There is no lack of examples of this process of illegitimate inference and illegitimate association. After Mime has answered the first of the Wanderer's three questions, the latter congratulates him in this wise (Siegfried, vocal score, p. 74):
Right well the name
of the race dost thou know:
sly, thou rascal, thou seemest!
—to the same phrase that is often used in the Rhinegold to suggest the trickiness of Loge in particular, but also, apparently, to suggest deceit in general. It accompanies, for example, Fafner's remark to Fasolt, à propos of the attempt of Wotan to evade the promised payment for Valhalla—
My trusty brother,
seest thou, fool, his deceit?
(V. S. 89, 90); and again the words in which Wotan tries to calm the apprehensions of Fricka—
Where simple strength serves,
of none ask I assistance:
but to force the hate
of foes to help me,
needs such craft and deceit
as Loge the artful employs.
(V. S. 82, 83). That is to say, a purely arbitrary musical figure is to be taken as symbolising not merely the slyness of a particular person, but slyness in the abstract—a length to which we must decline to go with Wagner.
And as with his waves and his moral qualities, so with his animals; they too are both particular and universal. When Alberich, at the urging of Loge, turns himself into a serpent (Rhinegold, p. 182), it is to the accompaniment of a motive that is itself admirably pictorial. But in Siegfried, (p. 7, etc.), and the Götterdämmerung (p. 34, etc.), the same motive is always used to characterise Fafner, after he has turned himself into a dragon. One need not enlarge upon the confusion this is bound to create.
We are willing again, to accept the "Swan" motive in Lohengrin as a purely conventional symbol; but the same motive strikes rather oddly on our ears when it is used to particularise the swan in Parsifal. If in Lohengrin it typifies that particular swan, it is obviously not right to employ it for a totally different bird in another opera; for there is nothing in the outline of the theme that can be said to bear the remotest resemblance to a swan in the way that an arpeggio theme may be said to resemble waves, or a crepitating theme to suggest fire. Again, Wagner only confuses us when he uses the motive that accompanies Kundry's ride in the first scene of Parsifal to accompany Parsifal's description of the horsemen he had once seen in the wood:
And once upon the fringe of the wood,
on glorious creatures mounted,
men all glittering went by me;
fain had I been like them:
with laughter they swept on their way.
And then I ran,
but never again I saw them;
through deserts wide I wandered,
o'er hill and dale;
oft fell the night,
then followed day: etc.