Wagner had finished the Ring before he conceived the idea of Tristan and Isolde. (It was printed in 1852.) In the former he intentionally raised the value of love and its position in the universe to a problem, embodying his knowledge of the world, and more especially of the modern world, in supernatural, mythical figures.  The greatest ambition of man is power and wealth, the symbol of which is a golden ring.  Gold in itself is innocent—­elementary—­a bauble at the bottom of the river, a toy for laughing children; but the insatiable thirst for power and wealth has robbed it of its harmlessness and made it the tool and symbol of tyranny.  Only a being completely in the grip of the greed for riches and dominion, a being who looks upon the world and all men as objects to be bent to his will, and who has consequently renounced love, could have thus enslaved the world.  Love does not impair the worth of a fellow-creature, but sets him above all things; a lover cannot be entirely selfish; his feeling at least for his mistress, and through her for the rest of the world, must be pure and unselfish.  The struggle between these two most powerful instincts, both in the race and in the heart of the individual (Wotan), is the incomparable subject of this tragedy.  The whole world-process is represented as a struggle between the apparently great, who are yet the slaves of gold and authority, and the truly free man who serves love, and on whom ambition has no hold.

The representatives of the petty, greedy, toiling human vermin, who readily renounced love for the sake of wealth, because the latter will always buy lust and pleasure, are the Niebelungs, the dwellers in the Netherworld who never see the sun.  They have but one standard:  money; one supreme value:  power, the gift of wealth.  Mime bewails his people (the small tradesmen as it were), as follows; “Light-hearted smiths we used to fashion gems and trinkets for our wives, gorgeous jewels, the Niebelungs’ pretty trifles—­we laughed at the labour.”  But Alberich, the capitalist, through the magic of the ring, has usurped the power and enslaved his fellows.  “Now the felon compels us to creep in the heart of the mountains to labour for him.  There we must delve and explore and despoil, plunder and smelt and hammer the metal, restlessly toiling to increase his treasure.”  The really daemonic property of the gold is that everybody succumbs to its seduction and strives to possess it.  The former naive joy of living, embodied in the Rhine-daughters, and their not yet humanised song, which seems to come direct from the heart of nature, is destroyed by the theft of the Rhine-gold.  What till then had been a serenely shining “star of the deep,” has been transformed into a means by which to win authority.  The programme of the greedy and tyrannous never varies; Alberich proclaims it; “The whole world will I win,” and it is his daemonic will to depreciate love and set up power as the only value, so that nobody