Читать книгу The Wagnerian Romances - Gertrude Hall Brownell - Страница 10

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Wotan's idea, from which the abode of the gods received its name of Walhalla, had been to people his halls with hordes of heroes who should defend it from Alberich and his "army of the night."

Erda's prophecy of a dark day dawning for the gods had destroyed Wotan's peace. The craving to know more of this drove him to seek her in the depths of the earth. He cast upon her the spell of love and constrained her to speak. It does not appear that he gained from her any clear knowledge of the future; he learned chiefly, as we gather, what were the dangers besetting him. The end threatened through Alberich's forces, which, however, could not prevail against the heroic garrison of Walhalla unless Alberich should recover the Ring; through the power of the Ring he would be able to estrange the heroes from Wotan and, turning their arms against him, overcome him. "When the dark enemy of love (Alberich) in wrath shall beget a son," so ran Erda's warning, "the end of the Blessed shall not be long delayed!"

From Erda was born to Wotan a daughter, so near to her father's heart that she seemed an incarnation of his most intimate wish, his very will embodied; so part of himself she knew his unspoken thought. This was Brünnhilde (from Brünne, corslet). With eight other daughters—born to Wotan from "the tie of lawless love," as we learn from Fricka in her tale of wrongs—Brünnhilde, the dearest to him of all, followed her father to battle, serving him as Valkyrie. These warlike maidens hovered over the battle-field, directing the fortune of the day according to Wotan's determination, protecting this combatant and seeing his death-doom executed upon the other; they seized the heroes as they fell, and bore them to Walhalla to form part of Wotan's guard. From these "Slain in Battle" it was that Walhalla had its name. To make great their number, Wotan, who earlier had by laws and compacts tried to bind men to peace, now breathed into them a rough, bellicose spirit, goaded them on to quarrel and revolt.

That the end of the gods, if prophecy must fulfill itself, should not be a contemptible or pitiful one, that was Wotan's preoccupation—to save, if nothing more, the dignity of the Eternals; with this in view, to keep Alberich from recovering the Ring, by which he might work such really disgusting havoc. The Ring was in the possession of Fafner, who had turned himself into a dragon, and in a lonely forest-girt cave guarded it and the rest of the treasure of the Nibelungen, for the sake of which he had killed Fasolt, his brother. Wotan, as we have seen, could not wrest from him the Ring which he himself had given in payment for the building of Walhalla: for the honour of his spear he must not attempt it. Alberich, not bound as he was to keep his hands off it, must infallibly and indefatigably be devising means to regain possession of it. It was plain to Wotan that he must find some one to do that which he himself could not, some one, who, unprompted by him, should yet accomplish his purposes, some one free as he was not. This tool who was yet not to be his tool, since a god's good faith demanded that neither directly nor indirectly he should meddle with the Ring, Wotan supposed he had created for himself in Siegmund, born to him, with a twin sister, Sieglinde, of a human mother. This boy with whom, in human disguise, under the names of Wälse and Wolf—Wolf for his enemies, Wälse for his kindred—he lived in the wild woods, he reared in a spirit of lawlessness, wild courage, disregard of the gods. We must suppose it to have been for the sake of preventing association with women from softening his disposition that, while Siegmund was a child, Wotan, sacrificing to the hardness of fibre it was his object to produce, permitted the catastrophe which deprived the boy of mother and sister. Returning home from a day's wild chase—hunters and hunted alike human—father and son found their dwelling burned to the ground, the mother slain, the sister gone. They lived for years together after that, in the woods, always in conflict with enemies, of whom their peculiar daring and strength raised them an infinite number. In time, when the son was well grown, Wotan forsook him, left him to complete his development alone, under the harsh training of the calamities and sorrows fatally incident to the temper and manner of viewing things which that father had bred in him. The lad received the usage of a sword in the forging, extremes of furnace and ice-brook. So he stood at last, Wotan's pupil and finished instrument, an embodied defiance of the law and the gods, proper to do the work which the law of the gods forbade. Some defence against the wrath which he must inevitably rouse, his father could not but feel impelled to provide, yet could he not, without violating the honour which in his simple-minded way he was striving to preserve intact, give it to him directly. He could not bestow upon him outright a Sieges-schwert—magical sword which ensured victory. But he placed one where the young man should find it.

