The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring
by George Bernard Shaw
Hypertext Meanings and Commentaries
from the Encyclopedia of the Self
by Mark Zimmerman

Preface to the First German Edition

In reading through this German version of my book in the
Manuscript of my friend Siegfried Trebitsch, I was struck by the
inadequacy of the merely negative explanation given by me of the
irrelevance of Night Falls On The Gods to the general philosophic
scheme of The Ring. That explanation is correct as far as it
goes; but, put as I put it, it now seems to me to suggest that
the operatic character of Night Falls On The Gods was the result
of indifference or forgetfulness produced by the lapse of
twenty-five years between the first projection of the work and
its completion. Now it is clear that in whatever other ways
Wagner may have changed, he never became careless and he never
became indifferent. I have therefore inserted a new section in
which I show how the revolutionary history of Western Europe from
the Liberal explosion of 1848 to the confused attempt at a
socialist, military, and municipal administration in Paris in
1871 (that is to say, from the beginning of The Niblung's Ring by
Wagner to the long-delayed completion of Night Falls On The
Gods), demonstrated practically that the passing away of the
present order was going to be a much more complicated business
than it appears in Wagner's Siegfried. I have therefore
interpolated a new chapter which will perhaps induce some readers
of the original English text to read the book again in German.

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

My obligation to Herr Trebitsch for making me a living German
author instead of merely a translated English one is so great
that I am bound to point out that he is not responsible for my
views or Wagner's, and that it is as an artist and a man of
letters, and not as a propagandist, that he is conveying to the
German speaking peoples political criticisms which occasionally
reflect on contemporary authorities with a European reputation
for sensitiveness. And as the very sympathy which makes his
translations so excellent may be regarded with suspicion, let me
hasten to declare I am bound to Germany by the ties that hold my
nature most strongly. Not that I like the average German: nobody
does, even in his own country. But then the average man is not
popular anywhere; and as no German considers himself an average
one, each reader will, as an exceptional man, sympathize with my
dislike of the common herd. And if I cannot love the typical
modern German, I can at least pity and understand him. His worst
fault is that he cannot see that it is possible to have too much
of a good thing. Being convinced that duty, industry, education,
loyalty, patriotism and respectability are good things (and I am
magnanimous enough to admit that they are not altogether bad
things when taken in strict moderation at the right time and in
the right place), he indulges in them on all occasions
shamelessly and excessively. He commits hideous crimes when crime
is presented to him as part of his duty; his craze for work is
more ruinous than the craze for drink; when he can afford
secondary education for his sons you find three out of every five
of them with their minds lamed for life by examinations which
only a thoroughly wooden head could go through with impunity; and
if a king is patriotic and respectable (few kings are) he puts up
statues to him and exalts him above Charlemagne and Henry the
Fowler. And when he meets a man of genius, he instinctively
insults him, starves him, and, if possible, imprisons and kills
him.

Now I do not pretend to be perfect myself. Heaven knows I have to
struggle hard enough every day with what the Germans call my
higher impulses. I know too well the temptation to be moral, to
be self-sacrificing, to be loyal and patriotic, to be respectable
and well-spoken of. But I wrestle with it and--as far as human
fraility will allow--conquer it, whereas the German abandons
himself to it without scruple or reflection, and is actually
proud of his pious intemperance and self-indulgence. Nothing will
cure him of this mania. It may end in starvation, crushing
taxation, suppression of all freedom to try new social
experiments and reform obsolete institutions, in snobbery,
jobbery, idolatry, and an omnipresent tyranny in which his doctor
and his schoolmaster, his lawyer and his priest, coerce him worse
than any official or drill sergeant: no matter: it is
respectable, says the German, therefore it must be good, and
cannot be carried too far; and everybody who rebels against it
must be a rascal. Even the Social-Democrats in Germany differ
from the rest only in carrying academic orthodoxy beyond human
endurance--beyond even German endurance. I am a Socialist and a
Democrat myself, the hero of a hundred platforms, one of the
leaders of the most notable Socialist organizations in England. I
am as conspicuous in English Socialism as Bebel is in German
Socialism; but do you suppose that the German Social-Democrats
tolerate me? Not a bit of it. I have begged again and again to be
taken to the bosom of my German comrades. I have pleaded that the
Super-Proletarians of all lands should unite. I have pointed out
that the German Social-Democratic party has done nothing at its
Congresses for the last ten years except the things I told them
to do ten years before, and that its path is white with the bones
of the Socialist superstitions I and my fellow Fabians have
slain. Useless. They do not care a rap whether I am a Socialist
or not. All they want to know is; Am I orthodox? Am I correct in
my revolutionary views? Am I reverent to the revolutionary
authorities? Because I am a genuine free-thinker they look at me
as a policeman looks at a midnight prowler or as a Berlin
bourgeois looks at a suspicious foreigner. They ask "Do you
believe that Marx was omniscient and infallible; that Engels was
his prophet; that Bebel and Singer are his inspired apostles; and
that Das Kapital is the Bible?" Hastening in my innocence to
clear myself of what I regard as an accusation of credulity and
ignorance, I assure them earnestly that I know ten times as much
of economics and a hundred times as much of practical
administration as Marx did; that I knew Engels personally and
rather liked him as a witty and amiable old 1848 veteran who
despised modern Socialism; that I regard Bebel and Singer as men
of like passions with myself, but considerably less advanced; and
that I read Das Kapital in the year 1882 or thereabouts, and
still consider it one of the most important books of the
nineteenth century because of its power of changing the minds of
those who read it, in spite of its unsound capitalist economics,
its parade of quotations from books which the author had either
not read or not understood, its affectation of algebraic
formulas, and its general attempt to disguise a masterpiece of
propagandist journalism and prophetic invective as a drily
scientific treatise of the sort that used to impose on people in
1860, when any book that pretended to be scientific was accepted
as a Bible. In those days Darwin and Helmholtz were the real
fathers of the Church; and nobody would listen to religion,
poetry or rhetoric; so that even Socialism had to call itself
"scientific," and predict the date of the revolution, as if it
were a comet, by calculations founded on "historic laws."

