When the artist of the Future — he who, spurning the mere Opera of effect, of gilded emptiness, of the Franco-Judaic commerce in melodic trinkets, dared to descend, as Wotan into the sulphurous clefts of Nibelheim, into the primal depths of the Folk-soul itself — when this artist, Richard Wagner, drew up from those depths the World-poem of the Ring, he did not suspect that a century of English schoolmasters, dons, divines and purveyors of nursery-sorcery would descend after him, not as poets descend, in fear and necessity, but as Alberich descended: to steal.
For what is this “high fantasy,” this genre so beloved of the Anglo-Saxon publishing-industry, so profitably exported to every corner of that Empire upon which — we were assured with characteristic modesty — the sun never set? It is nothing other than the Art-work of the Ring, dismembered, denatured, and re-sold; the total mythic World, which the true poet must create from the innermost need of his being, here reduced to a warehouse of properties: the Ring that confers world-mastery and destroys its bearer; the Dragon brooding upon accursed gold; the Sword, shattered and re-forged, by which alone the deed may be done; the Dwarf-smiths in their subterranean forges; the World-Ash and its withering; the twilight in which an old order of the world must go down in flame that a new one may arise. Every one of these the Ring gave to the world as living, necessary, organically-grown poetic Deed; every one of these the Englishmen took as dead material, as the pawnbroker takes the heirloom, appraising it only by its weight.
Why, nothing sells like ancient dread
When all its teeth are safely shed.
A dragon, yes, but not the pain
That makes both god and dragon vain.
A Ring, by all means, bright and round,
Provided guilt be never found.
Let children cheer, let heroes win;
But never show the god within.
Let us name the first of these appraisers. A professor of philology at Oxford — that seminary of imperial administration where the sons of the ruling caste were fitted, between chapel and cricket, for the governance of subjugated millions — took Wagner’s Ring, and, finding its terrible moral too strong for the digestion of his public, proceeded to sweeten it. Where Wagner’s Ring is forged from love renounced, from the primal wound that the lust for power inflicts upon the loving heart of the world, his Ring is forged by a Dark Lord — a being of motiveless, theological wickedness, a pantomime-Alberich stripped of Alberich’s grievance, his humiliation, his terrible justification. For mark this well: Wagner’s Alberich is wronged before he wrongs; the daughters of the Rhine mock his ugliness and his longing before ever he curses love; and Wotan, the god, the light-Alberich, is his mirror and his brother in guilt. But the Oxford professor cannot permit his readers so dangerous a thought as that the Dark Lord and the White Council are two faces of one Will; he requires an Enemy absolutely evil, that his Heroes may be absolutely justified — and his Heroes, note well, are small, comfortable, pipe-smoking, property-owning English country gentlemen, the very idyll of the shire and the county, who venture forth to exterminate the dark hordes of the South and East, the swart-skinned, slant-eyed Orc-masses bred in dirty multitudes beyond the borders of the green and pleasant land, and who return home to their gardens with the satisfaction of a colonial officer pensioned after a punitive expedition. That the professor protested — “both rings were round, and there the resemblance ceases!” — must be read as the confession of the debtor who, precisely because the debt is unpayable, denies that he ever borrowed.
A borrower, when sums are large,
Will call the creditor a charge.
He takes the gold, denies the loan,
Then stamps the sovereign as his own.
And what shall we say of his colleague and co-religionist, the Ulster divine, who did not even trouble to disguise the sermon as a saga? In his Narnia the whole apparatus of the Wonder-world — the talking beasts, the witch of winter, the deep magic from before the dawn of time — is nothing but the sugared coating upon the catechism-pill; the Lion is the Christ of the Thirty-Nine Articles wearing a fur costume; and the children of the English professional classes are crowned Kings and Queens over a realm of grateful natives, for no discernible merit beyond their nationality — the daydream of Empire made theology. Here too the dark-skinned man of the South, the scimitar-bearing, garlic-smelling Calormene, is the ordained enemy; here too war is not the tragic self-destruction of a guilty world-order but a jolly adventure, sanctified by Providence, from which the young reader learns that killing is splendid provided the Lion has roared his approval. And when the girl-child Susan is cast out of Paradise for the crime of growing up — for preferring, that is, the actual world of the senses to the nursery — the divine reveals his entire program: the reader must never grow up; the Folk must be kept forever in the pinafore of moral infancy, for the infant does not question the Empire, the Church, or the rod.
