Project Gutenberg surfs with a modem donated by Supra.
U >>
Unknown >> Project Gutenberg surfs with a modem donated by Supra.
Pages:
1 |
2 | 3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10
They are all overcome with Valhalla's glory except Loki. He is
behind the scenes of this joint reign of the Divine and the
Legal. He despises these gods with their ideals and their golden
apples. "I am ashamed," he says, "to have dealings with these
futile creatures." And so he follows them to the rainbow bridge.
But as they set foot on it, from the river below rises the
wailing of the Rhine maidens for their lost gold. "You down there
in the water," cries Loki with brutal irony: "you used to bask in
the glitter of your gold: henceforth you shall bask in the
splendor of the gods." And they reply that the truth is in the
depths and the darkness, and that what blazes on high there is
falsehood. And with that the gods pass into their glorious
stronghold.
WAGNER AS REVOLUTIONIST
Before leaving this explanation of The Rhine Gold, I must have a
word or two about it with the reader. It is the least popular of
the sections of The Ring. The reason is that its dramatic moments
lie quite outside the consciousness of people whose joys and
sorrows are all domestic and personal, and whose religions and
political ideas are purely conventional and superstitious. To
them it is a struggle between half a dozen fairytale personages
for a ring, involving hours of scolding and cheating, and one
long scene in a dark gruesome mine, with gloomy, ugly music, and
not a glimpse of a handsome young man or pretty woman. Only those
of wider consciousness can follow it breathlessly, seeing in it
the whole tragedy of human history and the whole horror of the
dilemmas from which the world is shrinking today. At Bayreuth I
have seen a party of English tourists, after enduring agonies of
boredom from Alberic, rise in the middle of the third scene, and
almost force their way out of the dark theatre into the sunlit
pine-wood without. And I have seen people who were deeply
affected by the scene driven almost beside themselves by this
disturbance. But it was a very natural thing for the unfortunate
tourists to do, since in this Rhine Gold prologue there is no
interval between the acts for escape. Roughly speaking, people
who have no general ideas, no touch of the concern of the
philosopher and statesman for the race, cannot enjoy The Rhine
Gold as a drama. They may find compensations in some exceedingly
pretty music, at times even grand and glorious, which will enable
them to escape occasionally from the struggle between Alberic and
Wotan; but if their capacity for music should be as limited as
their comprehension of the world, they had better stay away.
And now, attentive Reader, we have reached the point at which
some foolish person is sure to interrupt us by declaring that The
Rhine Gold is what they call "a work of art" pure and simple, and
that Wagner never dreamt of shareholders, tall hats, whitelead
factories, and industrial and political questions looked at from
the socialistic and humanitarian points of view. We need not
discuss these impertinences: it is easier to silence them with
the facts of Wagner's life. In 1843 he obtained the position of
conductor of the Opera at Dresden at a salary of L225 a year,
with a pension. This was a first-rate permanent appointment in
the service of the Saxon State, carrying an assured professional
position and livelihood with it In 1848, the year of revolutions,
the discontented middle class, unable to rouse the
Churchand-State governments of the day from their bondage to
custom, caste, and law by appeals to morality or constitutional
agitation for Liberal reforms, made common cause with the
starving wage-working class, and resorted to armed rebellion,
which reached Dresden in 1849. Had Wagner been the mere musical
epicure and political mugwump that the term "artist" seems to
suggest to so many critics and amateurs--that is, a creature in
their own lazy likeness--he need have taken no more part in the
political struggles of his day than Bishop took in the English
Reform agitation of 1832, or Sterndale Bennett in the Chartist or
Free Trade movements. What he did do was first to make a
desperate appeal to the King to cast off his bonds and answer the
need of the time by taking true Kingship on himself and leading
his people to the redress of their intolerable wrongs (fancy the
poor monarch's feelings!), and then, when the crash came, to take
his side with the right and the poor against the rich and the
wrong. When the insurrection was defeated, three leaders of it
were especially marked down for vengeance: August Roeckel, an old
friend of Wagner's to whom he wrote a well-known series of
letters; Michael Bakoonin, afterwards a famous apostle of
revolutionary Anarchism; and Wagner himself. Wagner escaped to
Switzerland: Roeckel and Bakoonin suffered long terms of
imprisonment. Wagner was of course utterly ruined, pecuniarily
and socially (to his own intense relief and satisfaction); and
his exile lasted twelve years. His first idea was to get his
Tannhauser produced in Paris. With the notion of explaining
himself to the Parisians he wrote a pamphlet entitled Art and
Revolution, a glance through which will show how thoroughly the
socialistic side of the revolution had his sympathy, and how
completely he had got free from the influence of the established
Churches of his day. For three years he kept pouring forth
pamphlets--some of them elaborate treatises in size and
intellectual rank, but still essentially the pamphlets and
manifestoes of a born agitator--on social evolution, religion,
life, art and the influence of riches. In 1853 the poem of The
Ring was privately printed; and in 1854, five years after the
Dresden insurrection, The Rhine Gold score was completed to the
last drum tap.
