Bernard Shaw

The Perfect Wagnerite, Commentary on the Ring
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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.
                
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