icult world by assuming and proclaiming that
might is right. Bismarck acted on this belief; our own Carlyle,
Tennyson and Ruskin preached it; and Wagner, being a feeble creature
physically, fell naturally, inevitably, a victim to the old delusion,
and set to work to glorify the strong man. There is a further
explanation. I need not do more than refer to an idea which took
definite form during the eighteenth century, that as many of the
defects and problems of modern life spring from the very conditions
under which our civilisation alone is possible, a return to a state of
nature, without government, clothes, or even houses to live in, would
be a return to the garden of Eden before the Fall. We see this notion
working in Wagner's mind continually in the prose writings, and in his
last opera we see Parsifal, the "pure fool," "redeeming" an
over-civilised world. To glorify the idiot absolute in this fashion
was to out-Rousseau Rousseau--though Wagner would have scorned the
suggestion. In _Siegfried_ he goes by no means so far; but he goes
quite far enough. Siegfried is no idiot; but he certainly is an
unamiable, truculent savage. He has been reared by a dwarf and
cripple, Mime, and the first we see of him is on his entry with a wild
bear in leash, which beast he drives at his terrified foster-father.
The justification is that he feels instinctively that Mime is bad, low
and cunning--and it does not justify him: Mime, with an ulterior
purpose, it is true, has saved him from death by starvation in his
infancy, and nurtured him, and the least Siegfried could do was to
leave the abject creature in peace. It is true also that he is mending
Siegfried's sword--but this is to anticipate. I cannot accept
Siegfried as a specimen of the highest heroic humanity. The boldness
of a man who because of his dull wits cannot realise danger is of no
use in this world under any imaginable conditions. Siegfried knows no
fear. There is a story of two officers conversing during a battle. One
asked, "Are you afraid?" Reply: "If you were as afraid as I am you
would run away." One, the tale assumes, had a finely organised brain,
the other brute force and insensibility. Which is the nearer approach
to an ideal of noble manhood? Wagner's _Siegfried_ answers, brute
ferocity. Judged by his own standard how would Wagner himself
stand?--as splendidly organised a brain as that possessed by any man
born into the nineteenth or any other century?

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