Chapter X: Part 10

Wagner had the same experience in this regard as Goethe; he also is a subjective artist who can not be separated from his art; every one of his artistic creations also forms “a fragment of a great confession.” His art forms a portion of his personality, and is therefore no more separable from him than speech is from man. He could therefore hope to be understood only where people felt and experienced with him, not merely where they were ready to consider a work of art in an objective manner. They must be able to penetrate with fullest sympathy into his personal sensations and moods. Wagner therefore says: “As such [that is to say, as his friends, by whom alone he could hope to be understood] I can not, however, regard those who pretend to love me as an artist and yet think it right to deny me their sympathy as a man. If the separation of the artist from the man is something just as unthinkable as the divorce of the soul from the body, and if it is established that an artist can never be loved, that his art can never be comprehended unless he be also (at all events, unconsciously and involuntarily) loved as a man, and unless his life also be understood along with his art, so much the less, as things are at the present day, and considering the despicably bad condition of our public artistic conditions, can an artist of my tendency be loved, and his art consequently be under, stood, unless this understanding and that possible love be founded before everything upon sympathy--that is to say, upon compassion and fellow-feeling with the most human part of his life.”[150] Wagner was perfectly right in this, though only with reference to “an artist of his tendency,” and he agrees in this opinion with Goethe; but we have seen that there is also an objective art to which this opinion would not apply. Wagner, however, from his point of view, could not come to any other judgment; he felt that he could only be understood in those cases in which people felt and experienced with him. His art appealed not to the intellect, but to the feelings. “The artist appeals to the feelings and not to the intellect; if an answer is given him from the side of the intellect, it may be said that he has not been understood, and the criticism amounts in truth to nothing else than the confession of a lack of understanding of the work of art, which can only be understood with the feelings.”[151]

Wagner saw, as Goethe expressed it, “the general in the particular,” and it was in this that his artistic gifts lay. In giving artistic expression to his own aspirations he unconsciously touched the feelings of humanity. He felt that he could only be understood by those who could feel artistically with him, “who happened to be in a more or less similar position with the artist, developed under similar conditions of life, and who could sympathize with him from the bottom of their nature and heart, so that they were, under certain circumstances, in a position to assume his view as their own, and were able to take the required intense interest in the effort to give them expression.”

With a view to giving artistic expression to his feelings, Wagner felt himself drawn toward a form of art which permitted him to appeal in the most unlimited manner possible to the receptive sensations, and this form of art was the musical drama. Of course this form of art had to be very different from the opera which had existed up to this time, so as to be in conformity with the difference between their respective aims. The aim of the opera of that day was the satisfaction of the prevailing artistic taste of an unintelligent mob, the satisfaction of a longing for diversion and amusement. The opera had to do justice to all these requirements. The dominating factor of the opera was the music, to which everything else was subordinate. To create “fine melodies” was the duty of the composer; the libretto was a secondary consideration, and sound and word had no intimate connection with each other. There was no desire for anything like “sense” in a libretto; the words were always merely the handmaids of the music, to suit which they were put together. Just in the same way as the poet was, so to speak, the train-bearer of the musician, the musician became the slave of the interpreter. Airs and duets were composed in order to give the singers the opportunity of displaying their artistic skill; composers had no hesitation in writing for particular singers, and in letting them prescribe the nature of their work, in order to attain as “powerful an effect” as possible.

Between productions of this kind and a form of art whose single aim it was to give expression to the emotions and feelings of the artist, there must naturally be a fundamental distinction. In Wagner’s eyes music was nothing further than a means of expression which in a co-ordinate manner stood opposed to the other factors of the work as a whole, of the drama. The meaning of the music begins at the point where that of the words no longer suffices. Temperaments and passions may be described in every case by the spoken words, but they can not be immediately brought to expression. Music, on the other hand, is the immediate proclaimer of the sensations; the words appeal to the intellect, the music appeals to the feelings.

Wagner felt very well that he had begun his true artistic career with the Flying Dutchman. “At that point my career as a poet begins where I left that of a composer of librettos.” His works of art originated thereafter no longer in reflection, but in the impulse to communicate moods that were present in him. “My treatment was new; it was suggested to me out of my inmost mood, and forced upon me by the impulse to communicate this mood. In order to deliver myself of what was in me--that is to say, in order to obey the inward pressure to communicate with persons feeling like me--I had as an artist to enter upon a path that had certainly not been suggested to me by outward experience, and that which impels a man hereto is necessity, a deeply felt, constraining necessity, though one not known to the practical mind.”

The Flying Dutchman was finished. The indefinite yearning of the artist assumed a more and more tangible form in the longing for home:

’Tis strange, methinks, to give its name
To every land to which I roam;
But not to find that dearest land
For which I burn--the land called home.[152]

It was in this state of mind that Wagner left Paris in the spring of 1842. Meanwhile his Rienzi had been accepted for the court theatre at Dresden; the Flying Dutchman was to be produced at Berlin; the future smiled upon the artist with rosy serenity, and with happy, joyous heart he set out for home. “For the first time I saw the Rhine, and with bright tears in my eyes I, poor artist that I was, swore eternal fidelity to my German Fatherland.”[153] In due course he reached Dresden, where he was received with love and sympathy. Rienzi was produced and proved a brilliant triumph. “After a long struggle amid paltry circumstances,” so Wagner writes, “after hard-fought battles, sufferings, and condemnation amid the loveless Parisian artistic and social life, I quickly found myself in surroundings that acknowledged me, helped me, and frequently met me in the most affectionate spirit.”

