgeous; but you
+cannot say, as you must in witnessing The Rhme Gold, The
+Valkyries, and the first two acts of Siegfried, that you have
+never seen anything like it before, and that the inspiration is
+entirely original. Not only the action, but most of the poetry,
+might conceivably belong to an Elizabethan drama. The situation
+of Cleopatra and Antony is unconsciously reproduced without being
+bettered, or even equalled in point of majesty and musical
+expression. The loss of al! simplicity and dignity, the
+impossibility of any credible scenic presentation of the
+incidents, and the extreme staginess of the conventions by which
+these impossibilities are got over, are no doubt covered from the
+popular eye by the overwhelming prestige of Die Gotterdammerung
+as part of so great a work as The Ring, and by the extraordinary
+storm of emotion and excitement which the music keeps up. But the
+very qualities that intoxicate the novice in music enlighten the
+adept. In spite of the fulness of the composer's technical
+accomplishment, the finished style and effortless mastery of
+harmony and instrumentation displayed, there is not a bar in the
+work which moves us as the same themes moved us in The Valkyries,
+nor is anything but external splendor added to the life and humor
+of Siegfried.
+
+In the original poem, Brynhild delays her self-immolation on the
+pyre of Siegfried to read the assembled choristers a homily on
+the efficacy of the Love panacea. "My holiest wisdom's hoard,"
+she says, "now I make known to the world. I believe not in
+property, nor money, nor godliness, nor hearth and high place,
+nor pomp and peerage, nor contract and custom, but in Love. Let
+that only prevail; and ye shall be blest in weal or woe." Here
+the repudiations still smack of Bakoonin; but the saviour is no
+longer the volition of the full-grown spirit of Man, the Free
+Willer of Necessity, sword in hand, but simply Love, and not even
+Shelleyan love, but vehement sexual passion. It is highly
+significant of 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, which was 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 recklessness of the old
+intention. The rigorous logic with which representative musical
+themes are employed in the earlier dramas is here abandoned
+without scruple; and for the main theme at the conclusion he
+selects a rapturous passage sung by Sieglinda in the third act of
+The Valkyries when Brynhild inspires her with a sense of her high
+destiny as the mother of the unborn hero. There is no dramatic
+logic whatever in the recurrence of this theme to express the
+transport in which Brynhild immolates herself. There is of course
+an excuse for it, inasmuch as both women have an impulse of
+self-sacrifice for the sake of Siegfried; but this is really
+hardly more than an excuse; since the Valhalla theme might be
+attached to Alberic on the no worse ground that both he and
+Wotan are inspired by ambition, and that the ambition has the
+same object, the possession of the ring. The common sense of the
+matter is that the only themes which had fully retained their
+significance in Wagner's memory at the period of the composition
+of Night Falls On The Gods are those which are mere labels of
+external features, such as the Dragon, the Fire, the Water and so
+on. This particular theme of Sieglinda's is, in truth, of no
+great musical merit: it might easily be the pet climax of a
+popular sentimental ballad: in fact, the gushing effect which is
+its sole valuable quality is so cheaply attained that it is
+hardly going too far to call it the most trumpery phrase in the
+entire tetralogy. Yet, since it undoubtedly does gush very
+emphatically, Wagner chose, for convenience' sake, to work up
+this final scene with it rather than with the more distinguished,
+elaborate and beautiful themes connected with the love of
+Brynhild and Siegfried.
+
+He would certainly not have thought this a matter of no
+consequence had he finished the whole work ten years earlier. It
+must always be borne in mind that the poem of The Ring was
+complete and printed in 1853, and represents the sociological
+ideas which, after germinating in the European atmosphere for
+many years, had been brought home to Wagner, who was intensely
+susceptible to such ideas, by the crash of 1849 at Dresden. Now
+no man whose mind is alive and active, as Wagner's was to the day
+of his death, can keep his political and spiritual opinions, much
+less his philosophic consciousness, at a standstill for quarter
+of a century until he finishes an orchestral score. When Wagner
+first sketched Night Falls On The Gods he was 35. When he
+finished the score for the first Bayreuth festival in 1876 he had
+turned 60. No wonder he had lost his old grip of it and left it
+behind him. He even tampered with The Rhine Gold for the sake of
+theatrical effect when stage-managing it, making Wotan pick up
+and brandish a sword to give visible point to his sudden
+inspiration as to the raising up of a hero. The sword had first
+to be discovered by Fafnir among the Niblung treasures and thrown
+away by him as useless. There is no sense in this device; and its
+adoption shows the same recklessness as to the original intention
+which we find in the music of the last act of The Dusk of the
+Gods.*
+
+*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 great
+philosophic theme to slacken even in twenty-five years if the
+theme still held good as a theory of actual life. If the history
+of Germany from 1849 to 1876 had been the history of Siegfried
+and Wotan transposed into the key of actual life Night Falls On
+The Gods would have been the logical consummation of Das
+Rheingold and The Valkyrie instead of the operatic anachronism it
+actually is.
+
+But, as a matter of fact, Siegfried did not succeed and Bismarck
+did. Roeckel was a prisoner whose mposonment made no difference;
+Bakoonin broke up, not Walhall, but the International, which
+ended in an undignified quarrel between him and Karl Marx. The
+Siegfrieds of 1848 were hopeless political failures, whereas the
+Wotans and Alberics and Lows were conspicuous political
+successes. Even the Mimes held their own as against Siegfried.
+With the single exception of Ferdinand Lassalle, there was no
+revolutionary leader who was not an obvious impossibilist in
+practical politics; and Lassalle got himself killed in a romantic
+and quite indefensible duel after wrecking his health in a
+titanic oratorical campaign which convinced him that the great
+majority of the working classes were not ready to join him, and
+that the minority who were ready did not understand him. The
+International, founded in 1861 by Karl Marx in London, and
+mistaken for several years by nervous newspapers for a red
+spectre, was really only a turnip ghost. It achieved some
+beginnings of International Trade Unionism by inducing English
+workmen to send money to support strikes on the continent, and
+recalling English workers who had been taken across the North Sea
+to defeat such strikes; but on its revolutionary socialistic side
+it was a romantic figment. The suppression of the Paris Commune,
+one of the most tragic examples in history of the pitilessness
+with which capable practical administrators and soldiers are
+forced by the pressure of facts to destroy romantic amateurs and
+theatrical dreamers, made an end of melodramatic Socialism. It
+was as easy for Marx to hold up Thiers as the most execrable of
+living scoundrels and to put upon Gallifet the brand that still
+makes him impossible in French politics as it was for Victor 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 much
+loftier ideals than Thiers and Gallifet; but the one fact that
+could not be denied was that when it came to actual shooting, it
+was Gallifet who got Delescluze shot and not Delescluze who got
+Gallifet shot, and that when it came to administering the affairs
+of France, Thiers could in one way or another get it done, whilst
+Pyat could neither do it nor stop talking and allow somebody else
+to do it. True, the penalty of following Thiers was to be
+exploited by the landlord and capitalist; but then the penalty of
+following Pyat was to get shot like a mad dog, or at best get
+sent to New Caledonia, quite unnecessarily and uselessly.
+
+To put it in terms of Wagner's allegory, Alberic had got the ring
+back again and was marrying into the best Walhall families with
+it. He had thought better of his old threat to dethrone Wotan and
+Loki. He had found that Nibelheim was a very gloomy place and
+that if he wanted to live handsomely and safely, he must not only
+allow Wotan and Loki to organize society for him, but pay them
+very handsomely for doing it. He wanted splendor, military glory,
+loyalty, enthusiasm, and patriotism; and his greed and gluttony
+were wholly unable to create them, whereas Wotan and Loki carried
+them all to a triumphant climax in Germany in I87I, when Wagner
+himself celebrated the event with his Kaisermarsch, which sounded
+much more convincing than the Marseillaise or the Carmagnole.
+
+How, after the Kaisermarsch, could Wagner go back to his
+idealization of Siegfried in 1853? How could he believe seriously
+in Siegfried slaying the dragon and charging through the mountain
+fire, when the immediate foreground was occupied by the Hotel de
+Ville with Felix Pyat endlessly discussing the principles of
+Socialism whilst the shells of Thiers were already battering the
+Arc de Triomphe, and ripping up the pavement of the Champs
+Elysees? Is it not clear that things had taken an altogether
+unexpected turn--that although the Ring may, like the famous
+Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels, be an inspired guest at
+the historic laws and predestined end of our
+capitalistic-theocratic epoch, yet Wagner, like Marx, was too
+inexperienced in technical government and administration and too
+melodramatic in his hero-contra-villain conception of the class
+struggle, to foresee the actual process by which his
+generalization would work out, or the part to be played in it by
+the classes involved?
+
+Let us go back for a moment to the point at which the Niblung
+legend first becomes irreconcilable with Wagner's allegory.
+Fafnir in the allegory becomes a capitalist; but Fafnir in the
+legend is a mere hoarder. His gold does not bring him in any
+revenue. It does not even support 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. And Siegfried himself has
+no more use for gold than Fafnir: the only difference between
+them in this respect is that Siegfried does not waste his time in
+watching a barren treasure that is no use to him, whereas Fafnir
+sacrifices his humanity and his life merely to prevent anybody
+else getting it. This contrast is true to human nature; but it
+shunts The Ring drama off the economic lines of the allegory. In
+real life, Fafnir is not a miser: he seeks dividends, comfortable
+life, and admission to the circles of Wotan and Loki. His only
+means of procuring these is to restore the gold to Alberic in
+exchange for scrip in Alberic's enterprises. Thus fortified with
+capital, Alberic exploits his fellow dwarfs as before, and also
+exploits Fafair's fellow giants who have no capital. What is
+more, the toil, forethought and self-control which the
+exploitation involves, and the self-respect and social esteem
+which its success wins, effect an improvement in Alberic's own
+character which neither Marx nor Wagner appear to have foreseen.
+He discovers that to be a dull, greedy, narrow-minded
+money-grubber is not the way to make money on a large scale; for
+though greed may suffice to turn tens into hundreds and even
+hundreds into thousands, to turn thousands into hundreds of
+thousands requires magnanimity and a will to power rather than to
+pelf. And to turn thousands into millions, Alberic must make
+himself an earthly providence for masses of workmen: he must
+create towns and govern markets. In the meantime, Fafair,
+wallowing in dividends which he has done nothing to earn, may
+rot, intellectually and morally, from mere disuse of his energies
+and lack of incentive to excel; but the more imbecile he becomes,
+the more dependent he is upon Alberic, and the more the
+responsibility of keeping the world-machine in working order
+falls upon Alberic. Consequently, though Alberic in Also may have
+been merely the vulgar Manchester Factory-owner portrayed by
+Engels, in 1876 he was well on the way towards becoming Krupp of
+Essen or Carnegie of Homestead.
+
+Now, without exaggerating the virtues of these gentlemen, it will
+be conceded by everybody except perhaps those veteran German
+Social-Democrats who have made a cult of obsolescence under the
+name of Marxism, that the modern entrepreneur is not to be
+displaced and dismissed so lightly as Alberic is dismissed in The
+Ring. They are really the masters of the whole situation. Wotan
+is hardly less dependent on them than Fafnir; the War-Lord visits
+their work, acclaims them in stirring speeches, and casts down
+their enemies; whilst Loki makes commercial treaties for them and
+subjects all his diplomacy to their approval.
+
+The end cannot come until Siegfried learns A1beric's trade and
+shoulders Alberic's burden. Not having as yet done so, he is
+still completely mastered by Alberic. He does not even rebel
+against him except when he is too stupid and ignorant, or too
+romantically impracticable, to see that Alberic's work, like
+Wotan's work and Loki's work, is necessary work, and that
+therefore Alberic can never be superseded by a warrior, but only
+by a capable man of business who is prepared to continue his work
+without a day's intermission. Even though the proletarians of all
+lands were to become "class conscious," and obey the call of Marx
+by uniting to carry the Class struggle to a proletarian victory
+in which all capital should become common property, and all
+Monarchs, Millionaires, Landlords and Capitalists become common
+citizens, the triumphant proletarians would have either to starve
+in Anarchy the next day or else do the political and industrial
+work which is now being done tant bien que mal by our Romanoffs,
+our Hohenzollerns, our Krupps, Carnegies, Levers, Pierpont
+Morgans, and their political retinues. And in the meantime these
+magnates must defend their power and property with all their
+might against the revolutionary forces until these forces become
+positive, executive, administrative forces, instead of the
+conspiracies of protesting, moralizing, virtuously indignant
+amateurs who mistook Marx for a man of affairs and Thiers for a
+stage villain. But all this represents a development of which one
+gathers no forecast from 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 its industrial history up to the year
+1848 far more penetratingly than the academic historians of their
+time. But they broke off there and left a void between 1848 and
+the end, in which we, who have to live in that period, get no
+guidance from them. The Marxists wandered for years in this void,
+striving, with fanatical superstition, to suppress the
+Revisionists who, facing the fact that the Social-Democratic
+party was lost, were trying to find the path by the light of
+contemporary history instead of vainly consulting the oracle in
+the pages of Das Kapital. Marx himself was too simpleminded a
+recluse and too full of the validity of his remoter
+generalizations, and the way in which the rapid integration of
+capital in Trusts and Kartels was confirming them, to be
+conscious of the void himself.
+
+Wagner, on the other hand, was comparatively a practical man. It
+is possible to learn more of the world by producing a single
+opera, or even conductmg a single orchestral rehearsal, than by
+ten years reading in the Library of the British Museum. Wagner
+must have learnt between Das Rheingold and the Kaisermarsch that
+there are yet several dramas to be interpolated in The Ring after
+The Valkyries before the allegory can tell the whole story, and
+that the first of these interpolated dramas will be much more
+like a revised Rienzi than like Siegfried. If anyone doubts the
+extent to which Wagner's eyes had been opened to the
+administrative-childishness and romantic conceit of the heroes of
+the revolutionary generation that served its apprenticeship on
+the barricades of 1848-9, and perished on those of 187@ under
+Thiers' mitrailleuses, let him read Eine Kapitulation, that
+scandalous burlesque in which the poet and composer of Siegfried,
+with the levity of a schoolboy, mocked the French republicans who
+were doing in 1871 what he himself was exiled for domg in 1849.
+He had set the enthusiasm of the Dresden Revolution to his own
+greatest music; but he set the enthusiasm of twenty years later
+in derision to the music of Rossini. There is no mistaking the
+tune he meant to suggest by his doggerel of Republik, Republik,
+Republik-lik-lik. The Overture to Wilhelm Tell is there as
+plainly as if it were noted down in full score.
+
+In the case of such a man as Wagner, you cannot explain this
+volte-face as mere jingoism produced by Germany's overwhelming
+victory in the Franco-Prussian War, nor as personal spite against
+the Parisians for the Tannhauser fiasco. Wagner had more cause
+for personal spite against his own countrymen than he ever had
+against the French. No doubt his outburst gratified the pettier
+feelings which great men have in common with 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 a profound
+philosophical contempt for the inadequacy of the men who were
+trying to wield Nothung, and who had done less work for Wagner's
+own art than a single German King and he, too, only a mad one.
+Wagner had by that time done too much himself not to know that
+the world is ruled by deeds, not by good intentions, and that
+one efficient sinner is worth ten futile saints and martyrs.
+
+I need not elaborate the point further in these pages. Like all
+men of genius, Wagner had exceptional sincerity, exceptional
+respect for facts, exceptional freedom from the hypnotic
+influence of sensational popular movements, exceptional sense of
+the realities of political power as distinguished from the
+presences and idolatries behind which the real masters of modern
+States pull their wires and train their guns. When he scored
+Night Falls On The Gods, he had accepted the failure of Siegfried
+and the triumph of the Wotan-Loki-Alberic-trinity as a fact. He
+had given up dreaming of heroes, heroines, and final solutions,
+and had conceived a new protagonist in Parsifal, whom he
+announced, not as a hero, but as a fool; who was armed, not with
+a sword which cut irresistibly, but with a spear which he held
+only on condition that he did not use it; and who instead of
+exulting in the slaughter of a dragon was frightfully ashamed of
+having shot a swan. The change in the conception of the Deliverer
+could hardly be more complete. It reflects the change which took
+place in Wagner's mind between the composition of The Rhine Gold
+and Night Falls On The Gods; and it explains why he dropped The
+Ring allegory and fell back on the status quo ante by
+Lohengrinizing.
+
+If you ask why he did not throw Siegfried into the waste paper
+basket and rewrite The Ring from The Valkyries onwards, one must
+reply that the time had not come for such a feat. Neither Wagner
+nor anyone else then living knew enough to achieve it. Besides,
+what he had already done had reached the omit of even his immense
+energy and perseverance and so he did the best he could with the
+unfinished and for ever unfinishable work, rounding it off with
+an opera much as Rossini rounded off some of his religious
+compositions with a galop. Only, Rossini on such occasions wrote
+in his score "Excusez du pen," but Wagner left us to find out the
+change for ourselves, perhaps to test how far we had really
+followed his meaning.
+
+
+
+WAGNER'S OWN EXPLANATION
+
+And now, having given my explanation of The Ring, can I give
+Wagner's explanation of it? If I could (and I can) I should not
+by any means accept it as conclusive. Nearly half a century has
+passed smce the tetralogy was written; and in that time the
+purposes of many half instinctive acts of genius have become
+clearer to the common man than they were to the doers. Some years
+ago, in the course of an explanation of Ibsen's plays, I pointed
+out that it was by no means certain or even likely that Ibsen was
+as definitely conscious of his thesis as I. All the stupid
+people, and some critics who, though not stupid, had not
+themselves written what the Germans call "tendency" works, saw
+nothing in this but a fantastic affectation of the extravagant
+self-conceit of knowing more about Ibsen than Ibsen himself.
+Fortunately, in taking exactly the same position now with regard
+to Wagner, I can claim his own authority to support me. "How," he
+wrote to Roeckel on the 23rd. August 1856, "can an artist expect
+that what he has felt intuitively should be perfectly realized by
+others, seeing that he himself feels in the presence of his work,
+if it is true Art, that he is confronted by a riddle, about which
+he, too, might have illusions, just as another might?"
+
+The truth is, we are apt to deify men of genius, exactly as we
+deify the creative force of the universe, by attributing to
+logical design what is the result of blind instinct. What Wagner
+meant by "true Art" is the operation of the artist's instinct,
+which is just as blind as any other instinct. Mozart, asked for
+an explanation of his works, said frankly "How do I know?"
+Wagner, being a philosopher and critic as well as a composer, was
+always looking for moral explanations of what he had created) and
+he hit on several very striking ones, all different. In the same
+way one can conceive Henry the Eighth speculating very
+brilliantly about the circulation of his own blood without
+getting as near the truth as Harvey did long after his death.
+
+None the less, Wagner's own explanations are of exceptional
+interest. To begin with, there is a considerable portion of The
+Ring, especially the portraiture of our capitalistic industrial
+system from the socialist's point of new in the slavery of the
+Niblungs and the tyranny of Alberic, which is unmistakable, as it
+dramatizes that portion of human activity which lies well within
+the territory covered by our intellectual consciousness. 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 part of the work
+which deals with the destiny of Wotan. And here, as it happened,
+Wagner's recollection of what he had been driving at was
+completely upset by his discovery, soon after the completion of
+The Ring poem, of Schopenhaur's famous treatise "The World as
+Will and Representation." So obsessed did he become with this
+masterpiece of philosophic art that he declared that it contained
+the intellectual demonstration of the conflict of human forces
+which he himself had demonstrated artistically in his great poem.
+"I must confess," he writes to Roeckel, "to having arrived at a
+clear understanding of my own works of art through the help of
+another, who has provided me with the reasoned conceptions
+corresponding to my intuitive principles."
+
+Schopenhaur, however, had done nothing of the sort. Wagner's
+determination to prove that he had been a Schopenhaurite all
+along without knowing it only shows how completely the
+fascination of the great treatise on The Will had run away with
+his memory. It is easy to see how this happened. Wagner says of
+himself that "seldom has there taken place in the soul of one and
+the same man so profound a division and estrangement between the
+intuitive or impulsive part of his nature and his consciously or
+reasonably formed ideas." And since Schopenhaur's great
+contribution to modern thought was to educate us into clear
+consciousness of this distinction--a distinction familiar, in a
+fanciful way, to the Ages of Faith and Art before the Renascence,
+but afterwards swamped in the Rationalism of that movement--it
+was inevitable that Wagner should jump at Schopenhaur's
+metaphysiology (I use a word less likely to be mistaken than
+metaphysics) as the very thing for him. But metaphysiology is one
+thing, political philosophy another. The political philosophy of
+Siegfried is exactly contrary to the political philosphy of
+Schopenhaur, although the same clear metaphysiological
+distinction between the instinctive part of man (his Will) and
+his reasoning faculty (dramatized in The Ring as Loki) is
+insisted on in both. The difference is that to Schopenhaur the
+Will is the universal tormentor of man, the author of that great
+evil, Life; whilst reason is the divine gift that is finally to
+overcome this life-creating will and lead, through its
+aboegation, to cessation and peace, annihilation and Nirvana.
+This is the doctrine of Pessimism. Now Wagner was, when he wrote
+The Ring, a most sanguine revolutionary Meliorist, contemptuous
+of the reasoning faculty, which he typified in the shifty,
+unreal, delusive Loki, and full of faith in the life-giving Will,
+which he typified in the glorious Siegfried. Not until he read
+Schopenhaur did he become bent on proving that he had always been
+a Pessimist at heart, and that Loki was the most sensible and
+worthy adviser of Wotan in The Rhine Gold.
+
+Sometimes he faces the change in his opinions frankly enough. "My
+Niblung drama," he writes to Roeckel, "had taken form at a time
+when I had built up with my reason an optimistic world on
+Hellenic principles, believing that nothing was necessary for the
+realization of such a world but that men should wish it. I
+ingeniously set aside-the problem why they did not wish it. I
+remember that it was with this definite creative purpose that I
+conceived the personality of Siegfried, with the intention of
+representing an existence free from pain." But he appeals to his
+earlier works to show that behind all these artificial optimistic
+ideas there was always with him an intuition of "the sublime
+tragedy of renunciation, the negation of the will." In trying to
+explain this, he s full of ideas philosophically, and full of the
+most amusing contradictions personally. Optimism, as an
+accidental excursion into the barren paths of reason on his own
+part, he calls "Hellenic." In others he denounces it as rank
+Judaism, the Jew having at that time become for him the whipping
+boy for all modern humamty. In a letter from London he expounds
+Schopenhaur to Roeckel with enthusiasm, preaching the
+renunciation of the Will to Live as the redemption from all error
+and vain pursuits: in the next letter he resumes the subject with
+unabated interest, and fin~shes by mentioning that on leaving
+London he went to Geneva and underwent "a most beneficial course
+of hydropathy." Seven months before this he had written as
+follows: "Believe me, I too was once possessed by the idea of a
+country life. In order to become a radically healthy human being,
+I went two years ago to a Hydropathic Establishment, prepared to
+give up Art and everything f I could once more become a child of
+Nature. But, my good friend, I was obliged to laugh at my own
+naivete when I found myself almost going mad. None of us 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
+explanations of the inconsistencies of The Ring with Night Falls
+On The Gods. Wagner defended himself with unfailing cleverness
+and occasional petulances, ranging from such pleas as "I believe
+a true instinct has kept me from a too great definiteness; for it
+has been borne in on me that an absolute disclosure of the
+intention disturbs true insight," to a volley of explanations and
+commentaries on the explanations. He gets excited and annoyed
+because Roeckel will not admire the Brynhild of Night Falls On
+The Gods; re-invents the Tarnhelm scene; and finally, the case
+being desperate, exclaims, "It is wrong of you to challenge me to
+explain it in words: you must feel that something is being
+enacted that is not to be expressed in mere words."
+
+THE PESSIMIST AS AMORIST
+
+Sometimes he gets very far away from Pessimism indeed, and
+recommends Roeckel to solace his captivity, not by conquering the
+will to live at liberty, but by "the inspiring influences of the
+Beautiful." The next moment 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; and only 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 comfort is that
+he is beloved. And on the subject of love he lets himself loose
+in a manner that would have roused the bitterest scorn in
+Schopenhaur, though, as we have seen (Love Panacea), it is highly
+characteristic of Wagner. "Love in its most perfect reality," he
+says, "is only possible between the sexes: it is only as man and
+woman that human beings can truly love. Every other manifestation
+of love can be traced back to that one absorbingly real feeling,
+of which all other affections are but an emanation, a connection,
+or an imitation. It is an error to look on this as only one of
+the forms in which love is revealed, as if there were other forms
+coequal with it, or even superior to it. He who after the manner
+of metaphysicians prefers UNREALITY to REALITY, and derives the
+concrete from the abstract--in short, puts the word before the
+fact--may be right in esteeming the idea of love as higher than
+the expression of love, and may affirm that actual love made
+manifest in feeling is nothing but the outward and visible sign
+of a pre-existent, non-sensuous, abstract love; and he will do
+well to despise that sensuous function in general. In any case it
+were safe to bet that such a man had never loved or been loved as
+human beings can love, or he would have understood that in
+despising this feeling, what he condemned was its sensual
+expression, the outcome of man's animal nature, and not true
+human love. The highest satisfaction and expression of the
+individual is only to be found in his complete absorption, and
+that is only possible through love. Now a human being is both MAN
+and WOMAN: it is only when these two are united that the real
+human being exists; and thus it is only by love that man and
+woman attain to the full measure of humanity. But when nowadays
+we talk of a human being, such heartless blockheads are we that
+quite involuntarily we only think of man. It is only in the umon
+of man and woman by love (sensuous and supersensuous) that the
+human being exists; and as the human being cannot rise to the
+conception of anything higher than his own existence--his own
+being--so the transcendent act of his life is this consummation
+of his humanity through love."
+
+It is clear after this utterance from the would-be
+Schopenhaurian, that Wagner's explanations of his works for the
+most part explain nothing but the mood in which he happened to be
+on the day he advanced them, or the train of thought suggested to
+his very susceptible imagination and active mind by the points
+raised by his questioner. Especially in his private letters,
+where his outpourings are modified by his dramatic consciousness
+of the personality of his correspondent, do we find him taking
+all manner of positions, and putting forward all sorts of cases
+which must be taken as clever and suggestive special pleadings,
+and not as serious and permanent expositions of his works. These
+works must speak for themselves: if The Ring says one thing, and
+a letter written afterwards says that it said something else, The
+Ring must be taken to confute the letter just as conclusively as
+if the two had been written by different hands. However, nobody
+fairly well acquainted with Wagner's utterances as a whole will
+find any unaccountable contradictions in them. As in all men of
+his type, our manifold nature was so marked in him that he was
+like several different men rolled into one. When he had exhausted
+himself in the character of the most pugnacious, aggressive, and
+sanguine of reformers, he rested himself as a Pessimist and
+Ninanist. 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 the pages to find the irrepressible bustle of Siegfried
+and the revelry of the clansmen expressed with equal zest. Wagner
+was not a Schopenhaurite every day in the week, nor even a
+Wagnerite. His mind changes as often as his mood. On Monday
+nothing will ever induce him to return to quilldriving: on
+Tuesday he begins a new pamphlet. On Wednesday he is impatient of
+the misapprehensions of people who cannot see how impossible it
+is for him to preside as a conductor over platform performances
+of fragments of his works, which can only be understood when
+presented strictly according to his intention on the stage: on
+Thursday he gets up a concert of Wagnerian selections, and when
+it is over writes to his friends describing how profoundly both
+bandsmen and audience were impressed. On Friday he exults in the
+self-assertion of Siegfried's will against all moral ordinances,
+and is full of a revolutionary sense of "the universal law of
+change and renewal": on Saturday he has an attack of holiness,
+and asks, "Can you conceive a moral action of which the root idea
+is not renunciation?" In short, Wagner can be quoted against
+himself almost without limit, much as Beethoven's adagios could
+be quoted against his scherzos if a dispute arose between two
+fools as to whether he was a melancholy man or a merry one.
+
+
+
+THE MUSIC OF THE RING
+
+THE REPRESENTATIVE THEMES
+
+To be able to follow the music of The Ring, all that is necessary
+is to become familiar enough with the brief musical phrases out
+of which it is built to recognize them and attach a certain
+definite significance to them, exactly as any ordinary Englishman
+recognizes and attaches a definite significance to the opening
+bars of God Save the King. There is no difficulty here: every
+soldier is expected to learn and distinguish between different
+bugle calls and trumpet calls; and anyone who can do this can
+learn and distinguish between the representative themes or
+"leading motives" (Leitmotifs) of The Ring. They are the easier
+to learn because they are repeated agam and agam; and the main
+ones are so emphatically impressed on the ear whilst the
+spectator is looking for the first time at the objects, or
+witnessing the first strong dramatic expression of the ideas they
+denote, that the requisite association is formed unconsciously.
+The themes are neither long, nor complicated, nor difficult.
+Whoever can pick up the flourish of a coach-horn, the note of a
+bird, the rhythm of the postman's knock or of a horse's gallop,
+will be at no loss in picking up the themes of The Ring. No
+doubt, when it comes to forming the necessary mental association
+with the theme, it may happen that the spectator may find his ear
+conquering the tune more easily than his mind conquers the
+thought. But for the most part the themes do not denote thoughts
+at all, but either emotions of a quite simple universal kind, or
+the sights, sounds and fancies common enough to be familiar to
+children. Indeed some of them are as frankly childish as any of
+the funny little orchestral interludes which, in Haydn's
+Creation, introduce the horse, the deer, or the worm. We have
+both the horse and the worm in The Ring, treated exactly in
+Haydn's manner, and with an effect not a whit less ridiculous to
+superior people who decline to take it good-humoredly. Even the
+complaisance of good Wagnerites is occasionally rather
+overstrained by the way in which Brynhild's allusions to her
+charger Grani elicit from the band a little rum-ti-tum triplet
+which by itself is in no way suggestive of a horse, although a
+continuous rush of such triplets makes a very exciting musical
+gallop.
+
+Other themes denote objects which cannot be imitatively suggested
+by music: for instance, music cannot suggest a ring, and cannot
+suggest gold; yet each of these has a representative theme which
+pervades the score in all directions. In the case of the gold the
+association is established by the very salient way in which the
+orchestra breaks into the pretty theme in the first act of The
+Rhine Gold at the moment when the sunrays strike down through the
+water and light up the glittering treasure, "hitherto invisible.
+The reference of the strange little theme of the wishing cap is
+equally manifest from the first, since the spectator's attention
+is wholly taken up with the Tarnhelm and its magic when the theme
+is first pointedly uttered by the orchestra. The sword theme is
+introduced at the end of The Rhine Gold to express Wotan's hero
+inspiration; and I have already mentioned that Wagner, unable,
+when it came to practical stage management, to forego the appeal
+to the eye as well as to the thought, here made Wotan pick up a
+sword and brandish it, though no such instruction appears in the
+printed score. When this sacrifice to Wagner's scepticism as to
+the reality of any appeal to an audience that is not made through
+their bodily sense is omitted, the association of the theme with
+the sword is not formed until that point in the first act of The
+Valkyries at which Siegmund is left alone by Hunding's hearth,
+weaponless, with the assurance that he will have to fight for his
+life at dawn with his host. He recalls then how his father
+promised him a sword for his hour of need; and as he does so, a
+flicker from the dying fire is caught by the golden hilt of the
+sword in the tree, when the theme immediately begins to gleam
+through the quiver of sound from the orchestra, and only dies out
+as the fire sinks and the sword is once more hidden by the
+darkness. Later on, this theme, which is never silent whilst
+Sieglinda is dwelling on the story of the sword, leaps out into
+the most dazzling splendor the band can give it when Siegmund
+triumphantly draws the weapon from the tree. As it consists of
+seven notes only, with a very marked measure, and a melody like a
+simple flourish on a trumpet or post horn, nobody capable of
+catching a tune can easily miss it.
