Wagner, however, was not the man to allow his grip of a great
philosophic theme to slacken even in twenty-five years if the theme
still held good as a theory of actual life. If the history of Germany
from 1849 to 1876 had been the history of Siegfried and Wotan transposed
into the key of actual life Night Falls On The Gods would have been the
logical consummation of Das Rheingold and The Valkyrie instead of the
operatic anachronism it actually is.
But, as a matter of fact, Siegfried did not succeed and Bismarck did.
Roeckel was a prisoner whose imprisonment made no difference; Bakoonin
broke up, not Walhall, but the International, which ended in an
undignified quarrel between him and Karl Marx. The Siegfrieds of 1848
were hopeless political failures, whereas the Wotans and Alberics and
Lokis were conspicuous political successes. Even the Mimes held their own
as against Siegfried. With the single exception of Ferdinand Lassalle,
there was no revolutionary leader who was not an obvious impossibilist
in practical politics; and Lassalle got himself killed in a romantic
and quite indefensible duel after wrecking his health in a titanic
oratorical campaign which convinced him that the great majority of the
working classes were not ready to join him, and that the minority who
were ready did not understand him. The International, founded in 1861
by Karl Marx in London, and mistaken for several years by nervous
newspapers for a red spectre, was really only a turnip ghost. It
achieved some beginnings of International Trade Unionism by inducing
English workmen to send money to support strikes on the continent, and
recalling English workers who had been taken across the North Sea to
defeat such strikes; but on its revolutionary socialistic side it was a
romantic figment. The suppression of the Paris Commune, one of the
most tragic examples in history of the pitilessness with which capable
practical administrators and soldiers are forced by the pressure of
facts to destroy romantic amateurs and theatrical dreamers, made an end
of melodramatic Socialism. It was as easy for Marx to hold up Thiers
as the most execrable of living scoundrels and to put upon Gallifet the
brand that still makes him impossible in French politics as it was for
Victor Hugo to bombard Napoleon III from his paper battery in Jersey.
It was also easy to hold up Felix Pyat and Delescluze as men of much
loftier ideals than Thiers and Gallifet; but the one fact that could not
be denied was that when it came to actual shooting, it was Gallifet who
got Delescluze shot and not Delescluze who got Gallifet shot, and that
when it came to administering the affairs of France, Thiers could in
one way or another get it done, whilst Pyat could neither do it nor stop
talking and allow somebody else to do it. True, the penalty of following
Thiers was to be exploited by the landlord and capitalist; but then the
penalty of following Pyat was to get shot like a mad dog, or at best get
sent to New Caledonia, quite unnecessarily and uselessly.
To put it in terms of Wagner's allegory, Alberic had got the ring back
again and was marrying into the best Walhall families with it. He had
thought better of his old threat to dethrone Wotan and Loki. He had
found that Nibelheim was a very gloomy place and that if he wanted to
live handsomely and safely, he must not only allow Wotan and Loki to
organize society for him, but pay them very handsomely for doing it. He
wanted splendor, military glory, loyalty, enthusiasm, and patriotism;
and his greed and gluttony were wholly unable to create them, whereas
Wotan and Loki carried them all to a triumphant climax in Germany in
1871, when Wagner himself celebrated the event with his Kaisermarsch,
which sounded much more convincing than the Marseillaise or the
Carmagnole.
How, after the Kaisermarsch, could Wagner go back to his idealization of
Siegfried in 1853? How could he believe seriously in Siegfried slaying
the dragon and charging through the mountain fire, when the immediate
foreground was occupied by the Hotel de Ville with Felix Pyat endlessly
discussing the principles of Socialism whilst the shells of Thiers were
already battering the Arc de Triomphe, and ripping up the pavement of
the Champs Elysees? Is it not clear that things had taken an altogether
unexpected turn--that although the Ring may, like the famous Communist
Manifesto of Marx and Engels, be an inspired guest at the historic laws
and predestined end of our capitalistic-theocratic epoch, yet
Wagner, like Marx, was too inexperienced in technical government
and administration and too melodramatic in his hero-contra-villain
conception of the class struggle, to foresee the actual process by which
his generalization would work out, or the part to be played in it by the
classes involved?
