the political philosophy
of Schopenhaur, although the same clear metaphysiological distinction
between the instinctive part of man (his Will) and his reasoning faculty
(dramatized in The Ring as Loki) is insisted on in both. The difference
is that to Schopenhaur the Will is the universal tormentor of man, the
author of that great evil, Life; whilst reason is the divine gift that
is finally to overcome this life-creating will and lead, through its
abnegation, to cessation and peace, annihilation and Nirvana. This is
the doctrine of Pessimism. Now Wagner was, when he wrote The Ring, a
most sanguine revolutionary Meliorist, contemptuous of the reasoning
faculty, which he typified in the shifty, unreal, delusive Loki, and
full of faith in the life-giving Will, which he typified in the glorious
Siegfried. Not until he read Schopenhaur did he become bent on proving
that he had always been a Pessimist at heart, and that Loki was the most
sensible and worthy adviser of Wotan in The Rhine Gold.

Sometimes he faces the change in his opinions frankly enough. "My
Niblung drama," he writes to Roeckel, "had taken form at a time when I
had built up with my reason an optimistic world on Hellenic principles,
believing that nothing was necessary for the realization of such a world
but that men should wish it. I ingeniously set aside-the problem why
they did not wish it. I remember that it was with this definite
creative purpose that I conceived the personality of Siegfried, with the
intention of representing an existence free from pain." But he appeals
to his earlier works to show that behind all these artificial optimistic
ideas there was always with him an intuition of "the sublime tragedy of
renunciation, the negation of the will." In trying to explain this, he
is full of ideas philosophically, and full of the most amusing
contradictions personally. Optimism, as an accidental excursion into the
barren paths of reason on his own part, he calls "Hellenic." In others
he denounces it as rank Judaism, the Jew having at that time become for
him the whipping boy for all modern humanity. In a letter from London
he expounds Schopenhaur to Roeckel with enthusiasm, preaching the
renunciation of the Will to Live as the redemption from all error and
vain pursuits: in the next letter he resumes the subject with unabated
interest, and finishes by mentioning that on leaving London he went to
Geneva and underwent "a most beneficial course of hydropath