+
+The Valhalla theme, sounded with solemn grandeur as the home of
+the gods first appears to us and to Wotan at the beginning of the
+second scene of The Rhine Gold, also cannot be mistaken. It, too,
+has a memorable rhythm; and its majestic harmonies, far from
+presenting those novel or curious problems in polyphony of which
+Wagner still stands suspected by superstitious people, are just
+those three simple chords which festive students who vamp
+accompaniments to comic songs "by ear" soon find sufficient for
+nearly all the popular tunes in the world.
+
+On the other hand, the ring theme, when it begins to hurtle
+through the third scene of The Rhine Gold, cannot possibly be
+referred to any special feature in the general gloom and turmoil
+of the den of the dwarfs. It is not a melody, but merely the
+displaced metric accent which musicians call syncopation, rung on
+the notes of the familiar chord formed by piling three minor
+thirds on top of one another (technically, the chord of the minor
+ninth, ci-devant diminished seventh). One soon picks it up and
+identifies it; but it does not get introduced in the
+unequivocally clear fashion of the themes described above, or of
+that malignant monstrosity, the theme which denotes the curse on
+the gold. Consequently it cannot be said that the musical design
+of the work is perfectly clear at the first hearing as regards
+all the themes; but it is so as regards most of them, the main
+lines being laid down as emphatically and intelligibly as the
+dramatic motives in a Shakespearean play. As to the coyer
+subtleties of the score, their discovery provides fresh interest
+for repeated hearings, giving The Ring a Beethovenian
+inexhaustibility and toughness of wear.
+
+The themes associated with the individual characters get stamped
+on the memory easily by the simple association of the sound of
+the theme with the appearance of the person indicated. Its
+appropriateness is generally pretty obvious. Thus, the entry of
+the giants Is made to a vigorous stumping, tramping measure.
+Mimmy, being a quaint, weird old creature, has a quaint, weird
+theme of two thin chords that creep down eerily one to the other.
+Gutrune's theme is pretty and caressing: Gunther's bold, rough,
+and commonplace. It is a favorite trick of Wagner's, when one of
+his characters is killed on the stage, to make the theme attached
+to that character weaken, fail, and fade away with a broken echo
+into silence.
+
+THE CHARACTERIZATION
+
+All this, however, is the mere child's play of theme work. The
+more complex characters, instead of having a simple musical label
+attached to them, have their characteristic ideas and aspirations
+identified with special representative themes as they come into
+play in the drama; and the chief merit of the thematic structure
+of The Ring is the mastery with which the dramatic play of the
+ideas is reflected in the contrapuntal play of the themes. We do
+not find Wotan, like the dragon or the horse, or, for the matter
+of that, like the stage demon in Weber's Freischutz or
+Meyerbeer's Robert the Devil, with one fixed theme attached to
+him like a name plate to an umbrella, blaring unaltered from the
+orchestra whenever he steps on the stage. Sometimes we have the
+Valhalla theme used to express the greatness of the gods as an
+idea of Wotan's. Again, we have his spear, the symbol of his
+power, identified with another theme, on which Wagner finally
+exercises his favorite device by making it break and fail, cut
+through, as it were, by the tearing sound of the theme identified
+with the sword, when Siegfried shivers the spear with the stroke
+of Nothung. Yet another theme connected with Wotan is the
+Wanderer music which breaks with such a majestic reassurance on
+the nightmare terror of Mimmy when Wotan appears at the mouth of
+his cave in the scene of the three riddles. Thus not only are
+there several Wotan themes, but each varies in its inflexions and
+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 most imposing splendor when it heralds his entry
+as full-fledged hero in the prologue to Night Falls On The Gods.
+Even Mimmy has his two or three themes: the weird one already
+described; the little one in triple measure imitating the tap of
+his hammer, and fiercely mocked in the savage laugh of Alberic at
+his death; and finally the crooning tune in which he details all
+his motherly kindnesses to the little foundling Siegfried.
+Besides this there are all manner of little musical blinkings and
+shamblings and whinings, the least hint of which from the
+orchestra at any moment instantly brings Mimmy to mind, whether
+he is on the stage at the time or not.
+
+In truth, dramatic characterization in music cannot be carried
+very far by the use of representative themes. Mozart, the
+greatest of all masters of this art, never dreamt of employing
+them; and, extensively as they are used in The Ring, they do not
+enable Wagner to dispense with the Mozartian method. Apart from
+the themes, Siegfried and Mimmy are still as sharply
+distinguished from one another by the character of their music as
+Don Giovanni from Leporello, Wotan from Gutrune as Sarastro from
+Papagena. It is true that the themes attached to the characters
+have the same musical appropriateness as the rest of the music:
+for example, neither the Valhalla nor the spear themes could,
+without the most ludicrous incongruity, be used for the forest
+bird or the unstable, delusive Loki; but for all that the musical
+characterization must be regarded as independent of the specific
+themes, since the entire elimination of the thematic system from
+the score would leave the characters 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 the fire theme. In the first act of
+Siegfried, Mimmy makes his unavailing attempt to explain fear to
+Siegfried. With the horror fresh upon him of the sort of
+nightmare into which he has fallen after the departure of the
+Wanderer, and which has taken the form, at once fanciful and
+symbolic, of a delirious dread of light, he asks Siegfried
+whether he has never, whilst wandering in the forest, had his
+heart set hammering in frantic dread by the mysterious lights of
+the gloaming. To this, Siegfried, greatly astonished, replies
+that on such occasions his heart is altogether healthy and his
+sensations perfectly normal Here Mimmy's question is accompanied
+by the tremulous sounding of the fire theme with its harmonies
+most oppressively disturbed and troubled; whereas with
+Siegfried's reply they become quite clear and straightforward,
+making the theme sound bold, brilliant, and serene. This is a
+typical instance of the way in which the themes are used.
+
+The thematic system gives symphonic interest, reasonableness, and
+unity to the music, enabling the composer to exhaust every aspect
+and quality of his melodic material, and, in Beethoven's manner,
+to work miracles of beauty, expression and significance with the
+briefest phrases. As a set-off against this, it has led Wagner to
+indulge in repetitions that would be intolerable in a purely
+dramatic work. Almost the first thing that a dramatist has to
+learn in constructing a play is that the persons must not come on
+the stage in the second act and tell one another at great length
+what the audience has already seen pass before its eyes in the
+first act. The extent to which Wagner has been seduced into
+violating this rule by his affection for his themes is startling
+to a practiced playwright. Siegfried inherits from Wotan a mania
+for autobiography which leads him to inflict on every one he
+meets the story of Mimmy and the dragon, although the audience
+have spent a whole evening witnessing the events he is narrating.
+Hagen tells the story to Gunther; and that same night Alberic's
+ghost tells it over again to Hagen, who knows it already as well
+as the audience. Siegfried tells the Rhine maidens as much of it
+as they will listen to, and then keeps telling it to his hunting
+companions until they kill him. Wotan's autobiography on the
+second evening becomes his biography in the mouths of the Norns
+on the fourth. The little that the Norns add to it is repeated an
+hour later by Valtrauta. How far all this repetition is tolerable
+is a matter of individual taste. A good story will bear
+repetition; and if it has woven into it such pretty tunes as the
+Rhine maidens' yodel, Mimmy's tinkling anvil beat, the note of
+the forest bird, the call of Siegfried's horn, and so on, it will
+bear a good deal of rehearing. Those who have but newly learnt
+their way through The Ring will not readily admit that there is a
+bar too much repetition.
+
+But how if you find some anti-Wagnerite raising the question
+whether the thematic system does not enable the composer to
+produce a music drama with much less musical fertility than was
+required from his predecessors for the composition of operas
+under the old system!
+
+Such discussions are not within the scope of this little book.
+But as the book is now finished (for really nothing more need be
+said about The Ring), I am quite willing to add a few pages of
+ordinary musical criticism, partly to please the amateurs who
+enjoy that sort of reading, and partly for the guidance of those
+who wish to obtain some hints to help them through such critical
+small talk about Wagner and Bayreuth as may 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 the
+composition of a fresh melody; but it is quite a mistake to
+suppose that this creative-effort extended continuously
+throughout the number from the first to the last bar. When a
+musician composes according to a set metrical pattern, the
+selection of the pattern and the composition of the first stave
+(a stave in music corresponds to a line in verse) generally
+completes the creative effort. All the rest follows more or less
+mechanically to fill up the pattern, an air being very like a
+wall-paper design in this respect. Thus the second stave is
+usually a perfectly obvious consequence of the first; and the
+third and fourth an exact or very slightly varied repetition of
+the first and second. For example, given the first line of Pop
+Goes the Weasel or Yankee Doodle, any musical cobbler could
+supply the remaining three. There is very little tune turning of
+this kind in The Ring; and it is noteworthy that where it does
+occur, as in Siegmund's spring song and Mimmy's croon, "Ein
+zullendes Kind," the effect of the symmetrical staves, recurring
+as a mere matter of form, is perceptibly poor and platitudinous
+compared with the free flow of melody which prevails elsewhere.
+
+The other and harder way of composing is to take a strain of free
+melody, and ring every variety of change of mood upon it as if it
+were a thought that sometimes brought hope, sometimes melancholy,
+sometimes exultation, sometimes raging despair and so on. To take
+several themes of this kind, and weave them together into a rich
+musical fabric passing panoramically before the ear with a
+continually varying flow of sentiment, is the highest feat of the
+musician: it is in this way that we get the fugue of Bach and the
+symphony of Beethoven. The admittedly inferior musician is the
+one who, like Auber and Offenbach, not to mention our purveyors
+of drawing-room ballads, can produce an unlimited quantity of
+symmetrical tunes, but cannot weave themes symphonically.
+
+When this is taken into account, it will be seen that the fact
+that there is a great deal of repetition in The Ring does not
+distinguish it from the old-fashioned operas. The real difference
+is that in them the repetition was used for the mechanical
+completion of conventional metric patterns, whereas in The Ring
+the recurrence of the theme is an intelligent and interesting
+consequence of the recurrence of the dramatic phenomenon which it
+denotes. It should be remembered also that the substitution of
+symphonically treated themes for tunes with symmetrical eight-bar
+staves and the like, has always been the rule in the highest
+forms of music. To describe it, or be affected by it, as an
+abandonment of melody, is to confess oneself an ignoramus
+conversant only with dance tunes and ballads.
+
+The sort of stuff a purely dramatic musician produces when he
+hampers himself with metric patterns in composition is not unlike
+what might have resulted in literature if Carlyle (for example)
+had been compelled by convention to write his historical stories
+in rhymed stanzas. That is to say, it limits his fertility to an
+occasional phrase, and three quarters of the time exercises only
+his barren ingenuity in fitting rhymes and measures to it. In
+literature the great masters of the art have long emancipated
+themselves from metric patterns. Nobody claims that the hierarchy
+of modern impassioned prose writers, from Bunyan to Ruskin,
+should be placed below the writers of pretty lyrics, from Herrick
+to Mr. Austin Dobson. Only in dramatic literature do we find the
+devastating tradition of blank verse still lingering, giving
+factitious prestige to the platitudes of dullards, and robbing
+the dramatic style of the genuine poet of its full natural
+endowment of variety, force and simplicity.
+
+This state of things, as we have seen, finds its parallel in
+musical art, since music can be written in prose themes or in
+versified tunes; only here nobody dreams of disputing the greater
+difficulty of the prose forms, and the comparative triviality of
+versification. Yet in dramatic music, as in dramatic literature,
+the tradition of versification clings with the same pernicious
+results; and the opera, like the tragedy, is conventionally made
+like a wall paper. The theatre seems doomed to be in all things
+the last refuge of the hankering after cheap prettiness in art.
+
+Unfortunately this confusion of the decorative with the dramatic
+element in both literature and music is maintained by the example
+of great masters in both arts. Very touching dramatic expression
+can be combined with decorative symmetry of versification when
+the artist happens to possess both the decorative and dramatic
+gifts, and to have cultivated both hand in hand. Shakespeare and
+Shelley, for instance, far from being hampered by the
+conventional obligation to write their dramas in verse, found it
+much the easiest and cheapest way of producing them. But if
+Shakespeare had been compelled by custom to write entirely in
+prose, all his ordinary dialogue might have been as good as the
+first scene of As You Like It; and all his lofty passages as fine
+as "What a piece of work is Man!", thus sparing us a great deal
+of blank verse in which the thought is commonplace, and the
+expression, though catchingly turned, absurdly pompous. The Cent
+might either have been a serious drama or might never have been
+written at all if Shelley had not been allowed to carry off its
+unreality by Elizabethan versification. Still, both poets have
+achieved many passages in which the decorative and dramatic
+qualities are not only reconciled, but seem to enhance one
+another to a pitch otherwise unattainable.
+
+Just so in music. When we find, as in the case of Mozart, a
+prodigiously gifted and arduously trained musician who is also,
+by a happy accident, a dramatist comparable to Mohere, the
+obligation to compose operas in versified numbers not only does
+not embarrass him, but actually saves him trouble and thought. No
+matter what his dramatic mood may be, he expresses it in
+exquisite musical verses more easily than a dramatist of ordinary
+singleness of talent can express it in prose. Accordingly, he
+too, like Shakespeare and Shelley,leaves versified airs, like
+Dalla sua pace, or Gluck's Che fare senza Euridice, or Weber's
+Leise, leise, which are as dramatic from the first note to the
+last as the untrammelled themes of The Ring. In consequence, it
+used to be professorially demanded that all dramatic music should
+present the same double aspect. The demand was unreasonable,
+since symmetrical versification is no merit in dramatic music:
+one might as well stipulate that a dinner fork should be
+constructed so as to serve also as a tablecloth. It was an
+ignorant demand too, because it is not true that the composers
+of these exceptional examples were always, or even often, able to
+combine dramatic expression with symmetrical versification. Side
+by side with Dalla sua pace we have Il mio tesoro and Non mi dir,
+in which exquisitely expressive opening phrases lead to
+decorative passages which are as grotesque from the dramatic
+point of view as the music which Alberic sings when he is
+slipping and sneezing in the Rhine mud is from the decorative
+point of view. Further, there is to be considered the mass of
+shapeless "dry recitative" which separates these symmetrical
+numbers, and which might have been raised to considerable
+dramatic and musical importance had it been incorporated into a
+continuous musical fabric by thematic treatment. Finally,
+Mozart's most dramatic finales and concerted numbers are more or
+less in sonata form, like symphonic movements, and must therefore
+be classed as musical prose. And sonata form dictates repetitions
+and recapitulations from which the perfectly unconventional form
+adopted by Wagner is free. On the whole, there is more scope for
+both repetition and convention in the old form than in the new;
+and the poorer a composer's musical gift is, the surer he is to
+resort to the eighteenth century patterns to eke out his
+invention.
+
+
+
+THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
+
+When Wagner was born in 1813, music had newly become the most
+astonishing, the most fascinating, the most miraculous art in the
+world. Mozart's Don Giovanni had made all musical Europe
+conscious of the enchantments of the modern orchestra and of the
+perfect adaptability of music to the subtlest needs of the
+dramatist. Beethoven had shown how those inarticulate mood-poems
+which surge through men who have, like himself, no exceptional
+command of words, can be written down in music as symphonies. Not
+that Mozart and Beethoven invented these applications of their
+art; but they were the first whose works made it clear that the
+dramatic and subjective powers of sound were enthralling enough
+to stand by themselves quite apart from the decorative musical
+structures of which they had hitherto been a mere feature. After
+the finales in Figaro and Don Giovanni, the possibility of
+the modern music drama lay bare. After the symphonies of
+Beethoven it was certain that the poetry that lies too deep for
+words does not lie too deep for music, and that the vicissitudes
+of the soul, from the roughest fun to the loftiest aspiration,
+can make symphonies without the aid of dance tunes. As much,
+perhaps, will be claimed for the preludes and fugues of Bach; but
+Bach's method was unattainable: his compositions were wonderful
+webs of exquisitely beautiful Gothic traceries in sound, quite
+beyond all ordinary human talent. Beethoven's far blunter craft
+was thoroughly popular and practicable: not to save his soul
+could he have drawn one long Gothic line in sound as Bach could,
+much less have woven several of them together with so apt a
+harmony that even when the composer is unmoved its progressions
+saturate themselves with the emotion which (as modern critics are
+a little apt to forget) springs as warmly from our delicately
+touched admiration as from our sympathies, and sometimes makes us
+give a composer credit for pathetic intentions which he does not
+entertain, just as a boy imagines a treasure of tenderness and
+noble wisdom in the beauty of a woman. Besides, Bach set comic
+dialogue to music exactly as he set the recitatives of the
+Passion, there being for him, apparently, only one recitative
+possible, and that the musically best. He reserved the expression
+of his merry mood for the regular set numbers in which he could
+make one of his wonderful contrapuntal traceries of pure ornament
+with the requisite gaiety of line and movement. Beethoven bowed
+to no ideal of beauty: he only sought the expression for his
+feeling. To him a joke was a joke; and if it sounded funny in
+music he was satisfied. Until the old habit of judging all music
+by its decorative symmetry had worn out, musicians were shocked
+by his symphonies, and, misunderstanding his integrity, openly
+questioned his sanity. But to those who were not looking for
+pretty new sound patterns, but were longing for the expression of
+their moods in music, he achieved revelation, because, being
+single in his aim to express his own moods, he anticipated with
+revolutionary courage and frankness all the moods of the rising
+generations of the nineteenth century.
+
+The result was inevitable. In the nineteenth century it was no
+longer necessary to be a born pattern designer in sound to be a
+composer. One had but to be a dramatist or a poet completely
+susceptible to the dramatic and descriptive powers of sound. A
+race of literary and theatrical musicians appeared; and
+Meyerbeer, the first of them, made an extraordinary impression.
+The frankly delirious description of his Robert the Devil in
+Balzac's short story entitled Gambra, and Goethe's astonishingly
+mistaken notion that he could have composed music for Faust, show
+how completely the enchantments of the new dramatic music upset
+the judgment of artists of eminent discernment. Meyerbeer was,
+people said (old gentlemen still say so in Paris), the successor
+of Beethoven: he was, if a less perfect musician than Mozart, a
+profounder genius. Above all, he was original and daring. Wagner
+himself raved about the duet in the fourth act of Les Huguenots
+as wildly as anyone.
+
+Yet all this effect of originality and profundity was produced by
+a quite limited talent for turning striking phrases, exploiting
+certain curious and rather catching rhythms and modulations, and
+devising suggestive or eccentric instrumentation. On its
+decorative side, it was the same phenomenon in music as the
+Baroque school in architecture: an energetic struggle to enliven
+organic decay by mechanical oddities and novelties. Meyerbeer was
+no symphonist. He could not apply the thematic system to his
+striking phrases, and so had to cobble them into metric patterns
+in the old style; and as he was no "absolute musician" either, he
+hardly got his metric patterns beyond mere quadrille tunes, which
+were either wholly undistinguished, or else made remarkable by
+certain brusqueries which, in the true rococo manner, owed their
+singularity to their senselessness. He could produce neither a
+thorough music drama nor a charming opera. But with all this, and
+worse, Meyerbeer had some genuine dramatic energy, and even
+passion; and sometimes rose to the occasion in a manner which,
+whilst the imagination of his contemporaries remained on fire
+with the novelties of dramatic music, led them to overrate him
+with an extravagance which provoked Wagner to conduct a long
+critical campaign against his leadership. Thirty years ago this
+campaign was mentably ascribed to the professional jealousy of a
+disappointed rival. Nowadays young people cannot understand how
+anyone could ever have taken Meyerbeer's influence seriously.
+Those who remember how his reputation stood half a century ago,
+and who realize what 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,
+like Mozart and Beethoven, produce decorative tone structures
+independently of any dramatic or poetic subject matter, because,
+that craft being no longer necessary for his purpose, he did not
+cultivate it. As Shakespeare, compared with Tennyson, appears to
+have an exclusively dramatic 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, thus giving dramatic integrity
+to opera, and making symphony articulate. A Beethoven symphony
+(except the articulate part of the ninth) expresses noble
+feeling, but not thought: it has moods, but no ideas. Wagner
+added thought and produced the music drama. Mozart's loftiest
+opera, his Ring, so to speak, The Magic Flute, has a libretto
+which, though none the worse for seeming, like The Rhine Gold,
+the merest Christmas tomfoolery to shallow spectators, is the
+product of a talent immeasurably inferior to Mozart's own.
+The libretto of Don Giovanni is coarse and trivial: its
+transfiguration by Mozart's music may be a marvel; but nobody
+will venture to contend that such transfigurations, however
+seductive, can be as satisfactory as tone poetry or drama in
+which the musician and the poet are at the same level. Here,
+then, we have the simple secret of Wagner's preemminence as a
+dramatic musician. He wrote the poems as well as composed the
+music of his "stage festival plays," as he called them.
+
+Up to a certain point in his career Wagner paid the penalty of
+undertaking two arts instead of one. Mozart had his trade as a
+musician at his fingers' ends when he was twenty, because he had
+served an arduous apprenticeship to that trade and no other.
+Wagner was very far from having attained equal mastery at
+thirty-five: indeed he himself has told us that not until he had
+passed the age at which Mozart died did he compose with that
+complete spontaneity of musical expression which can only be
+attained by winning entire freedom from all preoccupation with
+the difficulties of technical processes. But when that time came,
+he was not only a consummate musician, like Mozart, but a
+dramatic poet and a critical and philosophical essayist,
+exercising a considerable influence on his century. The sign of
+this consummation was his ability at last to play with his art,
+and thus to add to his already famous achievements in sentimental
+drama that lighthearted art of comedy of which the greatest
+masters, like Moliere and Mozart, are so much rarer than the
+tragedians and sentimentalists. It was then that he composed the
+first two acts of Siegfried, and later on The Mastersingers, a
+professedly comedic work, and a quite Mozartian garden of melody,
+hardly credible as the work of the straining artifices of
+Tanehauser. Only, as no man ever learns to do one thing by doing
+something else, however closely allied the two things may be,
+Wagner still produced no music independently of his poems. The
+overture to The Mastersingers is delightful when you know what it
+is all about; but only those to whom it came as a concert piece
+without any such clue, and who judged its reckless counterpoint
+by the standard of Bach and of Mozart's Magic Flute overture, can
+realize how atrocious it 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 mmor Mass fresh in my memory, I confess I
+thought that the parts had got dislocated, and that some 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,
+I can still quite understand certain passages producing that
+effect organ admirer of Bach even when performed with perfect
+accuracy.
+
+
+
+THE MUSIC OF THE FUTURE
+
+The success of Wagner has been so prodigious that to his dazzled
+disciples it seems that the age of what he called "absolute music
+must be at an end, and the musical future destined to be an
+exclusively Wagnerian one inaugurated at Bayreuth. All great
+geniuses produce this illusion. Wagner did not begin a movement:
+he consummated it. He was the summit of the nineteenth century
+school of dramatic music in the same sense as Mozart was the
+summit (the word is Gounod's) of the eighteenth century school.
+And those who attempt to carry on his Bayreuth tradition will
+assuredly share the fate of the forgotten purveyors of
+second-hand Mozart a hundred years ago. As to the expected
+supersession of absolute music, it is sufficient to point to the
+fact that Germany produced two absolute musicians of the first
+class during Wagner's lifetime: one, the greatly gifted Goetz,
+who died young; the other, Brahms, whose absolute musical
+endowment was as extraordinary as his thought was commonplace.
+Wagner had for him the contempt of the original thinker for the
+man of second-hand ideas, and of the strenuously dramatic
+musician for mere brute musical faculty; but though his contempt
+was perhaps deserved by the Triumphlieds, and Schicksalslieds,
+and Elegies and Requiems in which Brahms took his brains so
+seriously, nobody can listen to Brahms' natural utterance of the
+richest absolute music, especially in his chamber compositions,
+without rejoicing in his amazing gift. A reaction to absolute
+music, starting partly from Brahms, and partly from such revivals
+of medieval music as those of De Lange in Holland and Mr. Arnold
+Dolmetsch in England, is both likely and promising; whereas there
+is no more hope in attempts to out-Wagner Wagner in music drama
+than there was in the old attempts--or for the matter of that,
+the new ones--to make Handel the starting point of a great school
+of oratorio.
+
+
+
+BAYREUTH
+
+When the Bayreuth Festival Playhouse was at last completed, and
+opened in 1876 with the first performance of The Ring, European
+society was compelled to admit that Wagner was "a success."
+Royal personages, detesting his music, sat out the performances
+in the row of boxes set apart for princes. They all complimented
+him on the astonishing "push" with which, in the teeth of all
+obstacles, he had turned a fabulous and visionary project into a
+concrete commercial reality, patronized by the public at a pound
+a head. It is as well to know that these congratulations had no
+other effect upon Wagner than to open his eyes to the fact that
+the Bayreuth experiment, as an attempt to evade the ordinary
+social and commercial conditions of theatrical enterprise, was a
+failure. His own account of it contrasts the reality with his
+intentions 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 the frivolous public and in the hands of earnest
+disciples, banded together in little Wagner Societies throughout
+Europe, had ended in their forestalling by ticket speculators and
+their sale to just the sort of idle globe-trotting tourists
+against whom the temple was to have been strictly closed. The
+money, supposed to be contributed by the faithful, was begged by
+energetic subscription-hunting ladies from people who must have
+had the most grotesque misconceptions of the composer's aims--
+among others, the Khedive of Egypt and the Sultan of Turkey!
+
+The only change that has occurred since then is that
+subscriptions are no longer needed; for the Festival Playhouse
+apparently pays its own way now, and is commercially on the same
+footing as any other theatre. The only qualification required
+from the visitor is money. A Londoner spends twenty pounds on a
+visit: a native Bayreuther spends one pound. In either case "the
+Folk," on whose behalf Wagner turned out in 1849, are effectually
+excluded; and the Festival Playhouse must therefore be classed as
+infinitely less Wagnerian in its character than Hampton Court
+Palace. Nobody knew this better than Wagner; and nothing can be
+further off the mark than to chatter about Bayreuth as if it had
+succeeded in escaping from the conditions of our modern
+civilization any more than the Grand Opera in Paris or London.
+
+Within these conditions, however, it effected a new departure in
+that excellent German institution, the summer theatre. Unlike our
+opera houses, which are constructed so that the audience may
+present a splendid pageant to the delighted manager, it is
+designed to secure an uninterrupted view of the stage, and an
+undisturbed hearing of the music, to the audience. The dramatic
+purpose of the performances is taken with entire and elaborate
+seriousness as the sole purpose of them; and the management is
+jealous for the reputation of Wagner. The commercial success
+which has followed this policy shows that the public wants summer
+theatresof the highest class. There is no reason why the
+experiment should not be tried in England. If our enthusiasm for
+Handel can support Handel Festivals, laughably dull, stupid and
+anti-Handelian as these choral monstrosities are, as well as
+annual provincial festivals on the same model, there is no
+likelihood of a Wagner Festival failing. Suppose, for instance, a
+Wagner theatre were built at Hampton Court or on Richmond Hill,
+not to say Margate pier, so that we could have a delightful
+summer evening holiday, Bayreuth fashion, passing the hours
+between the acts in the park or ontheriver before sunset, is it
+seriously contended that there would be any lack of visitors? If
+a little of the money that is wasted on grand stands, Eiffel
+towers, and dismal Halls by the Sea, all as much tied to brief
+annual seasons as Bayreuth, were applied in this way, the profit
+would be far more certain and the social utility prodigiously
+greater. Any English enthusiasm for Bayreuth that does not take
+the form of clamor for a Festival Playhouse in England may be set
+aside as mere pilgrimage mania.
+
+Those who go to Bayreuth never repent it, although the
+performances there are often far from delectable. The singing is
+sometimes tolerable, and some times abominable. Some of the
+singers are mere animated beer casks, too lazy and conceited to
+practise the self-control and physical training that is expected
+as a matter of course from an acrobat, a jockey or a pugilist.
+The women's dresses are prudish and absurd. It is true that
+Kundry no longer wears an early Victorian ball dress with
+"ruchings," and that Fresh has been provided with a quaintly
+modish copy of the flowered gown of Spring in Botticelli's famous
+picture; but the mailclad Brynhild still climbs the mountains
+with her legs carefully hidden in a long white skirt, and looks
+so exactly like Mrs. Leo Hunter as Minerva that it is quite
+impossible to feel a ray of illusion whilst looking at her. The
+ideal of womanly beauty aimed at reminds Englishmen of the
+barmaids of the seventies, when the craze for golden hair was at
+its worst. Further, whilst Wagner's stage directions are
+sometimes disregarded as unintelligently as at Covent Garden, an
+intolerably old-fashioned tradition of half rhetorical, half
+historical-pictorial attitude and gesture prevails. The most
+striking moments of the drama are conceived as tableaux vivants
+with posed models, instead of as passages of action, motion and
+life.
+
+I need hardly add that the supernatural powers of control
+attributed by credulous pilgrims to Madame Wagner do not exist.
+Prima donnas and tenors are as unmanageable at Bayreuth as
+anywhere else. Casts are capriciously changed; stage business is
+insufficiently rehearsed; the public are compelled to listen to a
+Brynhild or Siegfried of fifty when they have carefully arranged
+to see one of twenty-five, much as in any ordinary opera house.
+Even the conductors upset the arrangements occasionally. On the
+other hand, if we leave the vagaries of the stars out of account,
+we may safely expect always that in thoroughness of preparation
+of the chief work of the season, in strenuous artistic
+pretentiousness, in pious conviction that the work is of such
+enormous importance as to be worth doing well at all costs, the
+Bayreuth performances will deserve their reputation. The band is
+placed out of sight of the audience, with the more formidable
+instruments beneath the stage, so that the singers have not to
+sing THROUGH the brass. The effect is quite perfect.
+
+BAYREUTH IN ENGLAND
+
+I purposely dwell on the faults of Bayreuth in order to show that
+there is no reason in the world why as good and better
+performances of The Ring should not be given in England. Wagner's
+scores are now before the world; and neither his widow nor his
+son can pretend to handle them with greater authority than any
+artist who feels the impulse to interpret them. Nobody will ever
+know what Wagner himself thought of the artists who established
+the Bayreuth tradition: he was obviously not in a position to
+criticize them. For instance, had Rubini survived to create
+Siegmund, it is quite certain that we should not have had from
+Wagner's pen so amusing and vivid a description as we have of his
+Ottavio in the old Paris days. Wagner was under great obligations
+to the heroes and heroines of 1876; and he naturally said nothing
+to disparage their triumphs; but there is no reason to believe
+that all or indeed any of them satisfied him as Schnorr of
+Carolsfeld satisfied him as Tristan, or Schroder Devrient as
+Fidelio. It is just as likely as not that the next Schnorr or
+Schroder may arise in England. If that should actually happen,
+neither of them will need any further authority than their own
+genius and Wagner's scores for their guidance. Certainly the less
+their spontaneous impulses are sophisticated by the very stagey
+traditions which Bayreuth is handing down from the age of
+Crummles, the better.
+
+WAGNERIAN SINGERS
+
+No nation need have much difficulty in producing a race of
+Wagnerian singers. With the single exception of Handel, no
+composer has written music so well calculated to make its singers
+vocal athletes as Wagner. Abominably as the Germans sing, it is
+astonishing how they thrive physically on his leading parts. His
+secret is the Handelian secret. Instead of specializing his vocal
+parts after the manner of Verdi and Gounod for high sopranos,
+screaming tenors, and high baritones with an effective compass of
+about a fifth at the extreme tiptop of their ranges, and for
+contraltos with chest registers forced all over their compass in
+the manner of music hall singers, he employs the entire range of
+the human voice freely, demanding from everybody very nearly two
+effective octaves, so that the voice is well exercised all over,
+and one part of it relieves the other healthily and continually.
