



Produced by Dianne Bean





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 in 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 Church-and-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 Siegfried
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 Siegfried'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
Siegfried'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 great 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 loving-kindness 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 Gotterdammerung 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 <DW19>s 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 presence 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 him 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
Lokis 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 Fafnir'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, Fafnir, 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 1850
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 limit 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 peu," 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 since 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 view 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 philosophy
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
abnegation, 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
is 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 humanity. 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
Nirvanist. 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 Project Gutenberg's The Perfect Wagnerite, by George Bernard Shaw

*** 