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

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

Why, then, you may ask, do I say that I am bound to Germany by
the ties that hold my nature most strongly? Very simply because I
should have perished of despair in my youth but for the world
created for me by that great German dynasty which began with Bach
and will perhaps not end with Richard Strauss. Do not suppose for
a moment that I learnt my art from English men of letters. True,
they showed me how to handle English words; but if I had known no
more than that, my works would never have crossed the Channel. My
masters were the masters of a universal language: they were, to
go from summit to summit, Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven
and Wagner. Had the Germans understood any of these men, they
would have hanged them. Fortunately they did not understand them,
and therefore only neglected them until they were dead, after
which they learnt to dance to their tunes with an easy
conscience. For their sakes Germany stands consecrated as the
Holy Land of the capitalist age, just as Italy, for its painters'
sakes, is the Holy Land of the early unvulgarized Renascence;
France, for its builders' sakes, of the age of Christian chivalry
and faith; and Greece, for its sculptors' sakes, of the Periclean
age.

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

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

London, 23rd. October 1907.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

The preparation of a Second Edition of this booklet is quite the
most unexpected literary task that has ever been set me. When it
first appeared I was ungrateful enough to remonstrate with its
publisher for printing, as I thought, more copies than the most
sanguine Wagnerite could ever hope to sell. But the result proved
that exactly one person buys a copy on every day in the year,
including Sundays; and so, in the process of the suns, a reprint
has become necessary.

Save a few verbal slips of no importance, I have found nothing to
alter in this edition. As usual, the only protests the book has
elicited are protests, not against the opinions it expresses, but
against the facts it records. There are people who cannot bear to
be told that their hero was associated with a famous Anarchist in
a rebellion; that he was proclaimed as "wanted" by the police;
that he wrote revolutionary pamphlets; and that his picture of
Niblunghome under the reign of Alberic is a poetic vision of
unregulated industrial capitalism as it was made known in Germany
in the middle of the nineteenth century by Engels's Condition of
the Laboring classes in England. They frantically deny these
facts, and then declare that I have connected them with Wagner in
a paroxysm of senseless perversity. I am sorry I have hurt them;
and I appeal to charitable publishers to bring out a new life of
Wagner, which shall describe him as a court musician of
unquestioned fashion and orthodoxy, and a pillar of the most
exclusive Dresden circles. Such a work, would, I believe, have a
large sale, and be read with satisfaction and reassurance by many
lovers of Wagner's music.

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

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

      London, 1901

Preface to the First Edition

This book is a commentary on The Ring of the Niblungs, Wagner's
chief work. I offer it to those enthusiastic admirers of Wagner
who are unable to follow his ideas, and do not in the least
understand the dilemma of Wotan, though they are filled with
indignation at the irreverence of the Philistines who frankly
avow that they find the remarks of the god too often tedious and
nonsensical. Now to be devoted to Wagner merely as a dog is
devoted to his master, sharing a few elementary ideas, appetites
and emotions with him, and, for the rest, reverencing his
superiority without understanding it, is no true Wagnerism. Yet
nothing better is possible without a stock of ideas common to
master and disciple. Unfortunately, the ideas of the
revolutionary Wagner of 1848 are taught neither by the education
nor the experience of English and American gentlemen-amateurs,
who are almost always political mugwumps, and hardly ever
associate with revolutionists. The earlier attempts to translate
his numerous pamphlets and essays into English, resulted in
ludicrous mixtures of pure nonsense with the absurdest   
distorsions of his ideas into the ideas of the translators. We
now have a translation which is a masterpiece of interpretation
and an eminent addition to our literature; but that is not
because its author, Mr. Ashton Ellis, knows the German dictionary
better than his predecessors. He is simply in possession of
Wagner's ideas, which were to them inconceivable.

All I pretend to do in this book is to impart the ideas which are
most likely to be lacking in the conventional Englishman's
equipment. I came by them myself much as Wagner did, having
learnt more about music than about anything else in my youth, and
sown my political wild oats subsequently in the revolutionary
school. This combination is not common in England; and as I seem,
so far, to be the only publicly articulate result of it, I
venture to add my commentary to what has already been written by
musicians who are no revolutionists, and revolutionists who are
no musicians.       G. B. S.

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

THE PERFECT WAGNERITE

PRELIMINARY ENCOURAGEMENTS

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

First, The Ring, with all its gods and giants and dwarfs, its
water-maidens and Valkyries, its wishing-cap, magic ring,
enchanted sword, and miraculous treasure, is a drama of today,
and not of a remote and fabulous antiquity. It could not have
been written before the second half of the nineteenth century,
because it deals with events which were only then consummating
themselves. Unless the spectator recognizes in it an image of the
life he is himself fighting his way through, it must needs appear
to him a monstrous development of the Christmas pantomimes, spun
out here and there into intolerable lengths of dull conversation
by the principal baritone. Fortunately, even from this point of
view, The Ring is full of extraordinarily attractive episodes,
both orchestral and dramatic. The nature music alone--music of
river and rainbow, fire and forest--is enough to bribe people
with any love of the country in them to endure the passages of
political philosophy in the sure hope of a prettier page to come.
Everybody, too, can enjoy the love music, the hammer and anvil
music, the clumping of the giants, the tune of the young
woodsman's horn, the trilling of the bird, the dragon music and
nightmare music and thunder and lightning music, the profusion of
simple melody, the sensuous charm of the orchestration: in short,
the vast extent of common ground between The Ring and the
ordinary music we use for play and pleasure. Hence it is that the
four separate music-plays of which it is built have become
popular throughout Europe as operas. We shall presently see that
one of them, Night Falls On The Gods, actually is an opera.

