Let me assume for a moment that you
are a young and good-looking woman. Try to imagine
yourself in that character at Klondyke five years ago.
The place is teeming with gold. If you are content
to leave the gold alone, as the wise leave flowers
without plucking them, enjoying with perfect naïveté
its color and glitter and preciousness, no human being
will ever be the worse for your knowledge of it; and
whilst you remain in that frame of mind the golden
age will endure.
Now suppose a man comes along:
a man who has no sense of the golden age, nor any
power of living in the present: a man with common
desires, cupidities, ambitions, just like most of
the men you know. Suppose you reveal to that
man the fact that if he will only pluck this gold up,
and turn it into money, millions of men, driven by
the invisible whip of hunger, will toil underground
and overground night and day to pile up more and more
gold for him until he is master of the world!
You will find that the prospect will not tempt him
so much as you might imagine, because it involves
some distasteful trouble to himself to start with,
and because there is something else within his reach
involving no distasteful toil, which he desires more
passionately; and that is yourself. So long as
he is preoccupied with love of you, the gold, and
all that it implies, will escape him: the golden
age will endure. Not until he forswears love
will he stretch out his hand to the gold, and found
the Plutonic empire for himself. But the choice
between love and gold may not rest altogether with
him. He may be an ugly, ungracious, unamiable
person, whose affections may seem merely ludicrous
and despicable to you. In that case, you may
repulse him, and most bitterly humiliate and disappoint
him. What is left to him then but to curse the
love he can never win, and turn remorselessly to the
gold? With that, he will make short work of your
golden age, and leave you lamenting its lost thoughtlessness
and sweetness.
In due time the gold of Klondyke will
find its way to the great cities of the world.
But the old dilemma will keep continually reproducing
itself. The man who will turn his back on love,
and upon all the fruitful it, and will set himself
single-heartedly to gather gold in an exultant dream
of wielding its Plutonic powers, will find the treasure
yielding quickly to his touch. But few men will
make this sacrifice voluntarily. Not until the
Plutonic power is so strongly set up that the higher
human impulses are suppressed as rebellious, and even
the mere appetites are denied, starved, and insulted
when they cannot purchase their satisfaction with
gold, are the energetic spirits driven to build their
lives upon riches. How inevitable that course
has become to us is plain enough to those who have
the power of understanding what they see as they look
at the plutocratic societies of our modern capitals.
First Scene
Here, then, is the subject of the
first scene of The Rhine Gold. As you sit waiting
for the curtain to rise, you suddenly catch the booming
ground-tone of a mighty river. It becomes plainer,
clearer: you get nearer to the surface, and catch
the green light and the flights of bubbles. Then
the curtain goes up and you see what you heard the
depths of the Rhine, with three strange fairy fishes,
half water-maidens, singing and enjoying themselves
exuberantly. They are not singing barcarolles
or ballads about the Lorely and her fated lovers, but
simply trolling any nonsense that comes into their
heads in time to the dancing of the water and the
rhythm of their swimming. It is the golden age;
and the attraction of this spot for the Rhine maidens
is a lump of the Rhine gold, which they value, in
an entirely uncommercial way, for its bodily beauty
and splendor. Just at present it is eclipsed,
because the sun is not striking down through the water.
Presently there comes a poor devil
of a dwarf stealing along the slippery rocks of the
river bed, a creature with energy enough to make him
strong of body and fierce of passion, but with a brutish
narrowness of intelligence and selfishness of imagination:
too stupid to see that his own welfare can only be
compassed as part of the welfare of the world, too
full of brute force not to grab vigorously at his own
gain. Such dwarfs are quite common in London.
He comes now with a fruitful impulse in him, in search
of what he lacks in himself, beauty, lightness of
heart, imagination, music. The Rhine maidens,
representing all these to him, fill him with hope
and longing; and he never considers that he has nothing
to offer that they could possibly desire, being by
natural limitation incapable of seeing anything from
anyone else’s point of view. With perfect
simplicity, he offers himself as a sweetheart to them.
