compulsion to renounce himself, to
destroy all that he loves and all that makes life sweet, then he rather
renounces life. So he awaits during the _Dusk of the Gods_, until
Siegfried has been slain and the ring restored to the Rhine. His own
power being broken, and the power that lay in the ring being again in
the hands of the innocent Rhine-maidens, there is nothing to control
Loge, who blazes up in sheets of fire, and Valhalla is consumed, while
the Rhine maidens swim joyfully about in the bubbling, roaring Rhine.

I have tried to trace as clearly as possible this main story as it
pursues its course through the tangle of subsidiary stories. In dealing
with a drama so richly stored with material, where every rift is loaded
with ore, much has necessarily to be left untouched; in such a sketch as
this one cannot do more than indicate the broad masses. There is no
philosophic idea, no exposition of a philosophy. Wagner was no
philosopher, though he found in Schopenhauer's Will to Live, and its
Renunciation, material which he could use for poetic and dramatic
purposes. The "lessons" which many ingenious persons find here are not
lessons at all, but the ground-facts on which the drama is based. That
the power of gold--signified by the ring--carries with it the curse of
gold is not a thing to be inferred from the drama; it is assumed as the
starting-point of the drama. That a man cannot by many subterfuges hold
power in this world without incidentally committing acts which revolt
the better part of his nature--this, again, is no lesson, but a fact
taken for granted. I will not waste space on the thousand odd
"meanings," "lessons" and so on found by the enthusiastic in Wagner. His
ideas were at once the substance and the inspiration of his
music-dramas; but he never dreamed of writing copybook headings. He had
in language to make his characters talk about these ideas for two
reasons, each sufficient in itself. First, excepting in melodrama and
rough-and-tumble farces, the audience must know the motives actuating
the personages of the drama--their situation, their emotions, ambitions,
fears and what not. Without that all drama would be an incomprehensible
jabbering and gesticulating of mummers, fit only to be put on the London
stage at the present moment. Second, if Wagner spread himself in the
expression of certain things where an ordinary dramatist would have
dealt with them more briefly, it must be remembered that he was wri