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

My second encouragement is addressed to modest citizens who may
suppose themselves to be disqualified from enjoying The Ring by
their technical ignorance of music. They may dismiss all such
misgivings speedily and confidently. If the sound of music has
any power to move them, they will find that Wagner exacts nothing
further. There is not a single bar of "classical music" in The
Ring--not a note in it that has any other point than the single
direct point of giving musical expression to the drama. In
classical music there are, as the analytical programs tell us,
first subjects and second subjects, free fantasias,
recapitulations, and codas; there are fugues, with
counter-subjects, strettos, and pedal points; there are
passacaglias on ground basses, canons ad hypodiapente, and other
ingenuities, which have, after all, stood or fallen by their
prettiness as much as the simplest folk-tune. Wagner is never
driving at anything of this sort any more than Shakespeare in his
plays is driving at such ingenuities of verse-making as sonnets,
triolets, and the like. And this is why he is so easy for the
natural musician who has had no academic teaching. The
professors, when Wagner's music is played to them, exclaim at
once "What is this? Is it aria, or recitative? Is there no
cabaletta to it--not even a full close? Why was that discord not
prepared; and why does he not resolve it correctly? How dare he
indulge in those scandalous and illicit transitions into a key
that has not one note in common with the key he has just left?
Listen to those false relations! What does he want with six drums
and eight horns when Mozart worked miracles with two of each? The
man is no musician." The layman neither knows nor cares about any
of these things. If Wagner were to turn aside from his
straightforward dramatic purpose to propitiate the professors
with correct exercises in sonata form, his music would at once
become unintelligible to the unsophisticated spectator, upon whom
the familiar and dreaded "classical" sensation would descend like
the influenza. Nothing of the kind need be dreaded. The
unskilled, untaught musician may approach Wagner boldly; for
there is no possibility of a misunderstanding between them: The
Ring music is perfectly single and simple. It is the adept
musician of the old school who has everything to unlearn: and him
I leave, unpitied, to his fate.

THE RING OF THE NIBLUNGS

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

THE RHINE GOLD

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

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

In due time the gold of Klondyke will find its way to the great
cities of the world. But the old dilemma will keep continually
reproducing itself. The man who will turn his back on love, and
upon all the fruitful it, and will set himself single-heartedly
to gather gold in an exultant dream of wielding its Plutonic
powers, will find the treasure yielding quickly to his touch. But
few men will make this sacrifice voluntarily. Not until the
Plutonic power is so strongly set up that the higher human
impulses are suppressed as rebellious, and even the mere
appetites are denied, starved, and insulted when they cannot
purchase their satisfaction with gold, are the energetic spirits
driven to build their lives upon riches. How inevitable that
course has become to us is plain enough to those who have the
power of understanding what they see as they look at the
plutocratic societies of our modern capitals.

First Scene

Here, then, is the subject of the first scene of The Rhine Gold.
As you sit waiting for the curtain to rise, you suddenly catch
the booming ground-tone of a mighty river. It becomes plainer,
clearer: you get nearer to the surface, and catch the green light
and the flights of bubbles. Then the curtain goes up and you see
what you heard--the depths of the Rhine, with three strange fairy
fishes, half water-maidens, singing and enjoying themselves
exuberantly. They are not singing barcarolles or ballads about
the Lorely and her fated lovers, but simply trolling any nonsense
that comes into their heads in time to the dancing of the water
and the rhythm of their swimming. It is the golden age; and the
attraction of this spot for the Rhine maidens is a lump of the
Rhine gold, which they value, in an entirely uncommercial way,
for its bodily beauty and splendor. Just at present it is
eclipsed, because the sun is not striking down through the
water.

Presently there comes a poor devil of a dwarf stealing along the
slippery rocks of the river bed, a creature with energy enough to
make him strong of body and fierce of passion, but with a brutish
narrowness of intelligence and selfishness of imagination: too
stupid to see that his own welfare can only be compassed as part
of the welfare of the world, too full of brute force not to grab
vigorously at his own gain. Such dwarfs are quite common in
London. He comes now with a fruitful impulse in him, in search of
what he lacks in himself, beauty, lightness of heart,
imagination, music. The Rhine maidens, representing all these to
him, fill him with hope and longing; and he never considers that
he has nothing to offer that they could possibly desire, being
by natural limitation incapable of seeing anything from anyone
else's point of view. With perfect simplicity, he offers himself
as a sweetheart to them. But they are thoughtless, elemental,
only half real things, much like modern young ladies. That the
poor dwarf is repulsive to their sense of physical beauty and
their romantic conception of heroism, that he is ugly and
awkward, greedy and ridiculous, disposes for them of his claim to
live and love. They mock him atrociously, pretending to fall in
love with him at first sight, and then slipping away and making
game of him, heaping ridicule and disgust on the poor wretch
until he is beside himself with mortification and rage. They
forget him when the water begins to glitter in the sun, and the
gold to reflect its glory. They break into ecstatic worship of
their treasure; and though they know the parable of Klondyke
quite well, they have no fear that the gold will be wrenched away
by the dwarf, since it will yield to no one who has not forsworn
love for it, and it is in pursuit of love that he has come to
them. They forget that they have poisoned that desire in him by
their mockery and denial of it, and that he now knows that life
will give him nothing that he cannot wrest from it by the
Plutonic power. It is just as if some poor, rough, vulgar, coarse
fellow were to offer to take his part in aristocratic society,
and be snubbed into the knowledge that only as a millionaire
could he ever hope to bring that society to his feet and buy
himself a beautiful and refined wife. His choice is forced on
him. He forswears love as thousands of us forswear it every day;
and in a moment the gold is in his grasp, and he disappears in
the depths, leaving the water-fairies vainly screaming "Stop
thief!" whilst the river seems to plunge into darkness and sink
from us as we rise to the cloud regions above.

