den ring. Gold in
itself is innocent--elementary--a bauble at the bottom of the river, a
toy for laughing children; but the insatiable thirst for power and
wealth has robbed it of its harmlessness and made it the tool and symbol
of tyranny. Only a being completely in the grip of the greed for riches
and dominion, a being who looks upon the world and all men as objects to
be bent to his will, and who has consequently renounced love, could have
thus enslaved the world. Love does not impair the worth of a
fellow-creature, but sets him above all things; a lover cannot be
entirely selfish; his feeling at least for his mistress, and through her
for the rest of the world, must be pure and unselfish. The struggle
between these two most powerful instincts, both in the race and in the
heart of the individual (Wotan), is the incomparable subject of this
tragedy. The whole world-process is represented as a struggle between
the apparently great, who are yet the slaves of gold and authority, and
the truly free man who serves love, and on whom ambition has no hold.

The representatives of the petty, greedy, toiling human vermin, who
readily renounced love for the sake of wealth, because the latter will
always buy lust and pleasure, are the Niebelungs, the dwellers in the
Netherworld who never see the sun. They have but one standard: money;
one supreme value: power, the gift of wealth. Mime bewails his people
(the small tradesmen as it were), as follows; "Light-hearted smiths we
used to fashion gems and trinkets for our wives, gorgeous jewels, the
Niebelungs' pretty trifles--we laughed at the labour." But Alberich, the
capitalist, through the magic of the ring, has usurped the power and
enslaved his fellows. "Now the felon compels us to creep in the heart of
the mountains to labour for him. There we must delve and explore and
despoil, plunder and smelt and hammer the metal, restlessly toiling to
increase his treasure." The really daemonic property of the gold is that
everybody succumbs to its seduction and strives to possess it. The
former naive joy of living, embodied in the Rhine-daughters, and their
not yet humanised song, which seems to come direct from the heart of
nature, is destroyed by the theft of the Rhine-gold. What till then had
been a serenely shining "star of the deep," has been transformed into a
means by which to win authority. The programme of the greedy and
tyrannous never varies; Alberich proclaims it; "The whole worl