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.