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FORGOTTEN ERE FINISHED

In all this, it will be observed, there is nothing new. The
musical fabric is enormously elaborate and gorgeous; but you
cannot say, as you must in witnessing The Rhme Gold, The
Valkyries, and the first two acts of Siegfried, that you have
never seen anything like it before, and that the inspiration is
entirely original. Not only the action, but most of the poetry,
might conceivably belong to an Elizabethan drama. The situation
of Cleopatra and Antony is unconsciously reproduced without being
bettered, or even equalled in point of majesty and musical
expression. The loss of al! simplicity and dignity, the
impossibility of any credible scenic presentation of the
incidents, and the extreme staginess of the conventions by which
these impossibilities are got over, are no doubt covered from the
popular eye by the overwhelming prestige of Die Gotterdammerung
as part of so great a work as The Ring, and by the extraordinary
storm of emotion and excitement which the music keeps up. But the
very qualities that intoxicate the novice in music enlighten the
adept. In spite of the fulness of the composer's technical
accomplishment, the finished style and effortless mastery of
harmony and instrumentation displayed, there is not a bar in the
work which moves us as the same themes moved us in The Valkyries,
nor is anything but external splendor added to the life and humor
of Siegfried.

In the original poem, Brynhild delays her self-immolation on the
pyre of Siegfried to read the assembled choristers a homily on
the efficacy of the Love panacea. "My holiest wisdom's hoard,"
she says, "now I make known to the world. I believe not in
property, nor money, nor godliness, nor hearth and high place,
nor pomp and peerage, nor contract and custom, but in Love. Let
that only prevail; and ye shall be blest in weal or woe." Here
the repudiations still smack of Bakoonin; but the saviour is no
longer the volition of the full-grown spirit of Man, the Free
Willer of Necessity, sword in hand, but simply Love, and not even
Shelleyan love, but vehement sexual passion. It is highly
significant of the extent to which this uxorious commonplace lost
its hold of Wagner (after disturbing his conscience, as he
confesses to Roeckel, for years) that it disappears in the full
score of Night Falls On The Gods, which was not completed until
he was on the verge of producing Parsifal, twenty years after the
publication of the poem. He cut the homily out, and composed the
music of the final scene with a flagrant recklessness of the old
intention. The rigorous logic with which representative musical
themes are employed in the earlier dramas is here abandoned
without scruple; and for the main theme at the conclusion he
selects a rapturous passage sung by Sieglinda in the third act of
The Valkyries when Brynhild inspires her with a sense of her high
destiny as the mother of the unborn hero. There is no dramatic
logic whatever in the recurrence of this theme to express the
transport in which Brynhild immolates herself. There is of course
an excuse for it, inasmuch as both women have an impulse of
self-sacrifice for the sake of Siegfried; but this is really
hardly more than an excuse; since the Valhalla theme might be
attached to Alberic on the no worse ground that both he and
Wotan are inspired by ambition, and that the ambition has the
same object, the possession of the ring. The common sense of the
matter is that the only themes which had fully retained their
significance in Wagner's memory at the period of the composition
of Night Falls On The Gods are those which are mere labels of
external features, such as the Dragon, the Fire, the Water and so
on. This particular theme of Sieglinda's is, in truth, of no
great musical merit: it might easily be the pet climax of a
popular sentimental ballad: in fact, the gushing effect which is
its sole valuable quality is so cheaply attained that it is
hardly going too far to call it the most trumpery phrase in the
entire tetralogy. Yet, since it undoubtedly does gush very
emphatically, Wagner chose, for convenience' sake, to work up
this final scene with it rather than with the more distinguished,
elaborate and beautiful themes connected with the love of
Brynhild and Siegfried.

He would certainly not have thought this a matter of no
consequence had he finished the whole work ten years earlier. It
must always be borne in mind that the poem of The Ring was
complete and printed in 1853, and represents the sociological
ideas which, after germinating in the European atmosphere for
many years, had been brought home to Wagner, who was intensely
susceptible to such ideas, by the crash of 1849 at Dresden. Now
no man whose mind is alive and active, as Wagner's was to the day
of his death, can keep his political and spiritual opinions, much
less his philosophic consciousness, at a standstill for quarter
of a century until he finishes an orchestral score. When Wagner
first sketched Night Falls On The Gods he was 35. When he
finished the score for the first Bayreuth festival in 1876 he had
turned 60. No wonder he had lost his old grip of it and left it
behind him. He even tampered with The Rhine Gold for the sake of
theatrical effect when stage-managing it, making Wotan pick up
and brandish a sword to give visible point to his sudden
inspiration as to the raising up of a hero. The sword had first
to be discovered by Fafnir among the Niblung treasures and thrown
away by him as useless. There is no sense in this device; and its
adoption shows the same recklessness as to the original intention
which we find in the music of the last act of The Dusk of the
Gods.*

*Die Gotterdammerung means literally Godsgloaming. The English
versions of the opera are usually called The Dusk of the Gods, or
The Twilight of the Gods. I have purposely introduced the
ordinary title in the sentence above for the reader's
information.

