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.