Wagner had already been for some time acquainted with the legend of Tannhäuser through an old book of folk-tales. On the journey from Paris to Dresden he visited the Wartburg for the first time, and it was in this way that this legend, which in the book in question was loosely connected with the singers’ war, came once more clearly before his eyes. But in Dresden, where he again took part in the outward pomp of modern artistic life, this impression gradually faded away. The extraordinary success of his Rienzi, the veneration and admiration which fell to his lot, deceived him once again with respect to the condition of art as it really existed, and caused him to regard it in an idealistic light. The post of director of the royal opera at Dresden having at this time been offered to him, it became perfectly clear to him that the public life of art did not imply any true art such as he had learned to know it, but only a “self-interest which adorned itself with an artistic appearance.” But the brilliancy of such a post in the eyes of others blinded him also, and he became director of the royal opera.

The production of the Flying Dutchman at Berlin had come to naught; but, in consequence of the great success which had attended Rienzi, the director of the court theatre of Dresden decided to have the Flying Dutchman also produced. The opera was quickly rehearsed under Wagner’s own direction, but fell entirely flat. The public had expected something like Rienzi, but this “new tendency” left it perfectly cold and unsympathetic. His Rienzi was repeated with so much the more enthusiasm, and it must have been clear to Wagner which path he ought to tread if he wished to make sure of fame and fortune. Once more the temptation came to him to be untrue to his real artistic nature. “The sensuous, luxurious mood,” so he writes, “which had come upon me by virtue of the complete change in my external circumstances, and in consequence of the first enjoyment of an assured position, but especially also of a certain amount of affection and admiration on the part of the public, became intensified into a pleasurable self-content, and soon led me more and more deeply into a misunderstanding and misuse of my true nature as it had hitherto developed itself, with its necessary consequences.”[154]

Once again the impulse came to Wagner to write a great, brilliant opera in the style of Rienzi, and he therefore took up a scheme which had already been sketched out at an earlier period, an historical opera in five acts--The Saracens--of which Manfred, son of the Emperor Frederick II, was the hero. But this artistic tendency, which was merely calculated for splendour and effect and was repugnant to his whole nature, was bound very soon to fill him with aversion and disgust. He himself describes this internal struggle: “An impulse, such as in every person impels toward the immediate present, now determined me, in my special circumstances as an artist, to a tendency which was bound again very soon and violently to disgust me. This impulse would only have been appeased in life if I had also sought as an artist to aspire to brilliancy and profit by a perfect subordination of my true nature to the demands of the public taste. I would have had to sacrifice myself to fashion and to playing upon the public’s taste, and here, at this point, it was clear to my feeling that in actually entering upon this tendency I would have to come to naught from sheer disgust.”

In this state of mind Tannhäuser again presented himself to Wagner’s soul, in his longing henceforth to get out of the world of sensuality and pleasure:

There’s more than joy affects my heart,
’Midst my delight I seek for smart;
Far from thy realm I must me hie,
O Queen! O Goddess! Let me fly![155]

He turned from this artistic tendency with aversion, and became filled with a mighty yearning after satisfaction in a higher, nobler element, which, in antithesis to the sensual world of enjoyment that was about him and that strove for fame and splendour, must appear to him like a “pure, chaste, maidenly, unapproachable and intangible loving being.” “How,” thus proceeds Wagner, “could this yearning for love, the noblest sensation which, taking into consideration my nature, I could feel, be anything but the craving after emancipation from the earthly present, after rebirth into an element of infinite love, such as is not to be found on earth, but seemed only attainable by death?”

In this internal struggle his true artist nature had once again come off victorious. Wagner had on many occasions called music his “good angel”; now he was freed by it through the irresistible impulse to truer, more unselfish devotion, from the sensuous striving after external splendour and fame. A sublime, unattainable ideal of the most unselfish sacrifice, only tangible in death, hovered before him in the form of a pure, chaste maiden, and within him sounded the words of redemption:

An angel prayed for thee on earth--
All blissful did she soar o’er thee:
Elizabeth![156]

This was the state of mind to which Tannhäuser owed its origin. How painfully must it have affected Wagner to be so entirely misunderstood in his intentions and efforts! He himself says: “How silly must those critics appear to me who have become ingenious under the influence of modern loose living, when they try to impute to my Tannhäuser a specifically Christian, impotently heavenward tendency!”[157]

The figure of Tannhäuser had sprung from his inmost soul; in it his true feelings and sensations found artistic incorporation. He now found himself again on the path of the only art which was capable of satisfying him, yet felt that here he must always deny himself fame and splendour. But he shunned neither struggle nor conflict; the freedom of his artistic creation was of more value to him than the sensual pleasures which had surrounded him.

Nay, I must off the earth to see,
With thee I can a slave but be;
For liberty I still do crave,
For full free liberty I rave;
To toil and strife I must be near,
Though ’tis to die and disappear;
So from thy realm I must me hie--
O Queen! O Goddess! Let me fly![158]

Well did he know what a thorny path he would henceforth have to traverse, for he says: “In writing this work I signed my own death warrant. No longer could I now hope for aught from the modern world of art.” Fully did he feel the curse of Venus:

Thy shame will then dishonour breed;
Expelled and cursed, taunts follow thee;
Crushed and oppressed I see thee come,
Thy dishonoured head with dust defiled.[159]

Nevertheless, bravely and unhesitatingly he went forward upon the only path that was possible for him.