+He uses extremely high notes very sparingly, and is especially
+considerate in the matter of instrumental accompaniment. Even
+when the singer appears to have all the thunders of the full
+orchestra raging against him, a glance at the score will show
+that he is well heard, not because of any exceptionally
+stentorian power in his voice, but because Wagner meant him to be
+heard and took the greatest care not to overwhelm him. Such
+brutal opacities of accompaniment as we find in Rossini's Stabat
+or Verdi's Trovatore, where the strings play a rum-tum
+accompaniment whilst the entire wind band blares away,
+fortissimo, in unison with the unfortunate singer, are never to
+be found in Wagner's work. Even in an ordinary opera house, with
+the orchestra ranged directly between the singers and the
+audience, his instrumentation is more transparent to the human
+voice than that of any other composer since Mozart. At the
+Bayreuth Buhnenfestspielhaus, with the brass under the stage, it
+is perfectly so.
+
+On every point, then, a Wagner theatre and Wagner festivals are
+much more generally practicable than the older and more
+artificial forms of dramatic music. A presentable performance of
+The Ring is a big undertaking only in the sense in which the
+construction of a railway is a big undertaking: that is, it
+requires plenty of work and plenty of professional skill; but it
+does not, like the old operas and oratorios, require those
+extraordinary  vocal gifts which only a few individuals scattered
+here and there throughout Europe are born with. Singers who could
+never execute the roulades of Semiramis,  Assur, and Arsaces in
+Rossini's Semiramide, could sing the parts of Brynhild, Wotan and
+Erda without missing a note. Any Englishman can understand this
+if he considers for a moment the difference between a Cathedral
+service and an Italian opera at Covent Garden. The service is a
+much more serious matter than the opera. Yet provincial talent is
+sufficient for it, if the requisite industry and devotion are
+forthcoming. Let us admit that geniuses of European celebrity are
+indispensable at the Opera (though I know better, having seen
+lusty troopers and porters, without art or manners, accepted by
+fashion as principal tenors at that institution during the long
+interval between Mario and Jean de Reszke); but let us remember
+that Bayreuth has recruited its Parsifals from the peasantry, and
+that the artisans of a village in the Bavarian Alps are capable
+of a famous and elaborate Passion Play, and then consider whether
+England is so poor in talent that its amateurs must journey to
+the centre of Europe to witness a Wagner Festival.
+
+The truth is, there is nothing wrong with England except the
+wealth which attracts teachers of singing to her shores in
+sufficient numbers to 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.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Perfect Wagnerite, by Shaw
+
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+***The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring***
+#5 in our series by [George] Bernard Shaw
+
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+The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring
+
+by [George] Bernard Shaw
+
+October, 1998  [Etext #1487]
+[This update first posted 08/30/01]
+
+Edition: 11
+
+Language: English
+
+***The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring***
+*****This file should be named sring11.txt or sring11.zip******
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+
+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 of my friend Siegfried Trebitsch, I was struck by the
+inadequacy of the merely negative explanation given by me of the
+irrelevance of Night Falls On The Gods to the general philosophic
+scheme of The Ring. That explanation is correct as far as it
+goes; but, put as I put it, it now seems to me to suggest that
+the operatic character of Night Falls On The Gods was the result
+of indifference or forgetfulness produced by the lapse of
+twenty-five years between the first projection of the work and
+its completion. Now it is clear that in whatever other ways
+Wagner may have changed, he never became careless and he never
+became indifferent. I have therefore inserted a new section in
+which I show how the revolutionary history of Western Europe from
+the Liberal explosion of 1848 to the confused attempt at a
+socialist, military, and municipal administration in Paris in
+1871 (that is to say, from the beginning of The Niblung's Ring by
+Wagner to the long-delayed completion of Night Falls On The
+Gods), demonstrated practically that the passing away of the
+present order was going to be a much more complicated business
+than it appears in Wagner's Siegfried. I have therefore
+interpolated a new chapter which will perhaps induce some readers
+of the original English text to read the book again in German.
+
+For some time to come, indeed, I shall have to refer English
+readers to this German edition as the most complete in
+existence.
+
+My obligation to Herr Trebitsch for making me a living German
+author instead of merely a translated English one is so great
+that I am bound to point out that he is not responsible for my
+views or Wagner's, and that 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 criticisms which occasionally
+reflect on contemporary authorities with a European reputation
+for sensitiveness. And as the very sympathy which makes his
+translations so excellent may be regarded with suspicion, let me
+hasten to declare I am bound to Germany by the ties that hold my
+nature most strongly. Not that I like the average German: nobody
+does, even in his own country. But then the average man is not
+popular anywhere; and as no German considers himself an average
+one, each reader will, as an exceptional man, sympathize with my
+dislike of the common herd. And if I cannot love the typical
+modern German, I can at least pity and understand him. His worst
+fault is that he cannot see that it is possible to have too much
+of a good thing. Being convinced that duty, industry, education,
+loyalty, patriotism and respectability are good things (and I am
+magnanimous enough to admit that they are not altogether bad
+things when taken in strict moderation at the right time and
+in the right place), he indulges in them on all occasions
+shamelessly and excessively. He commits hideous crimes when crime
+is presented to him as part of his duty; his craze for work is
+more ruinous than the craze for drink; when he can afford
+secondary education for his sons you find three out of every five
+of them with their minds lamed for life by examinations which
+only a thoroughly wooden head could go through with impunity; and
+if a king is patriotic and respectable (few kings are) he puts up
+statues to him and exalts him above Charlemagne and Henry the
+Fowler. And when he meets a man of genius, he instinctively
+insults him, starves him, and, if possible, imprisons and kills
+him.
+
+Now I do not pretend to be perfect myself. Heaven knows I have to
+struggle hard enough every day with what the Germans call my higher
+impulses. I know too well the temptation to be moral, to be
+self-sacrificing, to be loyal and patriotic, to be respectable and
+well-spoken of. But I wrestle with it and--as far as human fraility
+will allow--conquer it, whereas the German abandons himself to it
+without scruple or reflection, and is actually proud of his pious
+intemperance and self-indulgence. Nothing will cure him of this
+mania. It may end in starvation, crushing taxation, suppression of
+all freedom to try new social experiments and reform obsolete
+institutions, in snobbery, jobbery, idolatry, and an omnipresent
+tyranny in which his doctor and his schoolmaster, his lawyer and
+his priest, coerce him worse than any official or drill sergeant:
+no matter: it is respectable, says the German, therefore it must
+be good, and cannot be carried too far; and everybody who rebels
+against it must be a rascal. Even the Social-Democrats in Germany
+differ from the rest only in carrying academic 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 in England. I am
+as conspicuous in English Socialism as Bebel is in German Socialism;
+but do you suppose that the German Social-Democrats tolerate me? Not
+a bit of it. I have begged again and again to be taken to the bosom
+of my German comrades. I have pleaded that the Super-Proletarians
+of all lands should unite. I have pointed out that the German
+Social-Democratic party has done nothing at its Congresses for the
+last ten years except the things I told them to do ten years before,
+and that its path is white with the bones of the Socialist
+superstitions I and my fellow Fabians have slain. Useless. They do
+not care a rap whether I am a Socialist or not. All they want to
+know is; Am I orthodox? Am I correct in my revolutionary views? Am
+I reverent to the revolutionary authorities? Because I am a genuine
+free-thinker they look at me as a policeman looks at a midnight
+prowler or as a Berlin bourgeois looks at a suspicious foreigner.
+They ask "Do you believe that Marx was omniscient and infallible;
+that Engels was his prophet; that Bebel and Singer are his inspired
+apostles; and that Das Kapital is the Bible?" Hastening in my
+innocence to clear myself of what I regard as an accusation of
+credulity and ignorance, I assure them earnestly that I know ten
+times as much of economics and a hundred times as much of practical
+administration as Marx did; that I knew Engels personally and rather
+liked him as a witty and amiable old 1848 veteran who despised
+modern Socialism; that I regard Bebel and Singer as men of like
+passions with myself, but considerably less advanced; and that I
+read Das Kapital in the year 1882 or thereabouts, and still consider
+it one of the most important books of the nineteenth century because
+of its power of changing the minds of those who read it, in spite of
+its unsound capitalist economics, its parade of quotations from
+books which the author had either not read or not understood, its
+affectation of algebraic formulas, and its general attempt to
+disguise a masterpiece of propagandist journalism and prophetic
+invective as a drily scientific treatise of the sort that used to
+impose on people in 1860, when any book that pretended to be
+scientific was accepted as a Bible. In those days Darwin and
+Helmholtz were the real fathers of the Church; and nobody would
+listen to religion, poetry or rhetoric; so that even Socialism had
+to call itself "scientific," and predict the date of the revolution,
+as if it were a comet, by calculations founded on "historic laws."
+
+To my amazement these reasonable remarks were received as hideous
+blasphemies; none of the party papers were allowed to print any
+word of mine; the very Revisionists themselves found that the
+scandal of my heresy damaged them more than my support aided
+them; and I found myself an outcast from German Social-Democracy
+at the moment when, thanks to Trebitsch, the German bourgeoisie
+and nobility began to smile on me, seduced by the pleasure of
+playing with fire, and perhaps by Agnes Sorma'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 all allegiance to established religion, law,
+order, patriotism, and learning, he promptly uses his freedom to
+put on a headier set of chains; expels anti-militarists with the
+blood-thirstiest martial anti-foreign ardor; and gives the Kaiser
+reason to thank heaven that he was 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 ties that hold my nature most strongly? Very simply because
+I should have perished of despair in my youth but for the world
+created for me by that great German dynasty which began with Bach
+and will perhaps not end with Richard Strauss. Do not suppose for
+a moment that I learnt my art from English men of letters. True,
+they showed me how to handle English words; but if I had known no
+more than that, my works would never have crossed the Channel. My
+masters were the masters of a universal language: they were, to
+go from summit to summit, Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven
+and Wagner. Had the Germans understood any of these men, they
+would have hanged them. Fortunately they did not understand them,
+and therefore only neglected them until they were dead, after
+which they learnt to dance to their tunes with an easy
+conscience. For their sakes Germany stands consecrated as the
+Holy Land of the capitalist age, just as Italy, for its painters'
+sakes, is the Holy Land of the early unvulgarized Renascence;
+France, for its builders' sakes, of the age of Christian chivalry
+and faith; and Greece, for its sculptors' 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,
+industrious German 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 all sincerity--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
+most unexpected literary task that has ever been set me. When it
+first appeared I was ungrateful enough to remonstrate with its
+publisher for printing, as I thought, more copies than the most
+sanguine Wagnerite could ever hope to sell. But the result proved
+that exactly one person buys a copy on every day in the year,
+including Sundays; and so, in the process of the suns, a reprint
+has become necessary.
+
+Save a few verbal slips of no importance, I have found nothing to
+alter in this edition. As usual, the only protests the book has
+elicited are protests, not against the opinions it expresses, but
+against the facts it records. There are people who cannot bear to
+be told that their hero was associated with a famous Anarchist in
+a rebellion; that he was proclaimed as "wanted" by the police;
+that he wrote revolutionary pamphlets; and that his picture of
+Niblunghome under the reign of Alberic is a poetic vision of
+unregulated industrial capitalism as it was made known in Germany
+in the middle of the nineteenth century by Engels's Condition of
+the Laboring classes in England. They frantically deny these
+facts, and then declare that I have connected them with Wagner in
+a paroxysm of senseless perversity. I am sorry I have hurt them;
+and I appeal to charitable publishers to bring out a new life of
+Wagner, which shall describe him as a court musician of
+unquestioned fashion and orthodoxy, and a pillar of the most
+exclusive Dresden circles. Such a work, would, I believe, have a
+large sale, and be read with satisfaction and reassurance by many
+lovers of Wagner's music.
+
+As to my much demurred-to relegation of Night Falls On The Gods
+to the category of grand opera, I have nothing to add or
+withdraw. Such a classification is to me as much a matter of fact
+as the Dresden rising or the police proclamation; but I shall not
+pretend that it is a matter of such fact as everybody's judgment
+can grapple with. People who prefer grand opera to serious
+music-drama naturally resent my placing a very grand opera below
+a very serious music-drama. The ordinary lover of Shakespeare
+would equally demur to my placing his popular catchpenny plays,
+of which As You Like It is an avowed type, below true
+Shakespearean plays like Measure for Measure. I cannot help that.
+Popular dramas and operas may have overwhelming merits as
+enchanting make-believes; but a poet's sincerest vision of the
+world must always take precedence of his prettiest fool's
+paradise.
+
+As many English Wagnerites seem to be still under the impression
+that Wagner composed Rienzi in his youth, Tannhauser and
+Lohengrin in his middle age, and The Ring in his later years, may
+I again remind them that The Ring was the result of a political
+convulsion which occurred when Wagner was only thirty-six, and
+that the poem was completed when he was forty, with thirty more
+years of work before him? It is as much a first essay in
+political philosophy as Die Feen is a first essay in romantic
+opera. The attempt to recover its spirit twenty years later, when
+the music of Night Falls On The Gods was added, was an attempt to
+revive the barricades of Dresden in the Temple of the Grail. Only
+those who have never had any political enthusiasms to survive can
+believe that such 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
+chief work. I offer it to those enthusiastic admirers of Wagner
+who are unable to follow his ideas, and do not in the least
+understand the dilemma of Wotan, though they are filled with
+indignation at the irreverence of the Philistines who frankly
+avow that they find the remarks of the god too often tedious and
+nonsensical. Now to be devoted to Wagner merely as a dog is
+devoted to his master, sharing a few elementary ideas, appetites
+and emotions with him, and, for the rest, reverencing his
+superiority without understanding it, is no true Wagnerism. Yet
+nothing better is possible without a stock of ideas common to
+master and disciple. Unfortunately, the ideas of the
+revolutionary Wagner of 1848 are taught neither by the education
+nor the experience of English and American gentlemen-amateurs,
+who are almost always political mugwumps, and hardly ever
+associate with revolutionists. The earlier attempts to translate
+his numerous pamphlets and essays into English, resulted in
+ludicrous mixtures of pure nonsense with the absurdest
+distorsions of his ideas into the ideas of the translators. We
+now have a translation which is a masterpiece of interpretation
+and an eminent addition to our literature; but that is not
+because its author, Mr. Ashton Ellis, knows the German dictionary
+better than his predecessors. He is simply in possession of
+Wagner's ideas, which were to them inconceivable.
+
+All I pretend to do in this book is to impart the ideas which
+are most likely to be lacking in the conventional Englishman's
+equipment. I came by them myself much as Wagner did, having
+learnt more about music than about anything else in my youth, and
+sown my political wild oats subsequently in the revolutionary
+school. This combination is not common in England; and as I seem,
+so far, to be the only publicly articulate result of it, I
+venture to add my commentary to what has already been written by
+musicians who are no revolutionists, and revolutionists who are
+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
+the theatre to satisfy his curiosity, or his desire to be in the
+fashion, by witnessing a representation of Richard Wagner's
+famous Ring of the Niblungs.
+
+First, The Ring, with all its gods and giants and dwarfs, its
+water-maidens and Valkyries, its wishing-cap, magic ring,
+enchanted sword, and miraculous treasure, is a drama of today,
+and not of a remote and fabulous antiquity. It could not have
+been written before the second half of the nineteenth century,
+because it deals with events which were only then consummating
+themselves. Unless the spectator recognizes in it an image of the
+life he is himself fighting his way through, it must needs appear
+to him a monstrous development of the Christmas pantomimes, spun
+out here and there into intolerable lengths of dull conversation
+by the principal baritone. Fortunately, even from this point of
+view, The Ring is full of extraordinarily attractive episodes,
+both orchestral and dramatic. The nature music alone--music of
+river and rainbow, fire and forest--is enough to bribe people
+with any love of the country in them to endure the passages of
+political philosophy in the sure hope of a prettier page to come.
+Everybody, too, can enjoy the love music, the hammer and anvil
+music, the clumping of the giants, the tune of the young
+woodsman's horn, the trilling of the bird, the dragon music and
+nightmare music and thunder and lightning music, the profusion of
+simple melody, the sensuous charm of the orchestration: in short,
+the vast extent of common ground between The Ring and the
+ordinary music we use for play and pleasure. Hence it is that
+the four separate music-plays of which it is built have become
+popular throughout Europe as operas. We shall presently see that
+one of them, Night Falls On The Gods, actually is an opera.
+
+It is generally understood, however, that there is an inner ring
+of superior persons to whom the whole work has a most urgent
+and searching philosophic and social significance. I profess to
+be such a superior person; and I write this pamphlet for the
+assistance of those who wish to be introduced to the work on
+equal terms with that inner circle of adepts.
+
+My second encouragement is addressed to modest citizens who may
+suppose themselves to be disqualified from enjoying The Ring by
+their technical ignorance of music. They may dismiss all such
+misgivings speedily and confidently. If the sound of music has
+any power to move them, they will find 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 point than the
+single direct point of giving musical expression to the drama.
+In classical music there are, as the analytical programs tell
+us, first subjects and second subjects, free fantasias,
+recapitulations, and codas; there are fugues, with
+counter-subjects, strettos, and pedal points; there are
+passacaglias on ground basses, canons ad hypodiapente, and other
+ingenuities, which have, after all, stood or fallen by their
+prettiness as much as the simplest folk-tune. Wagner is never
+driving at anything of this sort any more than Shakespeare in
+his plays is driving at 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 no academic teaching. The
+professors, when Wagner's music is played to them, exclaim at
+once "What is this? Is it aria, or recitative? Is there no
+cabaletta to it--not even a full close? Why was that discord not
+prepared; and why does he not resolve it correctly? How dare he
+indulge in those scandalous and illicit transitions into a key
+that has not one note in common with the key he has just left?
+Listen to those false relations! What does he want with six
+drums and eight horns when Mozart worked miracles with two of
+each? The man is no musician." The layman neither knows nor
+cares about any of these things. If Wagner were to turn aside
+from his straightforward dramatic purpose to propitiate the
+professors with correct exercises in sonata form, his music
+would at once become unintelligible to the unsophisticated
+spectator, upon whom the familiar and dreaded "classical"
+sensation would descend like the influenza. Nothing of the kind
+need be dreaded. The unskilled, untaught musician may approach
+Wagner boldly; for there is no possibility of a misunderstanding
+between them: The Ring music is perfectly single and simple. It
+is the adept musician of the old school who has everything to
+unlearn: and him I leave, unpitied, to his fate.
+
+
+
+THE RING OF THE NIBLUNGS
+
+The Ring consists of four plays, intended to be performed on four
+successive evenings, entitled The Rhine Gold (a prologue to the
+other three), The Valkyries, Siegfried, and Night Falls On The
+Gods; or, in the original German, Das Rheingold, Die Walkure,
+Siegfried, and Die Gotterdammerung.
+
+
+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 gold alone, as the wise leave flowers without plucking
+them, enjoying with perfect naivete its color and glitter and
+preciousness, no human being will ever be the worse for your
+knowledge of it; and whilst you remain in that frame of mind the
+golden age will endure.
+
+Now suppose a man comes along: a man who has no sense of the
+golden age, nor any power of living in the present: a man with
+common desires, cupidities, ambitions, just like most of the men
+you know. Suppose you reveal 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 whip of hunger, will toil underground and
+overground night and day to pile up more and more gold for him
+until he is master of the world! You will find 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 no
+distasteful toil, which he desires more passionately; and that
+is yourself. So long as he is preoccupied with love of you, the
+gold, and all that it implies, will escape him: the golden age
+will endure. Not until he forswears love will he stretch out his
+hand to the gold, and found the Plutonic empire for himself. But
+the choice between love and gold may not rest altogether with
+him. He may be an ugly, ungracious, unamiable person, whose
+affections may seem merely ludicrous and despicable to you. In
+that case, you may repulse him, and most bitterly humiliate and
+disappoint him. What is left to him then but to curse the love 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
+its lost thoughtlessness and sweetness.
+
+In due time the gold of Klondyke will find its way to the great
+cities of the world. But the old dilemma will keep continually
+reproducing itself. The man who will turn his back on love, and
+upon all the fruitful it, and will set himself single-heartedly
+to gather gold in an exultant dream of wielding its Plutonic
+powers, will find the treasure yielding quickly to his touch.
+But few men will make this sacrifice voluntarily. Not until
+the Plutonic power is so strongly set up that the higher human
+impulses are suppressed as rebellious, and even the mere
+appetites are denied, starved, and insulted when they cannot
+purchase their satisfaction with gold, are the energetic spirits
+driven to build their lives upon riches. How inevitable that
+course has become to us is plain enough to those who have the
+power of understanding what they see as 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.
+As you sit waiting for the curtain to rise, you suddenly catch
+the booming ground-tone of a mighty river. It becomes plainer,
+clearer: you get nearer to the surface, and catch the green light
+and the flights of bubbles. Then the curtain goes up and you see
+what you heard--the depths of the Rhine, with three strange fairy
+fishes, half water-maidens, singing and enjoying themselves
+exuberantly. They are not singing barcarolles or ballads about
+the Lorely and her fated lovers, but simply trolling any nonsense
+that comes into their heads in time to the dancing of the water
+and the rhythm of their swimming. It is the golden age; and the
+attraction of this spot for the Rhine maidens is a lump of the
+Rhine gold, which they value, in an entirely uncommercial way,
+for its bodily beauty and splendor. Just at present it is
+eclipsed, because the sun is not striking down through the
+water.
+
+Presently there comes a poor devil of a dwarf stealing along the
+slippery rocks of the river bed, a creature with energy enough to
+make him strong of body and fierce of passion, but with a brutish
+narrowness of intelligence and selfishness of imagination: too
+stupid to see that his own welfare can only be compassed as part
+of the welfare of the world, 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 fruitful impulse in him, in search
+of what he lacks in himself, beauty, lightness of heart,
+imagination, music. The Rhine maidens, representing all these to
+him, fill him with hope and longing; and he never considers that
+he has nothing to offer that they could possibly desire, being
+by natural limitation incapable of seeing anything from anyone
+else's point of view. With perfect simplicity, he offers himself
+as a sweetheart to them. But they are thoughtless, elemental,
+only half real things, much like modern young ladies. That the
+poor dwarf is repulsive to their sense of physical beauty and
+their romantic conception of heroism, that he is ugly and
+awkward, greedy and ridiculous, disposes for them of his claim to
+live and love. They mock him atrociously, pretending to fall in
+love with him at first sight, and then slipping away and making
+game of him, heaping ridicule and disgust on the poor wretch
+until he is beside himself with mortification and rage. They
+forget him when the water begins to glitter in the sun, and the
+gold to reflect its glory. They break into ecstatic worship of
+their treasure; and though they know the parable of Klondyke
+quite well, they have no fear that the gold will be wrenched away
+by the dwarf, since it will yield to no one who has not forsworn
+love for it, and it is in pursuit of love that he has come to
+them. They forget that they have poisoned that desire in him by
+their mockery and denial of it, and that he now knows that life
+will give him nothing that he cannot wrest from it by the
+Plutonic power. It is just as if some poor, rough, vulgar, coarse
+fellow were to offer to take his part in aristocratic society,
+and be snubbed into the knowledge that only as a millionaire
+could he ever hope to bring that society to his feet and buy
+himself a beautiful and refined wife. His choice is forced on
+him. He forswears love as thousands of us forswear it every day;
+and in a moment the gold is in his grasp, and he disappears in
+the depths, leaving the water-fairies vainly screaming "Stop
+thief!" whilst the river seems to plunge into darkness and sink
+from us as we rise to the cloud regions above.
+
+And now, what forces are there in the world to resist Alberic,
+our dwarf, in his new character of sworn plutocrat? He is soon at
+work wielding the power of the gold. For his gain, hordes of his
+fellow-creatures are thenceforth condemned to slave miserably,
+overground and underground, lashed to their work by the invisible
+whip of starvation. They never see him, any more than the victims
+of our "dangerous trades" ever see the shareholders whose power
+is nevertheless everywhere, driving them to destruction. The very
+wealth they create with their labor becomes an additional force
+to impoverish them; for as fast as they make it it slips from
+their hands into the hands of their master, and makes him
+mightier than ever. You can see the process for yourself in every
+civilized country today, where millions of people toil in want
+and disease to heap up more wealth for our Alberics, laying up
+nothing for themselves, except sometimes horrible and agonizing
+disease and the certainty of premature death. All this part of
+the story is frightfully real, frightfully present, frightfully
+modern; and its effects on our social life are so ghastly and
+ruinous that we no longer know enough of happiness to be
+discomposed by it. It is only the poet, with his vision of what
+life might be, to whom these things are unendurable. If we were a
+race of poets we would make an end of them before the end of this
+miserable century. Being a race of moral dwarfs instead, we think
+them highly respectable, comfortable and proper, and allow them
+to breed and multiply their evil in all directions. If there were
+no higher power in the world to work against Alberic, the end of
+it would be utter destruction.
+
+Such a force there is, however; and it is called Godhead. The
+mysterious thing we call life organizes itself into all living
+shapes, bird, beast, beetle and fish, rising to the human marvel
+in cunning dwarfs and in laborious muscular giants, capable,
+these last, of enduring toil, willing to buy love and life, not
+with suicidal curses and renunciations, but with patient manual
+drudgery in the service of higher powers. And these higher powers
+are called into existence by the same self-organization of life
+still more wonderfully into rare persons who may by comparison be
+called gods, creatures capable of thought, whose aims extend far
+beyond the satisfaction of their bodily appetites and personal
+affections, since they perceive that it is only by the
+establishment of a social order founded on common bonds of moral
+faith that the world can rise from mere savagery. But how is this
+order to be set up by Godhead in a world of stupid giants, since
+these thoughtless ones pursue only their narrower personal ends
+and can by no means understand the aims of a god? Godhead, face
+to face with Stupidity, must compromise. Unable to enforce on the
+world the pure law of thought, it must resort to a mechanical law
+of commandments to be enforced by brute punishments and the
+destruction of the disobedient. And however carefully these laws
+are framed to represent the highest thoughts of the framers at
+the moment of their promulgation, before a day has elapsed that
+thought has grown and widened by the ceaseless evolution of life;
+and lo! yesterday's law already fallen out with today's thought.
+Yet if the high givers of that law themselves set the example of
+breaking it before it is a week old, they destroy all its
+authority with their subjects, and so break the weapon they have
+forged to rule them for their own good. They must therefore
+maintain at all costs the sanctity of the law, even when it has
+ceased to represent their thought; so that at last they get
+entangled in a network of ordinances which they no longer believe
+in, and yet have made so sacred by custom and so terrible by
+punishment, that they cannot themselves escape from them. Thus
+Godhead's resort to law finally costs it half its integrity--as
+if a spiritual king, to gain temporal power, had plucked out one
+of his eyes--and it finally begins secretly to long for the
+advent of some power higher than itself which will destroy its
+artificial empire of law, and establish a true republic of free
+thought.
+
+This is by no means the only difficulty in the dominion of Law.
+The brute force for its execution must be purchased; and the mass
+of its subjects must be persuaded to respect the authority which
+employs this force. But how is such respect to be implanted in
+them if they are unable to comprehend the thought of the
+lawgiver? Clearly, only by associating the legislative power with
+such displays of splendor and majesty as will impress their
+senses and awe their imaginations. The god turned lawgiver, in
+short, must be crowned Pontiff and King. Since he cannot be known
+to the common folk as their superior in wisdom, he must be 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
+commander of armies, and the wielder of powers of life and death,
+of salvation and damnation after death. Something may be done in
+this way without corruption whilst the golden age still endures.
+Your gods may not prevail with the dwarfs; but they may go to
+these honest giants who will give a day's work for a day's pay,
+and induce them to build for Godhead a mighty fortress, complete
+with hall and chapel, tower and bell, for the sake of the
+homesteads that will grow up in security round that
+church-castle. This only, however, whilst the golden age lasts.
+The moment the Plutonic power is let loose, and the loveless
+Alberic comes into the field with his corrupting millions, the
+gods are face to face with destruction; since Alberic, able with
+invisible hunger-whip to force 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 bigger brains, can capture his
+gold. This, the dilemma of the Church today, is the situation
+created by the exploit of Alberic in the depths of the Rhine.
+
+Second Scene
+
+From the bed of the river we rise into cloudy regions, and
+finally come out into the clear in a meadow, where Wotan, the
+god of gods, and his consort Fricka lie sleeping. Wotan, you
+will observe, has lost one eye; and you will presently learn
+that he plucked it out voluntarily as the price to be paid for
+his alliance with Fricka, who in return has brought to him as
+her dowry all the powers of Law. The meadow is on the brink of
+a ravine, beyond which, towering on distant heights, stands
+Godhome, a mighty castle, newly built as a house of state for the
+one-eyed god and his all-ruling wife. Wotan has not yet seen this
+castle except in his dreams: two giants have just built it for
+him whilst he slept; and the reality is before him for the first
+time when Fricka wakes him. In that majestic burg he is to rule
+with her and through her over the humble giants, who have eyes to
+gape at the glorious castles their own hands have built from his
+design, but no brains to design castles for themselves, 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 no
+weaknesses, no respect for persons. All such sweet littlenesses
+must be left to the humble stupid giants to make their toil sweet
+to them; and the god must, after all, pay for Olympian power the
+same price the dwarf has paid for Plutonic power.
+
+Wotan has forgotten this in his dreams of greatness. Not so
+Fricka. What she 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 giants Fricka's sister, the goddess Freia, with
+her golden love-apples. When Fricka reproaches Wotan with having
+selfishly forgotten this, she finds that he, like herself, is not
+prepared to go through with his bargain, and that he is trusting
+to another great worldforce, the Lie (a European Power, as
+Lassalle said), to help him to trick the giants out of their
+reward. 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 to deliver him from his contract, and to cheat the
+giants for him; but he has not arrived to keep his word: indeed,
+as Fricka bitterly points out, why should not the Lie fail Wotan,
+since such failure is the very essence of him?
+
+The giants come soon enough; and Freia flies to Wotan for
+protection against them. Their purposes are quite honest; and
+they have no doubt of the god's faith. There stands their part
+of the contract fulfilled, stone on stone, port and pinnacle all
+faithfully finished from Wotan's design by their mighty labor.
+They have come undoubtingly for their agreed wage. Then there
+happens what is to them an incredible, inconceivable thing. The
+god begins to shuffle. There are no moments in life more tragic
+than those in which the humble common man, the manual worker,
+leaving with implicit trust all high affairs to his betters, and
+reverencing them wholly as worthy of that trust, even to the
+extent of accepting as his rightful function the saving of them
+from all roughening and coarsening drudgeries, first discovers
+that they are corrupt, greedy, unjust and treacherous. The shock
+drives a ray of prophetic light into one giant's mind, and gives
+him a momentary eloquence. In that moment he rises above his
+stupid gianthood, and earnestly warns the Son of Light that all
+his power and eminence of priesthood, godhood, and kingship must
+stand or fall with the unbearable cold greatness of the
+incorruptible law-giver. But Wotan, whose assumed character of
+law-giver is altogether false to his real passionate nature,
+despises the rebuke; and the giant's ray of insight is lost in
+the murk of his virtuous indignation.
+
+In the midst of the wrangle, Loki comes at last, excusing himself
+for being late on the ground that he has been detained by a
+matter of importance which he has promised to lay before Wotan.
+When pressed to give his mind to the business immediately in
+hand, and to extricate Wotan from his dilemma, he has nothing to
+say except that the giants are evidently altogether in the right.
+The castle has been duly built: he has tried every stone of it,
+and found the work first-rate: there is nothing to be done but
+pay the price agreed upon by handing over Freia to the giants.
