Why He Changed His Mind - Page 2

could neither do it nor stop talking and allow somebody else
to do it. True, the penalty of following Thiers was to be
exploited by the landlord and capitalist; but then the penalty of
following Pyat was to get shot like a mad dog, or at best get
sent to New Caledonia, quite unnecessarily and uselessly.

To put it in terms of Wagner's allegory, Alberic had got the ring
back again and was marrying into the best Walhall families with
it. He had thought better of his old threat to dethrone Wotan and
Loki. He had found that Nibelheim was a very gloomy place and
that if he wanted to live handsomely and safely, he must not only
allow Wotan and Loki to organize society for him, but pay them
very handsomely for doing it. He wanted splendor, military glory,
loyalty, enthusiasm, and patriotism; and his greed and gluttony
were wholly unable to create them, whereas Wotan and Loki carried
them all to a triumphant climax in Germany in 1871, when Wagner
himself celebrated the event with his Kaisermarsch, which sounded
much more convincing than the Marseillaise or the Carmagnole.

How, after the Kaisermarsch, could Wagner go back to his
idealization of Siegfried in 1853? How could he believe seriously
in Siegfried slaying the dragon and charging through the mountain
fire, when the immediate foreground was occupied by the Hotel de
Ville with Felix Pyat endlessly discussing the principles of
Socialism whilst the shells of Thiers were already battering the
Arc de Triomphe, and ripping up the pavement of the Champs
Elysees? Is it not clear that things had taken an altogether
unexpected turn--that although the Ring may, like the famous
Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels, be an inspired guest
at the historic laws and predestined end of our
capitalistic-theocratic epoch, yet Wagner, like Marx, was too
inexperienced in technical government and administration and too
melodramatic in his hero-contra-villain conception of the class
struggle, to foresee the actual process by which his
generalization would work out, or the part to be played in it
by the classes involved?

Let us go back for a moment to the point at which the Niblung
legend first becomes irreconcilable with Wagner's allegory.
Fafnir in the allegory becomes a capitalist; but Fafnir in the
legend is a mere hoarder. His gold does not bring him in any
revenue. It does not even support him: he has to go out and
forage for food and drink. In fact, he is on the way to his
drinking-pool when Siegfried kills him. And Siegfried himself has
no more use for gold than Fafnir: the only difference between
them in this respect is that Siegfried does not waste his time in
watching a barren treasure that is no use to him, whereas Fafnir
sacrifices his