hich he himself
writhed during Alberic's brief reign. Mimmy is a blinking, shambling,
ancient creature, too weak and timid to dream of taking arms himself to
despoil Fafnir, who still, transformed to a monstrous serpent, broods
on the gold in a hole in the rocks. Mimmy needs the help of a hero for
that; and he has craft enough to know that it is quite possible, and
indeed much in the ordinary way of the world, for senile avarice and
craft to set youth and bravery to work to win empire for it. He knows
the pedigree of the child left on his hands, and nurses it to manhood
with great care.

His pains are too well rewarded for his comfort. The boy Siegfried,
having no god to instruct him in the art of unhappiness, inherits none
of his father's ill luck, and all his father's hardihood. The fear
against which Siegmund set his face like flint, and the woe which he
wore down, are unknown to the son. The father was faithful and grateful:
the son knows no law but his own humor; detests the ugly dwarf who has
nursed him; chafes furiously under his claims for some return for
his tender care; and is, in short, a totally unmoral person, a born
anarchist, the ideal of Bakoonin, an anticipation of the "overman" of
Nietzsche. He is enormously strong, full of life and fun, dangerous and
destructive to what he dislikes, and affectionate to what he likes; so
that it is fortunate that his likes and dislikes are sane and healthy.
Altogether an inspiriting young forester, a son of the morning, in whom
the heroic race has come out into the sunshine from the clouds of his
grandfather's majestic entanglements with law, and the night of his
father's tragic struggle with it.

The First Act

Mimmy's smithy is a cave, in which he hides from the light like the
eyeless fish of the American caverns. Before the curtain rises the music
already tells us that we are groping in darkness. When it does rise
Mimmy is in difficulties. He is trying to make a sword for his nursling,
who is now big enough to take the field against Fafnir. Mimmy can make
mischievous swords; but it is not with dwarf made weapons that heroic
man will hew the way of his own will through religions and governments
and plutocracies and all the other devices of the kingdom of the fears
of the unheroic. As fast as Mimmy makes swords, Siegfried Bakoonin
smashes them, and then takes the poor old swordsmith by the scruff of
the neck and chastises him wrathfully. The particular day on which