ation of which seems to them to have been the most
cruel and mischievous feature of their slavery to duty. It is useless to
warn them that this reaction, if prescribed as a panacea, will prove as
great a failure as all the other reactions have done; for they do not
recognize its identity with any reaction that ever occurred before.
Take for instance the hackneyed historic example of the austerity of
the Commonwealth being followed by the licence of the Restoration.
You cannot persuade any moral enthusiast to accept this as a pure
oscillation from action to reaction. If he is a Puritan he looks upon
the Restoration as a national disaster: if he is an artist he regards it
as the salvation of the country from gloom, devil worship and starvation
of the affections. The Puritan is ready to try the Commonwealth again
with a few modern improvements: the Amateur is equally ready to try the
Restoration with modern enlightenments. And so for the present we must
be content to proceed by reactions, hoping that each will establish some
permanently practical and beneficial reform or moral habit that will
survive the correction of its excesses by the next reaction.

DRAMATIC ORIGIN OF WOTAN

We can now see how a single drama in which Wotan does not appear, and of
which Siegfried is the hero, expanded itself into a great fourfold
drama of which Wotan is the hero. You cannot dramatize a reaction by
personifying the reacting force only, any more than Archimedes could
lift the world without a fulcrum for his lever. You must also personify
the established power against which the new force is reacting; and
in the conflict between them you get your drama, conflict being the
essential ingredient in all drama. Siegfried, as the hero of Die
Gotterdammerung, is only the primo tenore robusto of an opera book,
deferring his death, after he has been stabbed in the last act, to
sing rapturous love strains to the heroine exactly like Edgardo in
Donizetti's Lucia. In order to make him intelligible in the wider
significance which his joyous, fearless, conscienceless heroism soon
assumed in Wagner's imagination, it was necessary to provide him with a
much vaster dramatic antagonist than the operatic villain Hagen. Hence
Wagner had to create Wotan as the anvil for Siegfried's hammer; and
since there was no room for Wotan in the original opera book, Wagner
had to work back to a preliminary drama reaching primarily to the very
beginnings of human soc