+The gods are furious; and Wotan passionately declares that he
+only consented to the bargain on Loki's promise to find a way for
+him out of it. But Loki says no: he has promised to find a way
+out if any such way exist, but not to make a way if there is no
+way. He has wandered over the whole earth in search of some
+treasure great enough to buy Freia back from the giants; but in
+all the world he has found nothing for which Man will give up
+Woman. And this, by the way, reminds him of the matter he had
+promised to lay before Wotan. The Rhine maidens have complained
+to him of Alberic's theft of their gold; and he mentions it as
+a curious exception to his universal law of the unpurchasable
+preciousness of love, that this gold-robber has forsworn love for
+the sake of the fabulous riches of the Plutonic empire and the
+mastery of the 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 the instrument for cruelly murdering his self-respect. But
+the giants, with love within their reach, with Freia and her
+golden apples in their hands, offer to give her up for the
+treasure of Alberic. Observe, it is the treasure alone that they
+desire. They have no fierce dreams of dominion over their
+superiors, or of moulding the world to any conceptions of their
+own. They are neither clever nor ambitious: they simply covet
+money. Alberic's gold: that is their demand, or else Freia, as
+agreed upon, whom they now carry off as hostage, leaving Wotan
+to consider their ultimatum.
+
+Freia gone, the gods begin to wither and age: her golden apples,
+which they so lightly bargained away, they now find to be a
+matter of life and death 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 Wotan to do? Loki sees the
+answer clearly enough: he must bluntly rob Alberic. There is
+nothing to prevent him except moral scruple; for Alberic, after
+all, is a poor, dim, dwarfed, credulous creature whom a god can
+outsee and a lie can outwit. Down, then, Wotan and Loki plunge
+into the mine where Alberic's slaves are piling up wealth for him
+under the invisible whip.
+
+Third Scene
+
+This gloomy place need not be a mine: it might just as well be
+a match-factory, with yellow phosphorus, phossy jaw, a large
+dividend, and plenty of clergymen shareholders. Or it might be
+a whitelead factory, or a chemical works, or a pottery, or a
+railway shunting yard, or a tailoring shop, or a little
+gin-sodden laundry, or a bakehouse, or a big shop, or any other
+of the places where human life and welfare are daily sacrificed
+in order that some greedy foolish creature may be able to hymn
+exultantly to his Platonic idol:
+
+Thou mak'st me eat whilst others starve,
+And sing while others do lament:
+Such untome Thy blessings are,
+As if I were Thine only care.
+
+In the mine, which resounds with the clinking anvils of the
+dwarfs toiling miserably to heap up treasure for their master,
+Alberic has set his brother Mime--more familiarly, Mimmy--to make
+him a helmet. Mimmy dimly sees that there is some magic in this
+helmet, and tries to keep it; but Alberic wrests it from him, and
+shows him, to his cost, that it is the veil of the invisible
+whip, and that he who wears it can appear in what shape he will,
+or disappear from view altogether. This helmet is a very common
+article in our streets, where it generally takes the form of a
+tall hat. It makes a man invisible as a shareholder, and changes
+him into various shapes, such as a pious Christian, a subscriber
+to hospitals, a benefactor of the poor, a model husband and
+father, a shrewd, practical independent Englishman, and what not,
+when he is really a pitiful parasite on the commonwealth,
+consuming a great deal, and producing nothing, feeling nothing,
+knowing nothing, believing nothing, and doing nothing except what
+all the rest do, and that only because 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 instinctively mistrusts Intellect, even in the
+garb of Poetry and the company of Godhead, whilst envying the
+brilliancy of the one and the dignity of the other. Alberic
+breaks out at them with a terrible boast of the power now within
+his grasp. He paints for them the world as it will be when his
+dominion over it is complete, when the soft airs and green mosses
+of its valleys shall be changed into smoke, slag, and filth; when
+slavery, disease, and squalor, soothed by drunkenness and
+mastered by the policeman's baton, shall become the foundation of
+society; and when nothing shall escape ruin except such pretty
+places and pretty women as he may like to buy for the slaking of
+his own lusts. In that kingdom of evil he sees that there will be
+no power but his own. These gods, with their moralities and
+legalities and intellectual subtlety, will go under and be
+starved out of existence. He bids Wotan and Loki beware of it;
+and his "Hab' Acht!" is hoarse, horrible, and sinister. Wotan
+is revolted to the very depths of his being: he cannot stifle the
+execration that bursts from him. But Loki is unaffected: he has
+no moral passion: indignation is as absurd to him as enthusiasm.
+He finds it exquisitely amusing--having a touch of the comic
+spirit in him--that the dwarf, in stirring up the moral fervor of
+Wotan, has removed his last moral scruple about becoming a thief.
+Wotan will now rob the dwarf without remorse; for is it not
+positively his highest duty to take this power out of such evil
+hands and use it himself in the interests of Godhead? On the
+loftiest moral grounds, he lets Loki do his worst.
+
+A little cunningly disguised flattery makes short work of
+Alberic. Loki pretends to be afraid of him; and he swallows that
+bait unhesitatingly. But how, enquires Loki, is he to guard
+against the hatred of his million slaves? 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 to boast
+of the enchantments of the magic helmet. Loki refuses to believe
+in such marvels without witnessing them. Alberic, only too glad
+to show off his powers, puts on the helmet and transforms himself
+into a monstrous serpent. Loki gratifies him by pretending to be
+frightened out of his wits, but ventures to remark that it would
+be better still if the helmet could transform its owner into some
+tiny creature that could hide and spy in the smallest cranny.
+Alberic promptly transforms himself into a toad. In an instant
+Wotan's foot is on him; Loki tears away the helmet; they pinion
+him, and drag him away a prisoner up through the earth to the
+meadow by the castle.
+
+Fourth Scene
+
+There, to pay for his freedom, he has to summon his slaves from
+the depths to place all the treasure they have heaped up for him
+at the feet of Wotan. Then he demands his liberty; but Wotan must
+have the ring as well. And here the dwarf, like the giant before
+him, feels the very foundations of the world shake beneath him at
+the discovery of his own base cupidity in a higher power. That
+evil should, in its loveless desperation, create malign powers
+which Godhead could not create, seems but natural justice to him.
+But that Godhead should steal those malign powers from evil, and
+wield them itself, is a monstrous perversion; and his appeal to
+Wotan to forego it is almost terrible in its conviction of wrong.
+It is of no avail. Wotan falls back again on virtuous
+indignation. He reminds Alberic that he stole the gold from the
+Rhine maidens, and takes the attitude of the just judge
+compelling a restitution of stolen goods. Alberic knowing
+perfectly well that the judge is taking the goods to put them m
+his own pocket, has the ring torn from his finger, and is once
+more as poor as he was when he came slipping 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
+laborer was drained dry by the knightly spendthrift, and the
+spendthrift was drained by the Jewish usurer, Church and State,
+religion and law, seized on the Jew and drained him as a
+Christian duty. When the forces of lovelessness and greed had
+built up our own sordid capitalist systems, driven by invisible
+proprietorship, robbing the poor, defacing the earth, and forcing
+themselves as a universal curse even on the generous and humane,
+then religion and law and intellect, which would never themselves
+have discovered such systems, their natural bent being towards
+welfare, economy, and life instead of towards corruption, waste,
+and death, nevertheless did not scruple to seize by fraud and
+force these powers of evil on presence of using them for good.
+And it inevitably happens that when the Church, the Law, and all
+the Talents have made common cause to rob the people, the Church
+is far more vitally harmed by that unfaithfulness to itself than
+its more mechanical confederates; so that finally they turn on
+their discredited ally and rob the Church, with the cheerful
+co-operation of Loki, as in France and Italy for instance.
+
+The twin giants come back with their hostage, in whose presence
+Godhead blooms again. The gold is ready for them; but now that
+the moment has come for parting with Freia the gold
+does not seem so tempting; and they are sorely loth to let her
+go. Not unless there is gold enough to utterly hide her from
+them--not until the heap has grown so that they can see nothing
+but gold--until money has come between them and every human
+feeling, will they part with her. There is not gold enough to
+accomplish this: however cunningly Loki spreads it, the glint of
+Freia's hair is still visible to Giant Fafnir, and the magic
+helmet must go on the heap to shut it out. Even then Fafnir's
+brother, Fasolt, can catch a beam from her eye through a chink,
+and is rendered incapable thereby of forswearing her. There is
+nothing to stop that chink but the ring; and Wotan is as greedily
+bent on keeping that as Alberic himself was; nor can the other
+gods persuade him that Freia is worth it, since for the highest
+god, love is not the highest good, but only the universal delight
+that bribes all living things to travail with renewed life. Life
+itself, with its accomplished marvels and its infinite
+potentialities, is the only force that Godhead can worship. Wotan
+does not yield until he is reached by the voice of the fruitful
+earth that before he or the dwarfs 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 something higher even than
+himself, that shall one day supersede him and cut the tangles and
+alliances and compromises that already have cost him one of his
+eyes. When Erda, the First Mother of life, rises from her
+sleeping-place in the heart of the earth, and warns him to yield
+the ring, he obeys her; the ring is added to the heap of gold;
+and all sense of Freia is cut off from the giants.
+
+But now what Law is left to these two poor stupid laborers
+whereby one shall yield to the other any of the treasure for
+which they have each paid the whole price in surrendering Freia?
+They look by mere habit to the god to judge for them; but he,
+with his heart stirring towards higher forces than himself, turns
+with disgust from these lower forces. They settle it as two
+wolves might; and Fafnir batters his brother dead with his staff.
+It is a horrible thing to see and hear, to anyone who knows how
+much blood has been shed in the world in just that way by its
+brutalized toilers, honest fellows enough until their betters
+betrayed them. Fafnir goes off with his booty. It is quite
+useless to him. He has neither the cunning nor the ambition to
+establish the Plutonic empire with it. Merely to prevent others
+from getting it is the only purpose it brings him. He piles it in
+a cave; transforms himself into a dragon by the helmet; and
+devotes his life to guarding it, as much a slave to it as a
+jailor is to his prisoner. He had much better have thrown it all
+back into the Rhine and transformed himself into the
+shortest-lived animal that enjoys at least a brief run in the
+sunshine. His case, however, is far too common to be surprising.
+The world is overstocked with persons who sacrifice all their
+affections, and madly trample and batter 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 the most
+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 a shepherd calls his flocks. They come at his summons;
+and he and the castle are hidden by their black legions. Froh,
+the Rainbow god, hastens to his side. At the stroke of Donner's
+hammer the black murk is riven in all directions by darting
+ribbons of lightning; and as the air clears, the castle is seen in
+its fullest splendor, accessible now by the rainbow bridge which
+Froh has cast across the ravine. In the glory of this moment
+Wotan has a great thought. With all his aspirations to establish
+a reign of noble thought, of righteousness, order, and justice,
+he has found that day that there is no race yet in the world that
+quite spontaneously, naturally, and unconsciously realizes his
+ideal. He himself has found how far short Godhead falls of the
+thing it conceives. He, the greatest of gods, has been unable to
+control his fate: he has been forced against his will to choose
+between evils, to make disgraceful bargains, to break them still
+more disgracefully, and even 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 his affections; and the
+attempt to retain both has cost him his honor. On every side he
+is shackled and bound, dependent on the laws of Fricka and on the
+lies of Loki, forced to traffic with dwarfs for handicraft and
+with 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 not yet exhausted. The life that came from her
+has ever climbed up to a higher and higher organization. From
+toad and serpent to dwarf, from bear 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 whom the god's
+unavailing thought shall have become effective will and life, who
+shall make his way straight to truth and reality over the laws of
+Fricka and the lies of Loki with a strength that overcomes giants
+and a cunning that outwits dwarfs? Yes: Erda, the First Mother,
+must travail again, and breed him a race of heroes to deliver the
+world and himself from his limited powers and disgraceful
+bargains. This is the vision that flashes on him as he turns to
+the rainbow bridge and calls his wife to come and dwell with him
+in Valhalla, the home of the gods.
+
+They are all overcome with Valhalla's glory except Loki. He is
+behind the scenes of this joint reign of the Divine and the
+Legal. He despises these gods with their ideals and their golden
+apples. "I am ashamed," he says, "to have dealings with these
+futile creatures." And so he follows them to the rainbow bridge.
+But as they set foot on it, from the river below rises the
+wailing of the Rhine maidens for their lost gold. "You down there
+in the water," cries Loki with brutal irony: "you used to bask in
+the glitter of your gold: henceforth you shall bask in the
+splendor of the gods." And they reply that the truth is in the
+depths and the darkness, and that what blazes on high there is
+falsehood. And with that the gods pass into their glorious
+stronghold.
+
+
+
+WAGNER AS REVOLUTIONIST
+
+Before leaving this explanation of The Rhine Gold, I must have a
+word or two about it with the reader. It is the least popular of
+the sections of The Ring. The reason is that its dramatic moments
+lie quite outside the consciousness of people whose joys and
+sorrows are all domestic and personal, and whose religions and
+political ideas are purely conventional and superstitious. To
+them it is a struggle between half a dozen fairytale personages
+for a ring, involving hours of scolding and cheating, and one
+long scene in a dark gruesome mine, with gloomy, ugly music, and
+not a glimpse of a handsome young man or pretty woman. Only those
+of wider consciousness can follow it breathlessly, seeing in it
+the whole tragedy of human history and the whole horror of the
+dilemmas from which the world is shrinking today. At Bayreuth I
+have seen a party of English tourists, after enduring agonies of
+boredom from Alberic, rise in the middle of the third scene, and
+almost force their way out of the dark theatre into the sunlit
+pine-wood without. And I have seen people who were deeply
+affected by the scene driven almost beside themselves by this
+disturbance. But it was a very natural thing for the unfortunate
+tourists to do, since in this Rhine Gold prologue there is no
+interval between the acts for escape. Roughly speaking, people
+who have no general ideas, no touch of the concern of the
+philosopher and statesman for the race, cannot enjoy The Rhine
+Gold as a drama. They may find compensations in some exceedingly
+pretty music, at times even grand and glorious, which will enable
+them to escape occasionally from the struggle between Alberic and
+Wotan; but if their capacity for music should be as limited as
+their comprehension of the world, they had better stay away.
+
+And now, attentive Reader, we have reached the point at which
+some foolish person is sure to interrupt us by declaring that The
+Rhine Gold is what they call "a work of art" pure and simple, and
+that Wagner never dreamt of shareholders, tall hats, whitelead
+factories, and industrial and political questions looked at from
+the socialistic and humanitarian points of view. We need not
+discuss these impertinences: it is easier to silence them with
+the facts of Wagner's life. In 1843 he obtained the position of
+conductor of the Opera at Dresden at a salary of L225 a year,
+with a pension. This was a first-rate permanent appointment in
+the service of the Saxon State, carrying an assured professional
+position and livelihood with it In 1848, the year of revolutions,
+the discontented middle class, unable to rouse the
+Churchand-State governments of the day from their bondage to
+custom, caste, and law by appeals to morality or constitutional
+agitation for Liberal reforms, made common cause with the
+starving wage-working class, and resorted to armed rebellion,
+which reached Dresden in 1849. Had Wagner been the mere musical
+epicure and political mugwump that the term "artist" seems to
+suggest to so many critics and amateurs--that is, a creature in
+their own lazy likeness--he need have taken no more part in the
+political struggles of his day than Bishop took in the English
+Reform agitation of 1832, or Sterndale Bennett in the Chartist or
+Free Trade movements. What he did do was first to make a
+desperate appeal to the King to cast off his bonds and answer the
+need of the time by taking true Kingship on himself and leading
+his people to the redress of their intolerable wrongs (fancy the
+poor monarch's feelings!), and then, when the crash came, to take
+his side with the right and the poor against the rich and the
+wrong. When the insurrection was defeated, three leaders of it
+were especially marked down for vengeance: August Roeckel, an old
+friend of Wagner's to whom he wrote a well-known series of
+letters; Michael Bakoonin, afterwards a famous apostle of
+revolutionary Anarchism; and Wagner himself. Wagner escaped to
+Switzerland: Roeckel and Bakoonin suffered long terms of
+imprisonment. Wagner was of course utterly ruined, pecuniarily
+and socially (to his own intense relief and satisfaction); and
+his exile lasted twelve years. His first idea was to get his
+Tannhauser produced in Paris. With the notion of explaining
+himself to the Parisians he wrote a pamphlet entitled Art and
+Revolution, a glance through which will show how thoroughly the
+socialistic side of the revolution had his sympathy, and how
+completely he had got free from the influence of the established
+Churches of his day. For three years he kept pouring forth
+pamphlets--some of them elaborate treatises in size and
+intellectual rank, but still essentially the pamphlets and
+manifestoes of a born agitator--on social evolution, religion,
+life, art and the influence of riches. In 1853 the poem of The
+Ring was privately printed; and in 1854, five years after the
+Dresden insurrection, The Rhine Gold score was completed to the
+last drum tap.
+
+These facts are on official record in Germany, where the
+proclamation summing up Wagner as "a politically dangerous
+person" may be consulted to this day. The pamphlets are now
+accessible to English readers in the translation of Mr. Ashton
+Ellis. This being so, any person who, having perhaps heard that
+I am a Socialist, attempts to persuade you that my interpretation
+of The Rhine Gold is only "my socialism" read into the works of
+a dilettantist who borrowed an idle tale from an old saga to make
+an opera book with, may safely be dismissed from your
+consideration as an ignoramus.
+
+If you are now satisfied that The Rhine Gold is an allegory, do
+not forget that an allegory is never quite consistent except when
+it is written by someone without dramatic faculty, in which case
+it is unreadable. There is only one way of dramatizing an idea;
+and that is by putting on the stage a human being possessed
+by that idea, yet none the less a human being with all the human
+impulses which make him akin and therefore interesting to us.
+Bunyan, in his Pilgrim's Progress, does not, like his unread
+imitators, attempt to personify Christianity and Valour: he
+dramatizes for you the life of the Christian and the Valiant Man.
+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 character in 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's
+rogueries. That, of course, is just what State Law would do; but
+we must not save the credit of the allegory by a quip. Not until
+she reappears in the next play (The Valkyries) does her function
+in the allegorical scheme become plain.
+
+One preconception will bewilder the spectator hopelessly unless
+he has been warned against it or is naturally free from it. In
+the old-fashioned orders of creation, the supernatural personages
+are invariably conceived as greater than man, for good or evil.
+In the modern 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 the earth. There are dwarfs, giants, and gods. The
+danger is that you will jump to the conclusion that the gods, at
+least, are a higher order than the human order. On the contrary,
+the world is waiting for Man to redeem it 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: to wit,
+the instinctive, predatory, lustful, greedy people; the patient,
+toiling, stupid, respectful, money-worshipping people; and the
+intellectual, moral, talented people who devise and administer
+States and Churches. History shows us only one order higher than
+the highest of these: namely, the order of Heroes.
+
+Now it is quite clear--though you have perhaps never thought of
+it--that if the next generation of Englishmen consisted wholly of
+Julius Caesars, all our political, ecclesiastical, and moral
+institutions would vanish, and the less perishable of their
+appurtenances be classed with Stonehenge and the cromlechs and
+round towers as inexplicable relics of a bygone social order.
+Julius Caesars would no more trouble themselves about such
+contrivances as our codes and churches than a fellow of the Royal
+Society will touch his hat to the squire and listen to the
+village curate's sermons. This is precisely what must happen some
+day if life continues thrusting towards higher and higher
+organization as it has hitherto done. As most of our English
+professional men are to Australian bushmen, so, we must suppose,
+will the average man of some future day be to Julius Caesar. Let
+any man of middle age, pondering this prospect consider what has
+happened within a single generation to the articles of faith his
+father regarded as eternal nay, to the very scepticisms and
+blasphemies of his youth (Bishop Colenso's criticism of the
+Pentateuch, for example!); and he will begin to realize how much
+of our barbarous Theology and Law the man of the future will do
+without. Bakoonin, the Dresden revolutionary leader with whom
+Wagner went out in 1849, put forward later on a program, often
+quoted with foolish horror, for the abolition of all
+institutions, religious, political, juridical, financial, legal,
+academic, and so on, so as to leave the will of man free to find
+its own way. All the loftiest spirits of that time were burning
+to raise Man up, to give him self-respect, to shake him out of
+his habit of grovelling before the ideals created by his own
+imagination, of attributing the good that sprang from the
+ceaseless energy 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
+end of dwarfs, giants, and gods. Meanwhile, let us not forget
+that godhood means to Wagner infirmity and compromise, and
+manhood strength and integrity. Above all, we must understand--
+for it is the key to much that we are to see--that the god,
+since his desire is toward a higher and fuller life, must long
+in his inmost soul for the advent of that greater power whose
+first work, though this he does not see as yet, must be his
+own undoing.
+
+In the midst of all these far-reaching ideas, it is amusing
+to find Wagner still full of his ingrained theatrical
+professionalism, and introducing effects which now seem
+old-fashioned and stagey with as much energy and earnestness as
+if they were his loftiest inspirations. When Wotan wrests the
+ring from Alberic, the dwarf delivers a lurid and bloodcurdling
+stage curse, calling down on its every future possessor care,
+fear, and death. The musical phrase accompanying this outburst
+was a veritable harmonic and melodic bogey to mid-century ears,
+though time has now robbed it of its terrors. It sounds again
+when Fafnir slays Fasolt, and on every subsequent occasion when
+the ring brings death to its holder. This episode must justify
+itself purely as a piece of stage sensationalism. On deeper
+ground it is superfluous and confusing, as the ruin to which
+the pursuit of riches leads needs no curse to explain it; nor
+is there any sense in investing Alberic with providential powers
+in the matter.
+
+
+
+THE VALKYRIES
+
+Before the curtain rises on the Valkyries, let us see what has
+happened since it fell on The Rhine Gold. The persons of the
+drama will tell us presently; but as we probably do not
+understand German, that may not help us.
+
+Wotan is still ruling the world in glory from his giant-built
+castle with his wife Fricka. But he has no security for the
+continuance of his reign, since Alberic may at any moment
+contrive to recover the ring, the full power of which he can
+wield because he has forsworn love. Such forswearing 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 have
+seen, his power has been established in the world by and as a
+system of laws enforced by penalties. These he must consent to be
+bound by himself; for a god who broke his own laws would betray
+the fact that legality and conformity are not the highest rule
+of conduct--a discovery fatal to his supremacy as Pontiff and
+Lawgiver. Hence he may not wrest the ring unlawfully from
+Fafnir, even if he could bring himself to forswear 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 duty it is to sweep through battle-fields and
+bear away to Valhalla the souls of the bravest who fall there.
+Thus reinforced by a host of warriors, he has thoroughly
+indoctrinated them, Loki helping him as dialectician-in-chief,
+with the conventional system of law and duty, supernatural
+religion and self-sacrificing idealism, which they believe to
+be the essence of his godhood, but which is really only the
+machinery of the love of necessary power which is his mortal
+weakness. This process secures their fanatical devotion to his
+system of government, but he knows perfectly well that such
+systems, in spite of their moral pretensions, serve selfish and
+ambitious tyrants better than benevolent despots, and that, if
+once Alberic gets the ring back, he will easily out-Valhalla
+Valhalla, if not buy it over as a going concern. The only chance
+of permanent security, then, is the appearance in the world of a
+hero who, without any illicit prompting from Wotan, will destroy
+Alberic and wrest the ring from Fafnir. There will then, he
+believes, be no further cause for anxiety, since he does not yet
+conceive Heroism as a force hostile to Godhead. In his longing
+for a rescuer, it does not occur to him that when the Hero comes,
+his first exploit must be to sweep 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 First Mother; and through her womb, eternally fertile,
+the inner true thought that made him first a god is reborn as his
+daughter, uncorrupted by his ambition, unfettered by his
+machinery of power and his alliances with Fricka 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 to
+anyone, since in speaking to her he but speaks to himself. "Was
+Keinem in Worten unausgesprochen," he says to her, "bleib es
+ewig: mit mir nur rath' ich, red' ich zu dir."
+
+But from Brynhild no hero can spring until there is a man of
+Wotan's race to breed with her. Wotan wanders further; and a
+mortal woman bears him twins: a son and a daughter. He separates
+them by letting the girl fall into the hands of a forest tribe
+which in due time gives her as a wife to a fierce chief, one
+Hunding. With the son he himself leads the life of a wolf, and
+teaches him the only power a god can teach, the power of doing
+without happiness. When he has given him this terrible training,
+he abandons him, and goes to the bridal feast of his daughter
+Sieglinda and Hunding. In the blue cloak of the wanderer, wearing
+the broad hat that flaps over the socket of his forfeited eye, he
+appears in Hunding's house, the middle pillar of which is a
+mighty tree. Into that tree, without a word, he strikes a sword
+up to the hilt, so that only the might of a hero can withdraw
+it. Then he goes out as silently as he came, blind to the truth
+that no weapon from the armory of Godhead can serve the turn of
+the true Human Hero. Neither Hunding nor any of his guests can
+move the sword; and there it stays awaiting the destined hand.
+That is the history of the generations between The Rhine Gold and
+The Valkyries.
+
+The First Act
+
+This time, as we sit looking expectantly at the curtain, we hear,
+not the deep booming of the Rhine, but the patter of a forest
+downpour, accompanied by the mutter of a storm which soon gathers
+into a roar and culminates in crashing thunderbolts. As it
+passes off, the curtain rises; and there is no mistaking whose
+forest habitation we are in; for the central pillar is a mighty
+tree, and the place fit for the dwelling of a fierce chief. The
+door opens: and an exhausted man reels in: an adept from the
+school of unhappiness. Sieglinda finds him lying on the hearth.
+He explains that he has been in a fight; that his weapons not
+being as strong as his arms, were broken; and that he had to fly.
+He desires some drink and a moment's rest; then he will go; for
+he is an unlucky person, and does not want to bring his ill-luck
+on the woman who is succoring him. But she, it appears, is also
+unhappy; and a strong sympathy springs up between them. When her
+husband arrives, he observes not only this sympathy, but a
+resemblance between them, a gleam of the snake in their eyes.
+They sit down to table; and the stranger tells them his unlucky
+story. He is the son of Wotan, who is known to him only as
+Wolfing, of the race of the Volsungs. The earliest thing he
+remembers is returning from a hunt with his father to find their
+home destroyed, his mother murdered, and his twin-sister carried
+off. This was the work of a tribe called the Neidings, upon whom
+he and Wolfing thenceforth waged implacable war until the day
+when his father disappeared, leaving no trace of himself but an
+empty wolfskin. The young Volsung was thus cast alone upon the
+world, finding most hands against him, and bringing no good luck
+even to his friends. His latest exploit has been the slaying of
+certain brothers who were forcing their sister to wed against
+her will. 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 brothers and 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 the woman to bed, and follows her himself,
+taking his spear with him.
+
+The unlucky stranger, left brooding by the hearth, has nothing to
+console himself with but an old promise of his father's that he
+shall find a weapon to his hand when he most needs one. The last
+flicker of the dying fire strikes on the golden hilt of the sword
+that sticks in the 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 forced marriage, and of the sword. She
+has always felt, she says, that her miseries will end in the arms
+of the hero who shall succeed in drawing it forth. The stranger,
+diffident as he is about his luck, has no misgivings as to his
+strength and destiny. He gives her his affection at once, and
+abandons himself to the charm of the night and the season;
+for it is the beginning of Spring. They soon learn from their
+confidences that she is his stolen twin-sister. He is transported
+to find that the heroic race of the Volsungs need neither perish
+nor be corrupted by a lower strain. Hailing the sword by the name
+of Nothung (or Needed), he plucks it from the tree as her
+bride-gift, and then, crying "Both bride and 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
+his war-maiden Brynhild, the child borne to him by the First
+Mother, and bids 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 may have defied the law, and
+put his own will in its place; but can a god hold him guiltless,
+when the whole power of the gods can enforce itself only by law?
+Fricka, shuddering with horror, outraged in every instinct, comes
+clamoring for punishment. Wotan pleads the general necessity of
+encouraging heroism in order to keep up the Valhalla bodyguard;
+but his remonstrances only bring upon him torrents of reproaches
+for his own unfaithfulness to the law in roaming through the
+world and begetting war-maidens, "wolf cubs," and the like. He is
+hopelessly beaten in the argument. Fricka is absolutely right
+when she declares that the ending of the gods began when he
+brought this wolf-hero into the world; and now, to save their
+very existence, she pitilessly demands his destruction. Wotan has
+no power to refuse: it is Fricka's mechanical force, and not his
+thought, that really rules the world. He has to recall Brynhild;
+take back his former instructions; and ordain that Hunding shall
+slay the Volsung.
+
+But now comes another difficulty. Brynhild is the inner thought
+and will of Godhead, the aspiration from the high life to the
+higher that is its divine element, and only becomes separated
+from it when its resort to kingship and priestcraft for the sake
+of temporal power has made it false to itself. Hitherto,
+Brynhild, as Valkyrie or hero chooser, has obeyed Wotan
+implicitly, taking her work as the holiest and bravest in his
+kingdom; and now he tells her what he could not tell Fricka--what
+indeed he could not tell to Brynhild, were she not, as she says,
+his own will--the whole story of Alberic and of that inspiration
+about the raising up of a hero. She thoroughly approves of the
+inspiration; but when 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 the hero down, she for the first time
+hesitates to accept his command. In his fury and despair he
+overawes her by the most terrible threats of his anger; and she
+submits.
+
+Then comes the Volsung Siegmund, following his sister bride, who
+has fled into the mountains in a revulsion of horror at having
+allowed herself to bring her hero to shame. Whilst she is lying
+exhausted and senseless in his arms, Brynhild appears to him and
+solemnly warns him that he must presently leave the earth with
+her. He asks whither he must follow her. To Valhalla, to take his
+place there among the heroes. He asks, 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 his sister there? No.
+Then, says Siegmund, I will not come with you.
+
+She tries to make him understand that he cannot help himself.
+Being a hero, he will not be so persuaded: he has his father's
+sword, and does not 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, he accepts his fate, but will shape it
+with his own hand, both for himself and his sister, by slaying
+her, and then killing himself with the last stroke of the sword.
+And thereafter he will go to Hell, rather than to Valhalla.
+
+How now can Brynhild, being what she is, choose her side freely
+in a conflict between this hero and the vassal of Fricka? By
+instinct she at once throws Wotan's command to the winds, and
+bids Siegmund nerve himself for the combat with Hunding, in which
+she pledges him the protection of her shield. The horn of Hunding
+is soon heard; and Siegmund's spirits rise to fighting pitch at
+once. The two meet; and the Valkyrie's shield is held before the
+hero. But when he delivers his sword-stroke at his foe, the
+weapon shivers on the spear of Wotan, who suddenly appears
+between them; and the first of the race of heroes falls with the
+weapon of the Law's vassal through his breast. Brynhild snatches
+the fragments of the broken sword, and flies, carrying off the
+woman with her on her war-horse; and Wotan, in terrible wrath,
+slays Hunding with a wave of his hand, and starts in pursuit of
+his disobedient daughter.
+
+The Third Act
+
+On a rocky peak, four of the Valkyries are waiting for the rest.
+The absent 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 eight sisters learn that she has defied Wotan,
+they dare not help her; and Brynhild has to rouse Sieglinda to
+make an effort to save herself, by reminding her that she bears
+in her the seed of a hero, and must face everything, endure
+anything, sooner than let that seed miscarry. Sieglinda, in a
+transport of exaltation, takes the fragments of the sword and
+flies into the forest. Then Wotan comes; the sisters fly in
+terror at his command; and he is left alone with Brynhild.
