VI.

"Begone, then, and perish,Thou gorgeous pomp,Thou glittering disgraceOf godhood's grandeur!Asunder shall burstThe walls I built!My work I abandon,For one thing alone I wish—The end—The end—"

(He pauses in thought.)

"And to the endAlb'rich attends!Now I perceiveThe secret senseOf the Vala's 'wildering words:'When Love's ferocious foeIn rage begetteth a son,The night of the godsDraws near anon.'"[F]

And now observe how the logic of Wagner's constructive scheme marshals the symbols of the chief things which are in Wotan's thoughts while he contemplates past, present, and future—the wicked cause and the terrible effect. The curse, with death in its train, confronts him:

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the Nomir and their all-wise mother revisit his fancy:

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the ceaseless, tireless energy of the Niblung, which will not cease till the work of destruction be complete, pursues him with its rhythmical scourge as the Furies pursued Orestes:

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and the image of Valhalla rises in his far-seeing mind, not as a castle in its present grandeur (see Chapter I.), but in ruins; the rhythm of the musical symbol is shattered; its solid, restful, simple major harmony is destroyed:

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All this because of the accursed gold (closing cadencea).

The daughter to whom the god confides the whole depth of his misery is of all his daughters the dearest. She has no higher ambition than to be the embodiment of Wotan's will. Unconsciously to both, the god, in his divine resignation, is merely prefiguring the sacrifice to which, in the providence of a higher power than the Lord of Valhalla, that daughter has been chosen. But the god has not yet learned the full bitterness of his cup. He loves the Volsung, and is obliged to destroy at a blow the object of his love and the agent of his plan. In doing this the irresistible might of law bears down his will. That will is known to Brünnhilde. In defiance of Wotan's commands she attempts to shield the Volsung; and to bring the combat between Hunding and Siegmund to the conclusion inexorably demanded by that law of purity which the hero unwittingly violated, the god is himself compelled to interfere, and to cause the sword, designed as the symbol of the Volsung power, to be shattered on the spear with which Wotan exercises dominion.

Love, for a second time, feels the weight of Alberich's curse. Now the beloved daughter falls under the condemnation of the law. But the god is becoming unconsciously an agent in a plan of redemption, which belongs to a loftier ethical scheme than was possible before. Wotan is about to disappear as an active agent from the scene. His plot is wrecked. The representative of his will, the object of his tenderest paternal affection, unknown to him, but inspired wholly by a love void of all selfishness, is about to take up the task surrendered by the god, and carry it out to a conclusion different from and yet like that imagined bythe god. Before the punishment is visited upon her, the intensity of that love, turned through sympathy towards Sieglinde, has for a moment endowed her with prophetic powers. She hails the hero yet unborn, and persuades Sieglinde to save her own life for his sake. Then she accepts her punishment. She is bereft of her divinity, put into a magic sleep, and left by the way-side to be the prey of the first passer-by. But the love of the father, awakened to tenfold power by the bitterness of his own fate and the knowledge that his child's disobedience was but the execution of his own will, shields her from dishonor by surrounding her with a wall of fire, which none but a freer hero than the god himself, and one for whom the divine spear has no terrors, shall pass. The god's egotism is completely broken, the reconciliation between his offended majesty and the offender established. The punishment of Brünnhilde is but the chastisement of love. Can there be any doubt of this after the musical proclamation contained in the finale of "Die Walküre?"

I am presuming, to a great extent, upon the reader's familiarity with the incidents of the dramas constituting the tragedy. It is the action which takes place where we have not been in thehabit of looking for it that I am seeking to discover. "Siegfried," the second drama of the trilogy, is almost wholly devoted to preparation for the fateful outcome. To this fact is due much of its cheerfulness of tone. It is a period of comparative rest. The celestial plot has entered upon a new phase, and in this drama the new combination of characters is formed for the development of that new phase. The ethical drama which the play symbolizes might be described as follows:

The hero has been born and bred under circumstances which have developed his freedom in every direction. The representative of the evil principle seeks to direct his heroic powers towards an advancement of the sinister side of the counter-plot; but in vain. By his own efforts he endows himself with the magic sword, and in the full consciousness of his free manhood he achieves for himself the adventures and the happiness which were denied to the god. He gains the ring and tastes the delight of love.