And now, what forces are there in the world to resist Alberic,
our dwarf, in his new character of sworn plutocrat? He is soon at
work wielding the power of the gold. For his gain, hordes of his
fellow-creatures are thenceforth condemned to slave miserably,
overground and underground, lashed to their work by the invisible
whip of starvation. They never see him, any more than the victims
of our "dangerous trades" ever see the shareholders whose power
is nevertheless everywhere, driving them to destruction. The very
wealth they create with their labor becomes an additional force
to impoverish them; for as fast as they make it it slips from
their hands into the hands of their master, and makes him
mightier than ever. You can see the process for yourself in every
civilized country today, where millions of people toil in want
and disease to heap up more wealth for our Alberics, laying up
nothing for themselves, except sometimes horrible and agonizing
disease and the certainty of premature death. All this part of
the story is frightfully real, frightfully present, frightfully
modern; and its effects on our social life are so ghastly and
ruinous that we no longer know enough of happiness to be
discomposed by it. It is only the poet, with his vision of what
life might be, to whom these things are unendurable. If we were a
race of poets we would make an end of them before the end of this
miserable century. Being a race of moral dwarfs instead, we think
them highly respectable, comfortable and proper, and allow them
to breed and multiply their evil in all directions. If there were
no higher power in the world to work against Alberic, the end of
it would be utter destruction.

Such a force there is, however; and it is called Godhead. The
mysterious thing we call life organizes itself into all living
shapes, bird, beast, beetle and fish, rising to the human marvel
in cunning dwarfs and in laborious muscular giants, capable,
these last, of enduring toil, willing to buy love and life, not
with suicidal curses and renunciations, but with patient manual
drudgery in the service of higher powers. And these higher powers
are called into existence by the same selforganization of life
still more wonderfully into rare persons who may by comparison be
called gods, creatures capable of thought, whose aims extend far
beyond the satisfaction of their bodily appetites and personal
affections, since they perceive that it is only by the
establishment of a social order founded on common bonds of moral
faith that the world can rise from mere savagery. But how is this
order to be set up by Godhead in a world of stupid giants, since
these thoughtless ones pursue only their narrower personal ends
and can by no means understand the aims of a god? Godhead, face
to face with Stupidity, must compromise. Unable to enforce on the
world the pure law of thought, it must resort to a mechanical law
of commandments to be enforced by brute punishments and the
destruction of the disobedient. And however carefully these laws
are framed to represent the highest thoughts of the framers at
the moment of their promulgation, before a day has elapsed that
thought has grown and widened by the ceaseless evolution of life;
and lo! yesterday's law already fallen out with today's thought.
Yet if the high givers of that law themselves set the example of
breaking it before it is a week old, they destroy all its
authority with their subjects, and so break the weapon they have
forged to rule them for their own good. They must therefore
maintain at all costs the sanctity of the law, even when it has
ceased to represent their thought; so that at last they get
entangled in a network of ordinances which they no longer believe
in, and yet have made so sacred by custom and so terrible by
punishment, that they cannot themselves escape from them. Thus
Godhead's resort to law finally costs it half its integrity--as
if a spiritual king, to gain temporal power, had plucked out one
of his eyes--and it finally begins secretly to long for the
advent of some power higher than itself which will destroy its
artificial empire of law, and establish a true republic of free
thought.

This is by no means the only difficulty in the dominion of Law.
The brute force for its execution must be purchased; and the mass
of its subjects must be persuaded to respect the authority which
employs this force. But how is such respect to be implanted in
them if they are unable to comprehend the thought of the
lawgiver? Clearly, only by associating the legislative power with
such displays of splendor and majesty as will impress their
senses and awe their imaginations. The god turned lawgiver, in
short, must be crowned Pontiff and King. Since he cannot be known
to the common folk as their superior in wisdom, he must be known
to them as their superior in riches, as the dweller in castles,
the wearer of gold and purple, the eater of mighty feasts, the
commander of armies, and the wielder of powers of life and death,
of salvation and damnation after death. Something may be done in
this way without corruption whilst the golden age still endures.
Your gods may not prevail with the dwarfs; but they may go to
these honest giants who will give a day's work for a day's pay,
and induce them to build for Godhead a mighty fortress, complete
with hall and chapel, tower and bell, for the sake of the
homesteads that will grow up in security round that
church-castle. This only, however, whilst the golden age lasts.
The moment the Plutonic power is let loose, and the loveless
Alberic comes into the field with his corrupting millions, the
gods are face to face with destruction; since Alberic, able with
invisible hunger-whip to force the labor of the dwarfs and to buy
the services of the giants, can outshine all the temporal shows
and splendors of the golden age, and make himself master of the
world, unless the gods, with their bigger brains, can capture his
gold. This, the dilemma of the Church today, is the situation
created by the exploit of Alberic in the depths of the Rhine.