But they are thoughtless, elemental, only half real
things, much like modern young ladies. That the
poor dwarf is repulsive to their sense of physical
beauty and their romantic conception of heroism, that
he is ugly and awkward, greedy and ridiculous, disposes
for them of his claim to live and love. They
mock him atrociously, pretending to fall in love with
him at first sight, and then slipping away and making
game of him, heaping ridicule and disgust on the poor
wretch until he is beside himself with mortification
and rage. They forget him when the water begins
to glitter in the sun, and the gold to reflect its
glory. They break into ecstatic worship of their
treasure; and though they know the parable of Klondyke
quite well, they have no fear that the gold will be
wrenched away by the dwarf, since it will yield to
no one who has not forsworn love for it, and it is
in pursuit of love that he has come to them.
They forget that they have poisoned that desire in
him by their mockery and denial of it, and that he
now knows that life will give him nothing that he
cannot wrest from it by the Plutonic power. It
is just as if some poor, rough, vulgar, coarse fellow
were to offer to take his part in aristocratic society,
and be snubbed into the knowledge that only as a millionaire
could he ever hope to bring that society to his feet
and buy himself a beautiful and refined wife.
His choice is forced on him. He forswears love
as thousands of us forswear it every day; and in a
moment the gold is in his grasp, and he disappears
in the depths, leaving the water-fairies vainly screaming
“Stop thief!” whilst the river seems to
plunge into darkness and sink from us as we rise to
the cloud regions above.
And now, what forces are there in
the world to resist Alberic, our dwarf, in his new
character of sworn plutocrat? He is soon at work
wielding the power of the gold. For his gain,
hordes of his fellow-creatures are thenceforth condemned
to slave miserably, overground and underground, lashed
to their work by the invisible whip of starvation.
They never see him, any more than the victims of our
“dangerous trades” ever see the shareholders
whose power is nevertheless everywhere, driving them
to destruction. The very wealth they create with
their labor becomes an additional force to impoverish
them; for as fast as they make it it slips from their
hands into the hands of their master, and makes him
mightier than ever. You can see the process for
yourself in every civilized country today, where millions
of people toil in want and disease to heap up more
wealth for our Alberics, laying up nothing for themselves,
except sometimes horrible and agonizing disease and
the certainty of premature death. All this part
of the story is frightfully real, frightfully present,
frightfully modern; and its effects on our social
life are so ghastly and ruinous that we no longer
know enough of happiness to be discomposed by it.
It is only the poet, with his vision of what life
might be, to whom these things are unendurable.
If we were a race of poets we would make an end of
them before the end of this miserable century.
Being a race of moral dwarfs instead, we think them
highly respectable, comfortable and proper, and allow
them to breed and multiply their evil in all directions.
If there were no higher power in the world to work
against Alberic, the end of it would be utter destruction.
Such a force there is, however; and
it is called Godhead. The mysterious thing we
call life organizes itself into all living shapes,
bird, beast, beetle and fish, rising to the human
marvel in cunning dwarfs and in laborious muscular
giants, capable, these last, of enduring toil, willing
to buy love and life, not with suicidal curses and
renunciations, but with patient manual drudgery in
the service of higher powers. And these higher
powers are called into existence by the same self-organization
of life still more wonderfully into rare persons who
may by comparison be called gods, creatures capable
of thought, whose aims extend far beyond the satisfaction
of their bodily appetites and personal affections,
since they perceive that it is only by the establishment
of a social order founded on common bonds of moral
faith that the world can rise from mere savagery.
But how is this order to be set up by Godhead in a
world of stupid giants, since these thoughtless ones
pursue only their narrower personal ends and can by
no means understand the aims of a god? Godhead,
face to face with Stupidity, must compromise.
