Legal. He despises these gods with their ideals and their golden
apples. "I am ashamed," he says, "to have dealings with these
futile creatures." And so he follows them to the rainbow bridge.
But as they set foot on it, from the river below rises the
wailing of the Rhine maidens for their lost gold. "You down there
in the water," cries Loki with brutal irony: "you used to bask in
the glitter of your gold: henceforth you shall bask in the
splendor of the gods." And they reply that the truth is in the
depths and the darkness, and that what blazes on high there is
falsehood. And with that the gods pass into their glorious
stronghold.



WAGNER AS REVOLUTIONIST

Before leaving this explanation of The Rhine Gold, I must have a
word or two about it with the reader. It is the least popular of
the sections of The Ring. The reason is that its dramatic moments
lie quite outside the consciousness of people whose joys and
sorrows are all domestic and personal, and whose religions and
political ideas are purely conventional and superstitious. To
them it is a struggle between half a dozen fairytale personages
for a ring, involving hours of scolding and cheating, and one
long scene in a dark gruesome mine, with gloomy, ugly music, and
not a glimpse of a handsome young man or pretty woman. Only those
of wider consciousness can follow it breathlessly, seeing in it
the whole tragedy of human history and the whole horror of the
dilemmas from which the world is shrinking today. At Bayreuth I
have seen a party of English tourists, after enduring agonies of