Second Scene

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

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

The giants come soon enough; and Freia flies to Wotan for
protection against them. Their purposes are quite honest; and
they have no doubt of the god's faith. There stands their part of
the contract fulfilled, stone on stone, port and pinnacle all
faithfully finished from Wotan's design by their mighty labor.
They have come undoubtingly for their agreed wage. Then there
happens what is to them an incredible, inconceivable thing. The
god begins to shuffle. There are no moments in life more tragic
than those in which the humble common man, the manual worker,
leaving with implicit trust all high affairs to his betters, and
reverencing them wholly as worthy of that trust, even to the
extent of accepting as his rightful function the saving of them
from all roughening and coarsening drudgeries, first discovers
that they are corrupt, greedy, unjust and treacherous. The shock
drives a ray of prophetic light into one giant's mind, and gives
him a momentary eloquence. In that moment he rises above his
stupid gianthood, and earnestly warns the Son of Light that all
his power and eminence of priesthood, godhood, and kingship must
stand or fall with the unbearable cold greatness of the
incorruptible law-giver. But Wotan, whose assumed character of
law-giver is altogether false to his real passionate nature,
despises the rebuke; and the giant's ray of insight is lost in
the murk of his virtuous indignation.

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

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

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

Third Scene

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

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

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

When Wotan and Loki arrive, Loki claims Alberic as an old
acquaintance. But the dwarf has no faith in these civil
strangers: Greed instinctively mistrusts Intellect, even in the
garb of Poetry and the company of Godhead, whilst envying the
brilliancy of the one and the dignity of the other. Alberic
breaks out at them with a terrible boast of the power now within
his grasp. He paints for them the world as it will be when his
dominion over it is complete, when the soft airs and green mosses
of its valleys shall be changed into smoke, slag, and filth; when
slavery, disease, and squalor, soothed by drunkenness and
mastered by the policeman's baton, shall become the foundation of
society; and when nothing shall escape ruin except such pretty
places and pretty women as he may like to buy for the slaking of
his own lusts. In that kingdom of evil he sees that there will be
no power but his own. These gods, with their moralities and
legalities and intellectual subtlety, will go under and be
starved out of existence. He bids Wotan and Loki beware of it;
and his "Hab' Acht!" is hoarse, horrible, and sinister. Wotan
is revolted to the very depths of his being: he cannot stifle the
execration that bursts from him. But Loki is unaffected: he has
no moral passion: indignation is as absurd to him as enthusiasm.
He finds it exquisitely amusing--having a touch of the comic
spirit in him--that the dwarf, in stirring up the moral fervor of
Wotan, has removed his last moral scruple about becoming a thief.
Wotan will now rob the dwarf without remorse; for is it not
positively his highest duty to take this power out of such evil
hands and use it himself in the interests of Godhead? On the
loftiest moral grounds, he lets Loki do his worst.

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

Fourth Scene

There, to pay for his freedom, he has to summon his slaves from
the depths to place all the treasure they have heaped up for him
at the feet of Wotan. Then he demands his liberty; but Wotan must
have the ring as well. And here the dwarf, like the giant before
him, feels the very foundations of the world shake beneath him at
the discovery of his own base cupidity in a higher power. That
evil should, in its loveless desperation, create malign powers
which Godhead could not create, seems but natural justice to him.
But that Godhead should steal those malign powers from evil, and
wield them itself, is a monstrous perversion; and his appeal to
Wotan to forego it is almost terrible in its conviction of wrong.
It is of no avail. Wotan falls back again on virtuous
indignation. He reminds Alberic that he stole the gold from the
Rhine maidens, and takes the attitude of the just judge
compelling a restitution of stolen goods. Alberic knowing
perfectly well that the judge is taking the goods to put them m
his own pocket, has the ring torn from his finger, and is once
more as poor as he was when he came slipping and stumbling among
the slimy rocks in the bed of the Rhine.

This is the way of the world. In older times, when the Christian
laborer was drained dry by the knightly spendthrift, and the
spendthrift was drained by the Jewish usurer, Church and State,
religion and law, seized on the Jew and drained him as a
Christian duty. When the forces of lovelessness and greed had
built up our own sordid capitalist systems, driven by invisible
proprietorship, robbing the poor, defacing the earth, and forcing
themselves as a universal curse even on the generous and humane,
then religion and law and intellect, which would never themselves
have discovered such systems, their natural bent being towards
welfare, economy, and life instead of towards corruption, waste,
and death, nevertheless did not scruple to seize by fraud and
force these powers of evil on presence of using them for good.
And it inevitably happens that when the Church, the Law, and all
the Talents have made common cause to rob the people, the Church
is far more vitally harmed by that unfaithfulness to itself than
its more mechanical confederates; so that finally they turn on
their discredited ally and rob the Church, with the cheerful
co-operation of Loki, as in France and Italy for instance.

The twin giants come back with their hostage, in whose presence
Godhead blooms again. The gold is ready for them; but now that
the moment has come for parting with Freia the gold
does not seem so tempting; and they are sorely loth to let her
go. Not unless there is gold enough to utterly hide her from
them--not until the heap has grown so that they can see nothing
but gold--until money has come between them and every human
feeling, will they part with her. There is not gold enough to
accomplish this: however cunningly Loki spreads it, the glint of
Freia's hair is still visible to Giant Fafnir, and the magic
helmet must go on the heap to shut it out. Even then Fafnir's
brother, Fasolt, can catch a beam from her eye through a chink,
and is rendered incapable thereby of forswearing her. There is
nothing to stop that chink but the ring; and Wotan is as greedily
bent on keeping that as Alberic himself was; nor can the other
gods persuade him that Freia is worth it, since for the highest
god, love is not the highest good, but only the universal delight
that bribes all living things to travail with renewed life. Life
itself, with its accomplished marvels and its infinite
potentialities, is the only force that Godhead can worship. Wotan
does not yield until he is reached by the voice of the fruitful
earth that before he or the dwarfs or the giants or the Law or
the Lie or any of these things were, had the seed of them all in
her bosom, and the seed perhaps of something higher even than
himself, that shall one day supersede him and cut the tangles and
alliances and compromises that already have cost him one of his
eyes. When Erda, the First Mother of life, rises from her
sleeping-place in the heart of the earth, and warns him to yield
the ring, he obeys her; the ring is added to the heap of gold;
and all sense of Freia is cut off from the giants.