Unable to enforce on the world the pure law of thought,
it must resort to a mechanical law of commandments
to be enforced by brute punishments and the destruction
of the disobedient. And however carefully these
laws are framed to represent the highest thoughts of
the framers at the moment of their promulgation, before
a day has elapsed that thought has grown and widened
by the ceaseless evolution of life; and lo! yesterday’s
law already fallen out with today’s thought.
Yet if the high givers of that law themselves set
the example of breaking it before it is a week old,
they destroy all its authority with their subjects,
and so break the weapon they have forged to rule them
for their own good. They must therefore maintain
at all costs the sanctity of the law, even when it
has ceased to represent their thought; so that at
last they get entangled in a network of ordinances
which they no longer believe in, and yet have made
so sacred by custom and so terrible by punishment,
that they cannot themselves escape from them.
Thus Godhead’s resort to law finally costs it
half its integrity as if a spiritual king,
to gain temporal power, had plucked out one of his
eyes and it finally begins secretly to long
for the advent of some power higher than itself which
will destroy its artificial empire of law, and establish
a true republic of free thought.
This is by no means the only difficulty
in the dominion of Law. The brute force for its
execution must be purchased; and the mass of its subjects
must be persuaded to respect the authority which employs
this force. But how is such respect to be implanted
in them if they are unable to comprehend the thought
of the lawgiver? Clearly, only by associating
the legislative power with such displays of splendor
and majesty as will impress their senses and awe their
imaginations. The god turned lawgiver, in short,
must be crowned Pontiff and King. Since he cannot
be known to the common folk as their superior in wisdom,
he must be known to them as their superior in riches,
as the dweller in castles, the wearer of gold and
purple, the eater of mighty feasts, the commander
of armies, and the wielder of powers of life and death,
of salvation and damnation after death. Something
may be done in this way without corruption whilst
the golden age still endures. Your gods may not
prevail with the dwarfs; but they may go to these honest
giants who will give a day’s work for a day’s
pay, and induce them to build for Godhead a mighty
fortress, complete with hall and chapel, tower and
bell, for the sake of the homesteads that will grow
up in security round that church-castle. This
only, however, whilst the golden age lasts. The
moment the Plutonic power is let loose, and the loveless
Alberic comes into the field with his corrupting millions,
the gods are face to face with destruction; since
Alberic, able with invisible hunger-whip to force
the labor of the dwarfs and to buy the services of
the giants, can outshine all the temporal shows and
splendors of the golden age, and make himself master
of the world, unless the gods, with their bigger brains,
can capture his gold. This, the dilemma of the
Church today, is the situation created by the exploit
of Alberic in the depths of the Rhine.
Second Scene
From the bed of the river we rise
into cloudy regions, and finally come out into the
clear in a meadow, where Wotan, the god of gods, and
his consort Fricka lie sleeping. Wotan, you will
observe, has lost one eye; and you will presently
learn that he plucked it out voluntarily as the price
to be paid for his alliance with Fricka, who in return
has brought to him as her dowry all the powers of
Law. The meadow is on the brink of a ravine,
beyond which, towering on distant heights, stands Godhome,
a mighty castle, newly built as a house of state for
the one-eyed god and his all-ruling wife. Wotan
has not yet seen this castle except in his dreams:
two giants have just built it for him whilst he slept;
and the reality is before him for the first time when
Fricka wakes him. In that majestic burg he is
to rule with her and through her over the humble giants,
who have eyes to gape at the glorious castles their
own hands have built from his design, but no brains
to design castles for themselves, or to comprehend
divinity. As a god, he is to be great, secure,
and mighty; but he is also to be passionless, affectionless,
wholly impartial; for Godhead, if it is to live with
Law, must have no weaknesses, no respect for persons.
All such sweet littlenesses must be left to the humble
stupid giants to make their toil sweet to them; and
the god must, after all, pay for Olympian power the
same price the dwarf has paid for Plutonic power.
Wotan has forgotten this in his dreams
of greatness. Not so Fricka. What she is
thinking of is this price that Wotan has consented
to pay, in token whereof he has promised this day
to hand over to the giants Fricka’s sister,
the goddess Freia, with her golden love-apples.