Let us go back for a moment to the point at which the Niblung legend
first becomes irreconcilable with Wagner's allegory. Fafnir in the
allegory becomes a capitalist; but Fafnir in the legend is a mere
hoarder. His gold does not bring him in any revenue. It does not even
support him: he has to go out and forage for food and drink. In fact,
he is on the way to his drinking-pool when Siegfried kills him. And
Siegfried himself has no more use for gold than Fafnir: the only
difference between them in this respect is that Siegfried does not waste
his time in watching a barren treasure that is no use to him, whereas
Fafnir sacrifices his humanity and his life merely to prevent anybody
else getting it. This contrast is true to human nature; but it shunts
The Ring drama off the economic lines of the allegory. In real life,
Fafnir is not a miser: he seeks dividends, comfortable life, and
admission to the circles of Wotan and Loki. His only means of procuring
these is to restore the gold to Alberic in exchange for scrip in
Alberic's enterprises. Thus fortified with capital, Alberic exploits his
fellow dwarfs as before, and also exploits Fafnir's fellow giants who
have no capital. What is more, the toil, forethought and self-control
which the exploitation involves, and the self-respect and social esteem
which its success wins, effect an improvement in Alberic's own character
which neither Marx nor Wagner appear to have foreseen. He discovers that
to be a dull, greedy, narrow-minded money-grubber is not the way to make
money on a large scale; for though greed may suffice to turn tens
into hundreds and even hundreds into thousands, to turn thousands into
hundreds of thousands requires magnanimity and a will to power rather
than to pelf. And to turn thousands into millions, Alberic must make
himself an earthly providence for masses of workmen: he must create
towns and govern markets. In the meantime, Fafnir, wallowing in
dividends which he has done nothing to earn, may rot, intellectually
and morally, from mere disuse of his energies and lack of incentive to
excel; but the more imbecile he becomes, the more dependent he is upon
Alberic, and the more the responsibility of keeping the world-machine in
working order falls upon Alberic. Consequently, though Alberic in 1850
may have been merely the vulgar Manchester Factory-owner portrayed by
Engels, in 1876 he was well on the way towards becoming Krupp of Essen
or Carnegie of Homestead.
Now, without exaggerating the virtues of these gentlemen, it will
be conceded by everybody except perhaps those veteran German
Social-Democrats who have made a cult of obsolescence under the name
of Marxism, that the modern entrepreneur is not to be displaced and
dismissed so lightly as Alberic is dismissed in The Ring. They are
really the masters of the whole situation. Wotan is hardly less
dependent on them than Fafnir; the War-Lord visits their work, acclaims
them in stirring speeches, and casts down their enemies; whilst Loki
makes commercial treaties for them and subjects all his diplomacy to
their approval.
The end cannot come until Siegfried learns Alberic's trade and shoulders
Alberic's burden. Not having as yet done so, he is still completely
mastered by Alberic. He does not even rebel against him except when he
is too stupid and ignorant, or too romantically impracticable, to see
that Alberic's work, like Wotan's work and Loki's work, is necessary
work, and that therefore Alberic can never be superseded by a warrior,
but only by a capable man of business who is prepared to continue his
work without a day's intermission. Even though the proletarians of all
lands were to become "class conscious," and obey the call of Marx by
uniting to carry the Class struggle to a proletarian victory in
which all capital should become common property, and all Monarchs,
Millionaires, Landlords and Capitalists become common citizens, the
triumphant proletarians would have either to starve in Anarchy the next
day or else do the political and industrial work which is now being
done tant bien que mal by our Romanoffs, our Hohenzollerns, our Krupps,
Carnegies, Levers, Pierpont Morgans, and their political retinues. And
in the meantime these magnates must defend their power and property
with all their might against the revolutionary forces until these
forces become positive, executive, administrative forces, instead of the
conspiracies of protesting, moralizing, virtuously indignant amateurs
who mistook Marx for a man of affairs and Thiers for a stage villain.
But all this represents a development of which one gathers no forecast
from Wagner or Marx. Both of them prophesied the end of our epoch, and,
so far as one can guess, prophesied it rightly. They also brought its
industrial history up to the year 1848 far more penetratingly than the
academic historians of their time. But they broke off there and left
a void between 1848 and the end, in which we, who have to live in that
period, get no guidance from them. The Marxists wandered for years
in this void, striving, with fanatical superstition, to suppress the
Revisionists who, facing the fact that the Social-Democratic party was
lost, were trying to find the path by the light of contemporary history
instead of vainly consulting the oracle in the pages of Das Kapital.