At first Siegfried appears simply as a wild forest lad, who has grown up with no sympathetic acquaintance beyond the beasts and birds with which he is wont to associate in their haunts. In this character the composer pictures him musically by means of the merry hunting-call which he is supposed to blow on his horn (see Chapter I.). Most of the music which is associated with him in the first act of the drama, in which this horn-call enters so largely, is markedly characteristic of theimpetuous nature of the forest lad, with his contempt for dissimulation and his rough, straight-forward energy. But a different side of his nature is disclosed when, having learned the story of his birth and acquired possession of his father's sword, remade by himself, he becomes a part of the sylvan picture of the second act, which lends so much charm to the "Siegfried" drama. Here, again, is scenic music of the kind which each of the dramas possesses, and which has so often set us to wondering at Wagner's marvellous faculty for juggling with the senses—making our ears to see and our eyes to hear. Siegfried has been brought before the cave—where Fafner, in the form of a dragon, is guarding the ring and the hoard—by Mime, who has planned that the lad shall kill the dragon and then himself fall a victim to treachery. Siegfried throws himself on a hillock at the foot of a tree and listens to nature's music in the forest. And such music! Music redolent of that sweet mystery which peopled the old poets' minds with the whole amiable tribe of fays and dryads and wood-nymphs. The spirit which lurks under gnarled roots and in tangled boughs, in hollow trees and haunted forest caves, breathes through it. The youth is brooding over the mystery of his childhood, and he utters his thoughts in tender phrases, while the mellow wood-wind instruments in the orchestra identify his thoughts with the dead parents whom he never knew. He wonders what his mother looked like, and pathetically askswhether all human mothers die when their children are born. Suddenly the sunlight begins to flicker along the leafy canopy; a thousand indistinct voices join in that indefinable hum, of which, when heard in reality and not in the musician's creation, one is at a loss to tell how much is actual and how much the product of imagination, both sense and fancy having been miraculously quickened by the spirit which moves through the trees.

At last all is vocal, and Siegfried's ear is caught by the song of the bird to which we too have been listening. In his longing for companionship he wishes that he might understand and converse with his feathered playmate. Might he not if he were able to whistle like the bird? Now note the naïve touch of musical humor with which Wagner, the tragedian, enlivens the scene. Siegfried cuts a reed growing beside a rivulet and fashions a rude pipe out of it. He listens, and when the bird quits singing he attempts to imitate its "wood-note wild." But his pipe is too low in pitch and out of tune. He cuts it shorter and raises its pitch half a tone. Again he cuts it, with the same result; then squeezes it impatiently, and renders it still more "out of tune and harsh." He throws it away, confesses his humiliation by the bird, then reaches for his horn. With its merry call he wakes the echoes, disturbs the sleep of the dragon, and precipitates the combat which ends in his equipment withTarnhelmand ring, and his receipt ofthe injunction from the bird (which now he understands through the magic of the dragon's blood touching his lips) to slay Mime and waken Brünnhilde on the burning mountain.

We now catch our last glimpse of Wotan as a personage in the play. He has not been active in the plot since he was obliged to destroy his own handiwork. Twice he appeared in the character of a seemingly unconcerned spectator wandering over the face of the earth, and once he even offered to help Alberich recover the ring from Fafner. He aroused the dragon and suggested that Alberich warn him of threatened danger, and ask the ring as a reward. His present concern is to learn whether the danger threatening the gods is yet to be averted. By chanting of powerful runes he summons Erda, of ancient wisdom. But she refuses to speak. Now he tells her that he no longer grieves over the approaching doom of the gods; his will, newly enlightened, has decreed that the catastrophe shall overwhelm the gods, but also that the world, which in his despair he had surrendered to the hate of the Niblung, shall become instead the heritage of the Volsung who has won the ring. A single act remains to be done: the free-agency of Siegfried must be tested. The youth follows his feathered guide up the mountain to find the promised bride. Wotan bars his way with his spear. Siegfried hews the shaft through the middle. On the runes cut into that shaft rested Wotan's dominion. They were the bond bywhich he governed. Its destruction symbolizes the approaching end of the old order of things. The musical phrase, typical of that compact, accompanies him, in broken rhythm, as he gathers up the pieces of the spear and departs. Prophecy and fulfilment are indicated by the recurrence of the phrase of Erda and her daughters, the Nornir, and its inversion, which symbolizes the twilight of the gods.