When Fricka reproaches Wotan with having selfishly
forgotten this, she finds that he, like herself, is
not prepared to go through with his bargain, and that
he is trusting to another great worldforce, the Lie
(a European Power, as Lassalle said), to help him
to trick the giants out of their reward. But
this force does not dwell in Wotan himself, but in
another, a god over whom he has triumphed, one Loki,
the god of Intellect, Argument, Imagination, Illusion,
and Reason. Loki has promised to deliver him
from his contract, and to cheat the giants for him;
but he has not arrived to keep his word: indeed,
as Fricka bitterly points out, why should not the
Lie fail Wotan, since such failure is the very essence
of him?
The giants come soon enough; and Freia
flies to Wotan for protection against them. Their
purposes are quite honest; and they have no doubt
of the god’s faith. There stands their part
of the contract fulfilled, stone on stone, port and
pinnacle all faithfully finished from Wotan’s
design by their mighty labor. They have come undoubtingly
for their agreed wage. Then there happens what
is to them an incredible, inconceivable thing.
The god begins to shuffle. There are no moments
in life more tragic than those in which the humble
common man, the manual worker, leaving with implicit
trust all high affairs to his betters, and reverencing
them wholly as worthy of that trust, even to the extent
of accepting as his rightful function the saving of
them from all roughening and coarsening drudgeries,
first discovers that they are corrupt, greedy, unjust
and treacherous. The shock drives a ray of prophetic
light into one giant’s mind, and gives him a
momentary eloquence. In that moment he rises
above his stupid gianthood, and earnestly warns the
Son of Light that all his power and eminence of priesthood,
godhood, and kingship must stand or fall with the unbearable
cold greatness of the incorruptible law-giver.
But Wotan, whose assumed character of law-giver is
altogether false to his real passionate nature, despises
the rebuke; and the giant’s ray of insight is
lost in the murk of his virtuous indignation.
In the midst of the wrangle, Loki
comes at last, excusing himself for being late on
the ground that he has been detained by a matter of
importance which he has promised to lay before Wotan.
When pressed to give his mind to the business immediately
in hand, and to extricate Wotan from his dilemma,
he has nothing to say except that the giants are evidently
altogether in the right. The castle has been duly
built: he has tried every stone of it, and found
the work first-rate: there is nothing to be done
but pay the price agreed upon by handing over Freia
to the giants. The gods are furious; and Wotan
passionately declares that he only consented to the
bargain on Loki’s promise to find a way for
him out of it. But Loki says no: he has promised
to find a way out if any such way exist, but not to
make a way if there is no way. He has wandered
over the whole earth in search of some treasure great
enough to buy Freia back from the giants; but in all
the world he has found nothing for which Man will
give up Woman. And this, by the way, reminds
him of the matter he had promised to lay before Wotan.
The Rhine maidens have complained to him of Alberic’s
theft of their gold; and he mentions it as a curious
exception to his universal law of the unpurchasable
preciousness of love, that this gold-robber has forsworn
love for the sake of the fabulous riches of the Plutonic
empire and the mastery of the world through its power.
No sooner is the tale told than the
giants stoop lower than the dwarf. Alberic forswore
love only when it was denied to him and made the instrument
for cruelly murdering his self-respect. But the
giants, with love within their reach, with Freia and
her golden apples in their hands, offer to give her
up for the treasure of Alberic. Observe, it is
the treasure alone that they desire. They have
no fierce dreams of dominion over their superiors,
or of moulding the world to any conceptions of their
own. They are neither clever nor ambitious:
they simply covet money. Alberic’s gold:
that is their demand, or else Freia, as agreed upon,
whom they now carry off as hostage, leaving Wotan to
consider their ultimatum.