He felt that on this path he would alienate the public and many friends who had hitherto honoured him; he knew that he would not be able to offer an adequate substitute for the amusing and pleasure-giving popular opera of the day; he recognised that his works were entirely unfitted for the artistic stage as it then was. Thus he says: “A piece that is likely to draw good houses, that is likely to be produced before the public for a lengthy period, or perhaps always, alternated with other pieces like it, ought not to be derived from any mood, nor to require for its understanding any particular mood. For this purpose productions must be taken that are either based on no mood in particular, or even on no mood at all, and therefore do not aim to appeal to a particular mood in the public. They should furnish, by the splendour of representation, and through the sympathy felt for the performers, a light form of entertainment.”

The directory of the court theatre at Dresden decided upon a production of Tannhäuser, which by this time had been finished. The opera was lavishly mounted, and--met with the same fate as the Flying Dutchman. The public was once more disappointed in its expectations, and did not hesitate to make known its extreme dissatisfaction.

Wagner was overpowered by a feeling of utter isolation. He had, indeed, found the means of giving artistic form and expression to his feelings; he now possessed, indeed, a language by which he could communicate his sensations, but there was no one who understood this language, who shared his sensations, who felt and experienced with him. “I had now become conscious of my perfect isolation as an artistic person to such an extent that it was only from this very feeling of isolation that I could draw the impulse and strength to endeavor to speak to those around me.”[160]

While in this state of mind there occurred to his fantasy a legend which he had already studied in connection with the Tannhäuser saga--that of Lohengrin. In Tannhäuser, Wagner had swung himself free from a world of sensuality, of outward brilliancy and vain aspiration; he had succeeded in soaring aloft to the desired height of purity and chastity. He had escaped from the world of weak indulgence to the lonely height of noblest renunciation. But on this height an inexpressible yearning filled him to get away from this sunlike brilliancy of chastest purity to the refreshing warmth of life, to the complete surrender of unselfish love. He yearned, not to get back to the life which he had left, but to be in a new ideal life which he had not yet known. “From this height my longing looks perceived--woman, the woman for whom the Flying Dutchman yearned from the ocean depth of his misery; the woman who like a star of heaven directed Tannhäuser from the dens of sensuality of the Venusberg to the way upward, and who now drew Lohengrin down from sunny heights to the cherishing bosom of the earth.”

Lohengrin did not wish to be looked up to and admired by the woman whom he went to seek, for whose deliverance he had been sent; he wished to be loved by her. This love was not to consist of a trembling adoration of a higher being, but was to be experienced in the inmost heart; it was to rest upon a truer, more intelligent devotion. For this it was necessary that Lohengrin should conceal his higher origin. For himself alone was Elsa to love him; nor must she ask who he was or whence he came:

Ne’er venture to inquire,
Nor proof from me desire,
Whence I my journey trace,
And what’s my name and race![161]

“Thus he desired the woman--thus the human heart.” Upon Elsa’s cry for help, which echoed up from the midst of humanity to his dreary isolation, he came to her aid, and saw in her the woman for whom he craved. Confidingly she gave herself up to her brave hero:

Take me! Hero, saviour mine!
All that I am deem thou as thine![162]

But soon jealousy and envy set to work, and awaken doubt and suspicion in the soul of the beloved woman. He perceives that she adores but does not understand him. The confession of his origin is forced from him, and he is compelled to return, crushed in spirit, to the dreariness of his isolation.

This is the story of Lohengrin, of which Wagner says: “In the character and the plight of this Lohengrin I now recognise unmistakably the symbol of the only tragic material, the only tragic element, in fact, of modern life.”[163]

He himself felt this tragedy in his inmost soul on the lonely height upon which he stood, and where he was consumed by ardent longing. “Here at last I hit the chief point of what is tragic in the situation of the true artist toward the life of the present time--the same situation, in truth, which received from me in Lohengrin its artistic shape. The most necessary and most natural craving of such an artist is, to be unreservedly accepted and understood by the feeling; and the impossibility, caused by our modern artistic life, of finding this feeling in such a state of ingenuousness and undoubting trust as he asked--to be understood; the necessity of having to communicate himself almost wholly to the critical understanding only, instead of to the feelings--this is indeed the first tragical element of his situation. As an artistic person I had to feel this, and it was destined to affect me in the course of my further development to such a degree that I finally broke out in open rebellion against the pressure of this situation.”[164]

Wagner describes how, during the elaboration of the material, the true nature of Elsa came more and more clearly before his mind’s eye. He saw in her not a woman filled with curiosity or jealousy, but “the longed-for complement of Lohengrin,” which blended with him into one whole, the “other part of his own nature.” “Elsa is the unconscious, involuntary element in which the conscious, voluntary nature of Lohengrin longs to dissolve itself.” The involuntary impulse, the motive force of his own efforts and creations, Wagner recognised in this Elsa, before whom “manly egoism even in its noblest shape had effaced itself totally.” “Elsa, the woman--the woman whom hitherto I had not understood, but whom now I knew--this most necessary incarnation of the purest sentient involuntariness--has converted me into a perfect revolutionist. She was the spirit of the people, the spirit in which I as an artistic person also longed for my freedom.”[165]

The home that had been yearned for in the Flying Dutchman, Wagner had failed to find. He felt a stranger and alone among those that did not comprehend him. His ideal sense perceived everywhere the limitations of the human mind by external circumstances, traditional usages, and convention, and nowhere did he see that free man who stood high above the trifling manœuvres of modern life, and for whom he craved with a glowing desire.

