CHAPTER XVI
'SIEGFRIED'
I
In a letter to Liszt Wagner says he would not have undertaken the toil of completing so gigantic a work as the Ring but for his love of Siegfried, his ideal of manhood. It is as well, from one point of view, that his love of his ideal was so intense, for in consequence we have the Ring; but from another point of view it is not so well, for the youth Siegfried is the least lovable, perhaps the most inane and detestable character to be found in any form of drama. He is a combination of impudence, stupidity and sheer animal strength—mere bone and sinew; his courage comes from his stupidity. The courage and strength and impudence carry him through to his one victory; then his stupidity leads him straight to destruction. He possesses not one fine trait: he is as weak in will and intellect as he is strong in muscle. In the 'fifties and 'sixties not only Germans but men of all other nationalities seem to have vainly imagined they had solved all the problems of this very difficult world by assuming and proclaiming that might is right. Bismarck acted on this belief; our own Carlyle, Tennyson and Ruskin preached it; and Wagner, being a feeble creature physically, fell naturally, inevitably, a victim to the old delusion, and set to work to glorify the strong man. There is a further explanation. I need not do more than refer to an idea which took definite form during the eighteenth century, that as many of the defects and problems of modern life spring from the very conditions under which our civilisation alone is possible, a return to a state of nature, without government, clothes, or even houses to live in, would be a return to the garden of Eden before the Fall. We see this notion working in Wagner's mind continually in the prose writings, and in his last opera we see Parsifal, the "pure fool," "redeeming" an over-civilised world. To glorify the idiot absolute in this fashion was to out-Rousseau Rousseau—though Wagner would have scorned the suggestion. In Siegfried he goes by no means so far; but he goes quite far enough. Siegfried is no idiot; but he certainly is an unamiable, truculent savage. He has been reared by a dwarf and cripple, Mime, and the first we see of him is on his entry with a wild bear in leash, which beast he drives at his terrified foster-father. The justification is that he feels instinctively that Mime is bad, low and cunning—and it does not justify him: Mime, with an ulterior purpose, it is true, has saved him from death by starvation in his infancy, and nurtured him, and the least Siegfried could do was to leave the abject creature in peace. It is true also that he is mending Siegfried's sword—but this is to anticipate. I cannot accept Siegfried as a specimen of the highest heroic humanity. The boldness of a man who because of his dull wits cannot realise danger is of no use in this world under any imaginable conditions. Siegfried knows no fear. There is a story of two officers conversing during a battle. One 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 Brünnhilda 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, Mime is his father, and he learns the truth. He softens into something approaching manhood as he hears of his mother's death; and finally rushes off into the forest, leaving Mime again to his task. Then follows a scene to be accounted for in only one way. First, the scene: Mime sits in despair, and there enters an old man with his slouch-hat drawn down over one eye, wearing a dark blue cloak (it ought to be dotted with stars), and carrying a spear or staff in his hands. He gains the sacred hearth, converses with Mime, and finally bets him his head that he cannot answer three questions. Much to my surprise when I first saw the score of Siegfried, these form merely an excuse for going again over the ground covered in the Rhinegold and the Valkyrie. The Scandinavian hegemony is expounded, and other matters are gracefully touched on; the only point is made when the last question is propounded and Mime cannot answer: Who is it shall forge the sword, slay Fafner, take the hoard, pass through the fire and take Brünnhilda for his wife? The old man laughs, leaves Mime his head, but tells him it will fall to the hero who can do all these things, the hero who knows not fear. He goes off; thunder is heard; strange lights flicker amongst the trees; and Mime falls into an ecstasy of terror, suffering all the agonies of a waking nightmare, until the spell is abruptly broken by the entry of Siegfried. Why we should have the two previous dramas of the Ring told again in this way is the puzzle. In the letter to Uhlig (p. [227]) Wagner had plainly given his reasons for writing the Rhinegold and the Valkyrie—to set before the audience clearly and vividly the events leading up to Siegfried's Death, in action, not in narrative. We have seen them in action, and lo! we get them in narrative! Wagner's idea must have been to show us Wotan, realising how matters had passed beyond his control, going about the world as the Wanderer, watching the development of things and awaiting the inevitable day. He gives us the very awe and thrill of our Scandinavian forbears with the apparition of the grey-bearded man in his cloak coloured like deep night—the terrible god that they believed walked the earth and might enter their homesteads at any moment. Of course, as we shall see presently, the answer to the third question prepares the next stage of the drama. But as to why the whole story of the Ring should be repeated—well, even gods must have something to talk about if they wish to talk at all; and the scene serves to sustain and to intensify the atmosphere in which the whole drama is enacted, the atmosphere of the old sagas. But I cheerfully concede that it is far too long, and in many respects an artistic error.
The real drama of Siegfried, considering it as a separate, self-contained opera, is now prepared for, and forthwith begins. We know Siegfried and the task before him; we know Mime and his task—to find out if Siegfried can be made to fear, and if he cannot, to encourage him to kill the dragon, win the gold, and then to poison him. He tries Siegfried with stories of terror, asks him if he has never felt afraid of this, that and the other; and finding that this is the veritable Hero, makes his preparation. Siegfried takes the splinters of the sword—the splinters no smith can weld together—files them to dust, melts the dust, re-casts the sword and finishes it. Meantime Mime, working on, brews his poisonous broth, muttering to himself about his purpose. At the end Siegfried tests the sword and proves it true by splitting the anvil. All sorts of allegorical meanings may be found in this gigantic scene; but the plain meaning is that to a hero, unique, unparalleled in the history of the world, a patched-up weapon, used previously by lesser men, is useless: his sword must be new, and only he himself can forge it.