Freia gone, the gods begin to wither
and age: her golden apples, which they so lightly
bargained away, they now find to be a matter of life
and death to them; for not even the gods can live
on Law and Godhead alone, be their castles ever so
splendid. Loki alone is unaffected: the Lie,
with all its cunning wonders, its glistenings and shiftings
and mirages, is a mere appearance: it has no
body and needs no food. What is Wotan to do?
Loki sees the answer clearly enough: he must bluntly
rob Alberic. There is nothing to prevent him
except moral scruple; for Alberic, after all, is a
poor, dim, dwarfed, credulous creature whom a god can
outsee and a lie can outwit. Down, then, Wotan
and Loki plunge into the mine where Alberic’s
slaves are piling up wealth for him under the invisible
whip.
Third Scene
This gloomy place need not be a mine:
it might just as well be a match-factory, with yellow
phosphorus, phossy jaw, a large dividend, and plenty
of clergymen shareholders. Or it might be a whitelead
factory, or a chemical works, or a pottery, or a railway
shunting yard, or a tailoring shop, or a little gin-sodden
laundry, or a bakehouse, or a big shop, or any other
of the places where human life and welfare are daily
sacrificed in order that some greedy foolish creature
may be able to hymn exultantly to his Platonic idol:
Thou mak’st me eat whilst others
starve, And sing while others do lament: Such
untome Thy blessings are, As if I were Thine only care.
In the mine, which resounds with the
clinking anvils of the dwarfs toiling miserably to
heap up treasure for their master, Alberic has set
his brother Mime more familiarly, Mimmy to
make him a helmet. Mimmy dimly sees that there
is some magic in this helmet, and tries to keep it;
but Alberic wrests it from him, and shows him, to his
cost, that it is the veil of the invisible whip, and
that he who wears it can appear in what shape he will,
or disappear from view altogether. This helmet
is a very common article in our streets, where it
generally takes the form of a tall hat. It makes
a man invisible as a shareholder, and changes him
into various shapes, such as a pious Christian, a subscriber
to hospitals, a benefactor of the poor, a model husband
and father, a shrewd, practical independent Englishman,
and what not, when he is really a pitiful parasite
on the commonwealth, consuming a great deal, and producing
nothing, feeling nothing, knowing nothing, believing
nothing, and doing nothing except what all the rest
do, and that only because he is afraid not to do it,
or at least pretend to do it.
When Wotan and Loki arrive, Loki claims
Alberic as an old acquaintance. But the dwarf
has no faith in these civil strangers: Greed instinctively
mistrusts Intellect, even in the garb of Poetry and
the company of Godhead, whilst envying the brilliancy
of the one and the dignity of the other. Alberic
breaks out at them with a terrible boast of the power
now within his grasp. He paints for them the
world as it will be when his dominion over it is complete,
when the soft airs and green mosses of its valleys
shall be changed into smoke, slag, and filth; when
slavery, disease, and squalor, soothed by drunkenness
and mastered by the policeman’s baton, shall
become the foundation of society; and when nothing
shall escape ruin except such pretty places and pretty
women as he may like to buy for the slaking of his
own lusts. In that kingdom of evil he sees that
there will be no power but his own. These gods,
with their moralities and legalities and intellectual
subtlety, will go under and be starved out of existence.
He bids Wotan and Loki beware of it; and his “Hab’
Acht!” is hoarse, horrible, and sinister.
Wotan is revolted to the very depths of his being:
he cannot stifle the execration that bursts from him.
But Loki is unaffected: he has no moral passion:
indignation is as absurd to him as enthusiasm.
He finds it exquisitely amusing having
a touch of the comic spirit in him that
the dwarf, in stirring up the moral fervor of Wotan,
has removed his last moral scruple about becoming
a thief. Wotan will now rob the dwarf without
remorse; for is it not positively his highest duty
to take this power out of such evil hands and use
it himself in the interests of Godhead? On the
loftiest moral grounds, he lets Loki do his worst.
A little cunningly disguised flattery
makes short work of Alberic. Loki pretends to
be afraid of him; and he swallows that bait unhesitatingly.
