iety. And since, on this world-embracing scale,
it was clear that Siegfried must come into conflict with many baser
and stupider forces than those lofty ones of supernatural religion and
political constitutionalism typified by Wotan and his wife Fricka, these
minor antagonists had to be dramatized also in the persons of Alberic,
Mime, Fafnir, Loki, and the rest. None of these appear in Night Falls On
The Gods save Alberic, whose weird dream-colloquy with Hagen, effective
as it is, is as purely theatrical as the scene of the Ghost in Hamlet,
or the statue in Don Giovanni. Cut the conference of the Norns and the
visit of Valtrauta to Brynhild out of Night Falls On The Gods, and the
drama remains coherent and complete without them. Retain them, and the
play becomes connected by conversational references with the three music
dramas; but the connection establishes no philosophic coherence, no
real identity between the operatic Brynhild of the Gibichung episode
(presently to be related) and the daughter of Wotan and the First
Mother.

THE LOVE PANACEA

We shall now find that at the point where The Ring changes from
music drama into opera, it also ceases to be philosophic, and becomes
didactic. The philosophic part is a dramatic symbol of the world as
Wagner observed it. In the didactic part the philosophy degenerates into
the prescription of a romantic nostrum for all human ills. Wagner, only
mortal after all, succumbed to the panacea mania when his philosophy was
exhausted, like any of the rest of us.

The panacea is by no means an original one. Wagner was anticipated in
the year 1819 by a young country gentleman from Sussex named Shelley, in
a work of extraordinary artistic power and splendor. Prometheus Unbound
is an English attempt at a Ring; and when it is taken into account that
the author was only 27 whereas Wagner was 40 when he completed the poem
of The Ring, our vulgar patriotism may find an envious satisfaction in
insisting upon the comparison. Both works set forth the same conflict
between humanity and its gods and governments, issuing in the redemption
of man from their tyranny by the growth of his will into perfect
strength and self-confidence; and both finish by a lapse into
panacea-mongering didacticism by the holding up of Love as the remedy
for all evils and the solvent of all social difficulties.

The differences between Prometheus Unbound and The Ring are as
interesting as the likenesses. Shelley