But now what Law is left to these two poor stupid laborers
whereby one shall yield to the other any of the treasure for
which they have each paid the whole price in surrendering Freia?
They look by mere habit to the god to judge for them; but he,
with his heart stirring towards higher forces than himself, turns
with disgust from these lower forces. They settle it as two
wolves might; and Fafnir batters his brother dead with his staff.
It is a horrible thing to see and hear, to anyone who knows how
much blood has been shed in the world in just that way by its
brutalized toilers, honest fellows enough until their betters
betrayed them. Fafnir goes off with his booty. It is quite
useless to him. He has neither the cunning nor the ambition to
establish the Plutonic empire with it. Merely to prevent others
from getting it is the only purpose it brings him. He piles it in
a cave; transforms himself into a dragon by the helmet; and
devotes his life to guarding it, as much a slave to it as a
jailor is to his prisoner. He had much better have thrown it all
back into the Rhine and transformed himself into the
shortest-lived animal that enjoys at least a brief run in the
sunshine. His case, however, is far too common to be surprising.
The world is overstocked with persons who sacrifice all their
affections, and madly trample and batter down their fellows to
obtain riches of which, when they get them, they are unable to
make the smallest use, and to which they become the most
miserable slaves.

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

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

WAGNER AS REVOLUTIONIST

Before leaving this explanation of The Rhine Gold, I must have a
word or two about it with the reader. It is the least popular of
the sections of The Ring. The reason is that its dramatic moments
lie quite outside the consciousness of people whose joys and
sorrows are all domestic and personal, and whose religions and
political ideas are purely conventional and superstitious. To
them it is a struggle between half a dozen fairytale personages
for a ring, involving hours of scolding and cheating, and one
long scene in a dark gruesome mine, with gloomy, ugly music, and
not a glimpse of a handsome young man or pretty woman. Only those
of wider consciousness can follow it breathlessly, seeing in it
the whole tragedy of human history and the whole horror of the
dilemmas from which the world is shrinking today. At Bayreuth I
have seen a party of English tourists, after enduring agonies of
boredom from Alberic, rise in the middle of the third scene, and
almost force their way out of the dark theatre into the sunlit
pine-wood without. And I have seen people who were deeply
affected by the scene driven almost beside themselves by this
disturbance. But it was a very natural thing for the unfortunate
tourists to do, since in this Rhine Gold prologue there is no
interval between the acts for escape. Roughly speaking, people
who have no general ideas, no touch of the concern of the
philosopher and statesman for the race, cannot enjoy The Rhine
Gold as a drama. They may find compensations in some exceedingly
pretty music, at times even grand and glorious, which will enable
them to escape occasionally from the struggle between Alberic and
Wotan; but if their capacity for music should be as limited as
their comprehension of the world, they had better stay away.

And now, attentive Reader, we have reached the point at which
some foolish person is sure to interrupt us by declaring that The
Rhine Gold is what they call "a work of art" pure and simple, and
that Wagner never dreamt of shareholders, tall hats, whitelead
factories, and industrial and political questions looked at from
the socialistic and humanitarian points of view. We need not
discuss these impertinences: it is easier to silence them with
the facts of Wagner's life. In 1843 he obtained the position of
conductor of the Opera at Dresden at a salary of L225 a year,
with a pension. This was a first-rate permanent appointment in
the service of the Saxon State, carrying an assured professional
position and livelihood with it In 1848, the year of revolutions,
the discontented middle class, unable to rouse the
Churchand-State governments of the day from their bondage to
custom, caste, and law by appeals to morality or constitutional
agitation for Liberal reforms, made common cause with the
starving wage-working class, and resorted to armed rebellion,
which reached Dresden in 1849. Had Wagner been the mere musical
epicure and political mugwump that the term "artist" seems to
suggest to so many critics and amateurs--that is, a creature in
their own lazy likeness--he need have taken no more part in the
political struggles of his day than Bishop took in the English
Reform agitation of 1832, or Sterndale Bennett in the Chartist or
Free Trade movements. What he did do was first to make a
desperate appeal to the King to cast off his bonds and answer the
need of the time by taking true Kingship on himself and leading
his people to the redress of their intolerable wrongs (fancy the
poor monarch's feelings!), and then, when the crash came, to take
his side with the right and the poor against the rich and the
wrong. When the insurrection was defeated, three leaders of it
were especially marked down for vengeance: August Roeckel, an old
friend of Wagner's to whom he wrote a well-known series of
letters; Michael Bakoonin, afterwards a famous apostle of
revolutionary Anarchism; and Wagner himself. Wagner escaped to
Switzerland: Roeckel and Bakoonin suffered long terms of
imprisonment. Wagner was of course utterly ruined, pecuniarily
and socially (to his own intense relief and satisfaction); and
his exile lasted twelve years. His first idea was to get his
Tannhauser produced in Paris. With the notion of explaining
himself to the Parisians he wrote a pamphlet entitled Art and
Revolution, a glance through which will show how thoroughly the
socialistic side of the revolution had his sympathy, and how
completely he had got free from the influence of the established
Churches of his day. For three years he kept pouring forth
pamphlets--some of them elaborate treatises in size and
intellectual rank, but still essentially the pamphlets and
manifestoes of a born agitator--on social evolution, religion,
life, art and the influence of riches. In 1853 the poem of The
Ring was privately printed; and in 1854, five years after the
Dresden insurrection, The Rhine Gold score was completed to the
last drum tap.