But how, enquires Loki, is he to guard against the
hatred of his million slaves? Will they not steal
from him, whilst he sleeps, the magic ring, the symbol
of his power, which he has forged from the gold of
the Rhine? “You think yourself very clever,”
sneers Alberic, and then begins to boast of the enchantments
of the magic helmet. Loki refuses to believe
in such marvels without witnessing them. Alberic,
only too glad to show off his powers, puts on the
helmet and transforms himself into a monstrous serpent.
Loki gratifies him by pretending to be frightened out
of his wits, but ventures to remark that it would be
better still if the helmet could transform its owner
into some tiny creature that could hide and spy in
the smallest cranny. Alberic promptly transforms
himself into a toad. In an instant Wotan’s
foot is on him; Loki tears away the helmet; they pinion
him, and drag him away a prisoner up through the earth
to the meadow by the castle.
Fourth Scene
There, to pay for his freedom, he
has to summon his slaves from the depths to place
all the treasure they have heaped up for him at the
feet of Wotan. Then he demands his liberty; but
Wotan must have the ring as well. And here the
dwarf, like the giant before him, feels the very foundations
of the world shake beneath him at the discovery of
his own base cupidity in a higher power. That
evil should, in its loveless desperation, create malign
powers which Godhead could not create, seems but natural
justice to him. But that Godhead should steal
those malign powers from evil, and wield them itself,
is a monstrous perversion; and his appeal to Wotan
to forego it is almost terrible in its conviction
of wrong. It is of no avail. Wotan falls
back again on virtuous indignation. He reminds
Alberic that he stole the gold from the Rhine maidens,
and takes the attitude of the just judge compelling
a restitution of stolen goods. Alberic knowing
perfectly well that the judge is taking the goods
to put them in his own pocket, has the ring torn from
his finger, and is once more as poor as he was when
he came slipping and stumbling among the slimy rocks
in the bed of the Rhine.
This is the way of the world.
In older times, when the Christian laborer was drained
dry by the knightly spendthrift, and the spendthrift
was drained by the Jewish usurer, Church and State,
religion and law, seized on the Jew and drained him
as a Christian duty. When the forces of lovelessness
and greed had built up our own sordid capitalist systems,
driven by invisible proprietorship, robbing the poor,
defacing the earth, and forcing themselves as a universal
curse even on the generous and humane, then religion
and law and intellect, which would never themselves
have discovered such systems, their natural bent being
towards welfare, economy, and life instead of towards
corruption, waste, and death, nevertheless did not
scruple to seize by fraud and force these powers of
evil on presence of using them for good. And it
inevitably happens that when the Church, the Law, and
all the Talents have made common cause to rob the
people, the Church is far more vitally harmed by that
unfaithfulness to itself than its more mechanical
confederates; so that finally they turn on their discredited
ally and rob the Church, with the cheerful co-operation
of Loki, as in France and Italy for instance.
The twin giants come back with their
hostage, in whose presence Godhead blooms again.
The gold is ready for them; but now that the moment
has come for parting with Freia the gold does not
seem so tempting; and they are sorely loth to let
her go. Not unless there is gold enough to utterly
hide her from them not until the heap has
grown so that they can see nothing but gold until
money has come between them and every human feeling,
will they part with her. There is not gold enough
to accomplish this: however cunningly Loki spreads
it, the glint of Freia’s hair is still visible
to Giant Fafnir, and the magic helmet must go on the
heap to shut it out. Even then Fafnir’s
brother, Fasolt, can catch a beam from her eye through
a chink, and is rendered incapable thereby of forswearing
her. There is nothing to stop that chink but the
ring; and Wotan is as greedily bent on keeping that
as Alberic himself was; nor can the other gods persuade
him that Freia is worth it, since for the highest
god, love is not the highest good, but only the universal
delight that bribes all living things to travail with
renewed life. Life itself, with its accomplished
marvels and its infinite potentialities, is the only
force that Godhead can worship. Wotan does not
yield until he is reached by the voice of the fruitful
earth that before he or the dwarfs or the giants or
the Law or the Lie or any of these things were, had
the seed of them all in her bosom, and the seed perhaps
of something higher even than himself, that shall
one day supersede him and cut the tangles and alliances
and compromises that already have cost him one of
his eyes. When Erda, the First Mother of life,
rises from her sleeping-place in the heart of the
earth, and warns him to yield the ring, he obeys her;
the ring is added to the heap of gold; and all sense
of Freia is cut off from the giants.
