wonderful creation of a strange genius, "Der Ring des Nibelungen."
Whatever else may be said of Wagner, it must always be admitted that
he was a genius. Something of the vanity of the child, the naïveté
that always dwells in the organization of the truly original artist,
is to be discerned in his every action, in his every utterance; and
it would be strange if it did not force itself upon our notice in his
works. There it discloses itself most frequently in a ludicrous error
of taking seriously things that can never be other than amusing to
the casual observer, and of missing the point of some of his own best
ideas.
Wagner has been much praised as a poet. Time was when the present
writer (who must be his own confessor), feeling the power and
beauty of the fundamental stuff in the music dramas, rather than
the adapter's cumbersome and rudely articulated Germanizing of it,
dreamed that Wagner had poetic craftsmanship of no mean order. But
he never fell into the error of regarding him as a brother of the
northern skalds, a bard chanting in full-blooded imagination. Wagner
was a dramatist, of an uncommonly high order, if you will, looking
always to the symbolism of musical investure for his stage pictures,
but just a dramatist and nothing more.
His truest drama, as it is his most finely wrought, is "Tristan und
Isolde," which rests upon the simplest of emotional propositions,
demonstrated in the most convincing of musical illustration. But
"Der Ring des Nibelungen" is his most ponderous conception, his
most elaborate structure, and withal second only to "Tristan und
Isolde" in the majestic heights of musical delineation to which it
triumphantly ascends.
Not a little of its musical glory grows out of its dramatic
difficulties. In its beginning it deals with gods, dwarfs, nixies
of the Rhine, and cumbersome giants, all fabulous, nebulous, in
some instances almost intangible figures, whose only force lies in
their simulation of humanity, and whose mastering weakness consists
in their unreality. Gradually these gods and goddesses fade away
and leave the picture occupied with purely human figures alone. The
last majestic burst of supernal majesty is the final scene of "Die
Walküre." In "Siegfried" a worn and weary wanderer, cherishing a
feeble hope, powerless to turn the flow of events, passes across the
canvas and dwindles out of sight before the dawn of human love.
The rest is pure humanity, except when in the end of
"Götterdämmerung" the imperial godhood of Brünnhilde enthrones itself
upon the wreck of worlds, and sings the death-warrant of the waning
Wotan and his wavering brood.
The futile and disappearing gods! These are the weird and enchanting
unrealities of Wagner's "Nibelungen" scheme. How they potter and
fumble with the machinery of the inevitable! How they falter and
fail in the presence of inscrutable Truth, which overcomes them like
a summer cloud! They parade before us in "Das Rheingold," clad in a
clarion of trumpets and trombones, made glorious with the radiance
of Wagner's blazing sunlight of sonorous chords; but they are none
the less futile. Save one,--Loge, the tempter, Loge, the spirit of
indomitable evil, who sows the seed of destruction in the beginning
and writes the plot of "Götterdämmerung" with a twist of his finger
toward the gleaming gold.
Of all Wagner's philosophic compositions, his psychological
conjurations out of the shadowy depths of his own fancy and the
equally cloudy shallows of Schopenhauer and Feuerbach, Loge is the
most intimately conceived and the most finely wrought. Disappearing,
indeed, he is, but by no means futile. The Mephistopheles of the
rock-ribbed north, the Lucifer of the hills, he unites all the
subtlety of the metropolitan conception of the sophisticated
Goethe with the breadth and spontaneity of the harp-strokes of the
storm-bred bard.
Wagner does not paint Loge so brilliantly in text as he does in
music. This Satanic tempter of the wise ones is an operatic character
raised to the seventh power. His words are unconvincing without his
music, which charges them and him with a boundless significance.
Never once in all his flickering career does he utter a single
sentence of such elemental majesty as that of Boito's Mefistofele:
"Son lo spirito che nega." That looming figure of the archlibrettist
of Tuscany spreads the shadow of contemporaneous sophistication
across the operatic firmament. Standing with his defiant gaze upon
the throne of the many-voiced invisible, he is a lyric reincarnation
of the epic Lucifer of Milton.
Loge is no such mighty spirit. He comes upon the scene whining
excuses for an ill-done errand. He slips, he slides, he wriggles
away. He is the aurora of casuistry, the embodiment of the elusive.