While in this state of mind he joined--I might say in an ingenuous manner--the revolution, as he hoped to see his ideal realized thereby. Thus he says: “From the degrading yoke of slavery, of general handicraftship, with its pale soul of money, we will soar up to a free artistic humanity with its bright universal soul; from wretched, burdened day-labourers, we will all become beautiful, strong men, to whom the world belongs as an eternal, inexhaustible source of highest artistic enjoyment.”[166]

His rebellion was not directed against a governing power but against a culture that had gone astray; his wrath was not a political but a purely human matter which had been developed by his individual artistic nature. When he had to fly in consequence of his share in the uprising, he said, therefore: “With nothing can I compare the agreeable sensation which, after I had surmounted the first grievous impressions, pervaded me when I felt myself free--free of the world’s tormenting, always unfulfilled wishes, free from the relations in which these wishes had been my only consuming nourishment! Since no consideration any longer bound me, the outlaw and fugitive, to any falsehood of any kind whatsoever; since I had thrown behind me every hope, every expectation from this now triumphant world, and could publicly and openly shout to it, with the most unconstrained candidness, that I, the artist, scorned it from the very bottom of my heart--this world so hypocritical and apprehensive of art and culture; since I could say to it that not a drop of really artistic blood flowed in any part of its vital veins, that it was incapable of pouring out a breath of human civilization, a whiff of human beauty--I felt myself for the first time in my life thoroughly and truly free, light, and happy, even though I might not know where next day I should hide myself that I might breathe the air of heaven.”[167]

While Wagner’s artistic creations had hitherto sprung from one single mood, one special situation in life, he was now impelled, as in the course of time all his sensations and views had assumed a more and more comprehensible form, to give to this inner life, these thoughts and feelings, artistic form in a great work of art. To the idea which chiefly filled him, the yearning after the free man who had raised himself above culture and civilization, he had given expression in his writings in the most various ways. Thus he says in Art and Revolution:[168] “Nature, human nature, will lay down the law to the two sisters--culture and civilization: So far as I am comprehended in you, shall you live and bloom; so far as I am not in you, shall you die and wither!” In another passage he says: “The real man will therefore not come until his life is formed and governed according to true human nature, and not by arbitrary political laws.”[169] In Art and Climate he says: “There is no higher power than that of the communistic man; there is nothing more lovable than communistic man. Only by the highest power of love do we, however, attain to true freedom, for there is no true freedom except that which is common to all men.”[170]

At the time of the Revolution Wagner had already plunged into the study of German mythology, by which he felt specially attracted. He says: “In the effort to give artistic form to the desires of my heart, and in the course of my earnest investigation as to what attracted me so irresistibly to the original source of the legends, I advanced step by step deeper into that antiquity where I was finally to find, to my unutterable joy, and that, too, right in the highest antiquity, the youthful, beautiful man in the strongest freshness of his power. My studies in this way led me through the poems of the Middle Ages to the very foundation of ancient German mythology; one vesture after the other, which later poetry had thrown around it to its disfigurement, I was able to sever from it so as finally to see it in its chastest beauty. What I here saw was no longer the historical conventional figure, whereof the vesture more than the real form must interest us, but the real fundamental man, in whom I was able to recognise every pulsation of the blood, every twitch of the strong muscles, in unconfined freedom--in short, the true man.”[171]

This “true, free man” it was who hovered before him as the ideal after which he yearned. He was filled with an internal impulse to the artistic realization of the “purely human being, free from all conventionality.” In Siegfried he had found this ideal: “Elsa had taught me to find this man; he was to me the manly incorporation of the eternal involuntariness, of the doer of real deeds, of the human being in the fulness of highest, most direct power, and most undoubted worthiness of love.”

If, in spite of Wagner’s unmistakable explanations, even his earlier works were so entirely misunderstood, in which only single moods were treated, how much more likely was his greatest work, into which he entered with all his soul, in which he incorporated artistically his view of the world, to give occasion to misunderstandings! If, therefore, I discuss this work at greater length, I can only point in excuse to the fact that, as we shall see later on, mistakes and false conceptions have given rise to the most momentous results. Let us therefore proceed to a consideration of the trilogy of the Ring of the Nibelungs.

