Carlyle in his "French Revolution" harps upon the end that was contained in the beginning. "Cast forth thy act, thy word," again in his "Sartor Resartus" he says, "into the ever working universe; it is a seed grain that cannot die; unnoticed to-day (says one) it will be found flourishing as a banyan grove (perhaps also as a hemlock forest) after a thousand years." The Scripture has tersely summarized the whole matter in the prophetic declaration that the wages of sin is death.
Wotan's original sin in cheating the giants spreads itself into the hemlock forest of a mighty tragedy, but for the god himself the Biblical maxim stands in letters of fire. And here mark the awful majesty of the Norse myth. Wotan and all his brood fall victims in the end to the physical manifestation of the evil spirit, Loge.
They are burned in Walhalla. The flickering fire singes out the last vestiges of this rotten dynasty. The spirit of temptation wreaks its own vengeance upon the tempted. "Son lo spirito che nega." The Mephistophelian principle of negation wipes the futile gods off the firmament. Was there any touch of Schopenhauer or Buddha in this? Not a whiff. It was pure, stern, primeval morality. It was unsophisticated man's recognition of the inexorable justice of the moral law.
How infinitely grander this conception is than the flimsy and artificial doctrines of the seduction and spear cure in "Parsifal"! In the consecrational festival play all is manufactured, all is artificial. The entire external machinery of the thing is a cheap theatrical pose. In "Der Ring des Nibelungen" the ethics are the common sense of a people, nay, of whole races, sprung from the mystic Aryan source and filtered through the anxious thought of a hundred tribes that speculated under the inspiring stars across the valleys and plains of all Europe.
How much of all this did Wagner perceive when he was constructing his extraordinary drama in four plays? His scheme, according to his own words, contemplated the representation of the gods as writhing in helplessness under the burden imposed by their own transgression of the law. This burden could be removed only by the action of a free agent, a man, whose deeds were all his own. After Titanic preparation Wagner places this man before us in the person of Siegfried.
His death is the vicarious sacrifice for the gods. In order to get him killed Wagner writes a whole drama, a mighty one indeed, in which this noble hero is made to commit a crime while under the influence of enchantment. He is slain for that crime by Hagen, who knows that he is innocent, and who contrived the whole plot simply to have an excuse for killing him, in order to get back the Nibelungs' ring.
What evidence is there that Wagner perceived the full significance of the final triumph of Loge over the erring Wotan? Not one jot. That the idea occurred to him in its purely external and physical form is proved by a passage in the final speech of Brünnhilde:
"Fly home, ye ravens!
Rede it in Walhalla