These facts are on official record in Germany, where the
proclamation summing up Wagner as "a politically dangerous
person" may be consulted to this day. The pamphlets are now
accessible to English readers in the translation of Mr. Ashton
Ellis. This being so, any person who, having perhaps heard that I
am a Socialist, attempts to persuade you that my interpretation
of The Rhine Gold is only "my socialism" read into the works of a
dilettantist who borrowed an idle tale from an old saga to make
an opera book with, may safely be dismissed from your
consideration as an ignoramus.
If you are now satisfied that The Rhine Gold is an allegory, do
not forget that an allegory is never quite consistent except when
it is written by someone without dramatic faculty, in which case
it is unreadable. There is only one way of dramatizing an idea;
and that is by puttmg on the stage a human being possessed
by that idea, yet none the less a human being with all the human
impulses which make him akin and therefore interesting to us.
Bunyan, in his Pilgrim's Progress, does not, like his unread
imitators, attempt to personify Christianity and Valour: he
dramatizes for you the life of the Christian and the Valiant Man.
Just so, though I have shown that Wotan is Godhead and Kingship,
and Loki Logic and Imagination without living Will (Brain without
Heart, to put it vulgarly); yet in the drama Wotan is a
religiously moral man, and Loki a witty, ingenious, imaginative
and cynical one. As to Fricka, who stands for State Law, she does
not assume her allegorical character in The Rhine Gold at all,
but is simply Wotan's wife and Freia's sister: nay, she
contradicts her allegorical self by conniving at all Wotan's
rogueries. That, of course, is just what State Law would do; but
we must not save the credit of the allegory by a quip. Not until
she reappears in the next play (The Valkyries) does her function
in the allegorical scheme become plain.
One preconception will bewilder the spectator hopelessly unless
he has been warned against it or is naturally free from it. In
the old-fashioned orders of creation, the supernatural personages
are invariably conceived as greater than man, for good or evil.
In the modern humanitarian order as adopted by Wagner, Man is the
highest. In The Rhine Gold, it is pretended that there are as yet
no men on the earth. There are dwarfs, giants, and gods. The
danger is that you will jump to the conclusion that the gods, at
least, are a higher order than the human order. On the contrary,
the world is waiting for Man to redeem it from the lame and
cramped government of the gods. Once grasp that; and the allegory
becomes simple enough. Really, of course, the dwarfs, giants, and
gods are dramatizations of the three main orders of men: to wit,
the instinctive, predatory, lustful, greedy people; the patient,
toiling, stupid, respectful, money-worshipping people; and the
intellectual, moral, talented people who devise and administer
States and Churches. History shows us only one order higher than
the highest of these: namely, the order of Heroes.
Now it is quite clear--though you have perhaps never thought of
it--that if the next generation of Englishmen consisted wholly of
Julius Caesars, all our political, ecclesiastical, and moral
institutions would vanish, and the less perishable of their
appurtenances be classed with Stonehenge and the cromlechs and
round towers as inexplicable relics of a bygone social order.
Julius Caesars would no more trouble themselves about such
contrivances as our codes and churches than a fellow of the Royal
Society will touch his hat to the squire and listen to the
village curate's sermons. This is precisely what must happen some
day if life continues thrusting towards higher and higher
organization as it has hitherto done. As most of our English
professional men are to Australian bushmen, so, we must suppose,
will the average man of some future day be to Julius Caesar. Let
any man of middle age, pondering this prospect consider what has
happened within a single generation to the articles of faith his
father regarded as eternal nay, to the very scepticisms and
blasphemies of his youth (Bishop Colenso's criticism of the
Pentateuch, for example!); and he will begin to realize how much
of our barbarous Theology and Law the man of the future will do
without. Bakoonin, the Dresden revolutionary leader with whom
Wagner went out in 1849, put forward later on a program, often
quoted with foolish horror, for the abolition of all
institutions, religious, political, juridical, financial, legal,
academic, and so on, so as to leave the will of man free to find
its own way. All the loftiest spirits of that time were burning
to raise Man up, to give him self-respect, to shake him out of
his habit of grovelling before the ideals created by his own
imagination, of attributmg the good that sprang from the
ceaseless energy of the life within himself to some superior
power in the clouds, and of making a fetish of self-sacrifice to
justify his own cowardice.