WHY HE CHANGED HIS MIND

Wagner, however, was not the man to allow his grip of a great
philosophic theme to slacken even in twenty-five years if the
theme still held good as a theory of actual life. If the history
of Germany from 1849 to 1876 had been the history of Siegfried
and Wotan transposed into the key of actual life Night Falls On
The Gods would have been the logical consummation of Das
Rheingold and The Valkyrie instead of the operatic anachronism it
actually is.

But, as a matter of fact, Siegfried did not succeed and Bismarck
did. Roeckel was a prisoner whose mposonment made no difference;
Bakoonin broke up, not Walhall, but the International, which
ended in an undignified quarrel between him and Karl Marx. The
Siegfrieds of 1848 were hopeless political failures, whereas the
Wotans and Alberics and Lows were conspicuous political
successes. Even the Mimes held their own as against Siegfried.
With the single exception of Ferdinand Lassalle, there was no
revolutionary leader who was not an obvious impossibilist in
practical politics; and Lassalle got himself killed in a romantic
and quite indefensible duel after wrecking his health in a
titanic oratorical campaign which convinced him that the great
majority of the working classes were not ready to join him, and
that the minority who were ready did not understand him. The
International, founded in 1861 by Karl Marx in London, and
mistaken for several years by nervous newspapers for a red
spectre, was really only a turnip ghost. It achieved some
beginnings of International Trade Unionism by inducing English
workmen to send money to support strikes on the continent, and
recalling English workers who had been taken across the North Sea
to defeat such strikes; but on its revolutionary socialistic side
it was a romantic figment. The suppression of the Paris Commune,
one of the most tragic examples in history of the pitilessness
with which capable practical administrators and soldiers are
forced by the pressure of facts to destroy romantic amateurs and
theatrical dreamers, made an end of melodramatic Socialism. It
was as easy for Marx to hold up Thiers as the most execrable of
living scoundrels and to put upon Gallifet the brand that still
makes him impossible in French politics as it was for Victor Hugo
to bombard Napoleon III from his paper battery in Jersey. It was
also easy to hold up Felix Pyat and Delescluze as men of much
loftier ideals than Thiers and Gallifet; but the one fact that
could not be denied was that when it came to actual shooting, it
was Gallifet who got Delescluze shot and not Delescluze who got
Gallifet shot, and that when it came to administering the affairs
of France, Thiers could in one way or another get it done, whilst
Pyat could neither do it nor stop talking and allow somebody else
to do it. True, the penalty of following Thiers was to be
exploited by the landlord and capitalist; but then the penalty of
following Pyat was to get shot like a mad dog, or at best get
sent to New Caledonia, quite unnecessarily and uselessly.

To put it in terms of Wagner's allegory, Alberic had got the ring
back again and was marrying into the best Walhall families with
it. He had thought better of his old threat to dethrone Wotan and
Loki. He had found that Nibelheim was a very gloomy place and
that if he wanted to live handsomely and safely, he must not only
allow Wotan and Loki to organize society for him, but pay them
very handsomely for doing it. He wanted splendor, military glory,
loyalty, enthusiasm, and patriotism; and his greed and gluttony
were wholly unable to create them, whereas Wotan and Loki carried
them all to a triumphant climax in Germany in I87I, when Wagner
himself celebrated the event with his Kaisermarsch, which sounded
much more convincing than the Marseillaise or the Carmagnole.

How, after the Kaisermarsch, could Wagner go back to his
idealization of Siegfried in 1853? How could he believe seriously
in Siegfried slaying the dragon and charging through the mountain
fire, when the immediate foreground was occupied by the Hotel de
Ville with Felix Pyat endlessly discussing the principles of
Socialism whilst the shells of Thiers were already battering the
Arc de Triomphe, and ripping up the pavement of the Champs
Elysees? Is it not clear that things had taken an altogether
unexpected turn--that although the Ring may, like the famous
Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels, be an inspired guest at
the historic laws and predestined end of our
capitalistic-theocratic epoch, yet Wagner, like Marx, was too
inexperienced in technical government and administration and too
melodramatic in his hero-contra-villain conception of the class
struggle, to foresee the actual process by which his
generalization would work out, or the part to be played in it by
the classes involved?