These facts are on official record in Germany, where the
proclamation summing up Wagner as "a politically dangerous
person" may be consulted to this day. The pamphlets are now
accessible to English readers in the translation of Mr. Ashton
Ellis. This being so, any person who, having perhaps heard that I
am a Socialist, attempts to persuade you that my interpretation
of The Rhine Gold is only "my socialism" read into the works of a
dilettantist who borrowed an idle tale from an old saga to make
an opera book with, may safely be dismissed from your
consideration as an ignoramus.

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

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

Now it is quite clear--though you have perhaps never thought of
it--that if the next generation of Englishmen consisted wholly of
Julius Caesars, all our political, ecclesiastical, and moral
institutions would vanish, and the less perishable of their
appurtenances be classed with Stonehenge and the cromlechs and
round towers as inexplicable relics of a bygone social order.
Julius Caesars would no more trouble themselves about such
contrivances as our codes and churches than a fellow of the Royal
Society will touch his hat to the squire and listen to the
village curate's sermons. This is precisely what must happen some
day if life continues thrusting towards higher and higher
organization as it has hitherto done. As most of our English
professional men are to Australian bushmen, so, we must suppose,
will the average man of some future day be to Julius Caesar. Let
any man of middle age, pondering this prospect consider what has
happened within a single generation to the articles of faith his
father regarded as eternal nay, to the very scepticisms and
blasphemies of his youth (Bishop Colenso's criticism of the
Pentateuch, for example!); and he will begin to realize how much
of our barbarous Theology and Law the man of the future will do
without. Bakoonin, the Dresden revolutionary leader with whom
Wagner went out in 1849, put forward later on a program, often
quoted with foolish horror, for the abolition of all
institutions, religious, political, juridical, financial, legal,
academic, and so on, so as to leave the will of man free to find
its own way. All the loftiest spirits of that time were burning
to raise Man up, to give him self-respect, to shake him out of
his habit of grovelling before the ideals created by his own
imagination, of attributmg the good that sprang from the
ceaseless energy of the life within himself to some superior
power in the clouds, and of making a fetish of self-sacrifice to
justify his own cowardice.

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

In the midst of all these far-reaching ideas, it is amusing to
find Wagner still full of his ingrained theatrical
professionalism, and introducing effects which now seem
old-fashioned and stagey with as much energy and earnestness as
if they were his loftiest inspirations. When Wotan wrests the
ring from Alberic, the dwarf delivers a lurid and bloodcurdling
stage curse, calling down on its every future possessor care,
fear, and death. The musical phrase accompanying this outburst
was a veritable harmonic and melodic bogey to mid-century ears,
though time has now robbed it of its terrors. It sounds again
when Fafnir slays Fasolt, and on every subsequent occasion when
the ring brings death to its holder. This episode must justify
itself purely as a piece of stage sensationalism. On deeper
ground it is superfluous and confusing, as the ruin to which the
pursuit of riches leads needs no curse to explain it; nor is
there any sense in investing Alberic with providential powers in
the matter.

THE VALKYRIES

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

Wotan is still ruling the world in glory from his giantbuilt
castle with his wife Fricka. But he has no security for the
continuance of his reign, since Alberic may at any moment
contrive to recover the ring, the full power of which he can
wield because he has forsworn love. Such forswearing is not
possible to Wotan: love, though not his highest need, is a higher
than gold: otherwise he would be no god. Besides, as we have
seen, his power has been established in the world by and as a
system of laws enforced by penalties. These he must consent to be
bound by himself; for a god who broke his own laws would betray
the fact that legality and conformity are not the highest rule of
conduct--a discovery fatal to his supremacy as Pontiff and
Lawgiver. Hence "he may not wrest the ring unlawfully from
Fafnir, even if he could bring himself to forswear love.  

In this insecurity he has hit on the idea of forming a heroic
bodyguard. He has trained his love children as war-maidens
(Valkyries) whose duty it is to sweep through battle-fields and
bear away to Valhalla the souls of the bravest who fall there.
Thus reinforced by a host of warriors, he has thoroughly
indoctrinated them, Loki helping him as dialectician-in-chief,
with the conventional system of law and duty, supernatural
religion and self-sacrificing idealism, which they believe to be
the essence of his godhood, but which is really only the
machinery of the love of necessary power which is his mortal
weakness. This process secures their fanatical devotion to his
system of government, but he knows perfectly well that such
systems, in spite of their moral pretensions, serve selfish and
ambitious tyrants better than benevolent despots, and that, if
once Alberic gets the ring back, he will easily out-Valhalla
Valhalla, if not buy it over as a going concern. The only chance
of permanent security, then, is the appearance in the world of a
hero who, without any illicit prompting from Wotan, will destroy
Alberic and wrest the ring from Fafnir. There will then, he
believes, be no further cause for anxiety, since he does not yet
conceive Heroism as a force hostile to Godhead. In his longing
for a rescuer, it does not occur to him that when the Hero comes,
his first exploit must be to sweep the gods and their ordinances
from the path of the heroic will.