+
+Here, then, we have the first of the inevitable moments which
+Wotan did not foresee. Godhead has now established its dominion
+over the world by a mighty Church, compelling obedience through
+its ally the Law, with its formidable State organization of force
+of arms and cunning of brain. It has submitted to this alliance
+to keep the Plutonic power in check--built it up primarily for
+the sake of that soul in itself which cares only to make the
+highest better and the best higher; and now here is that very
+soul separated from it and working for the destruction of its
+indispensable ally, the lawgiving State. How is the rebel to be
+disarmed? Slain it cannot be by Godhead, since it is still
+Godhead's own very dearest soul. But hidden, stifled, silenced
+it must be; or it will wreck the State and leave the Church
+defenseless. Not until it passes completely away from Godhead,
+and is reborn as the soul of the hero, can it work anything but
+the confusion and destruction of the existing order. 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 the highest
+principles, hide the Truth. Let Loki surround this mountain top
+with the appearance of a consuming fire; and who will dare
+penetrate to Brynhild? 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 through which he might carry a sack of
+gunpowder without being a penny the worse. Therefore let the fire
+seem so terrible that only the hero, when in the fulness of time
+he appears upon earth, will venture through it; and the problem
+is solved. Wotan, with a breaking heart, takes leave of Brynhild;
+throws her into a deep sleep; covers her with her long warshield;
+summons Loki, who comes in the shape of a wall of fire
+surrounding the mountain peak; and turns his back on Brynhild for
+ever.
+
+The allegory here is happily not so glaringly obvious to the
+younger generations of our educated classes as it was forty years
+ago. In those days, any child who expressed a doubt as to the
+absolute truth of the Church's teaching, even to the extent of
+asking why Joshua told the sun to stand still instead of telling
+the earth to cease turning, or of pointing out that a whale's
+throat would hardly have been large enough to swallow Jonah, was
+unhesitatingly told that if it harboured such doubts it would
+spend all eternity after its death in horrible torments in a lake
+of burning brimstone. It is difficult to write or read this
+nowadays without laughing; yet no doubt millions of ignorant and
+credulous people are still teaching their children that. When
+Wagner himself was a little child, the fact that hell was a
+fiction devised for the intimidation and subjection of the
+masses, was a well-kept secret of the thinking and governing
+classes. At that time the fires of Loki were a very real terror
+to all except persons of exceptional force of character and
+intrepidity of thought. Even thirty years after Wagner had
+printed the verses of The Ring for private circulation, we find
+him excusing himself from perfectly explicit denial of current
+superstitions, by reminding his readers that it would expose him
+to prosecution. In England, so many of our respectable voters are
+still grovelling in a gloomy devil worship, of which the fires of
+Loki are the main bulwark, that no Government has yet had the
+conscience or the courage to repeal our monstrous laws against
+"blasphemy." 
+
+
+
+SIEGFRIED
+
+Sieglinda, when she flies into the forest with the hero's son
+unborn in her womb, and the broken pieces of his sword in her
+hand, finds shelter in 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 who made for him the magic helmet.
+His aim in life is to gain possession of the helmet, the ring,
+and the treasure, and through them to obtain that Plutonic
+mastery of the world under the beginnings of which he himself
+writhed during Alberic's brief reign. Mimmy is a blinking,
+shambling, ancient creature, too weak and timid to dream of
+taking arms himself to despoil Fafnir, who still, transformed to
+a monstrous serpent, broods on the gold in a hole in the rocks.
+Mimmy needs the help of a hero for that; and he has craft enough
+to know that it is quite possible, and indeed much in the
+ordinary way of the world, for senile avarice and craft to set
+youth and bravery to work to win empire for it. He knows the
+pedigree of the child left on his hands, and nurses it to manhood
+with 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 none of his father's ill luck, and all his
+father's hardihood. The fear against which Siegmund set his face
+like flint, and the woe which he wore 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 has nursed him;
+chafes furiously under his claims for some return for his
+tender care; and is, in short, a totally unmoral person, a
+born anarchist, the ideal of Bakoonin, an anticipation of the
+"overman" of Nietzsche. He is enormously strong, full of life
+and fun, dangerous and destructive to what he dislikes, and
+affectionate to what he likes; so that it is fortunate that
+his likes and dislikes are sane and healthy. Altogether an
+inspiriting young forester, a son of the morning, in whom the
+heroic race has come out into the sunshine from the clouds of
+his grandfather's majestic entanglements with law, and the night
+of his father's tragic struggle with it.
+
+The First Act
+
+Mimmy's smithy is a cave, in which he hides from the light like
+the eyeless fish of the American caverns. Before the curtain
+rises the music already tells us that we are groping in darkness.
+When it does rise Mimmy 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 make mischievous swords; but it is not
+with dwarf made weapons that heroic man will hew the way of his
+own will through religions and governments and plutocracies and
+all the other devices of the kingdom of the fears of the
+unheroic. As fast as Mimmy makes swords, Siegfried Bakoonin
+smashes them, and then takes the poor old swordsmith by the
+scruff of the neck and chastises him wrathfully. The particular
+day on which the curtain 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 extreme terror of the wretched dwarf.
+When the bear is dismissed, the new sword is produced. It is
+promptly smashed, as usual, with, also, the usual effects on the
+temper of Siegfried, who is quite boundless in his criticisms of
+the smith's boasted skill, and declares that he would smash 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 of the care with which he has nursed the little boy
+into manhood. Siegfried replies candidly that the strangest thing
+about all this care is that instead of making him grateful, it
+inspires him with a lively desire to wring the dwarf's neck.
+Only, he admits that he always comes back to his Mimmy, though he
+loathes him more than any living thing in the forest. On this
+admission the dwarf attempts to build a theory of filial
+instinct. He explains that he is Siegfried's father, and that
+this is why Siegfried cannot do without him. But Siegfried has
+learned from his forest companions, the birds and foxes and
+wolves, that mothers as well as fathers go to the making of
+children. Mimmy, on the desperate ground that man is neither bird
+nor fox, declares that he is Siegfried's father and mother both.
+He is promptly denounced as a filthy liar, because the birds and
+foxes are exactly like their parents, whereas Siegfried, having
+often watched his own image in the water, can testify that he is
+no more like Mimmy than a toad is like a trout. Then, to place
+the conversation on a plane of entire frankness, he throttles
+Mimmy until he is speechless. When the dwarf recovers, he is so
+daunted that he tells Siegfried the truth about his birth, and
+for testimony thereof produces the pieces of the sword that broke
+upon Wotan's spear. Siegfried instantly orders him to repair the
+sword on pain of an unmerciful thrashing, and rushes off into the
+forest, rejoicing in the discovery that he is no kin of Mimmy's,
+and need have no more to do with him when the sword is mended.
+
+Poor Mimmy is now in a worse plight than ever; for he has long
+ago found that the sword utterly defies his skill: the steel will
+yield neither to his hammer nor to his furnace. Just then there
+walks into his cave a Wanderer, in a blue mantle, spear in hand,
+with one eye concealed by the brim of his wide hat. Mimmy, not by
+nature hospitable, tries to drive him away; but the Wanderer
+announces himself as a wise man, who can tell his host, in
+emergency, what it most concerns him to know. Mimmy, taking this
+offer in high dudgeon, because it implies that his visitor's wits
+are better than his own, offers to tell the wise one something
+that HE does not know: to wit, the way to the door. The
+imperturbable Wanderer's reply is to sit down and challenge the
+dwarf to a trial of wit. He wagers his head against Mimmy's that
+he will answer any three questions the dwarf can put to him.
+
+Now here were Mimmy's opportunity, had he only the wit to ask
+what he wants to know, instead of pretending to know everything
+already. It is above all things needful to him at this moment to
+find out how that sword can be mended; and there has just dropped
+in upon him in his need the one person who can tell him. In such
+circumstances a wise man would hasten to show to his visitor his
+three deepest ignorances, and ask him to dispel them. The dwarf,
+being a crafty fool, desiring only to detect ignorance in his
+guest, asks him for information on the three points on which he
+is proudest of being thoroughly well instructed himself. His
+three questions are, Who dwell under the earth? Who dwell on the
+earth? and Who dwell in the cloudy heights above? The Wanderer,
+in reply, tells him of the dwarfs and of Alberic; of the earth,
+and the giants Fasolt and Fafnir; of the gods and of Wotan:
+himself, as Mimmy now recognizes with 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 born of Wotan's infidelities to Fricka, and can tell
+the Wanderer the whole story of the twins and their son
+Siegfried. Wotan compliments him on his knowledge, and asks
+further with what sword Siegfried will slay Fafnir? Mimmy can
+answer that too: he has the whole history of the sword at his
+fingers' ends. Wotan hails him as the knowingest of the knowing,
+and then hurls at him the question he should himself have asked:
+Who will mend the sword? Mimmy, his head forfeited, confesses
+with loud lamentations that he cannot answer. The Wanderer reads
+him an appropriate little lecture on the folly of being too
+clever to ask what he wants to know, and informs him that a smith
+to whom fear is unknown will mend Nothung. To this smith he
+leaves the forfeited head of his host, and wanders off into the
+forest. Then Mimmy's nerves give way completely. He shakes like a
+man in delirium tremens, and has a horrible nightmare, in the
+supreme convulsion of which Siegfried, returning from the forest,
+presently finds him.
+
+A curious and amusing conversation follows. Siegfried himself
+does not know fear, and is impatient to acquire it as an
+accomplishment. Mimmy is all fear: the world for him is a
+phantasmagoria of terrors. It is not that he is afraid of being
+eaten by bears in the forest, or of burning his fingers in the
+forge fire. A lively objection to being destroyed or maimed does
+not make a man a coward: on the contrary, it is the beginning of
+a brave man's wisdom. But in Mimmy, fear is not the effect of
+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, indeed that he could fail to become a distinguished
+and influential leader of opinion by fearlessly pursuing such a
+course, but solely because he lives in a world of imaginary
+terrors, rooted in a modest and gentlemanly mistrust of his own
+strength and worth, and consequently of the value of his opinion.
+Just so is Mimmy afraid of anything that can do him any good,
+especially of the light and the fresh air. He is also convinced
+that anybody who is not sufficiently steeped in fear to be
+constantly on his guard, must perish immediately on his first
+sally into the world. To preserve Siegfried for the enterprise to
+which he has destined him he makes a grotesque attempt to teach
+him fear. He appeals to his experience of the terrors of the
+forest, of its dark places, of its threatening noises its
+stealthy ambushes, its sinister flickering lights its
+heart-tightening ecstasies of dread.
+
+All this has no other effect than to fill Siegfried with wonder
+and curiosity; for the forest is a place of delight for him. He
+is as eager to experience Mimmy's terrors as a schoolboy to feel
+what an electric shock is like. Then Mimmy has the happy idea of
+describing Fafnir to him as a likely person to give him an
+exemplary fright. Siegfried jumps at the idea, and, since Mimmy
+cannot mend the sword for him, proposes to set to work then and
+there to mend it for himself. Mimmy shakes his head, and bids him
+see now how his youthful laziness and frowardness have found him
+out--how he would not learn the smith's craft from Professor
+Mimmy, and therefore does not know how even to begin mending the
+sword. Siegfried Bakoonin's retort is simple and crushing. He
+points out that the net result of Mimmy's academic skill is that
+he can neither make a decent sword himself nor even set one to
+rights when it is damaged. Reckless of the remonstrances of the
+scandalized professor, he seizes a file, and in a few moments
+utterly destroys the fragments of the sword by rasping them into
+a heap of steel filings. Then he puts the filings into a
+crucible; buries it in the coals; and sets to at the bellows with
+the shouting exultation of the anarchist who destroys only to
+clear the ground for creation. When the steel is melted he runs
+it into a mould; and lo! a sword-blade in the rough. Mimmy,
+amazed at the success of this violation of all the rules of his
+craft, hails Siegfried as the mightiest of smiths, professing
+himself barely worthy to be his cook and scullion; and forthwith
+proceeds to poison some soup for him so that he may murder him
+safely when Fafnir is slain. Meanwhile Siegfned forges and
+tempers and hammers and rivets, uproariously singing the while as
+nonsensically as the Rhine maidens themselves. Finally he assails
+the anvil on which Mimmy's swords have been shattered, and
+cleaves 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
+ourselves before the cave of Fafnir, and there we find Alberic,
+who can find nothing 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. The wretched Fafnir, once an honest giant,
+can only make himself terrible enough to keep his gold by
+remaining a venomous reptile. Why he should not become an honest
+giant again and clear out of his cavern, leaving the gold and the
+ring and the rest of it for anyone fool enough to take them at
+such a price, is the first question that would occur to anyone
+except a civilized man, who would be too accustomed to that sort
+of mania to be at all surprised at it.
+
+To Alberic in the night comes the Wanderer, whom the dwarf,
+recognizing his despoiler of old, abuses as a shameless thief,
+taunting him with the helpless way in which all his boasted power
+is tied up with the laws and bargains 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 own real ends. Wotan, having
+already had to kill his own son with it, knows that very well;
+but it troubles him no more; for he is now at last rising to
+abhorrence of his own artificial power, and looking to the coming
+hero, not for its consolidation but its destruction. When Alberic
+breaks out again with his still unquenched hope of one day
+destroying the gods and ruling the world through the ring, Wotan
+is no longer shocked. He tells Alberic that Brother Mime
+approaches with a hero whom Godhead can neither help nor hinder.
+Alberic may try his luck against him without disturbance from
+Valhalla. Perhaps, he suggests, if Alberic warns Fafnir, and
+offers to deal with the hero for him, Fafnir, may give him the
+ring. They accordingly wake up the dragon, who condescends to
+enter into bellowing conversation, but is proof against their
+proposition, strong in the magic of property. "I have and hold,"
+he says: "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 me tell you one thing. All things happen according to
+their nature; and you can't alter them." And so he leaves him
+Alberic, raging with the sense that his old enemy has been
+laughing at him, and yet prophetically convinced that the last
+word will not be with the god, hides himself as the day breaks,
+and his brother approaches with Siegfried.
+
+Mimmy makes a final attempt to frighten Siegfried by discoursing
+of the dragon's terrible jaws, poisonous breath, corrosive
+spittle, and deadly, stinging tail. Siegfried is not interested
+in the tail: he wants to know whether the dragon has a heart,
+being confident of his ability to stick Nothung into it if it
+exists. Reassured on this point, he drives Mimmy away, and
+stretches himself under the trees, listening to the morning
+chatter of the birds. One of them has a great deal to say to him;
+but he cannot understand it; and after vainly trying to carry on
+the conversation with a reed which he cuts, he takes to
+entertaining the bird with tunes on his horn, asking it to send
+him a loving mate such as all the other creatures of the forest
+have. His tunes wake up the dragon; and Siegfried makes merry
+over the grim mate the bird has sent him. Fafnir is highly
+scandalized by the irreverence of the young Bakoonin. He loses
+his temper; fights; and is forthwith slain, to his own great
+astonishment.
+
+In such conflicts one learns to interpret the messages of Nature
+a little. When Siegfried, stung by the dragon's vitriolic blood,
+pops his finger into his mouth and tastes it, he understands what
+the bird is saying to him, and, instructed by it concerning the
+treasures within his reach, goes into the cave to secure the
+gold, the ring and the wishing cap. Then Mimmy returns, and is
+confronted by Alberic. The two quarrel furiously over the sharing
+of the booty they have not yet secured, until Siegfried comes
+from the cave with the ring and the helmet, not much impressed by
+the heap of gold, and disappointed because he has not yet learned
+to fear.
+
+He has, however, learnt to read the thoughts of such a creature
+as poor Mimmy, who, intending to overwhelm him with flattery and
+fondness, only succeeds in making such a self-revelation of
+murderous envy that Siegfried smites him with Nothung and slays
+him, to the keen satisfaction of the hidden Alberic. Caring
+nothing for the gold, which he leaves to the care of the slain;
+disappointed in his fancy for learning fear; and longing for a
+mate, he casts himself wearily down, and again appeals to his
+friend the bird, who tells him of a woman sleeping on a mountain
+peak within a fortress of fire that only the fearless can
+penetrate. Siegfried is up in a moment with all the tumult of
+spring in his veins, and follows the flight of the bird as it
+pilots him to the fiery mountain.
+
+The Third Act
+
+To the root of the mountain comes also the Wanderer, now nearing
+his doom. He calls up the First Mother from the depths of the
+earth, and begs 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 of the way of the Will in its perpetual
+strife with these helpless Fates who can only spin the net of
+circumstance and environment round the feet of men. Why not, says
+Erda then, go to the daughter I bore you, and take counsel 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 that
+case the First Mother cannot help him: such a separation is part
+of the bewilderment that is ever the first outcome of her eternal
+work of thrusting the life energy of the world to higher and
+higher organization. She can show him no way of escape from the
+destruction he foresees. Then from the innermost of him breaks
+the confession that he rejoices in his doom, and now himself
+exults in passing away with all his ordinances and alliances,
+with the spear-sceptre which he has only wielded on condition of
+slaying his dearest children with it, with the kingdom, the power
+and the glory which will never again boast themselves as "world
+without end." And so he dismisses Erda to her sleep in the heart
+of the earth as the forest bird draws near, piloting the slain
+son's son to his goal.
+
+Now it is an excellent thing to triumph in the victory of the new
+order and the passing away of the old; but if you happen to be
+part of the old order yourself, you must none the less fight for
+your life. It seems hardly possible that the British army at the
+battle of Waterloo did not include at least one Englishman
+intelligent enough to hope, for the sake of his country and
+humanity, that Napoleon might defeat the allied sovereigns; but
+such an Englishman would kill a French cuirassier rather than be
+killed by him just as energetically as the silliest soldier, ever
+encouraged by people who ought to know better, to call his
+ignorance, ferocity and folly, patriotism and duty. Outworn life
+may have become mere error; but it still claims the right to die
+a natural death, and will raise its hand against the millennium
+itself in self-defence if it tries to come by the short cut of
+murder. Wotan finds this out when he comes face to face with
+Siegfried, who is brought to a standstill at the foot of the
+mountain by the disappearance of the bird. Meeting the Wanderer
+there, he asks him the way to the mountain where a woman sleeps
+surrounded by fire. The Wanderer questions him, and extracts his
+story from him, breaking into fatherly delight when Siegfried,
+describing the mending of the sword, remarks that all he knew
+about the business was that the broken bits of Nothung would be
+of no use to him unless he made a new sword out of them right
+over again from the beginning. But the Wanderer's interest is by
+no means reciprocated by Siegfried. His majesty and elderly
+dignity are thrown away on the young anarchist, who, unwilling to
+waste time talking, bluntly bids him 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 old man I should
+treat you with respect." "That would be a precious notion," says
+Siegfried. "All my life long I was bothered and hampered by an
+old man until I swept him out of my way. I will sweep you in the
+same fashion if you don't let me pass. Why do you wear such a big
+hat; and what has happened to one of your eyes? Was it knocked
+out by somebody whose way you obstructed?" To which Wotan replies
+allegorically that the eye that is gone--the eye that his
+marriage with Fricka cost him--is now looking at him out of
+Siegfried's head. At this, Siegfried gives up the Wanderer as a
+lunatic, and renews his threats of personal violence. Then Wotan
+throws off the mask of the Wanderer; uplifts the world-governing
+spear; and puts forth all his divine awe and grandeur as the
+guardian of the mountain, round the crest of which the fires of
+Loki now break into a red background for the majesty of the god.
+But all this is lost on Siegfried Bakoonin. "Aha!" he cries, as
+the spear is levelled against his breast: "I have found my
+father's foe"; and the spear falls in two pieces under the stroke
+of Nothung. "Up then," says Wotan: "I cannot withhold you," and
+disappears forever from the eye of man. The fires roll down the
+mountain; but Siegfried goes at them as exultantly as he went at
+the forging of the sword or the heart of the dragon, and
+shoulders his way through them, joyously sounding his horn to the
+accompaniment of their crackling and seething. And never a hair
+of his head is singed. Those frightful flames which have scared
+mankind for centuries from the Truth, have not heat enough in
+them to make a child shut its eyes. They are mere phantasmagoria,
+highly creditable to Loki's imaginative stage-management; but
+nothing ever has perished or will perish eternally in them except
+the Churches which have been so poor and faithless 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 an end somewhere; and the hour of your release from these
+explanations is at hand. The rest of what you are going to see is
+opera, and nothing but opera. Before many bars have been played,
+Siegfried and the wakened Brynhild, newly become tenor and
+soprano, will sing a concerted cadenza; plunge on from that to
+a magnificent love duet; and end with a precipitous allegro a
+capella, driven headlong to its end by the impetuous semiquaver
+triplets of the famous finales to the first act of Don
+Giovanni or the coda to the Leonore overture, with a specifically
+contrapuntal theme, points d'orgue, and a high C for the soprano
+all complete.
+
+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 far missed, the opera chorus in full parade on the stage,
+not presuming to interfere with the prima donna as she sings her
+death song over the footlights. Nay, that chorus will have its
+own chance when it first appears, with a good roaring strain in
+C major, not, after all, so very different from, or at all less
+absurd than the choruses of courtiers in La Favorita or "Per te
+immenso giubilo" in Lucia. The harmony is no doubt a little
+developed, Wagner augmenting his fifths with a G sharp where
+Donizetti would have put his fingers in his ears and screamed for
+G natural. But it is an opera chorus all the same; and along with
+it we have theatrical grandiosities that recall Meyerbeer and
+Verdi: pezzi d'insieme for all the principals in a row, vengeful
+conjurations for trios of them, romantic death song for the
+tenor: in short, all manner of operatic conventions.
+
+Now it is probable that some of us will have been so talked by
+the more superstitious Bayreuth pilgrims into regarding Die
+Gotterdammerung as the mighty climax to a mighty epic, more
+Wagnerian than all the other three sections put together, as not
+to dare notice this startling atavism, especially if we find the
+trio-conjurations more exhilarating than the metaphysical
+discourses of Wotan in the three true music dramas of The Ring.
+There is, however, no real atavism involved. Die Gotterdammerung,
+though the last of The Ring dramas in order of performance, was
+the first in order of conception and was indeed the root from
+which all the others sprang.
+
+The history of the matter is as follows. All Wagner's works prior
+to The Ring are operas. The last of them, Lohengrin, is perhaps
+the best known of modern operas. As performed in its entirety at
+Bayreuth, it is even more operatic than it appears at Covent
+Garden, because it happens that its most old-fashioned features,
+notably some of the big set concerted pieces for principals and
+chorus (pezzi d'insieme as I have called them above), are
+harder to perform than the more modern and characteristically
+Wagnerian sections, and for that reason were cut out in preparing
+the abbreviated fashionable version. Thus Lohengrin came upon the
+ordinary operatic stage as a more advanced departure from current
+operatic models than its composer had made it. Still, it is
+unmistakably an opera, with chorus, concerted pieces, grand
+finales, and a heroine who, if she does not sing florid
+variations with flute obbligato, is none the less a very
+perceptible prima donna. In everything but musical technique the
+change from Lohengrin to The Rhine Gold 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 of The Rhine Gold, and thus belongs to a later and
+more masterful phase of Wagner's harmonic style. It first came
+into Wagner's head as an opera to be entitled Siegfied's Death,
+founded on the old Niblung Sagas, which offered to Wagner the
+same material for an effective theatrical tragedy as they did to
+Ibsen. Ibsen's Vikings in Helgeland is, in kind, what Siegfied's
+Death was originally intended to be: that is, a heroic piece for
+the theatre, without the metaphysical or allegorical
+complications of The Ring. Indeed, the ultimate catastrophe of
+the Saga cannot by any perversion of ingenuity be adapted to the
+perfectly clear allegorical design of The Rhine Gold, The
+Valkyries, and Siegfried.
+
+
+
+SIEGFRIED AS PROTESTANT
+
+The philosophically fertile element in the original project of
+Siegfried's Death was the conception of Siegfried himself as a
+type of the healthy man raised to perfect confidence in his own
+impulses by an intense and joyous vitality which is above fear,
+sickliness of conscience, malice, and the makeshifts and moral
+crutches of law and order which accompany them. Such a character
+appears extraordinarily fascinating and exhilarating to our
+guilty and conscience-ridden generations, however little they may
+understand him. The world has always delighted in the man who is
+delivered from conscience. From Punch and Don Juan down to Robert
+Macaire, Jeremy Diddler and the pantomime clown, he has always
+drawn large audiences; but hitherto he has been decorously given
+to the devil at the end. Indeed eternal punishment is sometimes
+deemed too high a compliment to his nature. When the late Lord
+Lytton, in his Strange Story, introduced a character personifying
+the joyousness of intense vitality, he felt bound to deny him the
+immortal soul which was at that time conceded even to the
+humblest characters in fiction, and to accept mischievousness,
+cruelty, and utter incapacity for sympathy as the inevitable
+consequence of his magnificent bodily and mental health.
+
+In short, though men felt all the charm of abounding life and
+abandonment to its impulses, they dared not, in their deep
+self-mistrust, conceive it otherwise than as a force making for
+evil--one which must lead to universal ruin unless checked and
+literally mortified by self-renunciation in obedience to
+superhuman guidance, or at least to some reasoned system of
+morals. When it became apparent to the cleverest of them that
+no such superhuman guidance existed, and that their secularist
+systems had all the fictitiousness of "revelation" without its
+poetry, there was no escaping the conclusion that all the good
+that man had done must be put down to his arbitrary will as well
+as all the evil he had done; and it was also obvious that if
+progress were a reality, his beneficent impulses must be gaining
+on his destructive ones. It was under the influence of these
+ideas that we began to hear about the joy of life where we had
+formerly heard about the grace of God or the Age of Reason, and
+that the boldest spirits began to raise the question whether
+churches and laws and the like were not doing a great deal more
+harm than good by their action in limiting the freedom of the
+human will. Four hundred years ago, when belief in God and in
+revelation was general throughout Europe, a similar wave of
+thought led the strongest-hearted peoples to affirm that every
+man's private judgment was a more trustworthy interpreter of God
+and revelation than the Church. This was called Protestantism;
+and though the Protestants were not strong enough for their
+creed, and soon set up a Church of their own, yet the movement,
+on the whole, has justified the direction it took. Nowadays the
+supernatural element in Protestantism has perished; and if every
+man's private judgment is still to be justified as the most
+trustworthy interpreter of the will of Humanity (which is not a
+more 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 new creeds of the eighteenth and nineteenth
+centuries.
+
+The weak place which experience finds out in the Anarchist theory
+is its reliance on the progress already achieved by "Man." There
+is no such thing as Man in the world: what we have to deal with
+is a multitude of men, some of them great rascals, some of them
+greet statesmen, others both, with a vast majority capable of
+managing their personal affairs, but not of comprehending social
+organization, or grappling with the problems created by their
+association in enormous numbers. If "Man" means this majority,
+then "Man" has made no progress: he has, on the contrary,
+resisted it. He will not even pay the cost of existing
+institutions: the requisite money has to be filched from him by
+"indirect taxation." Such people, like Wagner's giants; must be
+governed by laws; and their assent to such government must be
+secured by deliberately filling them with prejudices and
+practicing on their imaginations by pageantry and artificial
+eminences and dignities. The government is of course established
+by the few who are capable of government, though its mechanism
+once complete, it may be, and generally is, carried on
+unintelligently by people who are incapable of it the capable
+people repairing it from time to time when it gets too far behind
+the continuous advance or decay of civilization. All these
+capable people are thus in the position of Wotan, forced to
+maintain as sacred, and themselves submit to, laws which they
+privately know to be obsolescent makeshifts, and to affect the
+deepest veneration for creeds and 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 find himself
+confronted with the alternative of governing those who are not
+Siegfrieds or risking destruction at their hands. And this
+dilemma will persist until Wotan's inspiration comes to our
+governors, and they see that their business is not the devising
+of laws and institutions to prop up the weaknesses of mobs and
+secure the survival of the unfittest, but the breeding of men
+whose wills and intelligences may be depended on to produce
+spontaneously the social well-being our clumsy laws now aim at and
+miss. The majority of men at present in Europe have no business
+to be alive; and no serious progress will be made until we
+address ourselves earnestly and scientifically to the task of
+producing trustworthy human material for society. In short, it is
+necessary to breed a race of men in whom the life-giving impulses
+predominate, before the 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 nineteenth
+century, is that of a perfectly naive hero upsetting religion,
+law and order in all directions, and establishing in their place
+the unfettered action of Humanity doing exactly what it likes,
+and producing order instead of confusion thereby because it likes
+to do what is necessary for the good of the race. This
+conception, already incipient in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations,
+was certain at last to reach some great artist, and be embodied
+by him in a masterpiece. It was also certain that if that master
+happened to be a German, he should take delight in describing his
+hero as the Freewiller of Necessity, thereby beyond measure
+exasperating Englishmen with a congenital incapacity for
+metaphysics.
+
+PANACEA QUACKERY, OTHERWISE IDEALISM
+
+Unfortunately, human enlightenment does not progress by nicer
+and nicer adjustments, but by violent corrective reactions which
+invariably send us clean over our saddle and would bring us to
+the ground on the other side if the next reaction did not send
+us back again with equally excessive zeal. Ecclesiasticism and
+Constitutionalism send us one way, Protestantism and Anarchism
+the other; Order rescues us from confusion and lands us in
+Tyranny; Liberty then saves the situation and is presently found
+to be as great a nuisance as Despotism. A scientifically balanced
+application of these forces, theoretically possible, is
+practically incompatible with human passion. Besides, we have
+the same weakness in morals as in medicine: we cannot be cured
+of running after panaceas, or, as they are called in the sphere
+of morals, ideals. One generation sets up duty, renunciation,
+self-sacrifice as a panacea. The next generation, especially the
+women, wake up at the age of forty or thereabouts to the fact
+that their lives have been wasted in the worship of this ideal,
+and, what is still more aggravating, that the elders who imposed
+it on them did so in a fit of satiety with their own experiments
+in the other direction. Then that defrauded generation foams at
+the mouth at the very mention of duty, and sets up the
+alternative panacea of love, their deprivation of which seems to
+them to have been the most cruel and mischievous feature of their
+slavery to duty. It is useless to warn them that this reaction,
+if prescribed as a panacea, will prove as great a failure as all
+the other reactions have done; for they do not recognize its
+identity with any reaction that ever occurred before. Take for
+instance the hackneyed historic example of the austerity of the
+Commonwealth being followed by the licence of the Restoration.
+You cannot persuade any moral enthusiast to accept this as a pure
+oscillation from action to reaction. If he is a Puritan he looks
+upon the Restoration as a national disaster: if he is an artist
+he regards it as the salvation of the country from gloom, devil
+worship and starvation of the affections. The Puritan is ready
+to try the Commonwealth again with a few modern improvements:
+the Amateur is equally ready to try the Restoration with modern
+enlightenments. And so for the present we must be content to
+proceed by reactions, hoping that each will establish some
+permanently practical and beneficial reform or moral habit that
+will survive 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 of which Siegfried is the hero, expanded itself into a great
+fourfold drama of which Wotan is the hero. You cannot dramatize a
+reaction by personifying the reacting force only, any more than
+Archimedes could lift the world without a fulcrum for his lever.
+You must also personify the established power against which the
+new force is reacting; and in the conflict between them you get
+your drama, conflict being the essential ingredient in all drama.
