that is played on the stage:  by that alone, and by none of his earlier ideas, is Wagner to be judged:  he is to be judged by the effect and conviction of the finished play.  Now, it seems to me that in the finished play Bruennhilde is neither “a glorious woman “—­i.e. an Adelphi melodramatic heroine—­nor “a deceitful, vindictive woman”—­i.e. an Adelphi melodramatic villainess.  Also, while considered by itself “The Dusk of the Gods” is interesting mainly on account of the music, considered in association, as Wagner wished, and as one must—­for, after all, it is but the final act of a stupendous drama, and it is unfair and foolish to consider any one act of a drama alone—­with the other minor dramas of the greater drama, “The Nibelung’s Ring,” it is dramatically not only interesting, absorbing, but absolutely indispensable, true, inevitable.  It is true enough that the “Ring” suffered somewhat through the fact that Wagner took nearly a quarter of a century to carry out his plan, and during this period his views on life changed greatly; yet nevertheless “The Dusk of the Gods” stands as the noble—­in fact, the only possible—­conclusion to a story which is, on the whole, splendidly told.

When seeing “The Valkyrie,” one thinks of Sieglinde or Siegmund or Bruennhilde; when listening to “Siegfried,” one thinks of Siegfried and Bruennhilde and no others; but when one thinks of the complete “Ring,” the person of the drama most forcibly forced before the eye of the imagination, the person to whom one realises that sympathy is chiefly due, is Wotan.  Wotan, not Siegfried or Siegmund, is the hero of the “Ring.”  His tragedy—­if it is indeed a tragedy to emerge from the battle in the highest sense of the word triumphant—­includes the tragedy of Siegfried and Siegmund, Sieglinde and Bruennhilde—­in fact, the tragedy of all the smaller characters of the play.  “The Rheingold,” in spite of its glorious music, is entirely superfluous—­dramatically, at all events, it is superfluous—­but there, anyhow, the problem which we could easily understand without it is stated.  Wotan, who has been placed at the head of affairs by the three blind fates, has caught the general disease of wishing to gain the power to make others do his will.  So anxious is he for that authority that he not only makes a bargain for it with the powers of stupidity—­the giants, the brute forces of nature—­which bargain is afterwards and could never be anything but his ruin, but also he stoops to a base subterfuge to gain it, and with the help of Loge, fire, the final destroyer, he does gain it.  So determined was Wagner to make his point clear, that even in “The Rheingold,” the superfluous drama, he made it several times superfluously.  He was not content to let his point make itself—­the humanitarian, the preacher of all that makes for the highest humanity, was too strong in him for that:  it was a little too strong even for the artist in him:  he must needs make the powers of darkness lay a curse on power