The flickering fire is his outward manifestation. He is mean. He is
a sneak. But he is the intellectual superior of the entire coterie
of futile gods, and he laughs at their infantile incapacity. Poor
old Wotan! He mumbles in his beard that he cannot do mental tricks
as Loge can. A simple-minded old god is he, who would gladly cheat
the lumbering giants out of their guerdon, but does not know how. So
he turns to Loge, who comes waving and caracoling upon the scene--to
what theme? That of the fire! A theme which is as elusive as his
nature, a theme which has neither beginning nor end, which wanders
along in the form of an indefinite decimal of harmony and never for
an instant establishes a definite tonality.
Every movement of Loge, every betrayal of a new thought formed in his
shifty mind, is accompanied by an utterance of this motive in the
orchestra. Not once in "Das Rheingold" does the theme rest itself
upon the firm foundations of a major triad. Chromatic in form, it
is chromatic, chameleon-like in color. It is the real Loge. It is a
musical triumph, because in terms of purely descriptive imitation it
expresses a psychologic study. The music is the shifting, flickering,
changeful, destroying fire; the fire is the soul of Loge and the
first fruit of perdition.
The theme returns in the last scene of "Die Walküre," when Wotan,
the helpless father, has put his best-beloved to sleep. He is to
surround her with a belt of guardian fire. Fire is the soul of
Loge, a lovely protector for unconscious virtue! Again we hear
the fire music, but only for fire. Loge, most subtle of the gods
of the field, has to all appearances been the most futile. He has
disappeared already. But now his fire, at any rate, returns and beams
beneficently from a base of diatonic major harmonies with tinkling of
blissful bells. Did Wagner realize the fathomless depths of his own
sarcasm here? Or is it all a beautiful chance?
In the last scene of "Siegfried" there is an echo of the Loge
theme, but it means almost nothing. The same echo is heard in
"Götterdämmerung," Act I. In Act III. of the same drama, when
Brünnhilde seizes the torch to fire the funeral pyre whose flames
shall set all Walhalla in a blaze, the Loge chromatics, together
with a gleam of the ring theme, flashes up, but it is as futile as
the almost-forgotten Loge. Here was Wagner's opportunity to tell the
truth about his own secret conception of this vast phantasmagoria of
fact and fable. At the very end of "Das Rheingold" the crafty one
says:
"A feverish fancy
Doth woo me to wander
Forth in flickering fire:
To burn and waste them
Who bound me erewhile.
Rather than be
Thus blindly engulfed,
Even were they of gods the most godlike."
No Walhalla for the free spirit of flame, but liberty and the
ultimate destruction of these pitiful children of the light. Wagner
might have let the glittering chromatics of the fire theme rise just
once into a peal of majestic power in the end of "Götterdämmerung,"
when Wotan and all his hosts sat helpless amid the blazing of
Walhalla. It is Loge's triumph, is it not? Oh, yes, of course, it is
the stupendous immolation of Brünnhilde, with the unutterable thought
behind it and the regeneration of the earth before it. But Loge would
have seen in it nothing but the victory of the eternal principle of
destruction, which Wagner epitomized even better than he knew in his
musical characterization of the fire-fiend.
What was really in Wagner's mind when he wrote that extraordinarily
beautiful passage of song for Loge in the first scene of "Das
Rheingold"?
"Where life ebbeth and floweth
In flood and earth and air,
All asked I,
Ever inquiring,
Where sinew doth reign,
And seedlings are rooted,
What well a man
Could mightier deem
Than woman's wonderful worth."
Again, it is not the text, but the marvellous burst of throbbing
melody that tells the thought in Wagner's mind. But does it tell all?
Study well the phrases in the score. Are they sincere, or does Wagner
shadow forth just a suspicion of the dishonesty which lurks in the
utterance? Loge knows that he has yet his trump card, the gold of the
Rhine, to play; and either he believes that will be a winning card,
or he is not the devil, after all.
What, then, becomes of this manifestation of Wagnerian philosophy,
this joyous tempter of wooden gods? At the end of "Das Rheingold"
his personal career ends. Henceforth only his soul hovers about us.
Like the genie who, according to the veracious chronicler of the
"Arabian Nights," had sinned against Solomon, he was shut up in a
box, the old earth itself. He fades out of sight to reappear only in
a materialistic exhibit of steam and red fire. A sad end, indeed, for
such a thoughtful representation of sophistry. "Two special powers,"
says M. Taine, "lead mankind,--impulse and idea." Loge was the
embodiment of idea. Farewell to thee, Idea. Henceforth let impulse
lead us onward to love and death. Yet shall not Idea, subtle, crafty,
remorseless, triumph at last?
