“The Dusk of the Gods”
Quite a fierce little controversy raged a little while ago in the columns of the “Daily Chronicle,” and all about the “meaning” of “The Dusk of the Gods” and the behaviour of Brünnhilde. Mr. Shaw played Devil’s Advocate for Wagner, declaring “The Dusk of the Gods” to be irrelevant and operatic (as if that mattered); and Mr. Ashton Ellis and Mr. Edward Baughan, two mad Wagnerians, rushed in to protect Wagner from Mr. Shaw (as if he needed protection). In reading the various letters, my soul was moved to admiration and reverent awe by the ingenuity displayed by the various correspondents in their endeavours to make the easy difficult, the perfectly plain crooked. Wagner took enormous pains to make Brünnhilde a living character—that is to say, to show us her inmost soul so vividly that we know why she did anything or everything without even thinking about it; he set her on the stage, where we see her in the flesh behaving precisely as any woman—of her period—would behave. And then these excellent gentlemen come along and tell us that because Wagner at one time or another thought of handling her story, and the story of Wotan and Siegfried, in this or that way, therefore Wagner “meant” this or that, and failed or succeeded, or changed his original plan or held fast to it. All these things have nothing to do with the drama that is played on the stage: by that alone, and by none of his earlier ideas, is Wagner to be judged: he is to be judged by the effect and conviction of the finished play. Now, it seems to me that in the finished play Brünnhilde is neither “a glorious woman “—i.e. an Adelphi melodramatic heroine—nor “a deceitful, vindictive woman”—i.e. an Adelphi melodramatic villainess. Also, while considered by itself “The Dusk of the Gods” is interesting mainly on account of the music, considered in association, as Wagner wished, and as one must—for, after all, it is but the final act of a stupendous drama, and it is unfair and foolish to consider any one act of a drama alone—with the other minor dramas of the greater drama, “The Nibelung’s Ring,” it is dramatically not only interesting, absorbing, but absolutely indispensable, true, inevitable. It is true enough that the “Ring” suffered somewhat through the fact that Wagner took nearly a quarter of a century to carry out his plan, and during this period his views on life changed greatly; yet nevertheless “The Dusk of the Gods” stands as the noble—in fact, the only possible—conclusion to a story which is, on the whole, splendidly told.
When seeing “The Valkyrie,” one thinks of Sieglinde or Siegmund or Brünnhilde; when listening to “Siegfried,” one thinks of Siegfried and Brünnhilde and no others; but when one thinks of the complete “Ring,” the person of the drama most forcibly forced before the eye of the imagination, the person to whom one realises that sympathy is chiefly due, is Wotan. Wotan, not Siegfried or Siegmund, is the hero of the “Ring.” His tragedy—if it is indeed a tragedy to emerge from the battle in the highest sense of the word triumphant—includes the tragedy of Siegfried and Siegmund, Sieglinde and Brünnhilde—in fact, the tragedy of all the smaller characters of the play. “The Rheingold,” in spite of its glorious music, is entirely superfluous—dramatically, at all events, it is superfluous—but there, anyhow, the problem which we could easily understand without it is stated. Wotan, who has been placed at the head of affairs by the three blind fates, has caught the general disease of wishing to gain the power to make others do his will. So anxious is he for that authority that he not only makes a bargain for it with the powers of stupidity—the giants, the brute forces of nature—which bargain is afterwards and could never be anything but his ruin, but also he stoops to a base subterfuge to gain it, and with the help of Loge, fire, the final destroyer, he does gain it. So determined was Wagner to make his point clear, that even in “The Rheingold,” the superfluous drama, he made it several times superfluously. He was not content to let his point make itself—the humanitarian, the preacher of all that makes for the highest humanity, was too strong in him for that: it was a little too strong even for the artist in him: he must needs make the powers of darkness lay a curse on power over one’s fellow-beings, the Ring standing as the emblem of that power. While Wotan takes the power, his deepest wisdom, which is to say, his intuition—represented by the spirit of the earth, Erda—rises against him and tells him he is committing the fatal mistake, and he yields to the extent of letting the giants have the supreme power. But he thinks, just as you and I, reader, might think, that by some quaint unthinkable device he can evade the tremendous consequence of his own act; and, instead