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?

II

The continuous clink-clink-clink of a metalworker’s hammer is heard; the curtain rises, and we first see through an opening at the back of the stage the bright green shining forest; as our eyes grow accustomed to the darkness in the front we gradually perceive a rude smithy in a cave, with an anvil, a forge with a smouldering fire, and a deformed dwarf, Mime, at work trying to piece together the shards of the broken sword.  That sword was Siegmund’s, shattered by a blow of Wotan’s spear; and long ago it was to this cave Sieglinda fled, bearing with her the fragments.  Siegmund and Sieglinda are long dead, Sieglinda after giving birth to Siegfried; not far off is Hate-cave, where the dragon Fafner lies guarding his precious gold amongst it the Ring; far away Bruennhilda sleeps on the mountain, surrounded by her wall of fire.  There she lay on the evening of Siegmund’s death; there she has lain since.  The world has gone on its way; Siegmund and Sieglinda have departed; Siegfried has grown to manhood; year by year the young shoots in the forest have sprouted and the leaves spread to the sunlight:  as we see the forest now, so was it on that fateful day, and so it has been as the successive summers came.  Siegmund lived, died, and his memory has almost perished; save to the dwarf, the very name of Sieglinda is unknown; other men have lived and died:  nature only goes on her course, the trees each year bringing forth fresh leaves to repair last year’s losses, as though the lives and deaths of brave men and women were nothing to her.  The earth is sweet and pleasant, but nature must attend to her own affairs, and her indifference to the affairs of men, her unchangeableness amidst all the vicissitudes of men’s lives, compel us to realise in such a scene as this at once her own eternal youthfulness and man’s brief, ephemeral existence.  At one stroke Wagner creates the atmosphere for his drama, and gives us as no other artist has ever given it a sense of the unfathomable mystery of the world and of life.

The dwarf taps away with his hammer; he longs to patch up the sword that Siegfried may kill the dragon and he, Mime, get the hoard; he bewails his weakness, but he does his best.  All his labour proves useless—­the sword refuses to be mended; and in comes Siegfried with his bear.  The bear is driven off into the woods; there is a long altercation and an explanation; Siegfried cannot believe that, as he has been told,