The first scene of the Rhinegold shows us the three Daughters of the Rhine in harmless, playful sport at the bottom of the river. Alberich approaches them in a wild passion of sensual love. He tries to overpower them. When one escapes him he pursues the others. It is all the same to him which one he overtakes, and that one always appears to him to be the most beautiful whom he happens to hold in his embrace. In him we see the representative of that sensuality which forms the antithesis to ideal, unselfish love. While he is thus engaged in pursuing the Daughters of the Rhine, the gold glitters with a strong light and delights with its splendour the Daughters of the Rhine, who artlessly hail it. Alberich stands blinded in amazed embarrassment, and listens to the proclaiming words of the Daughters of the Rhine:

He gains the world
As his own inheritance,
Who from the Rhinegold
Creates the ring
Which measureless might doth bestow.[172]

It is not in every one’s power, however, to accomplish this miracle:

Only who Love’s might
Doth withstand,
Only who Love’s joys
Drives away,
None but he gets the secret power
The gold to force into a ring.[173]

Now, what is the meaning of this ring, which thus bestows “measureless might”--nay, the command of the world? In it we must see the sensuous rendering of that world from which Tannhäuser yearned to escape, from which he was saved by Elisabeth--the world of sensual enjoyment, the striving after outward fame and splendour, the all-constraining, world-ruling power of gold. That the love which he must renounce who longed to forge this ring, is not sexual love, is indicated by the fact that Alberich had a son, Hagen; it is, on the contrary, that ideal, unselfish impulse, that self-sacrificing love--Elisabeth.

The incarnation of sensuality, Alberich, cursed this love, stole the gold, forged the ring, and won by its means that measureless might which made him ruler of the world. Everybody had to create and work for him; his insatiable cupidity craved ever new treasures and wealth; even his own brother he held in a “degrading yoke of slavery,” and compelled him to make that wonderful piece of work, the Tarnhelm.[174]

After the ring and the hoard had been stolen from him, Alberich cursed the gold:

No joy shall please
Him who it holds;
Upon no favourite of fortune shall shine
Its brilliant light;
Who it doth own
Let care devour,
And who has it not,
Let envy gnaw!
All shall strive
For what it brings,
Yet none joy shall reap
Though it is used.[175]

This curse weighed upon the gold from this time on, and brought death and ruin on those who possessed it.

The central figure of the whole action, in which all that is tragic in the drama is realized, is the mighty form of the all-governing god Wotan, the father of gods and men. Wagner writes in an article:[176] “In my conception of the Ring of the Nibelung I had, unknown to myself, confessed the truth relative to human affairs. Everything here is thoroughly tragic, and the will which would form a world after its wish, can finally attain nothing more satisfactory than its own dignified destruction.” This will, bereft of freedom and conditioned and bound down by circumstances, is Wotan. He feels the mighty power within him, yet can not put it forth. He is bound by stipulations; he must resist his desire.

In contradistinction to him, the restless, forward-pressing will which always strives after new aims while it denies itself, stands Erda, the representative of intellectual knowledge. We meet her first in Rhinegold, when Wotan deliberates as to whether he shall deliver up the world-governing ring in order to recover the stolen Freia:

How all was, I know,
How all is,
How all will be,
I see too:
Th’ eternal world
Ur-Wala,
Erda puts in your mind.[177]

Erda, true knowledge, sleeps, and in her place watches Fricka, Wotan’s spouse. In her we have to see the representative of right based upon pure convention. She protects the right, not because of its intrinsic value, or because she has recognised it as such, but because it exists and is designated as right. She sticks to the letter, and law and custom are the motives which alone determine her. The deeper emotions of heart and feeling out of which true right proceeds are strange to her; she is personified externality, purely arbitrary formality.

The second scene of Rhinegold discloses to us Walhalla, the mighty burg of the gods, raising heavenward its shining battlements. It signifies the irresistible will power, the struggle for endless fame. Fricka is anxious and terror-stricken at sight of the burg. As representative of the law, of strict right, she first of all bethinks herself of the bargain that has been made, and of the stipulated reward:

Ready is the burg,
The pledge forfeited:
Dost thou forget what thou didst give?[178]

To the restless, onward striving will the bargain suggests no cause for anxiety. Wotan rejoices at the sight of the mighty citadel; he breaks the concluded agreement by which he rules the world, but has to atone for his guilt, since his will is fettered, bound by law and custom.

To the giants who built the burg, Wotan had promised Freia as a reward. Fasolt and Faffner now approach to claim their reward, the building of the burg being completed. Freia is the refreshing ideal, that “artistic humanity with its bright universal soul,” that love which Alberich had cursed--the unselfish love of human being for human being. The partaking of her apples, which she proffers to the gods, gives them everlasting youthful energy. But if they are withheld from them they shall wither in joyless, fameless old age. Wotan now recognises his mistake in sacrificing Freia, and refuses the reward: “I will not sell Freia.”

While the giants persist in claiming the reward for which they had bargained, Loge approaches, the representative of cunning, stratagem, and untruth, who had advised the agreement. Very characteristic of the signification of Freia and of the Rhinegold is Loge’s account of how he sought to replace Freia and finally discovered the Rhinegold.

Loge’s narrative arouses the cupidity of the giants. They are ready to renounce Freia if the Rhinegold is given them in her stead. Very characteristic of the difference between the Rhinegold and Freia is the scene in which Fasolt and Faffner exchange her for the hoard. Even the “awkward giants,” the “rude clowns,” the representatives of the coarsest materialism, the rough-hewn opposites of delicate feeling--even they will not sever themselves from the ravishing woman.