The piece opens with the blustering music of a storm, whose violence is rapidly dying down.

The curtain rises upon the interior of Hunding's very primitive dwelling, built about a great ash-tree whose trunk stands in view. Siegmund, predestined to be ever at strife with his fellow-man, in circumstances of peculiar distress seeks the shelter of Hunding's roof. We see him burst into the empty hall, staggering and panting. His spear and shield have splintered beneath the enemies' strokes; deprived of arms, he has been forced to flee; he has been so hotly pursued, so beaten by the storm, that upon reaching this refuge he can no more than drop beside the hearth and lie there, exhausted.

It is his sister's house to which fate has led him, where, ill-starred and unhappy like himself, this other child of Wälse's lives, in subjection to Hunding, her lord, who has come by her through some obscure commerce, and to whom she is no more than part of the household baggage.

Hearing the rustle of Siegmund's entrance, Sieglinde hurries in, and, beholding a stranger outstretched upon the ground, stops short to observe him. The strength of the prostrate body cannot fail to strike her. At his gasped call for water, she hurries to fetch it from the spring out of doors. His perishing need is shown in the devotion with which he drains the horn she hands him. His eyes, as he returns it, are arrested by her face, and dwell upon it with fearless lingering scrutiny—while the strain for the first time trembles upon the air which, singing the love of Siegmund and Sieglinde, is to caress our hearing so many times more. His fatigue has magically vanished. He asks to whom he owes the refreshment afforded him. When, at her reply and request that he shall await Hunding's return, he refers to himself as an unarmed and wounded guest, she eagerly inquires of his wounds. But he jumps up, shaking off all thought of wounds or weariness. His succinct narrative of the circumstances which have brought him to her hearth, he brings to a close: "But faster than I vanished from the mob of my pursuers, my weariness has vanished from me. Night lay across my eyelids—the sun now smiles upon me anew!" She offers the guest mead to drink, at his prayer tasting it before him. As he returns the emptied horn, again his eyes dwell upon her face, with an emotion ever increasing. Both gaze in simple undisguised intensity of interest. There is a long moment's silence between them. Then, at the love he feels surging in his bosom, remembrance comes to Siegmund of what he is—a man so ill-fated that it may well be feared his ill-fortune shall infect those with whom he comes into contact. "You have relieved an ill-fated man," he warns her, his voice unsteady with the pang of this recognition, "may his wish turn ill-fortune from you! Sweetly have I rested. … I will now fare further on my way!" As he turns to the door she detains him with the quick cry: "What pursues you, that you should thus flee?" He answers, slowly and sadly: "Misfortune pursues me wherever I flee. Misfortune meets me wherever I go. From you, woman, may it remain afar! I turn from you my footsteps and my glance." His hand is on the latch, when her sharp involuntary exclamation stops him: "Stay, then! You cannot bring sorrow into a house where sorrow is already at home!" Deeply shaken by her words, he fixes his eyes questioningly upon her. She meets them for a moment, then drops her own, sad and half-ashamed. The motif of the Wälsungen well expresses the nobility in misfortune of these poor children of Wälse. Siegmund returns quietly to the hearth: "Wehwalt is my name for myself. I will await Hunding." (Weh: woe, sorrow, calamity, pain; wallen: to govern. Wehwalt: lord of sorrows.) There is no further exchange of words while they wait, but in