A child believes the painted sign
Where heaven joins the royal line.
He kisses rods that priests employ,
And calls obedience holy joy.
Of the third — the authoress of the boy-wizard — one hesitates to speak at all, as one hesitates to include the operetta in a history of the Drama; and yet precisely her unexampled commercial triumph makes her the necessary consummation of the argument here advanced. Here the theft has become wholly unconscious, which is to say wholly complete: the Chosen One marked for the deed he alone can do — Siegfried, with the scar in place of the shattered sword; the Dark Lord who is the hero’s hidden double, bound to him by blood and destiny — Wotan and Alberich, curdled into melodrama; even the goblin-bankers in their subterranean vaults, a figure whose lineage delicacy forbids us to trace further. And in what World does this drama unfold? In a boarding school — the supreme institution of English caste-breeding, where children are sorted at eleven years into hereditary houses of the brave, the clever, the loyal and the wicked — yes, a house of designated villains, into which the child-reader learns that certain families, certain names, certain bloodlines are simply born! — while below stairs an entire race of house-elves labours in contented slavery, and the one character who proposes their emancipation is presented, for the amusement of the young, as a tiresome fanatic. Thus does the authoress teach ten million children that the existing order of masters and servants is cosmic, comfortable and kind; and this she calls a story about love.
The cleverest spell a ruler knows
Makes chains appear as silken bows.
The slave who smiles, the master mild,
Are safest in a tale for child.
Now set against these nursery-Manichaeisms the World-poem from which they all descend, and measure the abyss. In the Ring there is no Dark Lord, for the darkness is in the light-god himself; Wotan wills the free hero and by that very willing unfrees him; Siegfried, the fearless innocent, is also the blundering destroyer, the betrayer-through-innocence of the one being who loved him; Brünnhilde, wisest of the wise, becomes in her wound the instrument of vengeance; Alberich is monstrous and pitiable; even Hagen, the darkest figure of the drama, is what his begetting made him, the loveless child of the loveless deed. Who, in this world, is the villain? Power itself — the Ring — and the renunciation of love which is its price; and this power corrupts god and dwarf, giant and hero, with perfect impartiality. There is no shire to return to; there is no Aslan’s country beyond the stable-door; there is only the world, guilty, entangled, self-consuming, and at the last self-transcending in the free deed of a woman who gives back the gold and rides into the fire — not that Good may defeat Evil, for the drama knows no such persons, but that the whole guilty order, gods included, may end, and the world be given back to itself. This is an art for adults; it demands of its hearer not the child’s question, “which side shall I cheer?”, but the man’s question, “in which of these am I implicated?” — and it is precisely this question that the English fabulists, servants of an Empire that could not survive its being asked, laboured for a century to un-ask.
The Folk that is fed from childhood upon absolute Good and absolute Evil will find, when its masters require it, that Good has an accent remarkably like its own, and Evil a darker skin; it will march. The Folk that has stood in the darkness of the Ring knows that the enemy’s face is its own face, that the war is always civil war within the one guilty World-Will, and that redemption comes not by the sword that slays the Other but by the flame that consumes the Self. Middle-earth, Narnia, Hogwarts: three nurseries built from the timbers of Valhalla, with the tragedy carefully sanded off lest the children get splinters. But Valhalla was built to burn — and no art is honest that promises otherwise.
They stole the Ring and dulled its flame,
Made foreign blood the seat of blame;
Set saints in schools and fiends afar,
Then called their nursery tales to war.
But Wagner’s fire makes plain the art:
The Dark Lord dwells in every heart.