Farther on in The Ring we shall see the Hero arrive and make an
end of dwarfs, giants, and gods. Meanwhile, let us not forget
that godhood means to Wagner infirmity and compromise, and
manhood strength and integrity. Above all, we must understand--
for it is the key to much that we are to see--that the god, since
his desire is toward a higher and fuller life, must long in his
inmost soul for the advent of that greater power whose first
work, though this he does not see as yet, must be his own
undoing.
In the midst of all these far-reaching ideas, it is amusing to
find Wagner still full of his ingrained theatrical
professionalism, and introducing effects which now seem
old-fashioned and stagey with as much energy and earnestness as
if they were his loftiest inspirations. When Wotan wrests the
ring from Alberic, the dwarf delivers a lurid and bloodcurdling
stage curse, calling down on its every future possessor care,
fear, and death. The musical phrase accompanying this outburst
was a veritable harmonic and melodic bogey to mid-century ears,
though time has now robbed it of its terrors. It sounds again
when Fafnir slays Fasolt, and on every subsequent occasion when
the ring brings death to its holder. This episode must justify
itself purely as a piece of stage sensationalism. On deeper
ground it is superfluous and confusing, as the ruin to which the
pursuit of riches leads needs no curse to explain it; nor is
there any sense in investing Alberic with providential powers in
the matter.
THE VALKYRIES
Before the curtain rises on the Valkyries, let us see what has
happened since it fell on The Rhine Gold. The persons of the
drama will tell us presently; but as we probably do not
understand German, that may not help us.
Wotan is still ruling the world in glory from his giantbuilt
castle with his wife Fricka. But he has no security for the
continuance of his reign, since Alberic may at any moment
contrive to recover the ring, the full power of which he can
wield because he has forsworn love. Such forswearing is not
possible to Wotan: love, though not his highest need, is a higher
than gold: otherwise he would be no god. Besides, as we have
seen, his power has been established in the world by and as a
system of laws enforced by penalties. These he must consent to be
bound by himself; for a god who broke his own laws would betray
the fact that legality and conformity are not the highest rule of
conduct--a discovery fatal to his supremacy as Pontiff and
Lawgiver. Hence "he may not wrest the ring unlawfully from
Fafnir, even if he could bring himself to forswear love.
In this insecurity he has hit on the idea of forming a heroic
bodyguard. He has trained his love children as war-maidens
(Valkyries) whose duty it is to sweep through battle-fields and
bear away to Valhalla the souls of the bravest who fall there.
Thus reinforced by a host of warriors, he has thoroughly
indoctrinated them, Loki helping him as dialectician-in-chief,
with the conventional system of law and duty, supernatural
religion and self-sacrificing idealism, which they believe to be
the essence of his godhood, but which is really only the
machinery of the love of necessary power which is his mortal
weakness. This process secures their fanatical devotion to his
system of government, but he knows perfectly well that such
systems, in spite of their moral pretensions, serve selfish and
ambitious tyrants better than benevolent despots, and that, if
once Alberic gets the ring back, he will easily out-Valhalla
Valhalla, if not buy it over as a going concern. The only chance
of permanent security, then, is the appearance in the world of a
hero who, without any illicit prompting from Wotan, will destroy
Alberic and wrest the ring from Fafnir. There will then, he
believes, be no further cause for anxiety, since he does not yet
conceive Heroism as a force hostile to Godhead. In his longing
for a rescuer, it does not occur to him that when the Hero comes,
his first exploit must be to sweep the gods and their ordinances
from the path of the heroic will.
Indeed, he feels that in his own Godhead is the germ of such
Heroism, and that from himself the Hero must spring. He takes to
wandering, mostly in search of love, from Fricka and Valhalla. He
seeks the First Mother; and through her womb, eternally fertile,
the inner true thought that made him first a god is reborn as his
daughter, uncorrupted by his ambition, unfettered by his
machinery of power and his alliances with Fricka and Loki. This
daughter, the Valkyrie Brynhild, is his true will, his real
self, (as he thinks): to her he may say what he must not say to
anyone, since in speaking to her he but speaks to himself. "Was
Keinem in Worten unausgesprochen," he says to her, "bleib es
ewig: mit mir nur rath' ich, red' ich zu dir."