complete unashamed absorption they gaze at each other, and the music tells beautifully how it is within their hearts. Hunding's horn is heard. (Hund: hound. It was, as we learn later, this amiable personage's custom to hunt his enemies with a pack of dogs.) Startled from her trance, Sieglinde listens, and hastens to open. Hunding appears in the doorway, a dark figure, in helmet, shield and spear. At sight of the stranger, he questions his wife with a look. "I found the man on the hearth, spent with weariness. Necessity brings him to our house," she explains. There is some sternness apparently in Hunding's tone as he inquires: "Have you offered him refreshment?" for Siegmund, rash and instantaneous in the woman's defence, speaks, hard on the heels of her answer: "I have to thank her for shelter and drink. Will you therefor chide your wife?" But Hunding, at his best in this moment, without retort welcomes the guest: "Sacred is my hearth, sacred to you be my house!" and orders his wife to set forth food for them. Catching Sieglinde's eyes unconsciously fixed upon Siegmund, he glances quickly from one to the other, and is struck by the resemblance between them; but the luminous look they have in common he defines, with the constitutional dislike of his kind to that freer, more generous type: "The selfsame glittering serpent shines out of his eyes!" He inquires of the circumstances which have brought this stranger to his house, and finding that Siegmund has no idea whither his wild flight has led him, introduces himself with a dignity which commends to us, while he is doing it, the narrow-natured, unimaginative man: "He whose roof covers you and whose house shelters you—Hunding your host is called. If you should from here turn your footsteps eastward, there, in rich courts, dwell kinsmen, protectors of Hunding's honour!" They seat themselves at table; the host asks for this guest's name, and as Siegmund, plunged in thought, does not at once reply, Hunding, remarking the interest with which his wife waits for the stranger's words, sardonically encourages him: "If you are in doubt about trusting me, yet give the information to the lady here. See how eagerly she questions you!" And Sieglinde, too deeply interested, verily, to mind the thrust, proceeds further to give it point: "Guest, I should be glad to know who you are!" Whereupon Siegmund, as little constrained by the husband's presence as the wife herself, with his eyes upon hers, addressing her directly, tells his story: of Wolf, his father, of the twin sister lost to him in infancy, the enmity of the Neidingen clan, who in the absence of the men burned down their house, slew the mother, abducted the sister; of his life in the forest with Wolf, their numberless foes and perpetual warfare. Hunding recalls vaguely wild dark tales he has heard of the mighty pair, the Wölfingen. The disappearance of his father, Siegmund further relates, from whom he had been separated in a fight, and whom he could never, long though he sought, find again, nor any trace of him save an empty wolf-skin. "Then—" follow the strange cruel fortunes this father had arranged for him, "then I was impelled to forsake the woods, I was impelled to seek men and women. As many as I found, and wherever I found them—whether I sought for friend, or wooed for woman, always I met with denial, ill-fortune lay upon me!" With ingenuous wonder he describes the natural fruits of the education bestowed on him by Wotan: "What I thought right, others held to be wrong; what had ever seemed to me abominable, others considered with favour. I fell into feud wherever I was, anger fell upon me wherever I went. If I reached out toward happiness, I never failed to bring about calamity! For that reason it is I named myself Wehwalt, I command calamity alone!"

