r, like the vast majority of us, never to have passed through, than
to allow it to play more than a recreative holiday part in our lives. It
did not play a very large part in Wagner's own laborious life, and does
not occupy more than two scenes of The Ring. Tristan and Isolde, wholly
devoted to it, is a poem of destruction and death. The Mastersingers,
a work full of health, fun and happiness, contains not a single bar
of love music that can be described as passionate: the hero of it is
a widower who cobbles shoes, writes verses, and contents himself with
looking on at the sweetheartings of his customers. Parsifal makes an end
of it altogether. The truth is that the love panacea in Night Falls On
The Gods and in the last act of Siegfried is a survival of the first
crude operatic conception of the story, modified by an anticipation of
Wagner's later, though not latest, conception of love as the fulfiller
of our Will to Live and consequently our reconciler to night and death.

NOT LOVE, BUT LIFE

The only faith which any reasonable disciple can gain from The Ring is
not in love, but in life itself as a tireless power which is continually
driving onward and upward--not, please observe, being beckoned or drawn
by Das Ewig Weibliche or any other external sentimentality, but growing
from within, by its own inexplicable energy, into ever higher and
higher forms of organization, the strengths and the needs of which are
continually superseding the institutions which were made to fit our
former requirements. When your Bakoonins call out for the demolition of
all these venerable institutions, there is no need to fly into a panic
and lock them up in prison whilst your parliament is bit by bit doing
exactly what they advised you to do. When your Siegfrieds melt down the
old weapons into new ones, and with disrespectful words chop in twain
the antiquated constable's staves in the hands of their elders, the end
of the world is no nearer than it was before. If human nature, which
is the highest organization of life reached on this planet, is really
degenerating, then human society will decay; and no panic-begotten penal
measures can possibly save it: we must, like Prometheus, set to work to
make new men instead of vainly torturing old ones. On the other hand, if
the energy of life is still carrying human nature to higher and higher
levels, then the more young people shock their elders and deride and
discard their pet institutions