The foil to Loge is Wotan, foil and victim. What a sorrowful
spectacle is this unfortunate master of the gods, who takes up Loge
because that craftsman has brains, and yet cannot withstand the
temptations of his own devil! Jupiter did not need a devil to lead
him astray. A neatly turned ankle or a pair of melting eyes sufficed
to lure Zeus from Olympus. The world and the flesh were equal to
his undoing. But here is a primitive god, manufactured out of the
imagination of a wholly unsophisticated people, far removed from the
polish and culture of the Greeks, and he cannot sin in hot blood.
First of all, he must be tempted by a fiend, who lures him with the
promise of unlimited power. Zeus had his power ready-made.
Wotan was right. What was a god to do who was short of power?
Preposterous! He could not afford to allow some one else to get the
gold and make the ring. Alberich already had it. What was to be
done? Get it away from him, and so save the Walhalla dynasty from
being dethroned. Wise Wotan! It never occurred to him that Loge was
planning just that _coup_.
Here is a chief god whose power rests upon contracts, yet who does
not know how to make an advantageous bargain with two stupid giants!
Pity the sorrows of the one-eyed god! He is not omnipotent. He is
surrounded by enemies, and afar off looms the fathomless abyss of the
dusk of the gods, the pall of Ragnarok, the last battle. A fortress
must he have, and heroes culled by the aerial Valkyrs from the slain
of all the world to fight for Walhalla in the final hour.
Self-preservation is the selfish motive of Wotan's sin. He haggles
with Fafner and Fasolt for a haven of refuge, and offers a price he
knows he dare not pay. Without Freia, the goddess of youth, he must
wither. What does all this mean? Simply that Wotan was the subject
of a moral law outside of and above him. Was it strange that the
primitive mind could not conceive a god who was himself the law?
Not at all; for, after all, these children of the ages made deities
of human attributes,--power, knowledge, passion, beauty, swiftness.
They knew all these attributes were subject to the moral law, for the
blackest years of Egypt had not obscured the truth that the wages of
sin is death. In "Das Rheingold" Wotan falls a prey to the moral law
as interpreted to him by the giants. In "Die Walküre" he again makes
a foolish effort to dodge it, and the outraged majesty of Fricka
demands revenge. What a futile god!
The figure of Wotan is heroic only in "Die Walküre." Here we find
the old god at bay. In "Rheingold" he is a feeble plotter; in
"Walküre" he faces the inevitable and fights in the last ditch. In
"Siegfried" he has become a garrulous dotard, maundering about the
earth, impotent and puerile, quibbling in childish conundrums with a
shifty dwarf, pledging a head he would not sacrifice, waiting for the
defiant act of the youthful hero, and enacting the silly mummery of
opposing him with the spear which he knows the boy despises.
"In vain! I cannot hinder thee!" he tragically exclaims, as he
stalks off the stage and into the gallery of properties which Wagner
reserves for destruction in the last scene of all. And this is the
All-Father, the Thunderer of the Norse mythology, the supine creature
of moral laws which his pitiable nature cannot grasp and which he
feebly strives throughout the whole story to escape.
What music has Wagner evolved to body forth the traits and
accessories of this godless deity? The Walhall theme, which
identifies with the god the stone walls of his stronghold; the
spear motive, which speaks in splendid accents of the firmness of
sacred obligations, broken by Wotan in the very first scene of the
tragedy; Wotan's anger; Wotan's distress; Wotan the wanderer; Wotan's
bequest of the inheritance of the world. All these themes depict this
entangled god in the meshes of circumstance. There is not a single
motive setting forth any inherent grandeur of character, any great or
noble thought or passion blazing from his soul.
Walhall was Wotan's chapel of refuge. The spear's holy runes were
outside of his personality and greater than it. His anger was
awakened by the disobedience of a loving daughter who sought to be
what she had always been, the heart's wish of the god. The distress
was the fruit of a realization that the stern grip of the moral law
was strangling the whole coterie of Walhall because of its master's
sins.
Wotan the wanderer,--what a desolate succession of changing
tonalities, telling of a god without a local habitation or a name,
a god whose occupation was literally gone! The bequest theme tells
of this doddering deity's resignation of power in favor of youth
and love, two honest agencies much better fitted to carry on the
administration of a world than trickery and subterfuge.
