"Yes, now, as long as love need not be renounced, it will be easy
to obtain it," says simple Froh.
"Easy as mocking--child's-play!" sneers Loge.
"Then do you tell us, how?..." Wotan's fine majestic simplicity
has no false pride.
The Serpent gleefully replies, "By theft! What a thief stole, you
steal from the thief! Could anything be easier? Only, Alberich
is on his guard, you will have to proceed craftily if you would
overreach the robber... in order to return their treasure to the
Rhine-daughters, who earnestly entreat you."
"The Rhine-daughters?" chafes Wotan. "What do you trouble me with
them?"
And the goddess of Wisdom,--more sympathetic on the whole in this
exhibition of weakness than in her hard justice later--exposing
the core of her feminine being, breaks in: "I wish to hear nothing
whatever of that watery brood. Many a man, greatly to my vexation,
have they lured under while he was bathing, with promises of love."
The giants have been listening and have taken counsel together.
Fafner now approaches Wotan. "Hear, Wotan.... Keep Freia.... We
have fixed upon a lesser reward. We will take in her stead the
Nibelung's gold."
Wotan comes near losing his temper. "What I do not own, I shall
bestow upon you shameless louts?"
Fafner expresses a perfect confidence in Wotan's equipment for obtaining
the gold.
"For you I shall go to this trouble?" rails the irritated god,
"For you I shall circumvent this enemy? Out of all measure impudent
and rapacious my gratitude has made you clowns!..."
Fasolt who has only half-heartedly accepted his brother's decision
in favor of the gold, stays to hear no more, but seizes Freia. With
a warning that she shall be regarded as a hostage till evening,
but that if when they return the Rhinegold is not on the spot as
her ransom, they will keep her forever, the giants hurry her off.
Her cry for help rings back. Her brothers, in the act of rushing
to the rescue, look at Wotan for his sanction. No encouragement
is to be gathered from his face. He stands motionless, steeped
in perplexity, in conflict with himself.
Loge has now a few moments' pure enjoyment in safely tormenting
his superiors. He stands, with his fresh, ingenuous air, on a point
overlooking the valley, and describes the giants' progress, as
does the music, too. "Not happy is Freia, hanging on the back of
the rough ones as they wade through the Rhine...." Her dejected
kindred wince.
The heavy footsteps die away. Loge returning his attention to the
gods, voices his amazement at the sight which meets him: "Am I
deceived by a mist? Am I misled by a dream? How wan and fearful and
faded you do look! The glow is dead in your cheeks, the lightening
quenched in your glances. Froh, it is still early morning! Donner,
you are dropping your hammer! What ails Fricka? Is it chagrin to
see the greyness of age creeping over Wotan?" Sounds of woe burst
from all, save Wotan, who with his eyes on the ground still stands
absorbed in gloomy musing.
The solution of the puzzle suddenly, as he feigns, flashes upon
Loge: This is the result of Freia's leaving them! They had not yet
that morning tasted her apples. Now, of necessity, those golden
apples of youth in her garden, which she alone could cultivate, will
decay and drop. "Myself," he says, "I shall be less inconvenienced
than you, because she was ever grudging to me of the exquisite
fruit, for I am only half of as good lineage as you, Resplendent
Ones. On the other hand, you depended wholly upon the rejuvenating
apples; the giants knew that and are plainly practising against
your lives. Now bethink yourselves how to provide against this.
Without the apples, old and grey, a mock to the whole world, the
dynasty of the gods must perish!"
With sudden resolution, Wotan starts from his dark study. "Up, Loge!
Down with me to Nibelheim! I will conquer the gold!"
"The Rhine-daughters, then," speaks wicked Loge, "may look to have
their prayer granted?"
Wotan harshly silences him. "Be still, chatterer!... Freia the good,
Freia must be ransomed!"
Loge drops the subject and offers his services as guide. "Shall
we descend through the Rhine?"
The Rhine, with its infesting nymphs?...
"Not through the Rhine!" says Wotan.
"Then through the sulphur-cleft slip down with me!" And Loge vanishes
down a cleft in the rock, through which Wotan, after bidding his
family wait for him where they are until evening, follows.
Thick vapour pours forth from the sulphur-cleft, dimming and shortly
blotting out the scene. We are travelling downward into the earth.
A dull red glow gradually tinges the vapour. Sounds of diminutive
hammers upon anvils become distinct. The orchestra takes up their
suggestion and turns it into a simple monotonous strongly rhythmical
air--never long silent in this scene--which comes to mean for us
the little toiling Nibelungs, the cunning smiths. A great rocky
subterranean cave running off on every side into rough shafts,
is at last clearly visible, lighted by the ruddy reflection of
forge-fires.