But from Brynhild no hero can spring until there is a man of
Wotan's race to breed with her. Wotan wanders further; and a
mortal woman bears him twins: a son and a daughter. He separates
them by letting the girl fall into the hands of a forest tribe
which in due time gives her as a wife to a fierce chief, one
Hunding. With the son he himself leads the life of a wolf, and
teaches him the only power a god can teach, the power of doing
without happiness. When he has given him this terrible training,
he abandons him, and goes to the bridal feast of his daughter
Sieglinda and Hunding. In the blue cloak of the wanderer, wearing
the broad hat that flaps over the socket of his forfeited eye, he
appears in Hunding's house, the middle pillar of which is a
mighty tree. Into that tree, without a word, he strikes a sword
up to the hilt, so that only the might of a hero can withdraw
it. Then he goes out as silently as he came, blind to the truth
that no weapon from the armory of Godhead can serve the turn of
the true Human Hero. Neither Hunding nor any of his guests can
move the sword; and there it stays awaiting the destined hand.
That is the history of the generations between The Rhine Gold and
The Valkyries.
The First Act
This time, as we sit looking expectantly at the curtain, we hear,
not the deep booming of the Rhine, but the patter of a forest
downpour, accompanied by the mutter of a storm which soon gathers
into a roar and culminates in crashing thunderbolts. As it
passes off, the curtain rises; and there is no mistaking whose
forest habitation we are in; for the central pillar is a mighty
tree, and the place fit for the dwelling of a fierce chief. The
door opens: and an exhausted man reels in: an adept from the
school of unhappiness. Sieglinda finds him lying on the hearth.
He explains that he has been in a fight; that his weapons not
being as strong as his arms, were broken; and that he had to fly.
He desires some drink and a moment's rest; then he will go; for
he is an unlucky person, and does not want to bring his ill-luck
on the woman who is succoring him. But she, it appears, is also
unhappy; and a strong sympathy springs up between them. When her
husband arrives, he observes not only this sympathy, but a
resemblance between them, a gleam of the snake in their eyes.
They sit down to table; and the stranger tells them his unlucky
story. He is the son of Wotan, who is known to him only as
Wolfing, of the race of the Volsungs. The earliest thing he
remembers is returning from a hunt with his father to find their
home destroyed, his mother murdered, and his twin-sister carried
off. This was the work of a tribe called the Neidings, upon whom
he and Wolfing thenceforth waged implacable war until the day
when his father disappeared, leaving no trace of himself but an
empty wolfskin. The young Volsung was thus cast alone upon the
world, finding most hands against him, and bringing no good luck
even to his friends. His latest exploit has been the slaying of
certain brothers who were forcing their sister to wed against her
will. The result has been the slaughter of the woman by her
brothers' clansmen, and his own narrow escape by flight.
His luck on this occasion is even worse than he supposes; for
Hunding, by whose hearth he has taken refuge, is clansman to the
slain brothers and is bound to avenge them. He tells the Volsung
that in the morning, weapons or no weapons, he must fight for his
life. Then he orders the woman to bed, and follows her himself,
taking his spear with him.
The unlucky stranger, left brooding by the hearth, has nothing to
console himself with but an old promise of his father's that he
shall find a weapon to his hand when he most needs one. The last
flicker of the dying fire strikes on the golden hilt of the sword
that sticks in the tree; but he does not see it; and the embers
sink into blackness. Then the woman returns. Hunding is safely
asleep: she has drugged him. She tells the story of the one-eyed
man who appeared at her forced marriage, and of the sword. She
has always felt, she says, that her miseries will end in the arms
of the hero who shall succeed in drawing it forth. The stranger,
diffident as he is about his luck, has no misgivings as to his
strength and destiny. He gives her his affection at once, and
abandons himself to the charm of the night and the season; for it
is the beginning of Spring. They soon learn from their
confidences that she is his stolen twin-sister. He is transported
to find that the heroic race of the Volsungs need neither perish
nor be corrupted by a lower strain. Hailing the sword by the name
of Nothung (or Needed), he plucks it from the tree as her
bride-gift, and then, crying "Both bride and sister be of thy
brother; and blossom the blood of the Volsungs!" clasps her as
the mate the Spring has brought him.
