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

by Bernard Shaw




Preface to the First German Edition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

London, 23rd. October 1907.




PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

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

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

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

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

      London, 1901




Preface to the First Edition

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

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




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




THE PERFECT WAGNERITE




PRELIMINARY ENCOURAGEMENTS

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

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

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

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




THE RING OF THE NIBLUNGS

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




THE RHINE GOLD

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

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

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

First Scene

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

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

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

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

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

Second Scene

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

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

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

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

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

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

Third Scene

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

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

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

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

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

Fourth Scene

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

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

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

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