tting as near the truth
as Harvey did long after his death.

None the less, Wagner's own explanations are of exceptional interest. To
begin with, there is a considerable portion of The Ring, especially the
portraiture of our capitalistic industrial system from the socialist's
point of view in the slavery of the Niblungs and the tyranny of Alberic,
which is unmistakable, as it dramatizes that portion of human activity
which lies well within the territory covered by our intellectual
consciousness. All this is concrete Home Office business, so to speak:
its meaning was as clear to Wagner as it is to us. Not so that part
of the work which deals with the destiny of Wotan. And here, as it
happened, Wagner's recollection of what he had been driving at was
completely upset by his discovery, soon after the completion of The
Ring poem, of Schopenhaur's famous treatise "The World as Will and
Representation." So obsessed did he become with this masterpiece of
philosophic art that he declared that it contained the intellectual
demonstration of the conflict of human forces which he himself had
demonstrated artistically in his great poem. "I must confess," he writes
to Roeckel, "to having arrived at a clear understanding of my own
works of art through the help of another, who has provided me with the
reasoned conceptions corresponding to my intuitive principles."

Schopenhaur, however, had done nothing of the sort. Wagner's
determination to prove that he had been a Schopenhaurite all along
without knowing it only shows how completely the fascination of the
great treatise on The Will had run away with his memory. It is easy to
see how this happened. Wagner says of himself that "seldom has there
taken place in the soul of one and the same man so profound a division
and estrangement between the intuitive or impulsive part of his nature
and his consciously or reasonably formed ideas." And since Schopenhaur's
great contribution to modern thought was to educate us into clear
consciousness of this distinction--a distinction familiar, in a fanciful
way, to the Ages of Faith and Art before the Renascence, but afterwards
swamped in the Rationalism of that movement--it was inevitable that
Wagner should jump at Schopenhaur's metaphysiology (I use a word less
likely to be mistaken than metaphysics) as the very thing for him. But
metaphysiology is one thing, political philosophy another. The political
philosophy of Siegfried is exactly contrary to