Siegfried as Protestant

The philosophically fertile element in the original project of
Siegfried's Death was the conception of Siegfried himself as a
type of the healthy man raised to perfect confidence in his own
impulses by an intense and joyous vitality which is above fear,
sickliness of conscience, malice, and the makeshifts and moral
crutches of law and order which accompany them. Such a character
appears extraordinarily fascinating and exhilarating to our
guilty and conscience-ridden generations, however little they may
understand him. The world has always delighted in the man who is
delivered from conscience. From Punch and Don Juan down to Robert
Macaire, Jeremy Diddler and the pantomime clown, he has always
drawn large audiences; but hitherto he has been decorously given
to the devil at the end. Indeed eternal punishment is sometimes
deemed too high a compliment to his nature. When the late Lord
Lytton, in his Strange Story, introduced a character personifying
the joyousness of intense vitality, he felt bound to deny him the
immortal soul which was at that time conceded even to the
humblest characters in fiction, and to accept mischievousness,
cruelty, and utter incapacity for sympathy as the inevitable
consequence of his magnificent bodily and mental health.

In short, though men felt all the charm of abounding life and
abandonment to its impulses, they dared not, in their deep
self-mistrust, conceive it otherwise than as a force making for
evil--one which must lead to universal ruin unless checked and
literally mortified by self-renunciation in obedience to
superhuman guidance, or at least to some reasoned system of
morals. When it became apparent to the cleverest of them that
no such superhuman guidance existed, and that their secularist
systems had all the fictitiousness of "revelation" without its
poetry, there was no escaping the conclusion that all the good
that man had done must be put down to his arbitrary will as well
as all the evil he had done; and it was also obvious that if
progress were a reality, his beneficent impulses must be gaining
on his destructive ones. It was under the influence of these
ideas that we began to hear about the joy of life where we had
formerly heard about the grace of God or the Age of Reason, and
that the boldest spirits began to raise the question whether
churches and laws and the like were not doing a great deal more
harm than good by their action in limiting the freedom of the
human will. Four hundred years ago, when belief in God and in
revelation was general throughout Europe, a similar wave of
thought led the strongest-hearted peoples to affirm that every
man's private judgment was a more trustworthy interpreter of God
and revelation than the