To lose the woman,
Be sure, will grieve me sorely:
If then she from my sight must go,
The hoard of metal
Must so be heaped
That from my eyes
It wholly the fair one conceals![179]

With gold he will bury the gentlest higher emotion of the heart:

Alas, still shines
Her glance on me,
Her eye’s bright star
Still lights my way:
Through a small crevice
I must her spy!--
Do I see the dear delicious eyes.
I can not leave this woman fair.[180]

So soon as the giants have gained possession of the hoard, the Tarnhelm, and the ring, the curse of Alberich becomes fulfilled. Beset by jealousy and envy, they fall to quarreling, and Fasolt slays Faffner, his own brother. While the possession of the gold aroused in Alberich primarily lust of power, it manifests itself in Faffner’s case as the mere naked desire for possession itself. He does not know the value and the power of what he possesses; he finds delight merely in the fact that he possesses it. Through dread that some of it may be stolen from him, he drags his possession to a cavern, metamorphoses himself by means of the Tarnhelm into a mighty dragon, and there looks after his treasure in idle repose. “I lie and hold possession, let me repose,” are Faffner’s words. If we look around us in our modern world for Faffners, who seek to possess merely for the sake of possessing, it will not prove a very difficult task for us to discover a whole series of them.

The second part of the drama, the Walkyry, represents the hot struggle between Wotan, the mighty will which struggles for freedom, and Fricka, the incarnation of inflexible law, convention, and custom. Wotan recognises the bondage of his will, the impossibility of unfolding himself freely and unhampered:

I who by pact am a lord,
To the selfsame pact am now slave.[181]

Eternal knowledge, Erda, had predicted his destruction, “an ignominious end of the eternal.” He must fear Alberich. Should he ever be successful in acquiring the ring,

Then would Walhall be lost:
Who love did imprecate
He alone
With envy would use
The runes of the ring
Giving the noble
Infinite grief.[182]

To defy the foe, to shield himself and Walhalla, Wotan sent out the Walkyries to bring heroes, who should fight for him. The Walkyries, Wotan’s daughters, formed a portion of his personality. They formed the wish for liberty; they were hostile to Fricka--hostile to her right. Their origin “in wild love” of itself denotes their opposition to convention and custom.

But Fricka still reigns. The Walkyries form only a part of Wotan; the agreements that bind him they are unable to break. They, too, must submit to Fricka’s will.

Wotan is aware that only a free hero, one who starts up boldly and unhampered, will be able to defy the foe. Through such a hero he had hoped to attain what he wished. He betook himself to a noble stock which itself had sprung from him--the Wälsung. He had thrust a sacred sword into the trunk of an ash tree in such a way that only the strongest hero should be able to withdraw it. Siegmund, the Wälsung, the brave hero, he himself stimulated to the deed. Siegmund felt in himself the impulse to freedom; unhampered did his defiant spirit unfold itself. Then he found Sieglinde, his own sister, in the enemy’s house, married without love, courted without affection by Hunding. The deepest love was kindled in the young pair; custom and law failed to separate them; they followed solely the true human feeling which moved the inmost recesses of their hearts.

How wrongly has this love between Siegmund and Sieglinde been interpreted! After what has been said before, it requires no further explanation that here, as in all of Wagner’s creations, love is merely the symbolical expression of certain sensations; that it was in no way Wagner’s purpose to glorify in this relationship the impulse of sensual love or the like, but that the myth was only made use of in an ingenious way to incorporate artistically that already discussed antithesis, unfettered human freedom and right based upon custom and convention.

Fricka, the inflexible law which deviates not from the path of tradition, the conventional form, the personified externality, is horrified at this unequalled delinquency. Wotan, the will that strives for freedom, can not see anything wrong, any misdeed in the act:

What deed so bad
Have these twain done,
Whom spring united in love?
’Twas affection’s charm
Enraptured them;
Why should I blame affection’s might?[183]

Then he continues:

Thou see’st but one thing,
I another see,
And the first is driven from my sight.[184]

They are antagonistic principles--the right that is formed by virtue of interest and convention, and the right that is based upon a truer, more purely human experience. The sharply antagonistic elements which are here dealt with, and are so sharply opposed, one might specially refer to the moral sphere, and call illegal morality and legal immorality.

Wotan then proceeds:

Unholy
Deem I the oath
Which without love unites;
And of me in truth
Do not require
That by force I hold
What doth not cling to thee.
For where bold powers themselves array,
I must counsel open war.[185]

Fricka knows full well that she must regard the strong, free hero as her foe; that his triumph means her fall, her destruction, and she therefore demands of Wotan that he will deny him his countenance. She gains the day in this struggle with Wotan, and the latter is compelled to resolve upon Siegmund’s end. He has to give up his own yearning; he has to will against his wish:

In my own fetters
Am I caught:
I, the least free of all![186]

Such is Wotan’s plaint to Brünhilde, his and Erda’s daughter.

In her, the daughter of Will and Knowledge, Wotan sees his own will, formed through knowledge, whose free unfolding, however, he fears.

Wotan recognises that in Siegmund he merely sees himself, his own sword, his own energy, and he therefore determines upon Siegmund’s death.

Brünhilde, the daughter of Knowledge, knows that Sieglinde bears already under her heart the greatest hero:

Thy wife trust to me
On account of the pledge,
Which blissful from thee she received.[187]

In her is kindled the struggle between Knowledge and Will; the latter gets worsted, and she determines to save Siegmund against the will of Wotan. The fettered will, Wotan, has to will against his own wish, he has to destroy with his own hand Siegmund, whom he loves. Against Wotan’s spear, marked with the runes of the contract, his sword breaks, and Siegmund falls.

Wotan’s wrath, however, is only greater, his passion more headstrong, his fury more savage at the disobedience of Brünhilde; for he feels only more deeply his own bondage, his own weakness and impotency.