+Siegfried, as the hero of Die Gotterdammerung, is only the primo
+tenore robusto of an opera book, deferring his death, after he
+has been stabbed in the last act, to sing rapturous love strains
+to the heroine exactly like Edgardo in Donizetti's Lucia. In
+order to make him intelligible in the wider significance which
+his joyous, fearless, conscienceless heroism soon assumed in
+Wagner's imagination, it was necessary to provide him with a much
+vaster dramatic antagonist than the operatic villain Hagen. Hence
+Wagner had to create Wotan as the anvil for Siegfried's hammer;
+and since there was no room for Wotan in the original opera book,
+Wagner had to work back to a preliminary drama reaching primarily
+to the very beginnings of human society. And since, on this
+world-embracing scale, it was clear that Siegfried must come into
+conflict with many baser and stupider forces than those lofty
+ones of supernatural religion and political constitutionalism
+typified by Wotan and his wife Fricka, these minor antagonists
+had to be dramatized also in the persons of Alberic, Mime,
+Fafnir, Loki, and the rest. None of these appear in Night Falls
+On The Gods save Alberic, whose weird dream-colloquy with Hagen,
+effective as 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 the visit of Valtrauta to Brynhild
+out of Night Falls On The Gods, and the drama remains coherent
+and complete without them. Retain them, and the play becomes
+connected by conversational references with the three music
+dramas; but the connection establishes no philosophic coherence,
+no real identity between the operatic Brynhild of the Gibichung
+episode (presently to be related) and the daughter of Wotan and
+the First Mother.
+
+THE LOVE PANACEA
+
+We shall now find that at the point where The Ring changes from
+music drama into opera, it also ceases to be philosophic, and
+becomes didactic. The philosophic part is a dramatic symbol of
+the world as Wagner observed it. In the didactic part the
+philosophy degenerates into the prescription of a romantic
+nostrum for all human ills. Wagner, only mortal after all,
+succumbed to the panacea mania when his philosophy was exhausted,
+like any of the rest of us.
+
+The panacea is by no means an original one. Wagner was
+anticipated in the year 1819 by a young country gentleman from
+Sussex named Shelley, in a work of extraordinary artistic power
+and splendor. Prometheus Unbound is an English attempt at a Ring;
+and when it is taken into account that the author was only 27
+whereas Wagner was 40 when he completed the poem of The Ring, our
+vulgar patriotism may find an envious satisfaction in insisting
+upon the comparison. Both works set forth the same conflict
+between humanity and its gods and governments, issuing in the
+redemption of man from their tyranny by the growth of his will
+into perfect strength and self-confidence; and both finish by a
+lapse into panacea-mongering didacticism by the holding up of
+Love as the remedy for all evils and the solvent of all social
+difficulties.
+
+The differences between Prometheus Unbound and The Ring are as
+interesting as the likenesses. Shelley, caught in the pugnacity
+of his youth and the first impetuosity of his prodigious artistic
+power by the first fierce attack of the New Reformation, gave no
+quarter to the antagonist of his hero. His Wotan, whom he calls
+Jupiter, is the almighty fiend into whom the Englishman's God had
+degenerated during two centuries of ignorant Bible worship and
+shameless commercialism. He is Alberic, Fafnir Loki and the
+ambitious side of Wotan all rolled into one melodramatic demon
+who is finally torn from his throne and hurled shrieking into the
+abyss by a spirit representing that conception of Eternal Law
+which has been replaced since by the conception of Evolution.
+Wagner, an older, more experienced man than the Shelley of 1819,
+understood Wotan and pardoned him, separating him tenderly from
+all the compromising alliances to which Shelley fiercely held
+him; making the truth and heroism which overthrow him the
+children of his inmost heart; and representing him as finally
+acquiescing in and working for his own supersession and
+annihilation. Shelley, in his later works, is seen progressing
+towards the same tolerance, justice, and humility of spirit, as
+he advanced towards the middle age he never reached. But there is
+no progress from Shelley to Wagner as regards the panacea, except
+that in Wagner there is a certain shadow of night and death come
+on it: nay, even a clear opinion that the supreme good of love is
+that it so completely satisfies the desire for life, that after
+it the Will to Live ceases to trouble us, and we are at last
+content to achieve the highest 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 Prometheus Unbound is a sentiment of affectionate benevolence
+which has nothing to do with sexual passion. It might, and in
+fact does exist in the absence of any sexual interest whatever.
+The words mercy and kindness connote it less ambiguously than the
+word love. But Wagner sought always for some point of contact
+between his ideas and the physical senses, so that people might
+not only think or imagine them in the eighteenth century fashion,
+but see them on the stage, hear them from the orchestra, and feel
+them through the infection of passionate emotion. Dr. Johnson
+kicking the stone to confute Berkeley is not more bent on
+common-sense concreteness than Wagner: on all occasions he
+insists on the need for sensuous apprehension to give reality to
+abstract comprehension, maintaining, in fact, that reality has no
+other meaning. Now he could apply this process to poetic love
+only by following it back to its alleged origin in sexual
+passion, the emotional phenomena of which he has expressed in
+music with a frankness and forcible naturalism which would
+possibly have scandalized Shelley. The love duet in the first act
+of The Valkyries is brought to a point at which the conventions
+of our society demand the precipitate fall of the curtain; whilst
+the prelude to Tristan and Isolde is such an astonishingly
+intense and faithful translation into music of the emotions which
+accompany the union of a pair of lovers, that it is questionable
+whether the great popularity of this piece at our orchestral
+concerts really means that our audiences are entirely catholic
+in their respect for life in all its beneficently creative
+functions, or whether they simply enjoy the music without
+understanding it.
+
+But however offensive and inhuman may be the superstition which
+brands such exaltations of natural passion as shameful and
+indecorous, there is at least as much common sense in disparaging
+love as in setting it up as a panacea. Even the mercy and
+lovingkindness of Shelley do not hold good as a universal law of
+conduct: Shelley himself makes extremely short work of Jupiter,
+just as Siegfried does of Fafnir, Mime, and Wotan; and the fact
+that Prometheus is saved from doing the destructive part of his
+work by the intervention of that very nebulous personification of
+Eternity called Demogorgon, does not in the least save the
+situation, because, flatly, there is no such person as
+Demogorgon, and if Prometheus does not pull down Jupiter himself,
+no one else will. It would be exasperating, if it were not so
+funny, to see these poets leading their heroes through blood and
+destruction to the conclusion that, 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 by
+Siegfried's first taste of fear as he cuts through the mailed
+coat of the sleeping figure on the mountain, and discovers that
+it is a woman; by her fierce revolt against being touched by him
+when his terror gives way to ardor; by his manly transports of
+victory; and by the womanly mixture of rapture and horror with
+which she abandons herself to the passion which has seized on
+them both, is an experience which it is much better, like the
+vast majority of us, never to have passed through, than to allow
+it to play more than a recreative holiday part in our lives. It
+did not play a very large part in Wagner's own laborious life,
+and does not occupy more than two scenes of The Ring. Tristan and
+Isolde, wholly devoted to it, is a poem of destruction and death.
+The Mastersingers, a work full of health, fun and happiness,
+contains not a single bar of love music that can be described as
+passionate: the hero of it is a widower who cobbles shoes, writes
+verses, and contents himself with looking on at the
+sweetheartings of his customers. Parsifal makes an end of it
+altogether. The truth is that the love panacea in Night Falls On
+The Gods and in the last act of Siegfried is a survival of the
+first crude operatic conception of the story, modified by an
+anticipation of Wagner's later, though not latest, conception of
+love as the fulfiller of 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 is not in love, but in life itself as a tireless power which
+is continually driving onward and upward--not, please observe,
+being beckoned or drawn by Das Ewig Weibliche or any other
+external sentimentality, but growing from within, by its own
+inexplicable energy, into ever higher and higher forms of
+organization, the strengths and the needs of which are
+continually superseding the institutions which were made to fit
+our former requirements. When your Bakoonins call out for the
+demolition of all these venerable institutions, there is no need
+to fly into a panic and lock them up in prison whilst your
+parliament is bit by bit doing exactly what they advised you to
+do. When your Siegfrieds melt down the old weapons into new ones,
+and with disrespectful words chop in twain the antiquated
+constable's staves in the hands of their elders, the end of the
+world is no nearer than it was before. If human nature, which
+is the highest organization of life reached on this planet,
+is really degenerating, then human society will decay; and no
+panic-begotten penal measures can possibly save it: we must,
+like Prometheus, set to work to make new men instead of vainly
+torturing old ones. On the other hand, if the energy of life is
+still carrying human nature to higher and higher levels, then the
+more young people shock their elders and deride and discard their
+pet institutions the better for the hopes of the world, since the
+apparent growth of anarchy is only the measure of the rate of
+improvement. History, as far as we are capable of history (which
+is not saying much as yet), shows that all changes from crudity
+of social organization to complexity, and from mechanical
+agencies in government to living ones, seem anarchic at first
+sight. No doubt it is natural to a snail to think that any
+evolution which threatens to do away with shells will result in
+general death from exposure. Nevertheless, the most elaborately
+housed beings today are born not only without houses on their
+backs but without even fur or feathers to clothe them.
+
+ANARCHISM NO PANACEA
+
+One word of warning to those who may find themselves attracted
+by Siegfried's Anarchism, or, if they prefer a term with more
+respectable associations, his neo-Protestantism. Anarchism, as a
+panacea, is just as hopeless as any other panacea, and will still
+be so even if we breed a race of perfectly benevolent men. It is
+true that in the sphere of thought, Anarchism is an inevitable
+condition of progressive evolution. A nation without
+Freethinkers--that is, without intellectual Anarchists--will
+share the fate of China. It is also true that our criminal law,
+based on a conception of crime and punishment which is nothing
+but our vindictiveness and cruelty in a virtuous disguise, is an
+unmitigated and abominable nuisance, bound to be beaten out of
+us finally by the mere weight of our experience of its evil and
+uselessness. But it will not be replaced by anarchy. Applied to
+the industrial or political machinery of modern society, anarchy
+must always reduce itself speedily to absurdity. Even the
+modified form of anarchy on which modern civilization is based:
+that is, the abandonment of industry, in the name of individual
+liberty, to the upshot of competition for personal gain between
+private capitalists, is a disastrous failure, and is, by the
+mere necessities of the case, giving way to ordered Socialism.
+For the economic rationale of this, I must refer disciples of
+Siegfried to a tract from my hand published by the Fabian Society
+and entitled The Impossibilities of Anarchism, which explains
+why, owing to the physical constitution of our globe, society
+cannot effectively organize the production of its food, clothes
+and housing, nor distribute them fairly and economically on any
+anarchic plan: nay, that without concerting our social action to
+a much higher degree than we do at present we can never get rid
+of the wasteful and iniquitous welter of a little riches and
+a deal of poverty which current political humbug calls our
+prosperity and civilization. Liberty is an excellent thing; but
+it cannot begin until society has paid its daily debt to Nature
+by first earning its living. There is no liberty before that
+except the liberty to live at somebody else's expense, a liberty
+much sought after nowadays, since it is the criterion of
+gentility, but not wholesome from the point of view of the common
+weal.
+
+SIEGFRIED CONCLUDED
+
+In returning now to the adventures of Siegfried there is little
+more to be described except the finale of an opera. Siegfried,
+having passed unharmed through the fire, wakes Brynhild and goes
+through all the fancies and ecstasies of love at first sight in
+a duet which ends with an apostrophe to "leuchtende Liebe,
+lachender Tod!", which has been romantically translated into
+"Love that illumines, laughing at Death," whereas it really
+identifies enlightening love and laughing death as involving
+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
+Norns sit in the night on Brynhild's mountain top spinning their
+thread of destiny, and telling the story of Wotan's sacrifice of
+his eye, and of his breaking off a bough from the World Ash to
+make a heft for his spear, also how the tree withered after
+suffering that violence. They have also some fresher news to
+discuss. Wotan, on the breaking of his spear by Siegfried, has
+called all his heroes to cut down the withered World 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 in the
+great hall, with the Gods and Heroes assembled about him as if in
+council, solemnly waiting for the end. All this belongs to the
+old legendary materials with which Wagner began The Ring.
+
+The tale is broken by the thread snapping in the hands of the
+third Norn; for the hour has arrived when man has taken his
+destiny in his own hands to shape it for himself, and no longer
+bows to circumstance, environment, necessity (which he now freely
+wills), and all the rest of the inevitables. So the Norns
+recognize that the world has no further use for them, and sink
+into the earth to return to the First Mother. Then the day dawns;
+and Siegfried and Brynhild come, and have another duet. He gives
+her his ring; and she gives him her horse. Away then he goes in
+search of more adventures; and she watches him from her crag
+until he disappears. The curtain falls; but we can still hear the
+trolling of his horn, and the merry clatter of his horse's shoes
+trotting gaily down the valley. The sound is lost in the grander
+rhythm of the Rhine as he reaches its banks. We hear again an
+echo of the lament of the Rhine maidens for the ravished gold;
+and then, finally, a new strain, which does not surge like the
+mighty flood of the river, but has an unmistakable tramp of hardy
+men and a strong land flavor about it. And on this the opera
+curtain at last goes up--for please remember that all that has
+gone before is only the overture.
+
+The First Act
+
+We now understand the new tramping strain. We are in the
+Rhineside hall of the Gibichungs, in the resence of King Gunther,
+his sister Gutrune, and Gunther's grim half brother Hagen, the
+villain of the piece. Gunther is a fool, and has for Hagen's
+intelligence the respect a fool always has for the brains of a
+scoundrel. Feebly fishing for compliments, he appeals to Hagen
+to pronounce him a fine fellow and a glory to the race of Gibich.
+Hagen declares that it is impossible to contemplate him without
+envy, but thinks it a pity that he has not yet found a wife
+glorious enough for him. Gunther doubts whether so extraordinary
+a person can possibly exist. Hagen then tells him of Brynhild and
+her rampart of fire; also of Siegfried. Gunther takes this rather
+in bad part, since not only is he afraid of the fire, but
+Siegfried, according to Hagen, is not, and will therefore achieve
+this desirable match himself. But Hagen points out that since
+Siegfried is riding about in quest of adventures, he will
+certainly pay an early visit to the renowned chief of the
+Gibichungs. They can then give him a philtre which will make him
+fall in love with Gutrune and forget every other woman he has yet
+seen.
+
+Gunther is transported with admiration of Hagen's cunning when he
+takes in this plan; and he has hardly assented to it when
+Siegfried, with operatic opportuneness, drops in just as Hagen
+expected, and is duly drugged into the heartiest love for Gutrune
+and total oblivion of Brynhild and his own past. When Gunther
+declares his longing for the bride who lies inaccessible within
+a palisade of flame, Siegfried at once offers to undertake the
+adventure for him. Hagen then explains to both of them that
+Siegfried can, after braving the fire, appear to Brynhild in the
+semblance of Gunther through the magic of the wishing cap (or
+Tarnhelm, as it is called throughout The Ring), the use of which
+Siegfried now learns for the first time. It is of course part
+of the bargain that Gunther shall give his sister to Siegfried
+in marriage. On that they swear blood-brotherhood; and at this
+opportunity the old operatic leaven breaks out amusingly in
+Wagner. With tremendous exordium of brass, the tenor and baritone
+go at it with a will, showing off the power of their voices,
+following each other in canonic imitation, singing together in
+thirds and sixths, and finishing with a lurid unison, quite in
+the manner of Ruy Gomez and Ernani, or Othello and Iago. Then
+without further ado Siegfried departs on his expedition, taking
+Gunther with him to the foot of the mountain, and leaving Hagen
+to guard the hall and sing a very fine solo which has often
+figured in the programs of the Richter concerts, explaining that
+his interest in the affair is that Siegfried will bring back the
+Ring, and that he, Hagen, will presently contrive to possess
+himself of that Ring and become Plutonic master of the world.
+
+And now it will be asked how does Hagen know all about the
+Plutonic empire; and why was he able to tell Gunther about
+Brynhild and Siegfried, and to explain to Siegfried the trick of
+the Tarnhelm. The explanation is that though Hagen's mother was
+the mother of Gunther, his father was not the illustrious Gibich,
+but no less a person than our old friend Alberic, who, like
+Wotan, has begotten a son to do for him what he cannot do for
+himself.
+
+In the above incidents, those gentle moralizers who find the
+serious philosophy of the music dramas too terrifying for them,
+may allegorize pleasingly on the philtre as the maddening chalice
+of passion which, once tasted, causes the respectable man to
+forget his lawfully wedded wife and plunge into adventures which
+eventually lead him headlong to destruction.
+
+We now come upon a last relic of the tragedy of Wotan. Returning
+to Brynhild's mountain, we find her visited by her sister
+Valkyrie Valtrauta, who has witnessed Wotan's solemn preparations
+with terror. She repeats to Brynhild the account already given by
+the Norns. Clinging in anguish to Wotan's knees, she has heard
+him mutter that were the ring returned to the daughters of the
+deep Rhine, both Gods and world would be redeemed from that stage
+curse off Alberic's in The Rhine Gold. On this she has rushed on
+her warhorse through the air to beg Brynhild to give the Rhine
+back its ring. But this is asking Woman to give up love for the
+sake of Church and State. She declares that she will see them
+both perish first; and Valtrauta returns to Valhalla in despair.
+Whilst Brynhild is watching the course of the black thundercloud
+that marks her sister'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 strange voice: his figure is the unknown
+one of the king of the Gibichungs. He tears the ring from her
+finger, and, claiming her as his wife, drives her into the cave
+without pity for her agony of horror, and sets Nothung between
+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 the last hours of that night, still sits, his spear in his
+hand, and his shield beside him. At his knees crouches a dwarfish
+spectre, his father Alberic, still full of his old grievances
+against Wotan, and urging his son in his dreams to win back the
+ring for him. This Hagen swears to do; and as the apparition of
+his father vanishes, the sun rises and Siegfried suddenly comes
+from the river bank tucking into his belt the Tarnhelm, which has
+transported hi from the mountain like the enchanted carpet of the
+Arabian tales. He describes his adventures to Gutrune until
+Gunther's boat is seen approaching, when Hagen seizes a cowhorn
+and calls the tribesmen to welcome their chief and his bride.
+It is most exhilarating, this colloquy with the startled and
+hastily armed clan, ending with a thundering chorus, the drums
+marking the time with mighty pulses from dominant to tonic,
+much as Rossini would have made them do if he had been a pupil
+of Beethoven's.
+
+A terrible scene follows. Gunther leads his captive bride
+straight into the 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 of your 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 is
+obvious. "Then where are you hiding the ring that you had from
+me?" Gunther's confusion enlightens her; and she calls Siegfried
+trickster and thief to his face. In vain he declares that he got
+the ring from no woman, but from a dragon whom he slew; for he is
+manifestly puzzled; and she, seizing her opportunity, accuses him
+before the clan of having played Gunther false with her.
+
+Hereupon we have another grandiose operatic oath, Siegfried
+attesting his innocence on Hagen's spear, and Brynhild rushing
+to the footlights and thrusting him aside to attest his guilt,
+whilst the clansmen call upon their gods to send down lightnings
+and silence the perjured. The gods do not respond; and Siegfried,
+after whispering to Gunther that the Tarnhelm seems to have been
+only half effectual after all, laughs his way out of the general
+embarrassment and goes off merrily to prepare for his wedding,
+with his arm round Gutrune's waist, followed by the clan.
+Gunther, Hagen and Brynhild are left together to plot operatic
+vengeance. Brynhild, it appears, has enchanted Siegfried in such
+a fashion that no weapon can hurt him. She has, however, omitted
+to protect his back, since it is impossible that he should ever
+turn that to a foe. They agree accordingly that on the morrow a
+great hunt shall take place, at which Hagen shall thrust his
+spear into the hero's vulnerable 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-brotherhood and about his sister's
+bereavement, without having the strength of mind to prevent
+the murder. The three burst into a herculean trio, similar in
+conception to that of the three conspirators in Un Ballo in
+Maschera; and the act concludes with a joyous strain heralding
+the appearance of Siegfried's wedding procession, with strewing
+of flowers, sacrificing to the gods, and carrying bride and
+bridegroom in triumph.
+
+It will be seen that in this act we have lost all connection with
+the earlier drama. Brynhild is not only not the Brynhild of The
+Valkyries, she is the Hiordis of Ibsen, a majestically savage
+woman, in whom jealousy and revenge are intensified to heroic
+proportions. That is the inevitable theatrical treatment of the
+murderous heroine of the Saga. Ibsen's aim in The Vikings was
+purely theatrical, and not, as in his later dramas, also
+philosophically symbolic. Wagner's aim in Siegfried's Death was
+equally theatrical, and not, as it afterwards became in the
+dramas of which Siegfried's antagonist Wotan is the hero,
+likewise philosophically symbolic. The two master-dramatists
+therefore produce practically the same version of Brynhild.
+Thus on the second evening of The Ring we see Brynhild in the
+character of the truth-divining instinct in religion, cast into
+an enchanted slumber and surrounded by the fires of hell lest
+she should overthrow a Church corrupted by its alliance with
+government. On the fourth evening, we find her swearing a
+malicious lie to gratify her personal jealousy, and then plotting
+a treacherous murder with a fool and a scoundrel. In the original
+draft of Siegfried's Death, the incongruity is carried still
+further by the conclusion, at which the dead Brynhild, restored
+to her godhead by Wotan, and again a Valkyrie, carries the slain
+Siegfried to Valhalla to live there happily ever after with its
+pious heroes.
+
+As to Siegfried himself, he talks of women, both in this second
+act and the next, with the air of a man of the world. "Their
+tantrums," he says, "are soon over." Such speeches do not belong
+to the novice of the preceding drama, but to the original
+Siegfried's Tod, with its leading characters sketched on the
+ordinary romantic lines from the old Sagas, and not yet reminted
+as the original creations of Wagner's genius whose acquaintance
+we have made on the two previous evenings. The very title
+"Siegfried's Death" survives as a strong theatrical point in
+the following passage. Gunther, in his rage and despair, cries,
+"Save me, Hagen: save my honor and thy mother's who bore us both."
+"Nothing can save thee," replies Hagen: "neither brain nor hand,
+but SIEGFRIED'S DEATH." And Gunther echoes with a shudder,
+"SIEGFRIED'S DEATH!"
+
+A WAGNERIAN NEWSPAPER CONTROVERSY
+
+The devotion which Wagner's work inspires has been illustrated
+lately in a public correspondence on this very point. A writer
+in The Daily Telegraph having commented on the falsehood uttered
+by Brynhild in accusing Siegfried of having betrayed Gunther
+with her, a correspondence in defence of the beloved heroine
+was opened in The Daily Chronicle. The imputation of falsehood
+to Brynhild was strongly resented and combated, in spite of
+the unanswerable evidence of the text. It was contended that
+Brynhild's statement must be taken as establishing the fact that
+she actually was ravished by somebody whom she believed to be
+Siegfried, and that since this somebody cannot have been
+Siegfried, he being as incapable of treachery to Gunther as she
+of falsehood, it must have been Gunther himself after a second
+exchange of personalities not mentioned in the text. The reply to
+this--if so obviously desperate a hypothesis needs a reply--is
+that the text is perfectly explicit as to Siegfried, disguised as
+Gunther, passing the night with Brynhild with Nothung dividing
+them, and in the morning bringing her down the mountain THROUGH
+THE FIRE (an impassable obstacle to Gunther) and there
+transporting himself in a single breath, by the Tarnhelm's magic,
+back to the hall of the Gibichungs, leaving the real Gunther to
+bring Brynhild down the river after him. One controversialist
+actually pleaded for the expedition occupying two nights, on the
+second of which the alleged outrage might have taken place. But
+the time is accounted for to the last minute: it all takes place
+during the single night watch of Hagen. There is no possible way
+out of the plain fact that Brynhild's accusation is to her own
+knowledge false; and the impossible ways just cited are only
+interesting as examples of the fanatical worship which Wagner and
+his creations have been able to inspire in minds of exceptional
+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 that Siegfried's kiss awakened an ordinary mortal
+jealous woman. But a goddess can become mortal and jealous
+without plunging at once into perjury and murder. Besides, this
+explanation involves the sacrifice of the whole significance of
+the allegory, and the reduction of The Ring to the plane of a
+child's conception of The Sleeping Beauty. Whoever does not
+understand that, in terms of The Ring philosophy, a change from
+godhead to humanity is a step higher and not a degradation,
+misses the whole point of The Ring. It is precisely because the
+truthfulness of Brynhild is proof against Wotan's spells that
+he has to contrive the fire palisade with Loki, to protect the
+fictions and conventions of Valhalla against her.
+
+The only tolerable view is the one supported by the known history
+of The Ring, and also, for musicians of sufficiently fine
+judgment, by the evidence of the scores; of which more anon. As
+a matter of fact Wagner began, as I have said, with Siegfried's
+Death. Then, wanting to develop the idea of Siegfried as
+neo-Protestant, he went on to The Young Siegfried. As a Protestant
+cannot be dramatically projected without a pontifical antagonist.
+The Young Siegfried led to The Valkyries, and that again to its
+preface The Rhine Gold (the preface is always written after the
+book is finished). Finally, of course, the whole was revised. The
+revision, if carried out strictly, would have involved the cutting
+out of Siegfried's Death, now become inconsistent and
+superfluous; and that would have involved, in turn, the facing of
+the fact that The Ring was no longer a Niblung epic, and really
+demanded modern costumes, tall hats for Tarnhelms, factories for
+Nibelheims, villas for Valhallas, and so on--in short, a complete
+confession of the extent to which the old Niblung epic had become
+the merest pretext and name directory in the course of Wagner's
+travail. But, as Wagner's most eminent English interpreter once
+put it to me at Bayreuth between the acts of Night Falls On The
+Gods, the master wanted to "Lohengrinize" again after his long
+abstention from opera; and Siegfried's Death (first sketched in
+1848, the year before the rising in Dresden and the subsequent
+events which so deepened Wagner's sense of life and the
+seriousness of art) gave him exactly the libretto he required for
+that outbreak of the old 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 its Siegfried and Brynhild
+with the Siegfried and Brynhild of the allegory. As to the
+legendary matter about the world-ash and the destruction of
+Valhalla by Loki, it fitted in well enough; for though,
+allegorically, the blow by which Siegfried breaks the god's spear
+is the end of Wotan and of Valhalla, those who do not see the
+allegory, and take the story literally, like children, are sure
+to ask what becomes of Wotan after Siegfried gets past him up the
+mountain; and to this question the old tale 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 in
+relation to the three foregoing dramas, gives them a highly
+effective air of mystery; and no one ventures to challenge their
+consequentiality, because we are all more apt to pretend to
+understand great works of art than to confess that the meaning
+(if any) has escaped us. Valtrauta, however, betrays her
+irrelevance by explaining that the gods can be saved by the
+restoration of the ring to the Rhine maidens. This, considered as
+part of the previous allegory, is nonsense; so that even this
+scene, which has a more plausible air of organic connection with
+The Valkyries than any other in Night Falls On The Gods, is as
+clearly part of a different and earlier conception as the episode
+which concludes it, in which Siegfried actually robs Brynhild of
+her ring, though he has no recollection of having given it to
+her. Night Falls On The Gods, in fact, was not even revised into
+any real coherence with the world-poem which sprang from it; and
+that is the authentic solution of all the controversies which
+have arisen over it.
+
+The Third Act
+
+The hunting party comes off duly. Siegfried strays from it and
+meets the Rhine maidens, who almost succeed in coaxing the ring
+from him. He pretends to be afraid of his wife; and they chaff
+him as to her beating him and so forth; but when they add that
+the ring is accursed and will bring death upon him, he discloses
+to them, as unconsciously as Julius Caesar disclosed it long ago,
+that secret of heroism, never to let your life be shaped by fear
+of its end.* So he keeps the ring; and they leave him to his
+fate. The hunting party now finds him; and they all sit down
+together to make a meal by the river side, Siegfried telling them
+meanwhile the story of his adventures. When he approaches the
+subject of Brynhild, as to whom his memory is a blank, Hagen
+pours an antidote to the love philtre into his drinking horn,
+whereupon, his memory returning, he proceeds to narrate the
+incident of the fiery mountain, to Gunther's intense
+mortification. Hagen then plunges his spear into the back of
+Siegfried, who falls dead on his shield, but gets up again, after
+the old operatic custom, to sing about thirty bars to his love
+before allowing himself to be finally carried off to the strains
+of the famous 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 is night; and Gutrune, unable to sleep, and haunted by
+all sorts of vague terrors, is waiting for the return of her
+husband, and wondering whether a ghostly figure she has seen
+gliding down to the river bank is Brynhild, whose room is empty.
+Then comes the cry of Hagen, returning with the hunting party to
+announce the death of Siegfried by the tusk of a wild boar. But
+Gutrune divines the truth; and Hagen does not deny it.
+Siegfried's body is brought in; Gunther claims the ring; Hagen
+will not suffer him to take it; they fight; and Gunther is slain.
+Hagen then attempts to take it; but the dead man's hand closes on
+it and raises itself threateningly. Then Brynhild comes; and a
+funeral pyre is raised whilst she declaims a prolonged scene,
+extremely moving and imposing, but yielding nothing to resolute
+intellectual criticism except a very powerful and elevated
+exploitation of theatrical pathos, psychologically identical with
+the scene of Cleopatra and the dead Antony in Shakespeare's
+tragedy. Finally she flings a torch into the pyre, and rides her
+war-horse into the flames. The hall of the Gibichungs catches
+fire, as most halls would were a cremation attempted in the
+middle of the floor (I permit myself this gibe purposely to
+emphasize the excessive artificiality of the scene); but the
+Rhine overflows its banks to allow the three Rhine maidens to
+take the ring from Siegfried's finger, incidentally extinguishing
+the conflagration as it does so. Hagen attempts to snatch the
+ring from the maidens, who promptly drown him; and in the distant
+heavens the Gods and their castle are seen perishing in the fires
+of Loki as the curtain falls.
+
+FORGOTTEN ERE FINISHED
+
+In all this, it will be observed, there is nothing new. The
+musical fabric is enormously elaborate and gorgeous; but you
+cannot say, as you must in witnessing The Rhine Gold, The
+Valkyries, and the first two acts of Siegfried, that you have
+never seen anything like it before, and that the inspiration is
+entirely original. Not only the action, but most of the poetry,
+might conceivably belong to an Elizabethan drama. The situation
+of Cleopatra and Antony is unconsciously reproduced without being
+bettered, or even equalled in point of majesty and musical
+expression. The loss of all simplicity and dignity, the
+impossibility of any credible scenic presentation of the
+incidents, and the extreme staginess of the conventions by which
+these impossibilities are got over, are no doubt covered from the
+popular eye by the overwhelming prestige of Die Gotterdammerung
+as part of so great a work as The Ring, and by the extraordinary
+storm of emotion and excitement which the music keeps up. But the
+very qualities that intoxicate the novice in music enlighten the
+adept. In spite of the fulness of the composer's technical
+accomplishment, the finished style and effortless mastery of
+harmony and instrumentation displayed, there is not a bar in the
+work which moves us as the same themes moved us in The Valkyries,
+nor is anything but external splendor added to the life and humor
+of Siegfried.
+
+In the original poem, Brynhild delays her self-immolation on the
+pyre of Siegfried to read the assembled choristers a homily on
+the efficacy of the Love panacea. "My holiest wisdom's hoard,"
+she says, "now I make known to the world. I believe not in
+property, nor money, nor godliness, nor hearth and high place,
+nor pomp and peerage, nor contract and custom, but in Love. Let
+that only prevail; and ye shall be blest in weal or woe." Here
+the repudiations still smack of Bakoonin; but the saviour is no
+longer the volition of the full-grown spirit of Man, the Free
+Willer of Necessity, sword in hand, but simply Love, and not even
+Shelleyan love, but vehement sexual passion. It is highly
+significant of 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, which was 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 recklessness of the old
+intention. The rigorous logic with which representative musical
+themes are employed in the earlier dramas is here abandoned
+without scruple; and for the main theme at the conclusion he
+selects a rapturous passage sung by Sieglinda in the third act of
+The Valkyries when Brynhild inspires her with a sense of her high
+destiny as the mother of the unborn hero. There is no dramatic
+logic whatever in the recurrence of this theme to express the
+transport in which Brynhild immolates herself. There is of course
+an excuse for it, inasmuch as both women have an impulse of
+self-sacrifice for the sake of Siegfried; but this is really
+hardly more than an excuse; since the Valhalla theme might be
+attached to Alberic on the no worse ground that both he and
+Wotan are inspired by ambition, and that the ambition has the
+same object, the possession of the ring. The common sense of the
+matter is that the only themes which had fully retained their
+significance in Wagner's memory at the period of the composition
+of Night Falls On The Gods are those which are mere labels of
+external features, such as the Dragon, the Fire, the Water and so
+on. This particular theme of Sieglinda's is, in truth, of no
+great musical merit: it might easily be the pet climax of a
+popular sentimental ballad: in fact, the gushing effect which is
+its sole valuable quality is so cheaply attained that it is
+hardly going too far to call it the most trumpery phrase in the
+entire tetralogy. Yet, since it undoubtedly does gush very
+emphatically, Wagner chose, for convenience' sake, to work up
+this final scene with it rather than with the more distinguished,
+elaborate and beautiful themes connected with the love of
+Brynhild and Siegfried.
