And now, having given my explanation of The Ring, can I give Wagner's
explanation of it? If I could (and I can) I should not by any means
accept it as conclusive. Nearly half a century has passed since the
tetralogy was written; and in that time the purposes of many half
instinctive acts of genius have become clearer to the common man than
they were to the doers. Some years ago, in the course of an explanation
of Ibsen's plays, I pointed out that it was by no means certain or even
likely that Ibsen was as definitely conscious of his thesis as I. All
the stupid people, and some critics who, though not stupid, had not
themselves written what the Germans call "tendency" works, saw nothing
in this but a fantastic affectation of the extravagant self-conceit
of knowing more about Ibsen than Ibsen himself. Fortunately, in taking
exactly the same position now with regard to Wagner, I can claim his own
authority to support me. "How," he wrote to Roeckel on the 23rd. August
1856, "can an artist expect that what he has felt intuitively should
be perfectly realized by others, seeing that he himself feels in the
presence of his work, if it is true Art, that he is confronted by a
riddle, about which he, too, might have illusions, just as another
might?"
The truth is, we are apt to deify men of genius, exactly as we deify the
creative force of the universe, by attributing to logical design what
is the result of blind instinct. What Wagner meant by "true Art" is the
operation of the artist's instinct, which is just as blind as any other
instinct. Mozart, asked for an explanation of his works, said frankly
"How do I know?" Wagner, being a philosopher and critic as well as
a composer, was always looking for moral explanations of what he had
created and he hit on several very striking ones, all different. In the
same way one can conceive Henry the Eighth speculating very brilliantly
about the circulation of his own blood without getting as near the truth
as Harvey did long after his death.
None the less, Wagner's own explanations are of exceptional interest. To
begin with, there is a considerable portion of The Ring, especially the
portraiture of our capitalistic industrial system from the socialist's
point of view in the slavery of the Niblungs and the tyranny of Alberic,
which is unmistakable, as it dramatizes that portion of human activity
which lies well within the territory covered by our intellectual
consciousness. All this is concrete Home Office business, so to speak:
its meaning was as clear to Wagner as it is to us. Not so that part
of the work which deals with the destiny of Wotan. And here, as it
happened, Wagner's recollection of what he had been driving at was
completely upset by his discovery, soon after the completion of The
Ring poem, of Schopenhaur's famous treatise "The World as Will and
Representation." So obsessed did he become with this masterpiece of
philosophic art that he declared that it contained the intellectual
demonstration of the conflict of human forces which he himself had
demonstrated artistically in his great poem. "I must confess," he writes
to Roeckel, "to having arrived at a clear understanding of my own
works of art through the help of another, who has provided me with the
reasoned conceptions corresponding to my intuitive principles."
Schopenhaur, however, had done nothing of the sort. Wagner's
determination to prove that he had been a Schopenhaurite all along
without knowing it only shows how completely the fascination of the
great treatise on The Will had run away with his memory. It is easy to
see how this happened. Wagner says of himself that "seldom has there
taken place in the soul of one and the same man so profound a division
and estrangement between the intuitive or impulsive part of his nature
and his consciously or reasonably formed ideas." And since Schopenhaur's
great contribution to modern thought was to educate us into clear
consciousness of this distinction--a distinction familiar, in a fanciful
way, to the Ages of Faith and Art before the Renascence, but afterwards
swamped in the Rationalism of that movement--it was inevitable that
Wagner should jump at Schopenhaur's metaphysiology (I use a word less
likely to be mistaken than metaphysics) as the very thing for him. But
metaphysiology is one thing, political philosophy another. The political
philosophy of Siegfried is exactly contrary to the political philosophy
of Schopenhaur, although the same clear metaphysiological distinction
between the instinctive part of man (his Will) and his reasoning faculty
(dramatized in The Ring as Loki) is insisted on in both. The difference
is that to Schopenhaur the Will is the universal tormentor of man, the
author of that great evil, Life; whilst reason is the divine gift that
is finally to overcome this life-creating will and lead, through its
abnegation, to cessation and peace, annihilation and Nirvana. This is
the doctrine of Pessimism. Now Wagner was, when he wrote The Ring, a
most sanguine revolutionary Meliorist, contemptuous of the reasoning
faculty, which he typified in the shifty, unreal, delusive Loki, and
full of faith in the life-giving Will, which he typified in the glorious
Siegfried. Not until he read Schopenhaur did he become bent on proving
that he had always been a Pessimist at heart, and that Loki was the most
sensible and worthy adviser of Wotan in The Rhine Gold.
Sometimes he faces the change in his opinions frankly enough. "My
Niblung drama," he writes to Roeckel, "had taken form at a time when I
had built up with my reason an optimistic world on Hellenic principles,
believing that nothing was necessary for the realization of such a world
but that men should wish it. I ingeniously set aside-the problem why
they did not wish it. I remember that it was with this definite
creative purpose that I conceived the personality of Siegfried, with the
intention of representing an existence free from pain." But he appeals
to his earlier works to show that behind all these artificial optimistic
ideas there was always with him an intuition of "the sublime tragedy of
renunciation, the negation of the will." In trying to explain this, he
is full of ideas philosophically, and full of the most amusing
contradictions personally. Optimism, as an accidental excursion into the
barren paths of reason on his own part, he calls "Hellenic." In others
he denounces it as rank Judaism, the Jew having at that time become for
him the whipping boy for all modern humanity. In a letter from London
he expounds Schopenhaur to Roeckel with enthusiasm, preaching the
renunciation of the Will to Live as the redemption from all error and
vain pursuits: in the next letter he resumes the subject with unabated
interest, and finishes by mentioning that on leaving London he went to
Geneva and underwent "a most beneficial course of hydropathy." Seven
months before this he had written as follows: "Believe me, I too was
once possessed by the idea of a country life. In order to become a
radically healthy human being, I went two years ago to a Hydropathic
Establishment, prepared to give up Art and everything if I could once
more become a child of Nature. But, my good friend, I was obliged to
laugh at my own naivete when I found myself almost going mad. None of
us will reach the promised land: we shall all die in the wilderness.
Intellect is, as some one has said, a sort of disease: it is incurable."
Roeckel knew his man of old, and evidently pressed him for explanations
of the inconsistencies of The Ring with Night Falls On The Gods. Wagner
defended himself with unfailing cleverness and occasional petulances,
ranging from such pleas as "I believe a true instinct has kept me from a
too great definiteness; for it has been borne in on me that an absolute
disclosure of the intention disturbs true insight," to a volley of
explanations and commentaries on the explanations. He gets excited and
annoyed because Roeckel will not admire the Brynhild of Night Falls On
The Gods; re-invents the Tarnhelm scene; and finally, the case being
desperate, exclaims, "It is wrong of you to challenge me to explain it
in words: you must feel that something is being enacted that is not to
be expressed in mere words."