Thus Wotan casts off his child. But his heart is softened and appeased by the prayers of the “brave, noble child.” He will not yield her up as a prize “to the most cowardly man for an easy booty”:

A true bridal fire
Shall burn now for thee,
As ne er hitherto for bride it has burned!
Let flaming glow
Warm the rock around;
With consuming terror
Let it cowards scare;
Let faint heart avoid
Brünhilde’s rock:
For one alone woos the bride,
Who is freer than I, the god![188]

Brünhilde, Wotan’s glorious child, pure, unalloyed, genuine Knowledge, is sunk in a deep sleep and awaits the strong, free hero, who, uninfluenced by law and custom, free from human tradition, guided only by internal impulse to eternal perception and true beauty, shall come to awaken her.

Wotan, however, the fettered will, the denial of the will to live, resolves upon his end:

Depart, then,
Imperious pride,
Of divine splendour
Braggart disgrace!
Break all together,
What I have built!
My work I renounce;
There’s but one thing still left:
The end----
The end!--[189]

At this point the tragic element of the drama reaches its climax; “the will, which would form a world after its own wish,” finds a fitting destruction. But the world of the artist could not at the same time attain to a close. Borne on the wings of an artistic and enthusiastic fantasy, the artist soars in majestic flight to a height never foreseen. There he has seen it--the daring, free being “with the bright universal soul”; he has felt it, felt it deeply. In it Wagner saw the human ideal. It is the free, uninfluenced human being who acts according to the circumstances of this world without being influenced or impelled from without, whose actions are not conditioned by custom and convention, but who strives after what is highest and noblest from free inward stimulus. He only acts according to the dictates of his pure discernment, his true knowledge, and his stronger will is able to triumph over all the obstructions of the world.

Wotan had longed for this hero when he said to Brünhilde:

But one has the power.
Which I ne’er had:
A knight, whom to help
I never inclined;
Strange to the god,
Free from his grace,
Unconsciously,
Without command.
From his own need
With his own weapon
Performed the act,
Which I have to fear,
’Gainst which I gave no warning.
My only wish e’en wished it.[190]

Siegfried was the brave, happy hero, “the real original, human being in whom every pulsation of the blood, every twitch of the energetic muscles, was to be recognised in unconfined, fresh action”--the true, free human being. The myth, which makes him one of twins, is here symbolically and poetically turned to account; even his origin points to absolute freedom from custom and convention. Siegfried instinctively recognises in Mime the enemy, the traitor. In the latter we see incorporated the lowest human passions--envy, jealousy, and crudest egoism.

For Siegfried, the strong youth, no glaive was destined, as had been the father’s case. By his own strength he must form it, weld together the strong pieces of the divine glaive. The free man who is independent of conventional morality can, of course, know no fear. He alone has the courage and strength and activity to mount to the most beautiful ideal, to true human freedom. The forging of the sword is accomplished by Siegfried after a fashion quite counter to custom and in violation of every ancient rule of the craft, and his success greatly amazes Mime. The character traits with whose representatives, Mime and Faffner, we have made acquaintance, must disappear with the appearance of the ideal free man. Hence, in the drama, both are destroyed by Siegfried. With Nothung, the wonderful glaive, he slays the evil dragon before the grudge hole (Neidhöhle). The hoard of the Niebelung, and with it the Tarnhelm and the ring, now belong to Siegfried. He regards them, however, as useless toys, and does not trouble himself about the properties of that which he possesses:

What use you are to me
I do not know.[191]

The beautiful, strong, free man, who is artistically embodied in Siegfried, seeks in his inner worth alone happiness and contentment, not in the heaping up of external riches and goods.

Siegfried now strides away to the mount that no craven can approach without being consumed by the blazing fire. His actions are determined solely by his own will, which strives continually after what is noble. The restraint of compacts is foreign to him. He does not, therefore, bow to the spear of Wotan marked with runes of compact, which is held in his way, and against which the glaive of the father was shattered. Wotan is not able to withstand his might; he shivers the holy spear with Nothung, his glaive welded by his own strength. All hindrances, even the ocean of fire, must yield to his power and his will. So the hero, who “fears not the point of the spear,” advances, strides through the fire, his strength quenching the flaming glow, and approaches Brünhilde to awaken her from her long, inactive sleep. The beautiful, strong, free man, whom the artist sees in radiant light, awakens the world from long sleep. True knowledge, pure cognition awakens humanity to holy bliss. In self-forgetting and self-surrendering love Brünhilde demands of her lover that he leave her, and that he go out into the wide world to perform new and lordly deeds.

We now see the strong, free man in connection with the bad world, surrounded by plots and jealousy, envy and malice. In Hagen we recognise the representative of those properties for which Mime and Alberich previously stood. He is the antithesis of Siegfried, and his nature is shown by his descent. While Siegfried is the issue of a fiery _liaison_ of love contrary to conventional law, Hagen, the son of Alberich, owes his existence to a love bought with gold. Hagen says of himself:

My blood would spoil your drink;
It flows not genuine
And noble as yours,
Stubborn and cold
It curdles in me;
My cheek will not blush,
Wherefore I remain far
From the fiery bond.[192]

Siegfried, in his intercourse with the bad world, acts solely in conformity with his inner feelings. He believes everybody with whom he comes into contact open and true like himself. Hence all distrust is foreign to him, and he acts as the moment suggests. This is the signification of the drink of forgetfulness. Such a naïve, trustful behaviour must in the wicked world lead to ruin and destruction. Reflection, cunning calculation, and accurate recognition of the wickedness of others are the weapons necessary to self-assertion in the world. Thus Siegfried falls a sacrifice to hate, cupidity, and envy. He, to whom the slightest false motion of the heart is an impossibility, and whose soul is of divine peerage and noblest purity, becomes in the eyes of the world a criminal. He is accused of perjury, adultery, fraud, and treason, and intrigue is able to prove its charges and to require punishment therefor. But the true knowledge--the knowledge which, standing without the world, is conditioned by nothing--Brünhilde recognises the eternal and celestial faithfulness of him she loves.