This is where Alberich reigns and by the power of the ring compels
his enslaved brothers to labour for him. Renouncing love has not been
good for the disposition of Alberich. It is not only the insatiable
lust of gold and power now darkening the soul-face of the earlier
fairly gentle-natured Nibelung, it is a savage gloating cruelty,
bespeaking one unnaturally loveless; it is a sanguinary hatred,
too, of all who still can love, of love itself, a thirst and
determination to see it completely done away with in the world,
exterminated--a sort of fallen angel's sin against the Holy Ghost.
A state, beneath the incessant excitement of slave-driving and
treasure-amassing, of inexpressible unhappiness, lightened by moments
of huge exaltation in the sense of his new power.
We find him, when the cavern glimmers into sight, brutally handling
his crumb of a gnome brother. Mime, like Alberich, wins some part of
our heart on first acquaintance, which he later ceases to deserve;
but in the case of Mime I think it is never wholly withdrawn, even
when he is shown to be an unmitigated wretch; he is, to begin with,
so little, and he has a funny, fetching twist or quaver in his
voice, indicated by the notes themselves of his rather mean little
sing-song melodies. Alberich's nominal reason for indulging his
present passion for hurting--he is haling Mime by the ear--is that
the latter is overslow with certain piece of work which, with minute
instructions, he has been ordered to do. Mime, under pressure, produces
the article, which he had in truth been trying to keep for his own,
suspecting in it some mysterious value. It is the _Tarnhelm_, a
curious cap of linked metal. Its uncanny character is confided to us
even before we see it at work, by the motif which first appears with
its appearance: a motif preparing for some unearthly manifestation
the mind pricked to disquieted attention by the weirdness of the
air. Alberich places it upon his head, utters a brief incantation,
and disappears from sight. A column of vapour stands in his place.
"Do you see me?" asks Alberich's disembodied voice. Mime looks
around, astonished. "Where are you? I see you not!" "Then feel
me!" cries the power-drunken tyrant, and Mime winces and cowers
under blows from an unseen scourge, while Alberich's voice laughs.
Out of measure exhilarated by his successful new device for ensuring
diligence and inspiring fear, he storms out of hearing with the
terrible words, "Nibelungs all, bow to Alberich!... He can now
be everywhere at once, keeping watch over you. Rest and leisure
are done and over with for you! For him you must labour.... His
conquered slaves are you forever!" The moment of his overtaking
the Nibelungs is indicated by their sudden distant outcry.
Mime has been left crouching and whimpering on the rocky floor.
Thus Wotan and Loge find him.
Loge is in all the following scene Wotan's very active vizier,
furnishing the invention and carrying out the stratagems. Wotan,
except to the eye, takes the background and has little to say;
but as the blue of his mantle and the fresh chaplet on his locks
strike the eye refreshingly in the fire-reddened cave, so his voice,
with echoes in it of the noble upper world, comes like gusts of
sweet air.
Loge sets the cowering dwarf on his feet and by artful questions
gets the whole story from him of the ring and the Nibelungs' woe.
About the Tarnhelm, too, Mime tells Loge. At the recollection of
the stripes he has suffered, he rubs his back howling. The gods
laugh. That gives Mime the idea that these strangers must be of the
great. He is in his turn questioning them, when he hears Alberich's
bullying voice approaching. He runs hither and thither in terror and
calls to the strangers to look to themselves, Alberich is coming!
Wotan quietly seats himself on a stone to await him.
Alberich enters driving before him with his scourge a whole army of
little huddling, hurrying Nibelungs, groaning under the weight of
great pieces of gold and silver smithwork, which, while he threatens
and urges them, they heap in a duskily glimmering mound. In the
fancy that they are not obeying fast or humbly enough, he takes the
magic ring from his finger, kisses and lifts it commandingly over
them, whereupon with cries of dismay they scramble away, scattering
down the shafts, in feverish haste to be digging and delving.
Heavy groans are in the music when it refers to the oppression
of the Nibelungs; groans so tragic and seriously presented that
they bring up the thought of other oppressions and killing labours
than those of the Nibelungs. The music which later depicts the
amassing of riches, indicates such horror of strain, such fatigue,
such hopeless weariness of heart and soul, that the hearer must
think with sharpened sympathy of all that part of humanity which
represents the shoulder placed against the wheel.