All the adventures of Siegfried in this part of the drama, from the forging of the sword to the awaking of Brünnhilde, Wagner derived in almost the exact shape in which he presents them from the Scandinavian legends which tell of Sigurd. In the death-like sleep of Brünnhilde, the stream of fire around her couch, the passage of that stream by Siegfried, as later in the immolation of the heroine, there are so many foreshadowings of the mystery of the Atonement that I scarcely dare attempt a study of it. Let me but call attention to the fact that the fiery wall in the old legends always denotes the funeral pyre; that it was once customary to light the pyre with a thorn, and that when the Eddas tell us that Odin put his child Brynhild to sleep by pricking her in the temple with a sleep-thorn, the meaning is that she died. I have said a foreshadowing of the Atonementbecause these things are old Aryan possessions—much older than Christianity. The infernal river of the Greeks, which Alkestis had to cross when she went to the under-world on her mission of salvation, had a Greek name (Pyriphlegethon), which meant "fire-blazing." It was not, however, to lose myself in such speculations that I called up the old story, but simply to show with what fine insight into dramatic possibilities Wagner studied his sources. In the old Icelandic tale, some gossiping eagles, whose language Sigurd had come to understand by drinking of the blood of Regin and Fafnir, told him of a maiden who slumbered in a hall on high Hindarfiall surrounded with fire. Thither Sigurd went, penetrated the barrier of fire, found Brynhild, whom he thought to be a knight until he had ripped up her coat of mail with his sword, and awakened her. Learning the name of her deliverer, Brynhild cried out:

"Hail to thee, Day, come back!Hail, sons of the Daylight!Hail to thee, daughter of night!Look with kindly eyes downOn us sitting here lonely,And give us the gain that we long for."[G]

"Hail to thee, Day, come back!

Hail, sons of the Daylight!

Hail to thee, daughter of night!

Look with kindly eyes down

On us sitting here lonely,

And give us the gain that we long for."[G]

We reach the last drama of the trilogy.

In the joy of his new-found love Siegfried forgets his mission. Brünnhilde teaches him wisdom (recall how the ancient Teutons reverenced the utterance of their women), and he gives her the baneful circlet as the badge of his love. He goes out in search of adventure, and, separated from the protecting influence of woman's love, he falls a victim to the wiles of Hagen, the Niblung's son. Alberich had warned Hagen that so great was Siegfried's love for Brünnhilde that were she to ask it he would restore the ring to the Rhine nixies. This must be prevented, and Hagen has a plan ready. With a magic drink he robs Siegfried of all memory of Brünnhilde, and the hero, to gain a new love, puts on hisTarnhelmand rudely drags Brünnhilde from her flame-encircled retreat.

To Wagner's skill in expressing the miraculous in music is due the effectiveness of two scenes highly essential to the ethical scheme of the tragedy and very difficult to present in a dramatic form. The music accompanying the drink alone makes it possible to realize that the fateful change has taken place in Siegfried. He looks into the horn and pledges Brünnhilde:

"Were I to forgetAll thou gav'st,One lesson I'll neverUnlearn in my life.This morning-drink,In measureless love,Brünnhild, I pledge to thee!"[H]

Niemann puts the horn from his lips, and we know that a change has taken place in the man. It is the mystical property of that weird music that brings us this consciousness. We could not believe it if acts or words alone were relied on to make the publication.

Again has love been wronged. The guilt of a tragic hero may be unconsciously committed; still he must yield to fate. Chance puts the opportunity in the way of Siegfried to prevent the ring from falling into the hands of the powers inimical to the gods; but he proudly puts it aside because the demand of the Rhine daughters was coupled with a threat. Brünnhilde had also spurned the opportunity, but in her case the motive was her great love for Siegfried, which made her prize the ring, as its visible sign, above the welfare of the gods. That love, misguided, causes the death of the hero. Brünnhilde, learning of Siegfried's unconscious treachery, gives her aid to the Niblung's son. Only his death clears away the mystery. Then she expiates her crime and his with her life, and from her ashes the Rhine daughters recover the ring.