of at once looking at the consequence boldly and saying he will face it, he elaborates a plan by which no one will suffer anything, while he, Wotan, will gain the lordship of creation. From this moment his fate becomes tragic. The complete man, full of rich humanity—for whom Wotan stands—cannot exist, necessarily ceases to exist, if he is compelled to deny the better part of himself, as Peter denied Jesus of Nazareth. And in consequence of his own act Wotan has immediately to deny the better part of himself, to make war on his own son Siegmund, and then on his own daughter Brünnhilde: he destroys the first and puts away from him for ever Brünnhilde, who is incarnate love. The grand tragic moment of the whole cycle is the laying to sleep of Brünnhilde. Wotan knows that life without love is no life, and he is compelled to part from love by the very bargain which enables him to rule. Rather than live such a life, he deliberately, solemnly wills his own death; and a great part of “Siegfried” and the whole of “The Dusk of the Gods” are devoted to showing how his death, and the death of all the gods, comes about through Wotan’s first act. In “Siegfried” and “The Dusk of the Gods” there is no tragedy—how can there be any tragedy in the fate of the man who faithfully follows the impulse that makes for his highest and widest satisfaction, for the fullest exercise of his beneficent energies, for the man who says I will do this or that because I know and feel it is the best I can do? “The Dusk of the Gods” is Wotan’s most splendid triumph; he deliberately yields place to a new dynasty, because he knows that to keep possession of the throne will mean the continual suppression of all that is best in him, as he has had already to suppress it. Incidentally there are many tragedies in the “Ring.” The murder of Siegmund by Hunding, aided by Wotan, before Sieglinde’s eyes; the hideous incident of Siegfried winning his own wife to be the wife of his friend Gunther; the stabbing of Siegfried by Hagen; Brünnhilde’s telling Gutrune that she, Gutrune, was never the wife of Siegfried,—all these are terrible enough tragedies. Brünnhilde’s is the most terrible of them all, though she too takes her fate into her hands, and by willing the right thing, and doing it, goes victorious out of life. What there is difficult to understand about her, why she should be accused of deceit and have her conduct explained, I can hardly guess. In “The Valkyrie” she is a goddess; but when she offends Wotan by disobeying him and walking clean through all the Commandments, he is bound, for the maintenance of his power, to punish her. So he takes away her godhead, and she is thenceforth simply a woman. Siegfried treats her treacherously—as she necessarily thinks—and she very naturally takes vengeance on him. Mr. Shaw speaks as though he wished her to be a bread-and-butter miss; but a woman of Brünnhilde’s type, a daughter of the high gods, could scarcely be that.
In short, “The Dusk of the Gods” seems to me perfectly clear, and in no more need of explanation than “The Valkyrie” or “Siegfried.” Of course there are a thousand loose ends in the “Ring,” as there are in life itself; but to count them and find out what they all mean would occupy one for an eternity. To throw away “The Dusk of the Gods” because one cannot understand the loose ends, is ridiculous; instead of wishing there were fewer of them, I wish Wagner had been more careless, less German, and left more. It was through his endeavours to get unity, to show the close relation of each incident to every other incident, that he nearly came to utter grief. The drama was so gigantic, to secure sympathy for Wotan it was so necessary to secure sympathy for the minor characters whose story helps to make up Wotan’s story, that Wagner seemed perpetually afraid that the real, main drama would be forgotten. And it is true that the story of Siegmund and Sieglinde, or of Siegfried and Brünnhilde, absorbs one for a time so completely that one forgets all about Wotan and his woes. So Wagner came near to spoiling one of the most tremendous achievements of the human mind, by shoving old Wotan on to the stage again and again to recapitulate his troubles. But of these interruptions “The Dusk of the Gods” has none. The story proceeds swiftly, inevitably to the end; from the first bar to the last, the music is as splendid as any Wagner ever wrote. It is the fitting conclusion to the vision of life presented in the “Ring”: it is a funeral chant, mournful, sombre, but triumphant. The seed has been sown, the crop has grown and ripened and been harvested, and now the thing is over: a chill wind pipes over the empty stubble-land where late the yellow corn stood and the labourers laboured: there is nothing more: “ripeness is all” that life offers or means.