Carlyle in his "French Revolution" harps upon the end that was
contained in the beginning. "Cast forth thy act, thy word," again in
his "Sartor Resartus" he says, "into the ever working universe; it
is a seed grain that cannot die; unnoticed to-day (says one) it will
be found flourishing as a banyan grove (perhaps also as a hemlock
forest) after a thousand years." The Scripture has tersely summarized
the whole matter in the prophetic declaration that the wages of sin
is death.
Wotan's original sin in cheating the giants spreads itself into the
hemlock forest of a mighty tragedy, but for the god himself the
Biblical maxim stands in letters of fire. And here mark the awful
majesty of the Norse myth. Wotan and all his brood fall victims in
the end to the physical manifestation of the evil spirit, Loge.
They are burned in Walhalla. The flickering fire singes out the last
vestiges of this rotten dynasty. The spirit of temptation wreaks
its own vengeance upon the tempted. "Son lo spirito che nega." The
Mephistophelian principle of negation wipes the futile gods off
the firmament. Was there any touch of Schopenhauer or Buddha in
this? Not a whiff. It was pure, stern, primeval morality. It was
unsophisticated man's recognition of the inexorable justice of the
moral law.
How infinitely grander this conception is than the flimsy and
artificial doctrines of the seduction and spear cure in "Parsifal"!
In the consecrational festival play all is manufactured, all is
artificial. The entire external machinery of the thing is a cheap
theatrical pose. In "Der Ring des Nibelungen" the ethics are the
common sense of a people, nay, of whole races, sprung from the mystic
Aryan source and filtered through the anxious thought of a hundred
tribes that speculated under the inspiring stars across the valleys
and plains of all Europe.
How much of all this did Wagner perceive when he was constructing his
extraordinary drama in four plays? His scheme, according to his own
words, contemplated the representation of the gods as writhing in
helplessness under the burden imposed by their own transgression of
the law. This burden could be removed only by the action of a free
agent, a man, whose deeds were all his own. After Titanic preparation
Wagner places this man before us in the person of Siegfried.
His death is the vicarious sacrifice for the gods. In order to get
him killed Wagner writes a whole drama, a mighty one indeed, in which
this noble hero is made to commit a crime while under the influence
of enchantment. He is slain for that crime by Hagen, who knows that
he is innocent, and who contrived the whole plot simply to have an
excuse for killing him, in order to get back the Nibelungs' ring.
What evidence is there that Wagner perceived the full significance of
the final triumph of Loge over the erring Wotan? Not one jot. That
the idea occurred to him in its purely external and physical form is
proved by a passage in the final speech of Brünnhilde:
"Fly home, ye ravens!
Rede it in Walhalla
What here on the Rhine ye have heard!
To Brünnhilde's rock
Go round about.
Yet Loge burns there:
Walhall bid him revisit!
Draweth near in gloom
The dusk of the gods.
Thus, casting my torch,
I kindle Walhalla's towers."
And that is all. Yet the thought lurks always beneath the surface
of the tragedy. Wotan, the father and master of the futile and
disappearing gods, fell a victim to evil itself, to evil which in the
consuming power of flickering fire was its own executioner.
II.--THE WOMAN AND THE SERPENT
I will put enmity between thee and the serpent.
GENESIS iii. 15
Wagner's gallery of portraits of women has been much praised. Senta,
mooning by her idle spinning-wheel and waiting the time when she
might cast her pure spirit on the stained bosom of the ocean rover
and so save him another seven years' damnation; Elsa, wavering
between faith and doubt and finally rushing to destruction out of
sheer curiosity; the holy Elizabeth, praying for the life of him
who had committed against her the deadliest of all sins, gross
infidelity, the sanctified Elizabeth, sweetest, purest, most adorable
of all Wagner's heroines; the blazing torch of human passion, Isolde,
the primeval, unconventional woman; and Brünnhilde, the wish maid,
the sleeping beauty, the waking avenger and liberator,--all these
have been praised by learned commentators in divers tongues.
Wagner was a student of women. He married two, and there are also
many unpublished letters. He wrote "Tristan und Isolde" on the shores
of Lucerne, where Isolde's real name was Mathilde. In the end he was
dominated by a woman, but it may be doubted whether he ever really
comprehended the "ewig weibliche," of which he made such clever
theatrical use. There is not a very convincing feminine element in
"Das Rheingold." The first disclosure is of three Rhein daughters
sporting in the gauzy depths of their native element and singing in
a language all their own around a nugget of gold of which strange
lies are told. It is said that any person who makes a ring of that
gold will have power and dominion over the world. The truth is that
whosoever possesses that ring is bound to get into trouble, because a
filthy little black dwarf will place a freak's curse upon it.