Marx himself was too simpleminded a recluse and too full of the
validity of his remoter generalizations, and the way in which the rapid
integration of capital in Trusts and Kartels was confirming them, to be
conscious of the void himself.
Wagner, on the other hand, was comparatively a practical man. It is
possible to learn more of the world by producing a single opera, or even
conducting a single orchestral rehearsal, than by ten years reading in
the Library of the British Museum. Wagner must have learnt between Das
Rheingold and the Kaisermarsch that there are yet several dramas to be
interpolated in The Ring after The Valkyries before the allegory can
tell the whole story, and that the first of these interpolated dramas
will be much more like a revised Rienzi than like Siegfried. If
anyone doubts the extent to which Wagner's eyes had been opened to the
administrative-childishness and romantic conceit of the heroes of
the revolutionary generation that served its apprenticeship on the
barricades of 1848-9, and perished on those of 1870 under Thiers'
mitrailleuses, let him read Eine Kapitulation, that scandalous burlesque
in which the poet and composer of Siegfried, with the levity of a
schoolboy, mocked the French republicans who were doing in 1871 what he
himself was exiled for doing in 1849. He had set the enthusiasm of the
Dresden Revolution to his own greatest music; but he set the enthusiasm
of twenty years later in derision to the music of Rossini. There is
no mistaking the tune he meant to suggest by his doggerel of Republik,
Republik, Republik-lik-lik. The Overture to William Tell is there as
plainly as if it were noted down in full score.
In the case of such a man as Wagner, you cannot explain this volte-face
as mere jingoism produced by Germany's overwhelming victory in the
Franco-Prussian War, nor as personal spite against the Parisians for the
Tannhauser fiasco. Wagner had more cause for personal spite against
his own countrymen than he ever had against the French. No doubt his
outburst gratified the pettier feelings which great men have in common
with small ones; but he was not a man to indulge in such gratifications,
or indeed to feel them as gratifications, if he had not arrived at a
profound philosophical contempt for the inadequacy of the men who were
trying to wield Nothung, and who had done less work for Wagner's own
art than a single German King and he, too, only a mad one. Wagner had by
that time done too much himself not to know that the world is ruled by
deeds, not by good intentions, and that one efficient sinner is worth
ten futile saints and martyrs.
I need not elaborate the point further in these pages. Like all men of
genius, Wagner had exceptional sincerity, exceptional respect for facts,
exceptional freedom from the hypnotic influence of sensational popular
movements, exceptional sense of the realities of political power as
distinguished from the presences and idolatries behind which the real
masters of modern States pull their wires and train their guns. When he
scored Night Falls On The Gods, he had accepted the failure of Siegfried
and the triumph of the Wotan-Loki-Alberic-trinity as a fact. He had
given up dreaming of heroes, heroines, and final solutions, and had
conceived a new protagonist in Parsifal, whom he announced, not as
a hero, but as a fool; who was armed, not with a sword which cut
irresistibly, but with a spear which he held only on condition that he
did not use it; and who instead of exulting in the slaughter of a
dragon was frightfully ashamed of having shot a swan. The change in the
conception of the Deliverer could hardly be more complete. It reflects
the change which took place in Wagner's mind between the composition
of The Rhine Gold and Night Falls On The Gods; and it explains why
he dropped The Ring allegory and fell back on the status quo ante by
Lohengrinizing.
If you ask why he did not throw Siegfried into the waste paper basket
and rewrite The Ring from The Valkyries onwards, one must reply that the
time had not come for such a feat. Neither Wagner nor anyone else then
living knew enough to achieve it. Besides, what he had already done had
reached the limit of even his immense energy and perseverance and so
he did the best he could with the unfinished and for ever unfinishable
work, rounding it off with an opera much as Rossini rounded off some of
his religious compositions with a galop. Only, Rossini on such occasions
wrote in his score "Excusez du peu," but Wagner left us to find out the
change for ourselves, perhaps to test how far we had really followed his
meaning.