Truer than he
Swore no man oath;
More loyally than he
Held no man his pacts;
Purer than he
Loved never another.[193]

The ring, laden with the curse of the Nibelung, is restored by Brünhilde to the daughters of the Rhine. The Walhalla, with the old world of gods, collapses; but Brünhilde, in radiant accoutrement, bears Siegfried on high upon Grane, the courageous steed. The strife for outward glitter and display, for riches and possessions, ceases. The world, which had been governed by a will bound down to conventional ideas, collapses; and in its stead the true, free will, bound to nothing, but associated with pure knowledge and true recognition, is lord over all.

No more than Wagner intended in his Tannhäuser to teach “a specifically Christian, impotently heaven-expecting moral,” did he in Parsifal, his last artistic creation, have specifically religious ideas in view. Parsifal has rightly been called a continuation of the Nibelungen trilogy. That free hero, who in the trilogy must be overthrown in combating the wicked world, but whose final victory is there only intimated, becomes in Parsifal the real saviour of humanity.

The wardens of the Holy Grail--the sensuous emblem of the highest, holiest good of humanity, the human ideal, the renunciation of the sensual life, greedy for wealth, fame, and pleasure--were the knights of the Grail, who in the holy grove in the Gralsburg, or Grail castle, far from the ignoble impulses of the world, were dedicated to the service of the Holy Grail. A pure cup of crystal containing the blood of Christ was intrusted to the care of Amfortas, the king of the Grail knights. Klingsor, the representative of the element hostile to the ideal--that is, of selfishness and lust of power--himself aspired to the possession of the Holy Grail, not on account of its ideal graciousness, but from self-interest and cupidity. But it was granted to the pure alone to find the path to the relic:

Ye, who their service have attained to
By paths no sinners ever gained to,
Ye know ’tis but permitted
The pure to be admitted
’Mid those the Grail’s divinely magic power
With strength for pious work doth dower.[194]

Klingsor, conscious of his incapacity to become the master of sinful temptations, mutilated himself and so sought to obtain the Grail:

Unable in himself to stifle thoughts of evil,
Quickly turned he his guilty hand,
Resolved to gain the Grail’s command.
But scornfully was by its guardian spurned.[195]

Repulsed by Amfortas, Klingsor built a mighty enchanted palace in the neighbourhood of the Holy Grail castle, whither he knew how to decoy the knights of the Grail, and they fell sacrifices to the seductions of sensuality.

It left Amfortas no peace. He himself sallied forth to fight the wicked enemy and to free the knights from the danger, whereupon he himself fell a victim to the seductions of the crafty one:

While near the walls from us the king was taken,
A woman fair as sin has turned his brain;
He lay in transport her enfolding--
The spear escaped his holding;
A deathly cry! I rushed anigh:--
But laughing, Klingsor fled before,
The sacred spear with him he bore.[196]

That holy spear, with which Amfortas might have conquered the enchanter without trouble, had once shed the blood of Christ. The spear and that holy vessel, the most precious possession of all, had been conveyed by angels to Amfortas’s father, the pious Titurel. They were to be guarded in the holy castle as the holiest of holies--the highest ideals of humanity. Now Klingsor had succeeded in purloining the holy spear, and with it had inflicted upon Amfortas a bad wound, which was never to be healed:

That wound it is, which none may make to close.

Klingsor, being in possession of the mighty and holy weapon, hoped to exterminate the entire race of knights, and to get the Holy Grail as well. Sinful humanity, which found poetic shape in Kundry, is without will power in the hands of the mighty Klingsor, in the grasp of unconquerable passions. Kundry must do evil against her wish, against her will. She certainly felt within her an impulse to unselfish conduct, and sought in constant self-sacrifice to throw off the burden of her selfish propensities; but, driven as by demoniac power, she is not mistress of her will. When, struggling with herself, she cries out, “I will not!” Klingsor answers:

Well wilt thou, for thou must.[197]

The sight of the Holy Grail gives rejuvenated life and renewed strength to all that are noble and pure; but that which refreshes and quickens others fills him who is condemned to guard it with ineffable agony. The pains of the frightful wound are by the holy lustre exacerbated to insufferable torments; the conscience laden with guilt can not bear the contemplation of the highest ideal. In vain Amfortas seeks means for the alleviation of his pain, for relief from his torments. There came to him one comforting prophecy of the Grail:

Before the plundered sanctuary
In pray’r impassioned lay Amfortas,
Imploring for a sign of safety;
Heavenly radiance from the Grail then floated,
A sacred phantom face
From lips divine did chase
These words, whose purport clearly could be noted:
“By pity lightened,
The guileless fool,
Waits for him
My chosen tool.”[198]