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

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

The First Act

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

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

The unlucky stranger, left brooding by the hearth, has nothing to
console himself with but an old promise of his father's that he
shall find a weapon to his hand when he most needs one. The last
flicker of the dying fire strikes on the golden hilt of the sword
that sticks in the tree; but he does not see it; and the embers
sink into blackness. Then the woman returns. Hunding is safely
asleep: she has drugged him. She tells the story of the one-eyed
man who appeared at her forced marriage, and of the sword. She
has always felt, she says, that her miseries will end in the arms
of the hero who shall succeed in drawing it forth. The stranger,
diffident as he is about his luck, has no misgivings as to his
strength and destiny. He gives her his affection at once, and
abandons himself to the charm of the night and the season; for it
is the beginning of Spring. They soon learn from their
confidences that she is his stolen twin-sister. He is transported
to find that the heroic race of the Volsungs need neither perish
nor be corrupted by a lower strain. Hailing the sword by the name
of Nothung (or Needed), he plucks it from the tree as her
bride-gift, and then, crying "Both bride and sister be of thy
brother; and blossom the blood of the Volsungs!" clasps her as
the mate the Spring has brought him.

The Second Act

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

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

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

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

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

The Third Act

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

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

The allegory here is happily not so glaringly obvious to the
younger generations of our educated classes as it was forty years
ago. In those days, any child who expressed a doubt as to the
absolute truth of the Church's teaching, even to the extent of
asking why Joshua told the sun to stand still instead of telling
the earth to cease turning, or of pointing out that a whale's
throat would hardly have been large enough to swallow Jonah, was
unhesitatingly told that if it harboured such doubts it would
spend all eternity after its death in horrible torments in a lake
of burning brimstone. It is difficult to write or read this
nowadays without laughing; yet no doubt millions of ignorant and
credulous people are still teaching their children that. When
Wagner himself was a little child, the fact that hell was a
fiction devised for the intimidation and subjection of the
masses, was a well-kept secret of the thinking and governing
classes. At that time the fires of Loki were a very real terror
to all except persons of exceptional force of character and
intrepidity of thought. Even thirty years after Wagner had
printed the verses of The Ring for private circulation, we find
him excusing himself from perfectly explicit denial of current
superstitions, by reminding his readers that it would expose him
to prosecution. In England, so many of our respectable voters are
still grovelling in a gloomy devil worship, of which the fires of
Loki are the main bulwark, that no Government has yet had the
conscience or the courage to repeal our monstrous laws against
"blasphemy."

SIEGFRIED

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

His pains are too well rewarded for his comfort. The boy
Siegfried, having no god to instruct him in the art of
unhappiness, inherits none of his father's ill luck, and all his
father's hardihood. The fear against which Siegmund set his face
like flint, and the woe which he wore down, are unknown to the
son. The father was faithful and grateful: the son knows no law
but his own humor; detests the ugly dwarf ho has nursed him;
chafes furiously under his claims some return for his tender
care; and is, in short, a totally unmoral person, a born
anarchist, the ideal of Bakoonin, an anticipation of the
"overman" of Nietzsche. He is enormously strong, full of life and
fun, dangerous and destructive to what he dislikes, and
affectionate to what he likes; so that it is fortunate that his
likes and dislikes are sane and healthy. Altogether an
inspiriting young forester, a son of the morning, in whom the
heroic race has come out into the sunshine from the clouds of his
grandfather's majestic entanglements with law, and the night of
his father's tragic struggle with it.

The First Act

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

Mimmy falls back on his stock defence: a string of maudlin
reminders of the care with which he has nursed the little boy
into manhood. Siegfried replies candidly that the strangest thing
about all this care is that instead of making him grateful, it
inspires him with a lively desire to wring the dwarf's neck.
Only, he admits that he always comes back to his Mimmy, though he
loathes him more than any living thing in the forest. On this
admission the dwarf attempts to build a theory of filial
instinct. He explains that he is Siegfried's father, and that
this is why Siegfried cannot do without him. But Siegfried has
learned from his forest companions, the birds and foxes and
wolves, that mothers as well as fathers go to the making of
children. Mimmy, on the desperate ground that man is neither bird
nor fox, declares that he is Siegfried's father and mother both.
He is promptly denounced as a filthy liar, because the birds and
foxes are exactly like their parents, whereas Siegfried, having
often watched his own image in the water, can testify that he is
no more like Mimmy than a toad is like a trout. Then, to place
the conversation on a plane of entire frankness, he throttles
Mimmy until he is speechless. When the dwarf recovers, he is so
daunted that he tells Siegfried the truth about his birth, and
for testimony thereof produces the pieces of the sword that broke
upon Wotan's spear. Siegfried instantly orders him to repair the
sword on pain of an unmerciful thrashing, and rushes off into the
forest, rejoicing in the discovery that he is no kin of Mimmy's,
and need have no more to do with him when the sword is mended.

Poor Mimmy is now in a worse plight than ever; for he has long
ago found that the sword utterly defies his skill: the steel will
yield neither to his hammer nor to his furnace. Just then there
walks into his cave a Wanderer, in a blue mantle, spear in hand,
with one eye concealed by the brim of his wide hat. Mimmy, not by
nature hospitable, tries to drive him away; but the Wanderer
announces himself as a wise man, who can tell his host, in
emergency, what it most concerns him to know. Mimmy, taking this
offer in high dudgeon, because it implies that his visitor's wits
are better than his own, offers to tell the wise one something
that HE does not know: to wit, the way to the door. The
imperturbable Wanderer's reply is to sit down and challenge the
dwarf to a trial of wit. He wagers his head against Mimmy's that
he will answer any three questions the dwarf can put to him.

Now here were Mimmy's opportunity, had he only the wit to ask
what he wants to know, instead of pretending to know everything
already. It is above all things needful to him at this moment to
find out how that sword can be mended; and there has just dropped
in upon him in his need the one person who can tell him. In such
circumstances a wise man would hasten to show to his visitor his
three deepest ignorances, and ask him to dispel them. The dwarf,
being a crafty fool, desiring only to detect ignorance in his
guest, asks him for information on the three points on which he
is proudest of being thoroughly well instructed himself. His
three questions are, Who dwell under the earth? Who dwell on the
earth? and Who