Wagner's Own Explanation - Page 2

driving at was
completely upset by his discovery, soon after the completion of
The Ring poem, of Schopenhaur's famous treatise "The World as
Will and Representation." So obsessed did he become with this
masterpiece of philosophic art that he declared that it contained
the intellectual demonstration of the conflict of human forces
which he himself had demonstrated artistically in his great poem.
"I must confess," he writes to Roeckel, "to having arrived at a
clear understanding of my own works of art through the help of
another, who has provided me with the reasoned conceptions
corresponding to my intuitive principles."

Schopenhaur, however, had done nothing of the sort. Wagner's
determination to prove that he had been a Schopenhaurite all
along without knowing it only shows how completely the
fascination of the great treatise on The Will had run away with
his memory. It is easy to see how this happened. Wagner says of
himself that "seldom has there taken place in the soul of one and
the same man so profound a division and estrangement between the
intuitive or impulsive part of his nature and his consciously or
reasonably formed ideas." And since Schopenhaur's great
contribution to modern thought was to educate us into clear
consciousness of this distinction--a distinction familiar, in a
fanciful way, to the Ages of Faith and Art before the Renascence,
but afterwards swamped in the Rationalism of that movement--it
was inevitable that Wagner should jump at Schopenhaur's
metaphysiology (I use a word less likely to be mistaken than
metaphysics) as the very thing for him. But metaphysiology is one
thing, political philosophy another. The political philosophy of
Siegfried is exactly contrary to the political philosphy of
Schopenhaur, although the same clear metaphysiological
distinction between the instinctive part of man (his Will) and
his reasoning faculty (dramatized in The Ring as Loki) is
insisted on in both. The difference is that to Schopenhaur the
Will is the universal tormentor of man, the author of that great
evil, Life; whilst reason is the divine gift that is finally to
overcome this life-creating will and lead, through its
aboegation, to cessation and peace, annihilation and Nirvana.
This is the doctrine of Pessimism. Now Wagner was, when he wrote
The Ring, a most sanguine revolutionary Meliorist, contemptuous
of the reasoning faculty, which he typified in the shifty,
unreal, delusive Loki, and full of faith in the life-giving Will,
which he typified in the glorious Siegfried. Not until he read
Schopenhaur did he become bent on proving that he had always been
a Pessimist at heart, and that Loki was the most sensible and
worthy adviser