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 writing words to set to music.  An animadversion on the length of the speeches would be perfectly just if the drama were meant to be spoken; as the drama is meant to be sung, it is irrelevant and silly.  Now, it is idle to say, in answer to all this, that Wagner proves the truth of his premisses by the deductions he draws in the drama, as in Euclid a proposition is stated to be a truth and then proved to be a truth.  In Wagner nothing is proved.  Accept his premisses, and you understand the subsequent drama; wait for the premisses to be proved true, and there is no drama for you to understand—­no drama, but a series of incoherent, unrelated and inconsequent incidents.  Finally, we all know that when a man tumbles over a high precipice he is killed.  Suppose that in a melodrama the villain tumbled and is killed.  Would some wise commentator write, “The master here proves the wickedness of villainy, and shows conclusively how it always meets with its just punishment, for the villain tumbles over a precipice and is, if we mistake not, killed.  It is true the same fate unfortunately overtakes the hero, but the circumstances and the moral are different.  The villain met his just reward; an unlucky accident befell the hero.  Underlying this is the profounder truth that when men—­and we will even say women—­fall off high places, they get killed or seriously hurt”?  This is on a par with the “truths” and “morals” found in the Ring.