Wagner's Own Explanation

And now, having given my explanation of The Ring, can I give
Wagner's explanation of it? If I could (and I can) I should not
by any means accept it as conclusive. Nearly half a century has
passed smce the tetralogy was written; and in that time the
purposes of many half instinctive acts of genius have become
clearer to the common man than they were to the doers. Some years
ago, in the course of an explanation of Ibsen's plays, I pointed
out that it was by no means certain or even likely that Ibsen was
as definitely conscious of his thesis as I. All the stupid
people, and some critics who, though not stupid, had not
themselves written what the Germans call "tendency" works, saw
nothing in this but a fantastic affectation of the extravagant
self-conceit of knowing more about Ibsen than Ibsen himself.
Fortunately, in taking exactly the same position now with regard
to Wagner, I can claim his own authority to support me. "How," he
wrote to Roeckel on the 23rd. August 1856, "can an artist expect
that what he has felt intuitively should be perfectly realized by
others, seeing that he himself feels in the presence of his work,
if it is true Art, that he is confronted by a riddle, about which
he, too, might have illusions, just as another might?"

The truth is, we are apt to deify men of genius, exactly as we
deify the creative force of the universe, by attributing to
logical design what is the result of blind instinct. What Wagner
meant by "true Art" is the operation of the artist's instinct,
which is just as blind as any other instinct. Mozart, asked for
an explanation of his works, said frankly "How do I know?"
Wagner, being a philosopher and critic as well as a composer, was
always looking for moral explanations of what he had created and
he hit on several very striking ones, all different. In the same
way one can conceive Henry the Eighth speculating very
brilliantly about the circulation of his own blood without
getting as near the truth as Harvey did long after his death.

None the less, Wagner's own explanations are of exceptional
interest. To begin with, there is a considerable portion of The
Ring, especially the portraiture of our capitalistic industrial
system from the socialist's point of new in the slavery of the
Niblungs and the tyranny of Alberic, which is unmistakable, as it
dramatizes that portion of human activity which lies well within
the territory covered by our intellectual consciousness. All this
is concrete Home Office business, so to speak: its meaning was as
clear to Wagner as it is to us. Not so that part of the work
which deals with the destiny of Wotan. And here, as it happened,
Wagner's recollection of what he had been