"The ultimate question concerning the correctness or effectiveness of Wagner's system must be answered along with the question, Does the music touch the emotions, quicken the fancy, fire the imagination? If it does this we may, to a great extent, if we wish, get along without the intellectual process of reflection and comparison conditioned upon a recognition of his themes and their uses. But if we do this, we will also lose the pleasure which it is the province of memory sometimes to give;"[I]for a beautiful constructive use of the themes is for reminiscence. The culminating scene of the tragedy furnishes us an illustration of the twofold delight which Wagner's music can give: the simply sensuous and the sensuous intensified by intellectual activity. I refer to the death of Siegfried. As Siegfried, seated among Gunther's men, who are resting from the chase, tells the story of his life, we hear a recapitulation of the musical score of the second and third acts of "Siegfried" the drama. He starts up in an outburst of enthusiasm as he reaches the account of Brünnhilde's awaking, which is interrupted by the flight of Wotan's ravens, who go to inform the god that the end is nearing. He turns to look after the departing birds, when Hagen plunges a spear into his back. The music to which the hero, regaining his memory, breathes out his life, is that ecstasy in tones to which Siegfried's kiss had inspired the orchestra in the last scene of the preceding drama. Why is this? Because, as Siegfried's lastthoughts before taking the dreadful draught which robbed him of his memory were of Brünnhilde, so his first thoughts were of her when his memory was restored. Before his dying eyes there is only the picture of her awaking, till the last ray of light bears to him Brünnhilde's greeting:

"Brünnhild!Hallowed bride!Awaken! Open thine eyes!Who again has doomed theeTo dismal slumber?Who binds thee in bonds of sleep?The awakener came,His kiss awoke thee;Once more he brokeThe bonds of his bride;Then shared he Brünnhild's delight!Ah! those eyesAre open forever!Ah! how sweetIs her swelling breath!Delicious destruction—Ecstatic awe—Brünnhild gives greeting—to me!"

"Brünnhild!

Hallowed bride!

Awaken! Open thine eyes!

Who again has doomed thee

To dismal slumber?

Who binds thee in bonds of sleep?

The awakener came,

His kiss awoke thee;

Once more he broke

The bonds of his bride;

Then shared he Brünnhild's delight!

Ah! those eyes

Are open forever!

Ah! how sweet

Is her swelling breath!

Delicious destruction—

Ecstatic awe—

Brünnhild gives greeting—to me!"

This reminiscent love-music gives way to the Death March, which, from a purely structural point of view, is an epitome of much that is salient in the musical investiture of the entire tetralogy, yet in spirit is a veritable apotheosis, a marvellously eloquent proclamation of antique grief and heroic sorrow. This music loses nothing in being listened to as absolute music. Never mind that in obedience to his system of development Wagner has passed the life of Siegfried in review in the score. The orchestra has a nobler mission here. It is to make a proclamation which neither singers nor pantomimists nor stage mechanism and pictures can make.

The hero is dead!

What does it mean to him?

Union with Brünnhilde—restoration to that love of which he had been foully robbed.

What to his fellows in the play?

The end of a Teutonic hero of the olden kind. He is dead; they are awed at the catastrophe and they grieve; but their grief is mixed with thoughts of the prowess of the dead man and the exalted state into which he has entered. A Valkyria has kissed his wounds, and Wotan has made place for him at his board in Valhalla. There, surrounded by the elect of Wotan's wishmaidens, he is drinking mead and singing songs of mighty sonority—Viking songs like Ragnar Lodbrok's: "We smote with swords."

Is there room here for modern mourning; for shrouding crape and darkened rooms and sighs and tears and hopeless grief? No. The proper expression is a hymn, a pæan, a musical apotheosis; and this is what Wagner gives us until the funeral train enters Gutrune's house and the expression of sorrow goes over to the deceived wife.

But what does this march mean to us who have been trying to study the real meaning of the tragedy? The catastrophe which is to usher in the new era of love. Search for a musical symbol for the redeeming principle. It cannot appear in its fulness till the old order, changing, gives place to the new; but still we may find it in the prevision of a woman to whom the shadow of death gave mystical lore. A new song was put into the mouth of Sieglinde when Brünnhilde acclaimed her child, yet unborn, as destined to be the loftiest hero of earth. She poured out her gratitude in a prophetic strain in which we may, if we wish, hear the Valkyria celebrated as the loving, redeeming woman of the last portion of the tragedy. Out of that melody, and out of a phrase in the love duet in which Brünnhilde blesses the mother who gave birth to the glorious hero, grew the phrase in which, in "Die Götterdämmerung," Brünnhilde, Valkyria no longer, is symbolized in her new character as loving woman. But when the flames from Siegfried's funeral pile reach Valhalla, when by a stupendous achievement the poet-composer recapitulates the incidents of the tragedy in his orchestral postlude, while pompous brass and strident basses depict the destruction of Valhalla, the end of the old world of greed of gold and lust of power, this melody, the symbol of redeeming love, soars high into ethereal regions on the wings of the violins, and its last transfigured harmonies proclaim the advent of a new heaven and a new earth under the dominion of love. 'Tis the "Woman's Soul" leading us "upward and on:"

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