Wotan by disobeying him and walking clean through all the Commandments, he is bound, for the maintenance of his power, to punish her.  So he takes away her godhead, and she is thenceforth simply a woman.  Siegfried treats her treacherously—­as she necessarily thinks—­and she very naturally takes vengeance on him.  Mr. Shaw speaks as though he wished her to be a bread-and-butter miss; but a woman of Bruennhilde’s type, a daughter of the high gods, could scarcely be that.

In short, “The Dusk of the Gods” seems to me perfectly clear, and in no more need of explanation than “The Valkyrie” or “Siegfried.”  Of course there are a thousand loose ends in the “Ring,” as there are in life itself; but to count them and find out what they all mean would occupy one for an eternity.  To throw away “The Dusk of the Gods” because one cannot understand the loose ends, is ridiculous; instead of wishing there were fewer of them, I wish Wagner had been more careless, less German, and left more.  It was through his endeavours to get unity, to show the close relation of each incident to every other incident, that he nearly came to utter grief.  The drama was so gigantic, to secure sympathy for Wotan it was so necessary to secure sympathy for the minor characters whose story helps to make up Wotan’s story, that Wagner seemed perpetually afraid that the real, main drama would be forgotten.  And it is true that the story of Siegmund and Sieglinde, or of Siegfried and Bruennhilde, absorbs one for a time so completely that one forgets all about Wotan and his woes.  So Wagner came near to spoiling one of the most tremendous achievements of the human mind, by shoving old Wotan on to the stage again and again to recapitulate his troubles.  But of these interruptions “The Dusk of the Gods” has none.  The story proceeds swiftly, inevitably to the end; from the first bar to the last, the music is as splendid as any Wagner ever wrote.  It is the fitting conclusion to the vision of life presented in the “Ring”:  it is a funeral chant, mournful, sombre, but triumphant.  The seed has been sown, the crop has grown and ripened and been harvested, and now the thing is over:  a chill wind pipes over the empty stubble-land where late the yellow corn stood and the labourers laboured:  there is nothing more:  “ripeness is all” that life offers or means.

“PARSIFAL”

“Parsifal” is an immoral work.  One cannot for a moment suppose that Wagner, who had written “Tristan” and “Siegfried,” meant to preach downright immorality, or that he meant “Parsifal” to stand as anything more than the expression of a momentary mood, the mood of the exhausted, the effete man, the mood which follows the mood of “Tristan” as certainly as night follows day.  Nevertheless, in so far as “Parsifal” says anything to us, in so far as it brings, in Nonconformist cant, “a message,” it is immoral and vicious, just as in so far as “Siegfried” carries a message it is entirely moral, healthful, and sane.