The Second Act
So far, Wotan's plan seems prospering. In the mountains he calls
his war-maiden Brynhild, the child borne to him by the First
Mother, and bids her see to it that Hunding shall fall in the
approaching combat. But he is reckoning without his consort,
Fricka. What will she, the Law, say to the lawless pair who have
heaped incest on adultery? A hero may have defied the law, and
put his own will in its place; but can a god hold him guiltless,
when the whole power of the gods can enforce itself only by law?
Fricka, shuddering with horror, outraged in every instinct, comes
clamoring for punishment. Wotan pleads the general necessity of
encouraging heroism in order to keep up the Valhalla bodyguard;
but his remonstrances only bring upon him torrents of reproaches
for his own unfaithfulness to the law in roaming through the
world and begetting war-maidens, "wolf cubs," and the like. He is
hopelessly beaten in the argument. Fricka is absolutely right
when she declares that the ending of the gods began when he
brought this wolf-hero into the world; and now, to save their
very existence, she pitilessly demands his destruction. Wotan has
no power to refuse: it is Fricka's mechanical force, and not his
thought, that really rules the world. He has to recall Brynhild;
take back his former instructions; and ordain that Hunding shall
slay the Volsung.
But now comes another difficulty. Brynhild is the inner thought
and will of Godhead, the aspiration from the high life to the
higher that is its divine element, and only becomes separated
from it when its resort to kingship and priestcraft for the sake
of temporal power has made it false to itself. Hitherto,
Brynhild, as Valkyrie or hero chooser, has obeyed Wotan
implicitly, taking her work as the holiest and bravest in his
kingdom; and now he tells her what he could not tell Fricka--what
indeed he could not tell to Brynhild, were she not, as she says,
his own will--the whole story of Alberic and of that inspiration
about the raising up of a hero. She thoroughly approves of the
inspiration; but when the story ends in the assumption that she
too must obey Fricka, and help Fricka's vassal, Hunding, to undo
the great work and strike the hero down, she for the first time
hesitates to accept his command. In his fury and despair he
overawes her by the most terrible threats of his anger; and she
submits.
Then comes the Volsung Siegmund, following his sister bride, who
has fled into the mountains in a revulsion of horror at having
allowed herself to bring her hero to shame. Whilst she is lying
exhausted and senseless in his arms, Brynhild appears to him and
solemnly warns him that he must presently leave the earth with
her. He asks whither he must follow her. To Valhalla, to take his
place there among the heroes. He asks, shall he find his father
there? Yes. Shall he find a wife there? Yes: he will be waited on
by beautiful wishmaidens. Shall he meet his sister there? No.
Then, says Siegmund, I will not come with you.
She tries to make him understand that he cannot help himself.
Being a hero, he will not be so persuaded: he has his father's
sword, and does not fear Hunding. But when she tells him that she
comes from his father, and that the sword of a god will not avail
in the hands of a hero, he accepts his fate, but will shape it
with his own hand, both for himself and his sister, by slaying
her, and then killing himself with the last stroke of the sword.
And thereafter he will go to Hell, rather than to Valhalla.
How now can Brynhild, being what she is, choose her side freely
in a conflict between this hero and the vassal of Fricka? By
instinct she at once throws Wotan's command to the winds, and
bids Siegmund nerve himself for the combat with Hunding, in which
she pledges him the protection of her shield. The horn of Hunding
is soon heard; and Siegmund's spirits rise to fighting pitch at
once. The two meet; and the Valkyrie's shield is held before the
hero. But when he delivers his sword-stroke at his foe, the
weapon shivers on the spear of Wotan, who suddenly appears
between them; and the first of the race of heroes falls with the
weapon of the Law's vassal through his breast. Brynhild snatches
the fragments of the broken sword, and flies, carrying off the
woman with her on her war-horse; and Wotan, in terrible wrath,
slays Hunding with a wave of his hand, and starts in pursuit of
his disobedient daughter.
The Third Act
On a rocky peak, four of the Valkyries are waiting for the rest.
The absent ones soon arrive, galloping through the air with slain
heroes, gathered from the battle-field, hanging over their
saddles. Only, Brynhild, who comes last, has for her spoil a live
woman. When her eight sisters learn that she has defied Wotan,
they dare not help her; and Brynhild has to rouse Sieglinda to
make an effort to save herself, by reminding her that she bears
in her the seed of a hero, and must face everything, endure
anything, sooner than let that seed miscarry. Sieglinda, in a
transport of exaltation, takes the fragments of the sword and
flies into the forest. Then Wotan comes; the sisters fly in
terror at his command; and he is left alone with Brynhild.
Pages:
1 |
2 | 3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10