the theatre, without the metaphysical or allegorical
complications of The Ring. Indeed, the ultimate catastrophe of
the Saga cannot by any perversion of ingenuity be adapted to the
perfectly clear allegorical design of The Rhine Gold, The
Valkyries, and Siegfried.



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.