understanding it.

But however offensive and inhuman may be the superstition which
brands such exaltations of natural passion as shameful and
indecorous, there is at least as much common sense in disparaging
love as in setting it up as a panacea. Even the mercy and
lovingkindness of Shelley do not hold good as a universal law of
conduct: Shelley himself makes extremely short work of Jupiter,
just as Siegfried does of Fafnir, Mime, and Wotan; and the fact
that Prometheus is saved from doing the destructive part of his
work by the intervention of that very nebulous personification of
Eternity called Demogorgon, does not in the least save the
situation, because, flatly, there is no such person as
Demogorgon, and if Prometheus does not pull down Jupiter himself,
no one else will. It would be exasperating, if it were not so
funny, to see these poets leading their heroes through blood and
destruction to the conclusion that, as Browning's David puts it
(David of all people!), "All's Love; yet all's Law."

Certainly it is clear enough that such love as that implied by
Siegfried's first taste of fear as he cuts through the mailed
coat of the sleeping figure on the mountain, and discovers that
it is a woman; by her fierce revolt against being touched by him
when his terror gives way to ardor; by his manly transports of
victory; and by the womanly mixture of rapture and horror with
which she abandons herself to the passion which has seized on
them both, is an experience which it is much better, like the
vast majority of us, never to have passed through, than to allow
it to play more than a recreative holiday part in our lives. It
did not play a very large part in Wagner's own laborious life,