Let us go back for a moment to the point at which the Niblung
legend first becomes irreconcilable with Wagner's allegory.
Fafnir in the allegory becomes a capitalist; but Fafnir in the
legend is a mere hoarder. His gold does not bring him in any
revenue. It does not even support him: he has to go out and
forage for food and drink. In fact, he is on the way to his
drinking-pool when Siegfried kills him. And Siegfried himself has
no more use for gold than Fafnir: the only difference between
them in this respect is that Siegfried does not waste his time in
watching a barren treasure that is no use to him, whereas Fafnir
sacrifices his humanity and his life merely to prevent anybody
else getting it. This contrast is true to human nature; but it
shunts The Ring drama off the economic lines of the allegory. In
real life, Fafnir is not a miser: he seeks dividends, comfortable
life, and admission to the circles of Wotan and Loki. His only
means of procuring these is to restore the gold to Alberic in
exchange for scrip in Alberic's enterprises. Thus fortified with
capital, Alberic exploits his fellow dwarfs as before, and also
exploits Fafair's fellow giants who have no capital. What is
more, the toil, forethought and self-control which the
exploitation involves, and the self-respect and social esteem
which its success wins, effect an improvement in Alberic's own
character which neither Marx nor Wagner appear to have foreseen.
He discovers that to be a dull, greedy, narrow-minded
money-grubber is not the way to make money on a large scale; for
though greed may suffice to turn tens into hundreds and even
hundreds into thousands, to turn thousands into hundreds of
thousands requires magnanimity and a will to power rather than to
pelf. And to turn thousands into millions, Alberic must make
himself an earthly providence for masses of workmen: he must
create towns and govern markets. In the meantime, Fafair,
wallowing in dividends which he has done nothing to earn, may
rot, intellectually and morally, from mere disuse of his energies
and lack of incentive to excel; but the more imbecile he becomes,
the more dependent he is upon Alberic, and the more the
responsibility of keeping the world-machine in working order
falls upon Alberic. Consequently, though Alberic in Also may have
been merely the vulgar Manchester Factory-owner portrayed by
Engels, in 1876 he was well on the way towards becoming Krupp of
Essen or Carnegie of Homestead.

Now, without exaggerating the virtues of these gentlemen, it will
be conceded by everybody except perhaps those veteran German
Social-Democrats who have made a cult of obsolescence under the
name of Marxism, that the modern entrepreneur is not to be
displaced and dismissed so lightly as Alberic is dismissed in The
Ring. They are really the masters of the whole situation. Wotan
is hardly less dependent on them than Fafnir; the War-Lord visits
their work, acclaims them in stirring speeches, and casts down
their enemies; whilst Loki makes commercial treaties for them and
subjects all his diplomacy to their approval.

The end cannot come until Siegfried learns A1beric's trade and
shoulders Alberic's burden. Not having as yet done so, he is
still completely mastered by Alberic. He does not even rebel
against him except when he is too stupid and ignorant, or too
romantically impracticable, to see that Alberic's work, like
Wotan's work and Loki's work, is necessary work, and that
therefore Alberic can never be superseded by a warrior, but only
by a capable man of business who is prepared to continue his work
without a day's intermission. Even though the proletarians of all
lands were to become "class conscious," and obey the call of Marx
by uniting to carry the Class struggle to a proletarian victory
in which all capital should become common property, and all
Monarchs, Millionaires, Landlords and Capitalists become common
citizens, the triumphant proletarians would have either to starve
in Anarchy the next day or else do the political and industrial
work which is now being done tant bien que mal by our Romanoffs,
our Hohenzollerns, our Krupps, Carnegies, Levers, Pierpont
Morgans, and their political retinues. And in the meantime these
magnates must defend their power and property with all their
might against the revolutionary forces until these forces become
positive, executive, administrative forces, instead of the
conspiracies of protesting, moralizing, virtuously indignant
amateurs who mistook Marx for a man of affairs and Thiers for a
stage villain. But all this represents a development of which one
gathers no forecast from Wagner or Marx. Both of them prophesied
the end of our epoch, and, so far as one can guess, prophesied it
rightly. They also brought its industrial history up to the year
1848 far more penetratingly than the academic historians of their
time. But they broke off there and left a void between 1848 and
the end, in which we, who have to live in that period, get no
guidance from them. The Marxists wandered for years in this void,
striving, with fanatical superstition, to suppress the
Revisionists who, facing the fact that the Social-Democratic
party was lost, were trying to find the path by the light of
contemporary history instead of vainly consulting the oracle in
the pages of Das Kapital. Marx himself was too simpleminded a
recluse and too full of the validity of his remoter
generalizations, and the way in which the rapid integration of
capital in Trusts and Kartels was confirming them, to be
conscious of the void himself.