These three fish-tailed maidens, frisking in the sallow glare
of the shaded spot-light, youthful of aspect, ebullient of
manner, irreproachable in morals, so far as one can judge from
their treatment of the winsome Alberich, outlive the futile and
disappearing gods. They come to the surface in the final scene of
"Götterdämmerung," and wrest back their ring from the hands of Hagen,
whom they incontinently drown in their dotted Swiss habitation. There
must be a deep moral lesson somewhere in this. What is it? Possibly
it signifies that good girls are always triumphant in the end. At any
rate, it accentuates the pitiable feebleness of the mighty ones of
Walhall.
Another feminine figure in the foreword of the trilogy is the
excellent Erda. This portentous poser in green light and veiling
makes two appearances in the course of the tragedy. The first is in
"Rheingold" and the second in "Siegfried." She occupies a position
somewhat similar to that of a Greek chorus. She helps the audience to
a comprehension of what the rather incomprehensible gods are doing.
She always comes to the surface when Wotan is "stumped."
The first time she comes when he is about to commit an act of
folly. She tells him to get rid of the ring which he had employed
so much strategy to procure. He promptly obeys her, although he has
never seen her before, and was pretty thoroughly astonished by her
unexpected appearance. The second time she discloses herself when
Wotan is sorely in need of more sound advice. We now learn that
Wotan, who in "Rheingold" had declared that he intended to know
more of the lady, has not wasted his time in idle prating. The nine
Valkyrs are the living proofs of this. Erda is plainly not at all
pleased to meet her old friend again. She gives him another dark and
dismal warning, and leaves him to chew the cud of his own cheerful
reflection.
Freia, the charming young woman for whom the giants wrangle, is a
mere figure in "Rheingold." She might as well be a piece of stage
property. She counts for nothing else. She has no more dramatic
significance than the lumps of gold which the dwarfs lug upon
their straining shoulders. She belongs to the same category as the
delectable Donner and Froh, who stand about in odd corners and try
desperately to look as if they were Vulcan and Apollo, whereas they
are neither.
One feminine character stands alone in "Rheingold." The virtuous
Fricka, type of that species of amiable wife who regards all mortal
desire as utterly depraved and who would joy to wrap herself in a
spotless mantle of _noli me tangere_ and let her husband worship her
on bended knees outside the portals of her holy temple,--she is the
woman with a mission in this splendid tragedy of futile gods and
fumbling mortals.
But Fricka is right, after all. If Wotan had listened to her
advice, he would have come out of all his difficulties much better.
The fount of misfortune, as far as Fricka is concerned, was her
failure to brush the dust off her own garments in the day of the
first temptation. Loge knew where to touch the quick of her woman's
weakness. "Will the gold make pretty ornaments for women?" she asked;
and Loge, who, being the spirit of evil, well knew the root, declared
that there was nothing which it could do better than that. And so
Fricka stood actionless while Wotan went down to Niebelheim to rape
the gold from Alberich.
Short-sighted Fricka! Mean-spirited Fricka! True woman Fricka!
When she has tacitly consented to the theft of the gold, what does
she? Seeing her poor old one-eyed husband struggling to escape the
consequences of his guilt by creating a race of free agents to make
the atonement for him, she pounces upon him with a stern demand that
Siegmund shall die for violating her standards of virtue. But who
ever expected to find a consistent logic in the mind of fair woman,
even a resident of high Olympus?
Having turned upon the hand that sought to benefit her, what does
she? She joins the procession of the futile and disappearing gods.
Fricka mounts her ram-hauled chariot and slides away into the past,
only to reappear in the chaste and general conflagration of the last
great scene. She has served her purpose. She has made the drama of
"Siegfried" imperatively necessary.
Siegmund being slain in answer to her inexorable demand, Brünnhilde
must be punished for trying to carry out Wotan's original plot. Of
course that is well enough. If Brünnhilde had had her way, there
never would have been any drama of "Siegfried" and consequently
no "Götterdämmerung." But without Siegfried things cannot go on.
Sieglinde must hie her to the dark forest in the east, there to sob
out her sweet but shadowed young life, and leave to the whining Mime
the nursery task of rearing the youthful Volsung.