this joint reign of the Divine and the Legal. He despises
these gods with their ideals and their golden apples. "I am ashamed," he
says, "to have dealings with these futile creatures." And so he follows
them to the rainbow bridge. But as they set foot on it, from the river
below rises the wailing of the Rhine maidens for their lost gold. "You
down there in the water," cries Loki with brutal irony: "you used to
bask in the glitter of your gold: henceforth you shall bask in the
splendor of the gods." And they reply that the truth is in the depths
and the darkness, and that what blazes on high there is falsehood. And
with that the gods pass into their glorious stronghold.

WAGNER AS REVOLUTIONIST

Before leaving this explanation of The Rhine Gold, I must have a word or
two about it with the reader. It is the least popular of the sections of
The Ring. The reason is that its dramatic moments lie quite outside
the consciousness of people whose joys and sorrows are all domestic
and personal, and whose religions and political ideas are purely
conventional and superstitious. To them it is a struggle between half a
dozen fairytale personages for a ring, involving hours of scolding and
cheating, and one long scene in a dark gruesome mine, with gloomy, ugly
music, and not a glimpse of a handsome young man or pretty woman. Only
those of wider consciousness can follow it breathlessly, seeing in it
the whole tragedy of human history and the whole horror of the dilemmas
from which the world is shrinking today. At Bayreuth I have seen a party
of English tourists, after enduring agonies of boredom from Alberic,
rise in the middle of the third scene, and almost force their way out
of the dark theatre into the sunlit pine-wood without. And I have
seen people who were deeply affected by the scene driven almost beside
themselves by this disturbance. But it was a very natural thing for the
unfortunate tourists to do, since in this Rhine Gold prologue there is
no interval between the acts for escape. Roughly speaking, people who
have no general ideas, no touch of the concern of the philosopher and
statesman for the race, cannot enjoy The Rhine Gold as a drama. They may
find compensations in some exceedingly pretty music, at times even grand
and glorious, which will enable them to escape occasionally from the
struggle between Alberic and Wotan; but if their capacity for music
should be as limited as their comprehension of the world, they