The foil to Loge is Wotan, foil and victim. What a sorrowful spectacle is this unfortunate master of the gods, who takes up Loge because that craftsman has brains, and yet cannot withstand the temptations of his own devil! Jupiter did not need a devil to lead him astray. A neatly turned ankle or a pair of melting eyes sufficed to lure Zeus from Olympus. The world and the flesh were equal to his undoing. But here is a primitive god, manufactured out of the imagination of a wholly unsophisticated people, far removed from the polish and culture of the Greeks, and he cannot sin in hot blood. First of all, he must be tempted by a fiend, who lures him with the promise of unlimited power. Zeus had his power ready-made.
Wotan was right. What was a god to do who was short of power? Preposterous! He could not afford to allow some one else to get the gold and make the ring. Alberich already had it. What was to be done? Get it away from him, and so save the Walhalla dynasty from being dethroned. Wise Wotan! It never occurred to him that Loge was planning just that coup.
Here is a chief god whose power rests upon contracts, yet who does not know how to make an advantageous bargain with two stupid giants! Pity the sorrows of the one-eyed god! He is not omnipotent. He is surrounded by enemies, and afar off looms the fathomless abyss of the dusk of the gods, the pall of Ragnarok, the last battle. A fortress must he have, and heroes culled by the aerial Valkyrs from the slain of all the world to fight for Walhalla in the final hour.
Self-preservation is the selfish motive of Wotan's sin. He haggles with Fafner and Fasolt for a haven of refuge, and offers a price he knows he dare not pay. Without Freia, the goddess of youth, he must wither. What does all this mean? Simply that Wotan was the subject of a moral law outside of and above him. Was it strange that the primitive mind could not conceive a god who was himself the law?
Not at all; for, after all, these children of the ages made deities of human attributes,—power, knowledge, passion, beauty, swiftness. They knew all these attributes were subject to the moral law, for the blackest years of Egypt had not obscured the truth that the wages of sin is death. In "Das Rheingold" Wotan falls a prey to the moral law as interpreted to him by the giants. In "Die Walküre" he again makes a foolish effort to dodge it, and the outraged majesty of Fricka demands revenge. What a futile god!
The figure of Wotan is heroic only in "Die Walküre." Here we find the old god at bay. In "Rheingold" he is a feeble plotter; in "Walküre" he faces the inevitable and fights in the last ditch. In "Siegfried" he has become a garrulous dotard, maundering about the earth, impotent and puerile, quibbling in childish conundrums with a shifty dwarf, pledging a head he would not sacrifice, waiting for the defiant act of the youthful hero, and enacting the silly mummery of opposing him with the spear which he knows the boy despises.
"In vain! I cannot hinder thee!" he tragically exclaims, as he stalks off the stage and into the gallery of properties which Wagner reserves for destruction in the last scene of all. And this is the All-Father, the Thunderer of the Norse mythology, the supine creature of moral laws which his pitiable nature cannot grasp and which he feebly strives throughout the whole story to escape.
What music has Wagner evolved to body forth the traits and accessories of this godless deity? The Walhall theme, which identifies with the god the stone walls of his stronghold; the spear motive, which speaks in splendid accents of the firmness of sacred obligations, broken by Wotan in the very first scene of the tragedy; Wotan's anger; Wotan's distress; Wotan the wanderer; Wotan's bequest of the inheritance of the world. All these themes depict this entangled god in the meshes of circumstance. There is not a single motive setting forth any inherent grandeur of character, any great or noble thought or passion blazing from his soul.
Walhall was Wotan's chapel of refuge. The spear's holy runes were outside of his personality and greater than it. His anger was awakened by the disobedience of a loving daughter who sought to be what she had always been, the heart's wish of the god. The distress was the fruit of a realization that the stern grip of the moral law was strangling the whole coterie of Walhall because of its master's sins.
Wotan the wanderer,—what a desolate succession of changing tonalities, telling of a god without a local habitation or a name, a god whose occupation was literally gone! The bequest theme tells of this doddering deity's resignation of power in favor of youth and love, two honest agencies much better fitted to carry on the administration of a world than trickery and subterfuge.