Mammonart: An essay in economic interpretation

by Upton Sinclair

In the depths of the river dwell the Rhine-maidens, having a lump of gold which they admire because it shines, but for which they have no other use. An ugly little dwarf pursues them; and when he cannot get their love, he decides to get along with their gold. He steals it, and makes from it a magic ring, which represents the ability to build cities and palaces, to command luxury and pleasure—to be, in short, our present master class. Even the gods are seduced by this lure, and fall to quarreling and intriguing for the magic power of gold. The god Wotan wrests it from the dwarf Alberich; and the latter puts a curse upon it, to the effect that it can only be worn by those who have renounced love—which is just as you see it in our modern world, and just as Wagner saw it when he was a court servant in Dresden, and was driven mad by the insolence of hereditary privilege.

There are two giants, who represent our great captains of industry, and have built Wotan a palace known as Walhalla. The giants have been promised Wotan’s sister, the goddess of youthful beauty and goodness, as their pay for this labor; but they elect to take the ring instead. This is Wagner’s way of telling us his opinion of the great bankers and gentlemen of wealth whom he vainly besought to assist him in the production of his beautiful works of art.

There were no factories in old German mythology; but the scene shows us a cavern down in the bowels of the earth, where Alberich, by the power of his ring, compels all his fellow dwarfs to toil at making treasures for him. We see him wielding the lash, and the music snarls and whines, and it is precisely the atmosphere you find in every sweat-shop and cotton mill and coal mine under our blessed competitive system. And when we see one of the giants slay his brother, and carry off the ring, and turn himself into a dragon, to sit upon it and guard it for the balance of time, we know that Wagner has visited the millionaire clubs of Dresden, and seen the fat old plutocrats in their big leather arm-chairs.

Wotan, the old god, sees too late the ruin he has brought into the world; he decides that the only way of escape is to create a hero who shall slay the dragon of privilege and break the spell of economic might. This hero is the young Siegfried, the child of nature who knows no fear; Bernard Shaw says that he is Wagner’s young Anarchist associate, Bakunin. And note that in this Siegfried myth Wagner foreshadows the downfall not only of capitalism, but also of religion. The last of the four operas is called “The Twilight of the Gods,” and the two evil spells of gold and of superstition are broken by the strong arm and the clear mind of a human youth.

Wagner wrote the words of these four operas immediately after the Dresden revolution; the poem was privately published four years after his flight from the city. During the years of his exile he affords us a sublime example of a great man contending with obstacles for the sake of an ideal. He went ahead to compose his masterpiece in the face of poverty and debt, ridicule and ignominy. His works were absolutely new, they required an absolutely new method of presentation; so, even when he could get a chance of production, he had to face the stupidity and malice of singers and conductors and managers, who were sure in their own conceit and resented instructions from an upstart.

We find him in 1860, almost at the end of his exile, receiving from Louis Napoleon an opportunity to put on “Tannhäuser” in Paris. Now this opera is a music sermon in reprehension of sensual love; it portrays the ruin and ultimate repentance of a medieval knight who is lured into the Venusburg, the lurking place of the old heathen goddess. And this Sunday school lesson in music was to be presented in the great opera house, whose boxes were rented by members of the Jockey Club, the gilded youth of Paris who supported the opera in order to provide publicity for their mistresses in the ballet!

The clash was embittered by the fact that the members of the Jockey Club came late from their supper-parties, and wanted to see their mistresses dance; therefore it was an iron-clad law of the opera that the ballet came in the second act. But in Wagner’s Sunday school lesson the knight is lured into the Venusburg in the first act, and the composer stubbornly refused to change his story. Therefore the young gentlemen of the Jockey Club yelled and hooted and blew penny-whistles all through the performance, and kept that up night after night. They even took the trouble to come on Sunday to make sure of breaking up Wagner’s show.

It would be pleasant to have to record that this hero of the social revolution stood by his guns until the end of his life; but alas, he weakened, and sold out completely to the enemy. Bernard Shaw excuses him on the ground that the social revolution was not yet ready, and that the revolutionists were impractical men. But I say that it was Wagner’s task to help make the social revolution ready, and to train the revolutionists by setting them an example of probity. Instead of that, he decided that the establishing of his own reputation was more important than the salvation of society. He accepted amnesty from the Saxon king, and came back and made himself into a great captain of the music industry, and a national and patriotic hero.

He became the intimate friend and pensioner of the king of Bavaria; and for this king he wrote a highly confidential paper entitled “Of the State and Religion,” wherein he explained that he had once been a Socialist, but he now saw that the masses were gross and dull, incapable of high achievement. The problem was to get them to serve ends which they did not understand; they must be deceived, they must have illusions. The first mass-illusion was patriotism; they must be taught to reverence their king. The second mass-illusion was religion; they must believe they were obeying the will of God. The difficulty of government lay in the fact that the ruling class must see the truth, they could not believe either in the State or in God. For them there must be the higher illusions of the Wagnerian art. Needless to say, for this secret service King Ludwig paid generously, and we find Wagner spending his pension—I cite one item, three hundred yards of satin of thirteen carefully specified colors, at a cost of three thousand florins!

He had craved luxury all his life, and in the end he got it—not merely silks and satins and velvets, for which he had a sort of insanity, but all kinds of splendor and homage, with kings and emperors to attend the opening performances of his operas. When the Franco-Prussian war breaks out we find our Siegfried-Bakunin drinking the cup of military glory and pouring out a “Kaiser-march”; we find him stooping to an operatic libretto in which he casts odium upon all the genius of France, not sparing even Victor Hugo. He reads Schopenhauer, and decides that he is a pessimist, and has always been a pessimist, and he tries to reinterpret his revolutionary “Ring” accordingly. He composes a religious festival play, a mixture of Christian mysticism and Buddhist fatalism, called “Parsival,” which made the fortune of his Bayreuth enterprise, a play-house built out of funds subscribed by his admirers.