Wagner, on the other hand, was comparatively a practical man. It
is possible to learn more of the world by producing a single
opera, or even conductmg a single orchestral rehearsal, than by
ten years reading in the Library of the British Museum. Wagner
must have learnt between Das Rheingold and the Kaisermarsch that
there are yet several dramas to be interpolated in The Ring after
The Valkyries before the allegory can tell the whole story, and
that the first of these interpolated dramas will be much more
like a revised Rienzi than like Siegfried. If anyone doubts the
extent to which Wagner's eyes had been opened to the
administrative-childishness and romantic conceit of the heroes of
the revolutionary generation that served its apprenticeship on
the barricades of 1848-9, and perished on those of 187@ under
Thiers' mitrailleuses, let him read Eine Kapitulation, that
scandalous burlesque in which the poet and composer of Siegfried,
with the levity of a schoolboy, mocked the French republicans who
were doing in 1871 what he himself was exiled for domg in 1849.
He had set the enthusiasm of the Dresden Revolution to his own
greatest music; but he set the enthusiasm of twenty years later
in derision to the music of Rossini. There is no mistaking the
tune he meant to suggest by his doggerel of Republik, Republik,
Republik-lik-lik. The Overture to Wilhelm Tell is there as
plainly as if it were noted down in full score.

In the case of such a man as Wagner, you cannot explain this
volte-face as mere jingoism produced by Germany's overwhelming
victory in the Franco-Prussian War, nor as personal spite against
the Parisians for the Tannhauser fiasco. Wagner had more cause
for personal spite against his own countrymen than he ever had
against the French. No doubt his outburst gratified the pettier
feelings which great men have in common with small ones; but he
was not a man to indulge in such gratifications, or indeed to
feel them as gratifications, if he had not arrived at a profound
philosophical contempt for the inadequacy of the men who were
trying to wield Nothung, and who had done less work for Wagner's
own art than a single German King and he, too, only a mad one.
Wagner had by that time done too much himself not to know that
the world is ruled by deeds, not by good intentions, and that
one efficient sinner is worth ten futile saints and martyrs.

I need not elaborate the point further in these pages. Like all
men of genius, Wagner had exceptional sincerity, exceptional
respect for facts, exceptional freedom from the hypnotic
influence of sensational popular movements, exceptional sense of
the realities of political power as distinguished from the
presences and idolatries behind which the real masters of modern
States pull their wires and train their guns. When he scored
Night Falls On The Gods, he had accepted the failure of Siegfried
and the triumph of the Wotan-Loki-Alberic-trinity as a fact. He
had given up dreaming of heroes, heroines, and final solutions,
and had conceived a new protagonist in Parsifal, whom he
announced, not as a hero, but as a fool; who was armed, not with
a sword which cut irresistibly, but with a spear which he held
only on condition that he did not use it; and who instead of
exulting in the slaughter of a dragon was frightfully ashamed of
having shot a swan. The change in the conception of the Deliverer
could hardly be more complete. It reflects the change which took
place in Wagner's mind between the composition of The Rhine Gold
and Night Falls On The Gods; and it explains why he dropped The
Ring allegory and fell back on the status quo ante by
Lohengrinizing.

If you ask why he did not throw Siegfried into the waste paper
basket and rewrite The Ring from The Valkyries onwards, one must
reply that the time had not come for such a feat. Neither Wagner
nor anyone else then living knew enough to achieve it. Besides,
what he had already done had reached the omit of even his immense
energy and perseverance and so he did the best he could with the
unfinished and for ever unfinishable work, rounding it off with
an opera much as Rossini rounded off some of his religious
compositions with a galop. Only, Rossini on such occasions wrote
in his score "Excusez du pen," but Wagner left us to find out the
change for ourselves, perhaps to test how far we had really
followed his meaning.