+
+He would certainly not have thought this a matter of no
+consequence had he finished the whole work ten years earlier.
+It must always be borne in mind that the poem of The Ring was
+complete and printed in 1853, and represents the sociological
+ideas which, after germinating in the European atmosphere for
+many years, had been brought home to Wagner, who was intensely
+susceptible to such ideas, by the crash of 1849 at Dresden. Now
+no man whose mind is alive and active, as Wagner's was to the day
+of his death, can keep his political and spiritual opinions, much
+less his philosophic consciousness, at a standstill for quarter
+of a century until he finishes an orchestral score. When Wagner
+first sketched Night Falls On The Gods he was 35. When he
+finished the score for the first Bayreuth festival in 1876 he had
+turned 60. No wonder he had lost his old grip of it and left it
+behind him. He even tampered with The Rhine Gold for the sake of
+theatrical effect when stage-managing it, making Wotan pick up
+and brandish a sword to give visible point to his sudden
+inspiration as to the raising up of a hero. The sword had first
+to be discovered by Fafnir among the Niblung treasures and thrown
+away by him as useless. There is no sense in this device; and its
+adoption shows the same recklessness as to the original intention
+which we find in the music of the last act of The Dusk of the
+Gods.*
+
+*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 great
+philosophic theme to slacken even in twenty-five years if the
+theme still held good as a theory of actual life. If the history
+of Germany from 1849 to 1876 had been the history of Siegfried
+and Wotan transposed into the key of actual life Night Falls On
+The Gods would have been the logical consummation of Das
+Rheingold and The Valkyrie instead of the operatic 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;
+Bakoonin broke up, not Walhall, but the International, which
+ended in an undignified quarrel between him and Karl Marx. The
+Siegfrieds of 1848 were hopeless political failures, whereas the
+Wotans and Alberics and Lows were conspicuous political
+successes. Even the Mimes held their own as against Siegfried.
+With the single exception of Ferdinand Lassalle, there was no
+revolutionary leader who was not an obvious impossibilist in
+practical politics; and Lassalle got himself killed in a romantic
+and quite indefensible duel after wrecking his health in a
+titanic oratorical campaign which convinced him that the great
+majority of the working classes were not ready to join him, and
+that the minority who were ready did not understand him. The
+International, founded in 1861 by Karl Marx in London, and
+mistaken for several years by nervous newspapers for a red
+spectre, was really only a turnip ghost. It achieved some
+beginnings of International Trade Unionism by inducing English
+workmen to send money to support strikes on the continent, and
+recalling English workers who had been taken across the North Sea
+to defeat such strikes; but on its revolutionary socialistic side
+it was a romantic figment. The suppression of the Paris Commune,
+one of the most tragic examples in history of the pitilessness
+with which capable practical administrators and soldiers are
+forced by the pressure of facts to destroy romantic amateurs and
+theatrical dreamers, made an end of melodramatic Socialism. It
+was as easy for Marx to hold up Thiers as the most execrable of
+living scoundrels and to put upon Gallifet the brand that still
+makes him impossible in French politics as it was for Victor 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 much
+loftier ideals than Thiers and Gallifet; but the one fact that
+could not be denied was that when it came to actual shooting, it
+was Gallifet who got Delescluze shot and not Delescluze who got
+Gallifet shot, and that when it came to administering the affairs
+of France, Thiers could in one way or another get it done, whilst
+Pyat could neither do it nor stop talking and allow somebody else
+to do it. True, the penalty of following Thiers was to be
+exploited by the landlord and capitalist; but then the penalty of
+following Pyat was to get shot like a mad dog, or at best get
+sent to New Caledonia, quite unnecessarily and uselessly.
+
+To put it in terms of Wagner's allegory, Alberic had got the ring
+back again and was marrying into the best Walhall families with
+it. He had thought better of his old threat to dethrone Wotan and
+Loki. He had found that Nibelheim was a very gloomy place and
+that if he wanted to live handsomely and safely, he must not only
+allow Wotan and Loki to organize society for him, but pay them
+very handsomely for doing it. He wanted splendor, military glory,
+loyalty, enthusiasm, and patriotism; and his greed and gluttony
+were wholly unable to create them, whereas Wotan and Loki carried
+them all to a triumphant climax in Germany in 1871, when Wagner
+himself celebrated the event with his Kaisermarsch, which sounded
+much more convincing than the Marseillaise or the Carmagnole.
+
+How, after the Kaisermarsch, could Wagner go back to his
+idealization of Siegfried in 1853? How could he believe seriously
+in Siegfried slaying the dragon and charging through the mountain
+fire, when the immediate foreground was occupied by the Hotel de
+Ville with Felix Pyat endlessly discussing the principles of
+Socialism whilst the shells of Thiers were already battering the
+Arc de Triomphe, and ripping up the pavement of the Champs
+Elysees? Is it not clear that things had taken an altogether
+unexpected turn--that although the Ring may, like the famous
+Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels, be an inspired guest
+at the historic laws and predestined end of our
+capitalistic-theocratic epoch, yet Wagner, like Marx, was too
+inexperienced in technical government and administration and too
+melodramatic in his hero-contra-villain conception of the class
+struggle, to foresee the actual process by which his
+generalization would work out, or the part to be played in it
+by the classes involved?
+
+Let us go back for a moment to the point at which the Niblung
+legend first becomes irreconcilable with Wagner's allegory.
+Fafnir in the allegory becomes a capitalist; but Fafnir in the
+legend is a mere hoarder. His gold does not bring him in any
+revenue. It does not even support 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. And Siegfried himself has
+no more use for gold than Fafnir: the only difference between
+them in this respect is that Siegfried does not waste his time in
+watching a barren treasure that is no use to him, whereas Fafnir
+sacrifices his humanity and his life merely to prevent anybody
+else getting it. This contrast is true to human nature; but it
+shunts The Ring drama off the economic lines of the allegory. In
+real life, Fafnir is not a miser: he seeks dividends, comfortable
+life, and admission to the circles of Wotan and Loki. His only
+means of procuring these is to restore the gold to Alberic in
+exchange for scrip in Alberic's enterprises. Thus fortified with
+capital, Alberic exploits his fellow dwarfs as before, and also
+exploits Fafair's fellow giants who have no capital. What is
+more, the toil, forethought and self-control which the
+exploitation involves, and the self-respect and social esteem
+which its success wins, effect an improvement in Alberic's own
+character which neither Marx nor Wagner appear to have foreseen.
+He discovers that to be a dull, greedy, narrow-minded
+money-grubber is not the way to make money on a large scale; for
+though greed may suffice to turn tens into hundreds and even
+hundreds into thousands, to turn thousands into hundreds of
+thousands requires magnanimity and a will to power rather than
+to pelf. And to turn thousands into millions, Alberic must make
+himself an earthly providence for masses of workmen: he must
+create towns and govern markets. In the meantime, Fafair,
+wallowing in dividends which he has done nothing to earn, may
+rot, intellectually and morally, from mere disuse of his energies
+and lack of incentive to excel; but the more imbecile he becomes,
+the more dependent he is upon Alberic, and the more the
+responsibility of keeping the world-machine in working order
+falls upon Alberic. Consequently, though Alberic in Also may have
+been merely the vulgar Manchester Factory-owner portrayed by
+Engels, in 1876 he was well on the way towards becoming Krupp
+of Essen or Carnegie of Homestead.
+
+Now, without exaggerating the virtues of these gentlemen, it will
+be conceded by everybody except perhaps those veteran German
+Social-Democrats who have made a cult of obsolescence under the
+name of Marxism, that the modern entrepreneur is not to be
+displaced and dismissed so lightly as Alberic is dismissed in The
+Ring. They are really the masters of the whole situation. Wotan
+is hardly less dependent on them than Fafnir; the War-Lord visits
+their work, acclaims them in stirring speeches, and casts down
+their enemies; whilst Loki makes commercial treaties for them and
+subjects all his diplomacy to their approval.
+
+The end cannot come until Siegfried learns Alberic's trade and
+shoulders Alberic's burden. Not having as yet done so, he is
+still completely mastered by Alberic. He does not even rebel
+against him except when he is too stupid and ignorant, or too
+romantically impracticable, to see that Alberic's work, like
+Wotan's work and Loki's work, is necessary work, and that
+therefore Alberic can never be superseded by a warrior, but only
+by a capable man of business who is prepared to continue his work
+without a day's intermission. Even though the proletarians of all
+lands were to become "class conscious," and obey the call of Marx
+by uniting to carry the Class struggle to a proletarian victory
+in which all capital should become common property, and all
+Monarchs, Millionaires, Landlords and Capitalists become common
+citizens, the triumphant proletarians would have either to starve
+in Anarchy the next day or else do the political and industrial
+work which is now being done tant bien que mal by our Romanoffs,
+our Hohenzollerns, our Krupps, Carnegies, Levers, Pierpont
+Morgans, and their political retinues. And in the meantime these
+magnates must defend their power and property with all their
+might against the revolutionary forces until these forces become
+positive, executive, administrative forces, instead of the
+conspiracies of protesting, moralizing, virtuously indignant
+amateurs who mistook Marx for a man of affairs and Thiers for a
+stage villain. But all this represents a development of which one
+gathers no forecast from 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 its industrial history up to the year
+1848 far more penetratingly than the academic historians of their
+time. But they broke off there and left a void between 1848 and
+the end, in which we, who have to live in that period, get no
+guidance from them. The Marxists wandered for years in this void,
+striving, with fanatical superstition, to suppress the
+Revisionists who, facing the fact that the Social-Democratic
+party was lost, were trying to find the path by the light of
+contemporary history instead of vainly consulting the oracle in
+the pages of Das Kapital. Marx himself was too simpleminded a
+recluse and too full of the validity of his remoter
+generalizations, and the way in which the rapid integration of
+capital in Trusts and Kartels was confirming them, to be
+conscious of the void himself.
+
+Wagner, on the other hand, was comparatively a practical man.
+It is possible to learn more of the world by producing a single
+opera, or even conducting a single orchestral rehearsal, than by
+ten years reading in the Library of the British Museum. Wagner
+must have learnt between Das Rheingold and the Kaisermarsch that
+there are yet several dramas to be interpolated in The Ring after
+The Valkyries before the allegory can tell the whole story, and
+that the first of these interpolated dramas will be much more
+like a revised Rienzi than like Siegfried. If anyone doubts the
+extent to which Wagner's eyes had been opened to the
+administrative-childishness and romantic conceit of the heroes of
+the revolutionary generation that served its apprenticeship on
+the barricades of 1848-9, and perished on those of 1870 under
+Thiers' mitrailleuses, let him read Eine Kapitulation, that
+scandalous burlesque in which the poet and composer of Siegfried,
+with the levity of a schoolboy, mocked the French republicans who
+were doing in 1871 what he himself was exiled for doing in 1849.
+He had set the enthusiasm of the Dresden Revolution to his own
+greatest music; but he set the enthusiasm of twenty years later
+in derision to the music of Rossini. There is no mistaking the
+tune he meant to suggest by his doggerel of Republik, Republik,
+Republik-lik-lik. The Overture to William Tell is there as
+plainly as if it were noted down in full score.
+
+In the case of such a man as Wagner, you cannot explain this
+volte-face as mere jingoism produced by Germany's overwhelming
+victory in the Franco-Prussian War, nor as personal spite against
+the Parisians for the Tannhauser fiasco. Wagner had more cause
+for personal spite against his own countrymen than he ever had
+against the French. No doubt his outburst gratified the pettier
+feelings which great men have in common with 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 a profound
+philosophical contempt for the inadequacy of the men who were
+trying to wield Nothung, and who had done less work for Wagner's
+own art than a single German King and he, too, only a mad one.
+Wagner had by that time done too much himself not to know that
+the world is ruled by deeds, not by good intentions, and that
+one efficient sinner is worth ten futile saints and martyrs.
+
+I need not elaborate the point further in these pages. Like all
+men of genius, Wagner had exceptional sincerity, exceptional
+respect for facts, exceptional freedom from the hypnotic
+influence of sensational popular movements, exceptional sense of
+the realities of political power as distinguished from the
+presences and idolatries behind which the real masters of modern
+States pull their wires and train their guns. When he scored
+Night Falls On The Gods, he had accepted the failure of Siegfried
+and the triumph of the Wotan-Loki-Alberic-trinity as a fact. He
+had given up dreaming of heroes, heroines, and final solutions,
+and had conceived a new protagonist in Parsifal, whom he
+announced, not as a hero, but as a fool; who was armed, not with
+a sword which cut irresistibly, but with a spear which he held
+only on condition that he did not use it; and who instead of
+exulting in the slaughter of a dragon was frightfully ashamed of
+having shot a swan. The change in the conception of the Deliverer
+could hardly be more complete. It reflects the change which took
+place in Wagner's mind between the composition of The Rhine Gold
+and Night Falls On The Gods; and it explains why he dropped The
+Ring allegory and fell back on the status quo ante by
+Lohengrinizing.
+
+If you ask why he did not throw Siegfried into the waste paper
+basket and rewrite The Ring from The Valkyries onwards, one must
+reply that the time had not come for such a feat. Neither Wagner
+nor anyone else then living knew enough to achieve it. Besides,
+what he had already done had reached the omit of even his immense
+energy and perseverance and so he did the best he could with the
+unfinished and for ever unfinishable work, rounding it off with
+an opera much as Rossini rounded off some of his religious
+compositions with a galop. Only, Rossini on such occasions wrote
+in his score "Excusez du pen," but Wagner left us to find out the
+change for ourselves, perhaps to test how far we had really
+followed his meaning.
+
+
+
+WAGNER'S OWN EXPLANATION
+
+And now, having given my explanation of The Ring, can I give
+Wagner's explanation of it? If I could (and I can) I should not
+by any means accept it as conclusive. Nearly half a century has
+passed smce the tetralogy was written; and in that time the
+purposes of many half instinctive acts of genius have become
+clearer to the common man than they were to the doers. Some years
+ago, in the course of an explanation of Ibsen's plays, I pointed
+out that it was by no means certain or even likely that Ibsen was
+as definitely conscious of his thesis as I. All the stupid
+people, and some critics who, though not stupid, had not
+themselves written what the Germans call "tendency" works, saw
+nothing in this but a fantastic affectation of the extravagant
+self-conceit of knowing more about Ibsen than Ibsen himself.
+Fortunately, in taking exactly the same position now with regard
+to Wagner, I can claim his own authority to support me. "How," he
+wrote to Roeckel on the 23rd. August 1856, "can an artist expect
+that what he has felt intuitively should be perfectly realized by
+others, seeing that he himself feels in the presence of his work,
+if it is true Art, that he is confronted by a riddle, about which
+he, too, might have illusions, just as another might?"
+
+The truth is, we are apt to deify men of genius, exactly as we
+deify the creative force of the universe, by attributing to
+logical design what is the result of blind instinct. What Wagner
+meant by "true Art" is the operation of the artist's instinct,
+which is just as blind as any other instinct. Mozart, asked for
+an explanation of his works, said frankly "How do I know?"
+Wagner, being a philosopher and critic as well as a composer, was
+always looking for moral explanations of what he had created and
+he hit on several very striking ones, all different. In the same
+way one can conceive Henry the Eighth speculating very
+brilliantly about the circulation of his own blood without
+getting as near the truth as Harvey did long after his death.
+
+None the less, Wagner's own explanations are of exceptional
+interest. To begin with, there is a considerable portion of The
+Ring, especially the portraiture of our capitalistic industrial
+system from the socialist's point of new in the slavery of the
+Niblungs and the tyranny of Alberic, which is unmistakable, as it
+dramatizes that portion of human activity which lies well within
+the territory covered by our intellectual consciousness. 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 part of the work
+which deals with the destiny of Wotan. And here, as it happened,
+Wagner's recollection of what he had been driving at was
+completely upset by his discovery, soon after the completion of
+The Ring poem, of Schopenhaur's famous treatise "The World as
+Will and Representation." So obsessed did he become with this
+masterpiece of philosophic art that he declared that it contained
+the intellectual demonstration of the conflict of human forces
+which he himself had demonstrated artistically in his great poem.
+"I must confess," he writes to Roeckel, "to having arrived at a
+clear understanding of my own works of art through the help of
+another, who has provided me with the reasoned conceptions
+corresponding to my intuitive principles."
+
+Schopenhaur, however, had done nothing of the sort. Wagner's
+determination to prove that he had been a Schopenhaurite all
+along without knowing it only shows how completely the
+fascination of the great treatise on The Will had run away with
+his memory. It is easy to see how this happened. Wagner says of
+himself that "seldom has there taken place in the soul of one and
+the same man so profound a division and estrangement between the
+intuitive or impulsive part of his nature and his consciously or
+reasonably formed ideas." And since Schopenhaur's great
+contribution to modern thought was to educate us into clear
+consciousness of this distinction--a distinction familiar, in a
+fanciful way, to the Ages of Faith and Art before the Renascence,
+but afterwards swamped in the Rationalism of that movement--it
+was inevitable that Wagner should jump at Schopenhaur's
+metaphysiology (I use a word less likely to be mistaken than
+metaphysics) as the very thing for him. But metaphysiology is one
+thing, political philosophy another. The political philosophy of
+Siegfried is exactly contrary to the political philosphy of
+Schopenhaur, although the same clear metaphysiological
+distinction between the instinctive part of man (his Will) and
+his reasoning faculty (dramatized in The Ring as Loki) is
+insisted on in both. The difference is that to Schopenhaur the
+Will is the universal tormentor of man, the author of that great
+evil, Life; whilst reason is the divine gift that is finally to
+overcome this life-creating will and lead, through its
+aboegation, to cessation and peace, annihilation and Nirvana.
+This is the doctrine of Pessimism. Now Wagner was, when he wrote
+The Ring, a most sanguine revolutionary Meliorist, contemptuous
+of the reasoning faculty, which he typified in the shifty,
+unreal, delusive Loki, and full of faith in the life-giving Will,
+which he typified in the glorious Siegfried. Not until he read
+Schopenhaur did he become bent on proving that he had always been
+a Pessimist at heart, and that Loki was the most sensible and
+worthy adviser of Wotan in The Rhine Gold.
+
+Sometimes he faces the change in his opinions frankly enough.
+"My Niblung drama," he writes to Roeckel, "had taken form at a
+time when I had built up with my reason an optimistic world on
+Hellenic principles, believing that nothing was necessary for
+the realization of such a world but that men should wish it.
+I ingeniously set aside-the problem why they did not wish it.
+I remember that it was with this definite creative purpose that
+I conceived the personality of Siegfried, with the intention of
+representing an existence free from pain." But he appeals to his
+earlier works to show that behind all these artificial optimistic
+ideas there was always with him an intuition of "the sublime
+tragedy of renunciation, the negation of the will." In trying to
+explain this, he s full of ideas philosophically, and full of the
+most amusing contradictions personally. Optimism, as an
+accidental excursion into the barren paths of reason on his own
+part, he calls "Hellenic." In others he denounces it as rank
+Judaism, the Jew having at that time become for him the whipping
+boy for all modern humamty. In a letter from London he expounds
+Schopenhaur to Roeckel with enthusiasm, preaching the
+renunciation of the Will to Live as the redemption from all error
+and vain pursuits: in the next letter he resumes the subject with
+unabated interest, and finishes by mentioning that on leaving
+London he went to Geneva and underwent "a most beneficial course
+of hydropathy." Seven months before this he had written as
+follows: "Believe me, I too was once possessed by the idea of a
+country life. In order to become a radically healthy human being,
+I went two years ago to a Hydropathic Establishment, prepared to
+give up Art and everything if I could once more become a child
+of Nature. But, my good friend, I was obliged to laugh at my own
+naivete when I found myself almost going mad. None of us 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
+explanations of the inconsistencies of The Ring with Night Falls
+On The Gods. Wagner defended himself with unfailing cleverness
+and occasional petulances, ranging from such pleas as "I believe
+a true instinct has kept me from a too great definiteness; for
+it has been borne in on me that an absolute disclosure of the
+intention disturbs true insight," to a volley of explanations
+and commentaries on the explanations. He gets excited and annoyed
+because Roeckel will not admire the Brynhild of Night Falls On
+The Gods; re-invents the Tarnhelm scene; and finally, the case
+being desperate, exclaims, "It is wrong of you to challenge me
+to explain it in words: you must feel that something is being
+enacted that is not to be expressed in mere words."
+
+THE PESSIMIST AS AMORIST
+
+Sometimes he gets very far away from Pessimism indeed, and
+recommends Roeckel to solace his captivity, not by conquering the
+will to live at liberty, but by "the inspiring influences of the
+Beautiful." The next moment 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; and only 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 comfort is that
+he is beloved. And on the subject of love he lets himself loose
+in a manner that would have roused the bitterest scorn in
+Schopenhaur, though, as we have seen (Love Panacea), it is highly
+characteristic of Wagner. "Love in its most perfect reality," he
+says, "is only possible between the sexes: it is only as man and
+woman that human beings can truly love. Every other manifestation
+of love can be traced back to that one absorbingly real feeling,
+of which all other affections are but an emanation, a connection,
+or an imitation. It is an error to look on this as only one of
+the forms in which love is revealed, as if there were other forms
+coequal with it, or even superior to it. He who after the manner
+of metaphysicians prefers UNREALITY to REALITY, and derives the
+concrete from the abstract--in short, puts the word before the
+fact--may be right in esteeming the idea of love as higher than
+the expression of love, and may affirm that actual love made
+manifest in feeling is nothing but the outward and visible sign
+of a pre-existent, non-sensuous, abstract love; and he will do
+well to despise that sensuous function in general. In any case it
+were safe to bet that such a man had never loved or been loved as
+human beings can love, or he would have understood that in
+despising this feeling, what he condemned was its sensual
+expression, the outcome of man's animal nature, and not true
+human love. The highest satisfaction and expression of the
+individual is only to be found in his complete absorption, and
+that is only possible through love. Now a human being is both MAN
+and WOMAN: it is only when these two are united that the real
+human being exists; and thus it is only by love that man and
+woman attain to the full measure of humanity. But when nowadays
+we talk of a human being, such heartless blockheads are we that
+quite involuntarily we only think of man. It is only 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 the
+conception of anything higher than his own existence--his own
+being--so the transcendent act of his life is this consummation
+of his humanity through love."
+
+It is clear after this utterance from the would-be
+Schopenhaurian, that Wagner's explanations of his works for the
+most part explain nothing but the mood in which he happened to be
+on the day he advanced them, or the train of thought suggested to
+his very susceptible imagination and active mind by the points
+raised by his questioner. Especially in his private letters,
+where his outpourings are modified by his dramatic consciousness
+of the personality of his correspondent, do we find him taking
+all manner of positions, and putting forward all sorts of cases
+which must be taken as clever and suggestive special pleadings,
+and not as serious and permanent expositions of his works. These
+works must speak for themselves: if The Ring says one thing, and
+a letter written afterwards says that it said something else, The
+Ring must be taken to confute the letter just as conclusively as
+if the two had been written by different hands. However, nobody
+fairly well acquainted with Wagner's utterances as a whole will
+find any unaccountable contradictions in them. As in all men of
+his type, our manifold nature was so marked in him that he was
+like several different men rolled into one. When he had exhausted
+himself in the character of the most pugnacious, aggressive, and
+sanguine of reformers, he rested himself as a Pessimist and
+Ninanist. 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 the pages to find the irrepressible bustle of Siegfried
+and the revelry of the clansmen expressed with equal zest. Wagner
+was not a Schopenhaurite every day in the week, nor even a
+Wagnerite. His mind changes as often as his mood. On Monday
+nothing will ever induce him to return to quilldriving: on
+Tuesday he begins a new pamphlet. On Wednesday he is impatient of
+the misapprehensions of people who cannot see how impossible it
+is for him to preside as a conductor over platform performances
+of fragments of his works, which can only be understood when
+presented strictly according to his intention on the stage: on
+Thursday he gets up a concert of Wagnerian selections, and when
+it is over writes to his friends describing how profoundly both
+bandsmen and audience were impressed. On Friday he exults in the
+self-assertion of Siegfried's will against all moral ordinances,
+and is full of a revolutionary sense of "the universal law of
+change and renewal": on Saturday he has an attack of holiness,
+and asks, "Can you conceive a moral action of which the root idea
+is not renunciation?" In short, Wagner can be quoted against
+himself almost without limit, much as Beethoven's adagios could
+be quoted against his scherzos if a dispute arose between two
+fools as to whether he was a melancholy man or a merry one.
+
+
+
+THE MUSIC OF THE RING
+
+THE REPRESENTATIVE THEMES
+
+To be able to follow the music of The Ring, all that is necessary
+is to become familiar enough with the brief musical phrases out
+of which it is built to recognize them and attach a certain
+definite significance to them, exactly as any ordinary Englishman
+recognizes and attaches a definite significance to the opening
+bars of God Save the King. There is no difficulty here: every
+soldier is expected to learn and distinguish between different
+bugle calls and trumpet calls; and anyone who can do this can
+learn and distinguish between the representative themes or
+"leading motives" (Leitmotifs) of The Ring. They are the easier
+to learn because they are repeated again and again; and the main
+ones are so emphatically impressed on the ear whilst the
+spectator is looking for the first time at the objects, or
+witnessing the first strong dramatic expression of the ideas they
+denote, that the requisite association is formed unconsciously.
+The themes are neither long, nor complicated, nor difficult.
+Whoever can pick up the flourish of a coach-horn, the note of a
+bird, the rhythm of the postman's knock or of a horse's gallop,
+will be at no loss in picking up the themes of The Ring. No
+doubt, when it comes to forming the necessary mental association
+with the theme, it may happen that the spectator may find his ear
+conquering the tune more easily than his mind conquers the
+thought. But for the most part the themes do not denote thoughts
+at all, but either emotions of a quite simple universal kind, or
+the sights, sounds and fancies common enough to be familiar to
+children. Indeed some of them are as frankly childish as any of
+the funny little orchestral interludes which, in Haydn's
+Creation, introduce the horse, the deer, or the worm. We have
+both the horse and the worm in The Ring, treated exactly in
+Haydn's manner, and with an effect not a whit less ridiculous 
+to superior people who decline to take it good-humoredly. Even
+the complaisance of good Wagnerites is occasionally rather
+overstrained by the way in which Brynhild's allusions to her
+charger Grani elicit from the band a little rum-ti-tum triplet
+which by itself is in no way suggestive of a horse, although a
+continuous rush of such triplets makes a very exciting musical
+gallop.
+
+Other themes denote objects which cannot be imitatively suggested
+by music: for instance, music cannot suggest a ring, and cannot
+suggest gold; yet each of these has a representative theme which
+pervades the score in all directions. In the case of the gold the
+association is established by the very salient way in which the
+orchestra breaks into the pretty theme in the first act of The
+Rhine Gold at the moment when the sunrays strike down through the
+water and light up the glittering treasure, hitherto invisible.
+The reference of the strange little theme of the wishing cap is
+equally manifest from the first, since the spectator's attention
+is wholly taken up with the Tarnhelm and its magic when the theme
+is first pointedly uttered by the orchestra. The sword theme is
+introduced at the end of The Rhine Gold to express Wotan's hero
+inspiration; and I have already mentioned that Wagner, unable,
+when it came to practical stage management, to forego the appeal
+to the eye as well as to the thought, here made Wotan pick up a
+sword and brandish it, though no such instruction appears in the
+printed score. When this sacrifice to Wagner's scepticism as to
+the reality of any appeal to an audience that is not made through
+their bodily sense is omitted, the association of the theme with
+the sword is not formed until that point in the first act of The
+Valkyries at which Siegmund is left alone by Hunding's hearth,
+weaponless, with the assurance that he will have to fight for his
+life at dawn with his host. He recalls then how his father
+promised him a sword for his hour of need; and as he does so, a
+flicker from the dying fire is caught by the golden hilt of the
+sword in the tree, when the theme immediately begins to gleam
+through the quiver of sound from the orchestra, and only dies
+out as the fire sinks and the sword is once more hidden by the
+darkness. Later on, this theme, which is never silent whilst
+Sieglinda is dwelling on the story of the sword, leaps out into
+the most dazzling splendor the band can give it when Siegmund
+triumphantly draws the weapon from the tree. As it consists of
+seven notes only, with a very marked measure, and a melody like
+a simple flourish on a trumpet or post horn, nobody capable of
+catching a tune can easily miss it.
+
+The Valhalla theme, sounded with solemn grandeur as the home of
+the gods first appears to us and to Wotan at the beginning of the
+second scene of The Rhine Gold, also cannot be mistaken. It, too,
+has a memorable rhythm; and its majestic harmonies, far from
+presenting those novel or curious problems in polyphony of which
+Wagner still stands suspected by superstitious people, are just
+those three simple chords which festive students who vamp
+accompaniments to comic songs "by ear" soon find sufficient for
+nearly all the popular tunes in the world.
+
+On the other hand, the ring theme, when it begins to hurtle
+through the third scene of The Rhine Gold, cannot possibly be
+referred to any special feature in the general gloom and turmoil
+of the den of the dwarfs. It is not a melody, but merely the
+displaced metric accent which musicians call syncopation, rung on
+the notes of the familiar chord formed by piling three minor
+thirds on top of one another (technically, the chord of the minor
+ninth, ci-devant diminished seventh). One soon picks it up and
+identifies it; but it does not get introduced in the
+unequivocally clear fashion of the themes described above, or of
+that malignant monstrosity, the theme which denotes the curse on
+the gold. Consequently it cannot be said that the musical design
+of the work is perfectly clear at the first hearing as regards
+all the themes; but it is so as regards most of them, the main
+lines being laid down as emphatically and intelligibly as the
+dramatic motives in a Shakespearean play. As to the coyer
+subtleties of the score, their discovery provides fresh interest
+for repeated hearings, giving The Ring a Beethovenian
+inexhaustibility and toughness of wear.
+
+The themes associated with the individual characters get stamped
+on the memory easily by the simple association of the sound of
+the theme with the appearance of the person indicated. Its
+appropriateness is generally pretty obvious. Thus, the entry of
+the giants is made to a vigorous stumping, tramping measure.
+Mimmy, being a quaint, weird old creature, has a quaint, weird
+theme of two thin chords that creep down eerily one to the other.
+Gutrune's theme is pretty and caressing: Gunther's bold, rough,
+and commonplace. It is a favorite trick of Wagner's, when one of
+his characters is killed on the stage, to make the theme attached
+to that character weaken, fail, and fade away with a broken echo
+into silence.
