and does not occupy more than two scenes of The Ring. Tristan and
Isolde, wholly devoted to it, is a poem of destruction and death.
The Mastersingers, a work full of health, fun and happiness,
contains not a single bar of love music that can be described as
passionate: the hero of it is a widower who cobbles shoes, writes
verses, and contents himself with looking on at the
sweetheartings of his customers. Parsifal makes an end of it
altogether. The truth is that the love panacea in Night Falls On
The Gods and in the last act of Siegfried is a survival of the
first crude operatic conception of the story, modified by an
anticipation of Wagner's later, though not latest, conception of
love as the fulfiller of our Will to Live and consequently our
reconciler to night and death.

NOT LOVE, BUT LIFE

The only faith which any reasonable disciple can gain from The
Ring is not in love, but in life itself as a tireless power which
is continually driving onward and upward--not, please observe,
being beckoned or drawn by Das Ewig Weibliche or any other
external sentimentality, but growing from within, by its own
inexplicable energy, into ever higher and higher forms of
organization, the strengths and the needs of which are
continually superseding the institutions which were made to fit
our former requirements. When your Bakoonins call out for the
demolition of all these venerable institutions, there is no need
to fly into a panic and lock them up in prison whilst your
parliament is bit by bit doing exactly what they advised you to
do. When your Siegfrieds melt down the old weapons into new ones,
and with disrespectful words chop in twain the antiquated