But now what Law is left to these
two poor stupid laborers whereby one shall yield to
the other any of the treasure for which they have each
paid the whole price in surrendering Freia? They
look by mere habit to the god to judge for them; but
he, with his heart stirring towards higher forces
than himself, turns with disgust from these lower forces.
They settle it as two wolves might; and Fafnir batters
his brother dead with his staff. It is a horrible
thing to see and hear, to anyone who knows how much
blood has been shed in the world in just that way by
its brutalized toilers, honest fellows enough until
their betters betrayed them. Fafnir goes off
with his booty. It is quite useless to him.
He has neither the cunning nor the ambition to establish
the Plutonic empire with it. Merely to prevent
others from getting it is the only purpose it brings
him. He piles it in a cave; transforms himself
into a dragon by the helmet; and devotes his life
to guarding it, as much a slave to it as a jailor
is to his prisoner. He had much better have thrown
it all back into the Rhine and transformed himself
into the shortest-lived animal that enjoys at least
a brief run in the sunshine. His case, however,
is far too common to be surprising. The world
is overstocked with persons who sacrifice all their
affections, and madly trample and batter down their
fellows to obtain riches of which, when they get them,
they are unable to make the smallest use, and to which
they become the most miserable slaves.
The gods soon forget Fafnir in their
rejoicing over Freia. Donner, the Thunder god,
springs to a rocky summit and calls the clouds as a
shepherd calls his flocks. They come at his summons;
and he and the castle are hidden by their black legions.
Froh, the Rainbow god, hastens to his side.
At the stroke of Donner’s hammer the black murk
is riven in all directions by darting ribbons of lightning;
and as the air clears, the castle is seen in its fullest
splendor, accessible now by the rainbow bridge which
Froh has cast across the ravine. In the glory
of this moment Wotan has a great thought. With
all his aspirations to establish a reign of noble
thought, of righteousness, order, and justice, he
has found that day that there is no race yet in the
world that quite spontaneously, naturally, and unconsciously
realizes his ideal. He himself has found how
far short Godhead falls of the thing it conceives.
He, the greatest of gods, has been unable to control
his fate: he has been forced against his will
to choose between evils, to make disgraceful bargains,
to break them still more disgracefully, and even then
to see the price of his disgrace slip through his fingers.
His consort has cost him half his vision; his castle
has cost him his affections; and the attempt to retain
both has cost him his honor. On every side he
is shackled and bound, dependent on the laws of Fricka
and on the lies of Loki, forced to traffic with dwarfs
for handicraft and with giants for strength, and to
pay them both in false coin. After all, a god
is a pitiful thing. But the fertility of the First
Mother is not yet exhausted. The life that came
from her has ever climbed up to a higher and higher
organization. From toad and serpent to dwarf,
from bear and elephant to giant, from dwarf and giant
to a god with thoughts, with comprehension of the
world, with ideals. Why should it stop there?
Why should it not rise from the god to the Hero? to
the creature in whom the god’s unavailing thought
shall have become effective will and life, who shall
make his way straight to truth and reality over the
laws of Fricka and the lies of Loki with a strength
that overcomes giants and a cunning that outwits dwarfs?
Yes: Erda, the First Mother, must travail again,
and breed him a race of heroes to deliver the world
and himself from his limited powers and disgraceful
bargains. This is the vision that flashes on
him as he turns to the rainbow bridge and calls his
wife to come and dwell with him in Valhalla, the home
of the gods.
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.