+
+THE CHARACTERIZATION
+
+All this, however, is the mere child's play of theme work. The
+more complex characters, instead of having a simple musical label
+attached to them, have their characteristic ideas and aspirations
+identified with special representative themes as they come into
+play in the drama; and the chief merit of the thematic structure
+of The Ring is the mastery with which the dramatic play of the
+ideas is reflected in the contrapuntal play of the themes. We do
+not find Wotan, like the dragon or the horse, or, for the matter
+of that, like the stage demon in Weber's Freischutz or
+Meyerbeer's Robert the Devil, with one fixed theme attached to
+him like a name plate to an umbrella, blaring unaltered from the
+orchestra whenever he steps on the stage. Sometimes we have the
+Valhalla theme used to express the greatness of the gods as an
+idea of Wotan's. Again, we have his spear, the symbol of his
+power, identified with another theme, on which Wagner finally
+exercises his favorite device by making it break and fail, cut
+through, as it were, by the tearing sound of the theme identified
+with the sword, when Siegfried shivers the spear with the stroke
+of Nothung. Yet another theme connected with Wotan is the
+Wanderer music which breaks with such a majestic reassurance on
+the nightmare terror of Mimmy when Wotan appears at the mouth of
+his cave in the scene of the three riddles. Thus not only are
+there several Wotan themes, but each varies in its inflexions and
+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 most imposing splendor when it heralds his entry
+as full-fledged hero in the prologue to Night Falls On The Gods.
+Even Mimmy has his two or three themes: the weird one already
+described; the little one in triple measure imitating the tap of
+his hammer, and fiercely mocked in the savage laugh of Alberic at
+his death; and finally the crooning tune in which he details all
+his motherly kindnesses to the little foundling Siegfried.
+Besides this there are all manner of little musical blinkings and
+shamblings and whinings, the least hint of which from the
+orchestra at any moment instantly brings Mimmy to mind, whether
+he is on the stage at the time or not.
+
+In truth, dramatic characterization in music cannot be carried
+very far by the use of representative themes. Mozart, the
+greatest of all masters of this art, never dreamt of employing
+them; and, extensively as they are used in The Ring, they do not
+enable Wagner to dispense with the Mozartian method. Apart from
+the themes, Siegfried and Mimmy are still as sharply
+distinguished from one another by the character of their music as
+Don Giovanni from Leporello, Wotan from Gutrune as Sarastro from
+Papagena. It is true that the themes attached to the characters
+have the same musical appropriateness as the rest of the music:
+for example, neither the Valhalla nor the spear themes could,
+without the most ludicrous incongruity, be used for the forest
+bird or the unstable, delusive Loki; but for all that the musical
+characterization must be regarded as independent of the specific
+themes, since the entire elimination of the thematic system from
+the score would leave the characters 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 the fire theme. In the first act of
+Siegfried, Mimmy makes his unavailing attempt to explain fear
+to Siegfried. With the horror fresh upon him of the sort of
+nightmare into which he has fallen after the departure of the
+Wanderer, and which has taken the form, at once fanciful and
+symbolic, of a delirious dread of light, he asks Siegfried
+whether he has never, whilst wandering in the forest, had his
+heart set hammering in frantic dread by the mysterious lights of
+the gloaming. To this, Siegfried, greatly astonished, replies
+that on such occasions his heart is altogether healthy and his
+sensations perfectly normal. Here Mimmy's question is accompanied
+by the tremulous sounding of the fire theme with its harmonies
+most oppressively disturbed and troubled; whereas with
+Siegfried's reply they become quite clear and straightforward,
+making the theme sound bold, brilliant, and serene. This is a
+typical instance of the way in which the themes are used.
+
+The thematic system gives symphonic interest, reasonableness, and
+unity to the music, enabling the composer to exhaust every aspect
+and quality of his melodic material, and, in Beethoven's manner,
+to work miracles of beauty, expression and significance with the
+briefest phrases. As a set-off against this, it has led Wagner to
+indulge in repetitions that would be intolerable in a purely
+dramatic work. Almost the first thing that a dramatist has to
+learn in constructing a play is that the persons must not come on
+the stage in the second act and tell one another at great length
+what the audience has already seen pass before its eyes in the
+first act. The extent to which Wagner has been seduced into
+violating this rule by his affection for his themes is startling
+to a practiced playwright. Siegfried inherits from Wotan a mania
+for autobiography which leads him to inflict on every one he
+meets the story of Mimmy and the dragon, although the audience
+have spent a whole evening witnessing the events he is narrating.
+Hagen tells the story to Gunther; and that same night Alberic's
+ghost tells it over again to Hagen, who knows it already as well
+as the audience. Siegfried tells the Rhine maidens as much of it
+as they will listen to, and then keeps telling it to his hunting
+companions until they kill him. Wotan's autobiography on the
+second evening becomes his biography in the mouths of the Norns
+on the fourth. The little that the Norns add to it is repeated an
+hour later by Valtrauta. How far all this repetition is tolerable
+is a matter of individual taste. A good story will bear
+repetition; and if it has woven into it such pretty tunes as the
+Rhine maidens' yodel, Mimmy's tinkling anvil beat, the note of
+the forest bird, the call of Siegfried's horn, and so on, it will
+bear a good deal of rehearing. Those who have but newly learnt
+their way through The Ring will not readily admit that there is
+a bar too much repetition.
+
+But how if you find some anti-Wagnerite raising the question
+whether the thematic system does not enable the composer to
+produce a music drama with much less musical fertility than was
+required from his predecessors for the composition of operas
+under the old system!
+
+Such discussions are not within the scope of this little book.
+But as the book is now finished (for really nothing more need be
+said about The Ring), I am quite willing to add a few pages of
+ordinary musical criticism, partly to please the amateurs who
+enjoy that sort of reading, and partly for the guidance of those
+who wish to obtain some hints to help them through such critical
+small talk about Wagner and Bayreuth as may 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 the
+composition of a fresh melody; but it is quite a mistake to
+suppose that this creative-effort extended continuously
+throughout the number from the first to the last bar. When a
+musician composes according to a set metrical pattern, the
+selection of the pattern and the composition of the first stave
+(a stave in music corresponds to a line in verse) generally
+completes the creative effort. All the rest follows more or less
+mechanically to fill up the pattern, an air being very like a
+wall-paper design in this respect. Thus the second stave is
+usually a perfectly obvious consequence of the first; and the
+third and fourth an exact or very slightly varied repetition of
+the first and second. For example, given the first line of Pop
+Goes the Weasel or Yankee Doodle, any musical cobbler could
+supply the remaining three. There is very little tune turning of
+this kind in The Ring; and it is noteworthy that where it does
+occur, as in Siegmund's spring song and Mimmy's croon, "Ein
+zullendes Kind," the effect of the symmetrical staves, recurring
+as a mere matter of form, is perceptibly poor and platitudinous
+compared with the free flow of melody which prevails elsewhere.
+
+The other and harder way of composing is to take a strain of free
+melody, and ring every variety of change of mood upon it as if it
+were a thought that sometimes brought hope, sometimes melancholy,
+sometimes exultation, sometimes raging despair and so on. To take
+several themes of this kind, and weave them together into a rich
+musical fabric passing panoramically before the ear with a
+continually varying flow of sentiment, is the highest feat of the
+musician: it is in this way that we get the fugue of Bach and the
+symphony of Beethoven. The admittedly inferior musician is the
+one who, like Auber and Offenbach, not to mention our purveyors
+of drawing-room ballads, can produce an unlimited quantity of
+symmetrical tunes, but cannot weave themes symphonically.
+
+When this is taken into account, it will be seen that the fact
+that there is a great deal of repetition in The Ring does not
+distinguish it from the old-fashioned operas. The real difference
+is that in them the repetition was used for the mechanical
+completion of conventional metric patterns, whereas in The Ring
+the recurrence of the theme is an intelligent and interesting
+consequence of the recurrence of the dramatic phenomenon which it
+denotes. It should be remembered also that the substitution of
+symphonically treated themes for tunes with symmetrical eight-bar
+staves and the like, has always been the rule in the highest
+forms of music. To describe it, or be affected by it, as an
+abandonment of melody, is to confess oneself an ignoramus
+conversant only with dance tunes and ballads.
+
+The sort of stuff a purely dramatic musician produces when he
+hampers himself with metric patterns in composition is not unlike
+what might have resulted in literature if Carlyle (for example)
+had been compelled by convention to write his historical stories
+in rhymed stanzas. That is to say, it limits his fertility to an
+occasional phrase, and three quarters of the time exercises only
+his barren ingenuity in fitting rhymes and measures to it. In
+literature the great masters of the art have long emancipated
+themselves from metric patterns. Nobody claims that the hierarchy
+of modern impassioned prose writers, from Bunyan to Ruskin,
+should be placed below the writers of pretty lyrics, from Herrick
+to Mr. Austin Dobson. Only in dramatic literature do we find the
+devastating tradition of blank verse still lingering, giving
+factitious prestige to the platitudes of dullards, and robbing
+the dramatic style of the genuine poet of its full natural
+endowment of variety, force and simplicity.
+
+This state of things, as we have seen, finds its parallel in
+musical art, since music can be written in prose themes or in
+versified tunes; only here nobody dreams of disputing the greater
+difficulty of the prose forms, and the comparative triviality of
+versification. Yet in dramatic music, as in dramatic literature,
+the tradition of versification clings with the same pernicious
+results; and the opera, like the tragedy, is conventionally made
+like a wall paper. The theatre seems doomed to be in all things
+the last refuge of the hankering after cheap prettiness in art.
+
+Unfortunately this confusion of the decorative with the dramatic
+element in both literature and music is maintained by the example
+of great masters in both arts. Very touching dramatic expression
+can be combined with decorative symmetry of versification when
+the artist happens to possess both the decorative and dramatic
+gifts, and to have cultivated both hand in hand. Shakespeare and
+Shelley, for instance, far from being hampered by the
+conventional obligation to write their dramas in verse, found it
+much the easiest and cheapest way of producing them. But if
+Shakespeare had been compelled by custom to write entirely in
+prose, all his ordinary dialogue might have been as good as the
+first scene of As You Like It; and all his lofty passages as fine
+as "What a piece of work is Man!", thus sparing us a great deal
+of blank verse in which the thought is commonplace, and the
+expression, though catchingly turned, absurdly pompous. The Cent
+might either have been a serious drama or might never have been
+written at all if Shelley had not been allowed to carry off its
+unreality by Elizabethan versification. Still, both poets have
+achieved many passages in which the decorative and dramatic
+qualities are not only reconciled, but seem to enhance one
+another to a pitch otherwise unattainable.
+
+Just so in music. When we find, as in the case of Mozart, a
+prodigiously gifted and arduously trained musician who is also,
+by a happy accident, a dramatist comparable to Moliere, the
+obligation to compose operas in versified numbers not only does
+not embarrass him, but actually saves him trouble and thought.
+No matter what his dramatic mood may be, he expresses it in
+exquisite musical verses more easily than a dramatist of ordinary
+singleness of talent can express it in prose. Accordingly, he
+too, like Shakespeare and Shelley, leaves versified airs, like
+Dalla sua pace, or Gluck's Che fare senza Euridice, or Weber's
+Leise, leise, which are as dramatic from the first note to the
+last as the untrammelled themes of The Ring. In consequence, it
+used to be professorially demanded that all dramatic music should
+present the same double aspect. The demand was unreasonable,
+since symmetrical versification is no merit in dramatic music:
+one might as well stipulate that a dinner fork should be
+constructed so as to serve also as a tablecloth. It was an
+ignorant demand too, because it is not true that the composers
+of these exceptional examples were always, or even often, able to
+combine dramatic expression with symmetrical versification. Side
+by side with Dalla sua pace we have Il mio tesoro and Non mi dir,
+in which exquisitely expressive opening phrases lead to
+decorative passages which are as grotesque from the dramatic
+point of view as the music which Alberic sings when he is
+slipping and sneezing in the Rhine mud is from the decorative
+point of view. Further, there is to be considered the mass of
+shapeless "dry recitative" which separates these symmetrical
+numbers, and which might have been raised to considerable
+dramatic and musical importance had it been incorporated into a
+continuous musical fabric by thematic treatment. Finally,
+Mozart's most dramatic finales and concerted numbers are more or
+less in sonata form, like symphonic movements, and must therefore
+be classed as musical prose. And sonata form dictates repetitions
+and recapitulations from which the perfectly unconventional form
+adopted by Wagner is free. On the whole, there is more scope for
+both repetition and convention in the old form than in the new;
+and the poorer a composer's musical gift is, the surer he is to
+resort to the eighteenth century patterns to eke out his
+invention.
+
+
+
+THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
+
+When Wagner was born in 1813, music had newly become the most
+astonishing, the most fascinating, the most miraculous art in
+the world. Mozart's Don Giovanni had made all musical Europe
+conscious of the enchantments of the modern orchestra and of
+the perfect adaptability of music to the subtlest needs of the
+dramatist. Beethoven had shown how those inarticulate mood-poems
+which surge through men who have, like himself, no exceptional
+command of words, can be written down in music as symphonies.
+Not that Mozart and Beethoven invented these applications of
+their art; but they were the first whose works made it clear that
+the dramatic and subjective powers of sound were enthralling
+enough to stand by themselves quite apart from the decorative
+musical structures of which they had hitherto been a mere feature.
+After the finales in Figaro and Don Giovanni, the possibility
+of the modern music drama lay bare. After the symphonies of
+Beethoven it was certain that the poetry that lies too deep for
+words does not lie too deep for music, and that the vicissitudes
+of the soul, from the roughest fun to the loftiest aspiration,
+can make symphonies without the aid of dance tunes. As much,
+perhaps, will be claimed for the preludes and fugues of Bach; but
+Bach's method was unattainable: his compositions were wonderful
+webs of exquisitely beautiful Gothic traceries in sound, quite
+beyond all ordinary human talent. Beethoven's far blunter craft
+was thoroughly popular and practicable: not to save his soul
+could he have drawn one long Gothic line in sound as Bach could,
+much less have woven several of them together with so apt a
+harmony that even when the composer is unmoved its progressions
+saturate themselves with the emotion which (as modern critics are
+a little apt to forget) springs as warmly from our delicately
+touched admiration as from our sympathies, and sometimes makes us
+give a composer credit for pathetic intentions which he does not
+entertain, just as a boy imagines a treasure of tenderness and
+noble wisdom in the beauty of a woman. Besides, Bach set comic
+dialogue to music exactly as he set the recitatives of the
+Passion, there being for him, apparently, only one recitative
+possible, and that the musically best. He reserved the expression
+of his merry mood for the regular set numbers in which he could
+make one of his wonderful contrapuntal traceries of pure ornament
+with the requisite gaiety of line and movement. Beethoven bowed
+to no ideal of beauty: he only sought the expression for his
+feeling. To him a joke was a joke; and if it sounded funny in
+music he was satisfied. Until the old habit of judging all music
+by its decorative symmetry had worn out, musicians were shocked
+by his symphonies, and, misunderstanding his integrity, openly
+questioned his sanity. But to those who were not looking for
+pretty new sound patterns, but were longing for the expression of
+their moods in music, he achieved revelation, because, being
+single in his aim to express his own moods, he anticipated with
+revolutionary courage and frankness all the moods of the rising
+generations of the nineteenth century.
+
+The result was inevitable. In the nineteenth century it was no
+longer necessary to be a born pattern designer in sound to be a
+composer. One had but to be a dramatist or a poet completely
+susceptible to the dramatic and descriptive powers of sound.
+A race of literary and theatrical musicians appeared; and
+Meyerbeer, the first of them, made an extraordinary impression.
+The frankly delirious description of his Robert the Devil in
+Balzac's short story entitled Gambra, and Goethe's astonishingly
+mistaken notion that he could have composed music for Faust, show
+how completely the enchantments of the new dramatic music upset
+the judgment of artists of eminent discernment. Meyerbeer was,
+people said (old gentlemen still say so in Paris), the successor
+of Beethoven: he was, if a less perfect musician than Mozart, a
+profounder genius. Above all, he was original and daring. Wagner
+himself raved about the duet in the fourth act of Les Huguenots
+as wildly as anyone.
+
+Yet all this effect of originality and profundity was produced by
+a quite limited talent for turning striking phrases, exploiting
+certain curious and rather catching rhythms and modulations, and
+devising suggestive or eccentric instrumentation. On its
+decorative side, it was the same phenomenon in music as the
+Baroque school in architecture: an energetic struggle to enliven
+organic decay by mechanical oddities and novelties. Meyerbeer was
+no symphonist. He could not apply the thematic system to his
+striking phrases, and so had to cobble them into metric patterns
+in the old style; and as he was no "absolute musician" either, he
+hardly got his metric patterns beyond mere quadrille tunes, which
+were either wholly undistinguished, or else made remarkable by
+certain brusqueries which, in the true rococo manner, owed their
+singularity to their senselessness. He could produce neither a
+thorough music drama nor a charming opera. But with all this,
+and worse, Meyerbeer had some genuine dramatic energy, and even
+passion; and sometimes rose to the occasion in a manner which,
+whilst the imagination of his contemporaries remained on fire
+with the novelties of dramatic music, led them to overrate him
+with an extravagance which provoked Wagner to conduct a long
+critical campaign against his leadership. Thirty years ago this
+campaign was mentably ascribed to the professional jealousy of a
+disappointed rival. Nowadays young people cannot understand how
+anyone could ever have taken Meyerbeer's influence seriously.
+Those who remember how his reputation stood half a century ago,
+and who realize what 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,
+like Mozart and Beethoven, produce decorative tone structures
+independently of any dramatic or poetic subject matter, because,
+that craft being no longer necessary for his purpose, he did not
+cultivate it. As Shakespeare, compared with Tennyson, appears to
+have an exclusively dramatic 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, thus giving dramatic integrity
+to opera, and making symphony articulate. A Beethoven symphony
+(except the articulate part of the ninth) expresses noble
+feeling, but not thought: it has moods, but no ideas. Wagner
+added thought and produced the music drama. Mozart's loftiest
+opera, his Ring, so to speak, The Magic Flute, has a libretto
+which, though none the worse for seeming, like The Rhine Gold,
+the merest Christmas tomfoolery to shallow spectators, is the
+product of a talent immeasurably inferior to Mozart's own.
+The libretto of Don Giovanni is coarse and trivial: its
+transfiguration by Mozart's music may be a marvel; but nobody
+will venture to contend that such transfigurations, however
+seductive, can be as satisfactory as tone poetry or drama in
+which the musician and the poet are at the same level. Here,
+then, we have the simple secret of Wagner's preemminence as a
+dramatic musician. He wrote the poems as well as composed the
+music of his "stage festival plays," as he called them.
+
+Up to a certain point in his career Wagner paid the penalty of
+undertaking two arts instead of one. Mozart had his trade as a
+musician at his fingers' ends when he was twenty, because he had
+served an arduous apprenticeship to that trade and no other.
+Wagner was very far from having attained equal mastery at
+thirty-five: indeed he himself has told us that not until he had
+passed the age at which Mozart died did he compose with that
+complete spontaneity of musical expression which can only be
+attained by winning entire freedom from all preoccupation with
+the difficulties of technical processes. But when that time came,
+he was not only a consummate musician, like Mozart, but a
+dramatic poet and a critical and philosophical essayist,
+exercising a considerable influence on his century. The sign of
+this consummation was his ability at last to play with his art,
+and thus to add to his already famous achievements in sentimental
+drama that lighthearted art of comedy of which the greatest
+masters, like Moliere and Mozart, are so much rarer than the
+tragedians and sentimentalists. It was then that he composed the
+first two acts of Siegfried, and later on The Mastersingers, a
+professedly comedic work, and a quite Mozartian garden of melody,
+hardly credible as the work of the straining artifices of
+Tanehauser. Only, as no man ever learns to do one thing by doing
+something else, however closely allied the two things may be,
+Wagner still produced no music independently of his poems. The
+overture to The Mastersingers is delightful when you know what it
+is all about; but only those to whom it came as a concert piece
+without any such clue, and who judged its reckless counterpoint
+by the standard of Bach and of Mozart's Magic Flute overture, can
+realize how atrocious it 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 my memory, I confess I
+thought that the parts had got dislocated, and that some 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,
+I can still quite understand certain passages producing that
+effect organ admirer of Bach even when performed with perfect
+accuracy.
+
+
+
+THE MUSIC OF THE FUTURE
+
+The success of Wagner has been so prodigious that to his dazzled
+disciples it seems that the age of what he called "absolute"
+music must be at an end, and the musical future destined to be
+an exclusively Wagnerian one inaugurated at Bayreuth. All great
+geniuses produce this illusion. Wagner did not begin a movement:
+he consummated it. He was the summit of the nineteenth century
+school of dramatic music in the same sense as Mozart was the
+summit (the word is Gounod's) of the eighteenth century school.
+And those who attempt to carry on his Bayreuth tradition will
+assuredly share the fate of the forgotten purveyors of
+second-hand Mozart a hundred years ago. As to the expected
+supersession of absolute music, it is sufficient to point to the
+fact that Germany produced two absolute musicians of the first
+class during Wagner's lifetime: one, the greatly gifted Goetz,
+who died young; the other, Brahms, whose absolute musical
+endowment was as extraordinary as his thought was commonplace.
+Wagner had for him the contempt of the original thinker for the
+man of second-hand ideas, and of the strenuously dramatic
+musician for mere brute musical faculty; but though his contempt
+was perhaps deserved by the Triumphlieds, and Schicksalslieds,
+and Elegies and Requiems in which Brahms took his brains so
+seriously, nobody can listen to Brahms' natural utterance of the
+richest absolute music, especially in his chamber compositions,
+without rejoicing in his amazing gift. A reaction to absolute
+music, starting partly from Brahms, and partly from such revivals
+of medieval music as those of De Lange in Holland and Mr. Arnold
+Dolmetsch in England, is both likely and promising; whereas there
+is no more hope in attempts to out-Wagner Wagner in music drama
+than there was in the old attempts--or for the matter of that,
+the new ones--to make Handel the starting point of a great school
+of oratorio.
+
+
+
+BAYREUTH
+
+When the Bayreuth Festival Playhouse was at last completed, and
+opened in 1876 with the first performance of The Ring, European
+society was compelled to admit that Wagner was "a success."
+Royal personages, detesting his music, sat out the performances
+in the row of boxes set apart for princes. They all complimented
+him on the astonishing "push" with which, in the teeth of all
+obstacles, he had turned a fabulous and visionary project into a
+concrete commercial reality, patronized by the public at a pound
+a head. It is as well to know that these congratulations had no
+other effect upon Wagner than to open his eyes to the fact that
+the Bayreuth experiment, as an attempt to evade the ordinary
+social and commercial conditions of theatrical enterprise, was a
+failure. His own account of it contrasts the reality with his
+intentions 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 the frivolous public and in the hands of earnest
+disciples, banded together in little Wagner Societies throughout
+Europe, had ended in their forestalling by ticket speculators and
+their sale to just the sort of idle globe-trotting tourists
+against whom the temple was to have been strictly closed. The
+money, supposed to be contributed by the faithful, was begged by
+energetic subscription-hunting ladies from people who must have
+had the most grotesque misconceptions of the composer's aims--
+among others, the Khedive of Egypt and the Sultan of Turkey!
+
+The only change that has occurred since then is that
+subscriptions are no longer needed; for the Festival Playhouse
+apparently pays its own way now, and is commercially on the same
+footing as any other theatre. The only qualification required
+from the visitor is money. A Londoner spends twenty pounds on a
+visit: a native Bayreuther spends one pound. In either case "the
+Folk," on whose behalf Wagner turned out in 1849, are effectually
+excluded; and the Festival Playhouse must therefore be classed as
+infinitely less Wagnerian in its character than Hampton Court
+Palace. Nobody knew this better than Wagner; and nothing can be
+further off the mark than to chatter about Bayreuth as if it had
+succeeded in escaping from the conditions of our modern
+civilization any more than the Grand Opera in Paris or London.
+
+Within these conditions, however, it effected a new departure in
+that excellent German institution, the summer theatre. Unlike our
+opera houses, which are constructed so that the audience may
+present a splendid pageant to the delighted manager, it is
+designed to secure an uninterrupted view of the stage, and an
+undisturbed hearing of the music, to the audience. The dramatic
+purpose of the performances is taken with entire and elaborate
+seriousness as the sole purpose of them; and the management is
+jealous for the reputation of Wagner. The commercial success
+which has followed this policy shows that the public wants summer
+theatres of the highest class. There is no reason why the
+experiment should not be tried in England. If our enthusiasm for
+Handel can support Handel Festivals, laughably dull, stupid and
+anti-Handelian as these choral monstrosities are, as well as
+annual provincial festivals on the same model, there is no
+likelihood of a Wagner Festival failing. Suppose, for instance,
+a Wagner theatre were built at Hampton Court or on Richmond Hill,
+not to say Margate pier, so that we could have a delightful
+summer evening holiday, Bayreuth fashion, passing the hours
+between the acts in the park or on the river before sunset, is
+it seriously contended that there would be any lack of visitors?
+If a little of the money that is wasted on grand stands, Eiffel
+towers, and dismal Halls by the Sea, all as much tied to brief
+annual seasons as Bayreuth, were applied in this way, the profit
+would be far more certain and the social utility prodigiously
+greater. Any English enthusiasm for Bayreuth that does not take
+the form of clamor for a Festival Playhouse in England may be set
+aside as mere pilgrimage mania.
+
+Those who go to Bayreuth never repent it, although the
+performances there are often far from delectable. The singing is
+sometimes tolerable, and sometimes abominable. Some of the
+singers are mere animated beer casks, too lazy and conceited to
+practise the self-control and physical training that is expected
+as a matter of course from an acrobat, a jockey or a pugilist.
+The women's dresses are prudish and absurd. It is true that
+Kundry no longer wears an early Victorian ball dress with
+"ruchings," and that Fresh has been provided with a quaintly
+modish copy of the flowered gown of Spring in Botticelli's famous
+picture; but the mailclad Brynhild still climbs the mountains
+with her legs carefully hidden in a long white skirt, and looks
+so exactly like Mrs. Leo Hunter as Minerva that it is quite
+impossible to feel a ray of illusion whilst looking at her.
+The ideal of womanly beauty aimed at reminds Englishmen of the
+barmaids of the seventies, when the craze for golden hair was
+at its worst. Further, whilst Wagner's stage directions are
+sometimes disregarded as unintelligently as at Covent Garden,
+an intolerably old-fashioned tradition of half rhetorical, half
+historical-pictorial attitude and gesture prevails. The most
+striking moments of the drama are conceived as tableaux vivants
+with posed models, instead of as passages of action, motion and
+life.
+
+I need hardly add that the supernatural powers of control
+attributed by credulous pilgrims to Madame Wagner do not exist.
+Prima donnas and tenors are as unmanageable at Bayreuth as
+anywhere else. Casts are capriciously changed; stage business is
+insufficiently rehearsed; the public are compelled to listen to a
+Brynhild or Siegfried of fifty when they have carefully arranged
+to see one of twenty-five, much as in any ordinary opera house.
+Even the conductors upset the arrangements occasionally. On the
+other hand, if we leave the vagaries of the stars out of account,
+we may safely expect always that in thoroughness of preparation
+of the chief work of the season, in strenuous artistic
+pretentiousness, in pious conviction that the work is of such
+enormous importance as to be worth doing well at all costs, the
+Bayreuth performances will deserve their reputation. The band is
+placed out of sight of the audience, with the more formidable
+instruments beneath the stage, so that the singers have not to
+sing THROUGH the brass. The effect is quite perfect.
+
+BAYREUTH IN ENGLAND
+
+I purposely dwell on the faults of Bayreuth in order to show that
+there is no reason in the world why as good and better
+performances of The Ring should not be given in England. Wagner's
+scores are now before the world; and neither his widow nor his
+son can pretend to handle them with greater authority than any
+artist who feels the impulse to interpret them. Nobody will ever
+know what Wagner himself thought of the artists who established
+the Bayreuth tradition: he was obviously not in a position to
+criticize them. For instance, had Rubini survived to create
+Siegmund, it is quite certain that we should not have had from
+Wagner's pen so amusing and vivid a description as we have of his
+Ottavio in the old Paris days. Wagner was under great obligations
+to the heroes and heroines of 1876; and he naturally said nothing
+to disparage their triumphs; but there is no reason to believe
+that all or indeed any of them satisfied him as Schnorr of
+Carolsfeld satisfied him as Tristan, or Schroder Devrient as
+Fidelio. It is just as likely as not that the next Schnorr or
+Schroder may arise in England. If that should actually happen,
+neither of them will need any further authority than their own
+genius and Wagner's scores for their guidance. Certainly the less
+their spontaneous impulses are sophisticated by the very stagey
+traditions which Bayreuth is handing down from the age of
+Crummles, the better.
+
+WAGNERIAN SINGERS
+
+No nation need have much difficulty in producing a race of
+Wagnerian singers. With the single exception of Handel, no
+composer has written music so well calculated to make its singers
+vocal athletes as Wagner. Abominably as the Germans sing, it is
+astonishing how they thrive physically on his leading parts. His
+secret is the Handelian secret. Instead of specializing his vocal
+parts after the manner of Verdi and Gounod for high sopranos,
+screaming tenors, and high baritones with an effective compass of
+about a fifth at the extreme tiptop of their ranges, and for
+contraltos with chest registers forced all over their compass in
+the manner of music hall singers, he employs the entire range of
+the human voice freely, demanding from everybody very nearly two
+effective octaves, so that the voice is well exercised all over,
+and one part of it relieves the other healthily and continually.
+He uses extremely high notes very sparingly, and is especially
+considerate in the matter of instrumental accompaniment. Even
+when the singer appears to have all the thunders of the full
+orchestra raging against him, a glance at the score will show
+that he is well heard, not because of any exceptionally
+stentorian power in his voice, but because Wagner meant him to
+be heard and took the greatest care not to overwhelm him. Such
+brutal opacities of accompaniment as we find in Rossini's Stabat
+or Verdi's Trovatore, where the strings play a rum-tum
+accompaniment whilst the entire wind band blares away,
+fortissimo, in unison with the unfortunate singer, are never
+to be found in Wagner's work. Even in an ordinary opera house,
+with the orchestra ranged directly between the singers and the
+audience, his instrumentation is more transparent to the human
+voice than that of any other composer since Mozart. At the
+Bayreuth Buhnenfestspielhaus, with the brass under the stage,
+it is perfectly so.
+
+On every point, then, a Wagner theatre and Wagner festivals
+are much more generally practicable than the older and more
+artificial forms of dramatic music. A presentable performance
+of The Ring is a big undertaking only in the sense in which the
+construction of a railway is a big undertaking: that is, it
+requires plenty of work and plenty of professional skill; but
+it does not, like the old operas and oratorios, require those
+extraordinary vocal gifts which only a few individuals scattered
+here and there throughout Europe are born with. Singers who could
+never execute the roulades of Semiramis, Assur, and Arsaces in
+Rossini's Semiramide, could sing the parts of Brynhild, Wotan and
+Erda without missing a note. Any Englishman can understand this
+if he considers for a moment the difference between a Cathedral
+service and an Italian opera at Covent Garden. The service is a
+much more serious matter than the opera. Yet provincial talent
+is sufficient for it, if the requisite industry and devotion are
+forthcoming. Let us admit that geniuses of European celebrity are
+indispensable at the Opera (though I know better, having seen
+lusty troopers and porters, without art or manners, accepted by
+fashion as principal tenors at that institution during the long
+interval between Mario and Jean de Reszke); but let us remember
+that Bayreuth has recruited its Parsifals from the peasantry, and
+that the artisans of a village in the Bavarian Alps are capable
+of a famous and elaborate Passion Play, and then consider whether
+England is so poor in talent that its amateurs must journey to
+the centre of Europe to witness a Wagner Festival.
+
+The truth is, there is nothing wrong with England except the
+wealth which attracts teachers of singing to her shores in
+sufficient numbers to 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.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Perfect Wagnerite, by Shaw
+
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