WAGNER'S OWN EXPLANATION

And now, having given my explanation of The Ring, can I give
Wagner's explanation of it? If I could (and I can) I should not
by any means accept it as conclusive. Nearly half a century has
passed smce the tetralogy was written; and in that time the
purposes of many half instinctive acts of genius have become
clearer to the common man than they were to the doers. Some years
ago, in the course of an explanation of Ibsen's plays, I pointed
out that it was by no means certain or even likely that Ibsen was
as definitely conscious of his thesis as I. All the stupid
people, and some critics who, though not stupid, had not
themselves written what the Germans call "tendency" works, saw
nothing in this but a fantastic affectation of the extravagant
self-conceit of knowing more about Ibsen than Ibsen himself.
Fortunately, in taking exactly the same position now with regard
to Wagner, I can claim his own authority to support me. "How," he
wrote to Roeckel on the 23rd. August 1856, "can an artist expect
that what he has felt intuitively should be perfectly realized by
others, seeing that he himself feels in the presence of his work,
if it is true Art, that he is confronted by a riddle, about which
he, too, might have illusions, just as another might?"

The truth is, we are apt to deify men of genius, exactly as we
deify the creative force of the universe, by attributing to
logical design what is the result of blind instinct. What Wagner
meant by "true Art" is the operation of the artist's instinct,
which is just as blind as any other instinct. Mozart, asked for
an explanation of his works, said frankly "How do I know?"
Wagner, being a philosopher and critic as well as a composer, was
always looking for moral explanations of what he had created) and
he hit on several very striking ones, all different. In the same
way one can conceive Henry the Eighth speculating very
brilliantly about the circulation of his own blood without
getting as near the truth as Harvey did long after his death.

None the less, Wagner's own explanations are of exceptional
interest. To begin with, there is a considerable portion of The
Ring, especially the portraiture of our capitalistic industrial
system from the socialist's point of new in the slavery of the
Niblungs and the tyranny of Alberic, which is unmistakable, as it
dramatizes that portion of human activity which lies well within
the territory covered by our intellectual consciousness. All this
is concrete Home Office business, so to speak: its meaning was as
clear to Wagner as it is to us. Not so that part of the work
which deals with the destiny of Wotan. And here, as it happened,
Wagner's recollection of what he had been driving at was
completely upset by his discovery, soon after the completion of
The Ring poem, of Schopenhaur's famous treatise "The World as
Will and Representation." So obsessed did he become with this
masterpiece of philosophic art that he declared that it contained
the intellectual demonstration of the conflict of human forces
which he himself had demonstrated artistically in his great poem.
"I must confess," he writes to Roeckel, "to having arrived at a
clear understanding of my own works of art through the help of
another, who has provided me with the reasoned conceptions
corresponding to my intuitive principles."

Schopenhaur, however, had done nothing of the sort. Wagner's
determination to prove that he had been a Schopenhaurite all
along without knowing it only shows how completely the
fascination of the great treatise on The Will had run away with
his memory. It is easy to see how this happened. Wagner says of
himself that "seldom has there taken place in the soul of one and
the same man so profound a division and estrangement between the
intuitive or impulsive part of his nature and his consciously or
reasonably formed ideas." And since Schopenhaur's great
contribution to modern thought was to educate us into clear
consciousness of this distinction--a distinction familiar, in a
fanciful way, to the Ages of Faith and Art before the Renascence,
but afterwards swamped in the Rationalism of that movement--it
was inevitable that Wagner should jump at Schopenhaur's
metaphysiology (I use a word less likely to be mistaken than
metaphysics) as the very thing for him. But metaphysiology is one
thing, political philosophy another. The political philosophy of
Siegfried is exactly contrary to the political philosphy of
Schopenhaur, although the same clear metaphysiological
distinction between the instinctive part of man (his Will) and
his reasoning faculty (dramatized in The Ring as Loki) is
insisted on in both. The difference is that to Schopenhaur the
Will is the universal tormentor of man, the author of that great
evil, Life; whilst reason is the divine gift that is finally to
overcome this life-creating will and lead, through its
aboegation, to cessation and peace, annihilation and Nirvana.
This is the doctrine of Pessimism. Now Wagner was, when he wrote
The Ring, a most sanguine revolutionary Meliorist, contemptuous
of the reasoning faculty, which he typified in the shifty,
unreal, delusive Loki, and full of faith in the life-giving Will,
which he typified in the glorious Siegfried. Not until he read
Schopenhaur did he become bent on proving that he had always been
a Pessimist at heart, and that Loki was the most sensible and
worthy adviser of Wotan in The Rhine Gold.

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