Hunding has listened attentively. His small superstitious heart has taken alarm. "Fortune was not fond of you, who appointed for you so miserable a lot. The man can hardly welcome you with gladness, whom, a stranger to him, you approach as a guest." With a vivacity which cannot have been the common habit of her intercourse with her husband, Sieglinde pronounces judgment aloud and at once upon this ungenerous speech and speaker, whose prudence must certainly, in contrast with the Wälsung's frank magnificence of courage, seem to her unspeakably bourgeois: "Only cowards fear one going his way unarmed and alone!" And turning again eagerly to the guest: "Tell further, guest, how you lately lost your arms in battle!" Siegmund as eagerly satisfies her. The circumstances which he describes further exemplify the disposition fostered in him by his father, his non-recognition or acceptance of established law and custom, however sacred, his pursuit of an ideal unattached to any convention: He had lost his arms in the attempt to defend a damsel against her own immediate family, bent upon marrying her against her inclination. He had slain her brothers, whereupon the maiden, as another perhaps would have foreseen, had cast herself upon their bodies, sorrow annulling her resentment. He had stood over her, shielding her from the vengeance of her kindred pressing around. His armour had been shattered; the girl lay dead on her dead brothers. Wounded and weaponless, he had been chased by the infuriate horde. "Now you know, inquiring woman," he closes his narrative, "why I do not bear the name of Friedmund!" (Frieden: peace.) With this simple sally, whose bitterness is not enough to crumple the serene forehead, he rises and walks to the hearth, striding to the noble march-measure we know as the motif of the heroism of the Wälsungen—proud in its first bars, with Siegmund's pride, tender in the last, with Sieglinde's tenderness, loftily mournful throughout.

"I know a wild race of men," now speaks Hunding, "to whom nothing is holy of all that is revered by others; hated are they of all men—and of me!" He then reveals how he himself had that day been called out for vengeance with his clan against this officious champion of damsels. He had arrived too late for action, and returning home, behold, discovers the fugitive miscreant in his own house! As he granted the stranger hospitality for the night, his house shall shelter him for that length of time; but "with strong weapons arm yourself to-morrow," he grimly warns him; "it is the day I choose for combat; you shall pay me a price for the dead!" When Sieglinde in alarm places herself between the two men, Hunding orders her roughly: "Out of the room! Loiter not here! Prepare my night-drink and wait for me to go to rest!" Siegmund, smothering his anger, stands in contemptuous composure beside the hearth; his eyes frankly follow every movement of the woman as she prepares Hunding's drink. On her way out of the room, she pauses at the threshold of the inner chamber, and seeking Siegmund's eyes with her own, tries by a long significant glance to direct his glance to a spot in the ash-tree. The sword-motif, distinct and sharp, accompanies her look. Hunding, becoming aware of her lingering, with a peremptory gesture orders her again to be gone; and gathering up his own armour, with a warning to the Wölfing that on the morrow he will strike home—let him have a care!—withdraws, audibly bolting the door behind him.

Left alone, Siegmund lies down beside the dying fire. To remove himself during the night as far as possible from Hunding's reach is not the solution suggesting itself naturally to him. Yet there he stands, pledged to meet an enemy, and not a weapon to his hand of offence or defence. The difficulty of his position is certainly as great as could be, and, reaching the full consciousness of it, he recalls to mind that his father had promised him a sword, which he should find in the hour of his greatest need. "Unarmed I am fallen in the house of the enemy; here I rest, devoted to his vengeance. A woman I have seen, gloriously fair. … She to whom my longing draws me, who with a rapturous charm constrains me, is held in thraldom by the man who mocks my unarmed condition. … " Could need, indeed, be greater? With the whole strength of that need, in a cry, long, urgent, fit to pierce the walls of Walhalla, he calls upon his father for the promised sword: "Wälse! Wälse! Where is your sword? … "

A flame leaps from the embers and illuminates the ash-tree, bringing into view, at the spot Sieglinde had indicated to him with her eyes, a sword-hilt. But though his eyes are caught by the glitter, he does not recognise it for what it is; he watches it, without moving, as it shines in the firelight, and, lover-like, soon lapsing into undivided dreaming of the "flower-fair woman," plays tenderly with the conceit of the gleam on the ash-tree being the trace of her last bright glance. Forgetting his swordlessness and altogether unpromising plight, he goes on weaving poetry about her until the fire is quite out and he so nearly dozes that when a white form comes gliding through the door bolted by Hunding, he does not stir until addressed: "Guest, are you asleep?"

Sieglinde has mixed narcotic herbs in her husband's drink, and bids the stranger make use of the night to provide for his safety. "Let me advise you of a weapon. … Oh, might you obtain it! The most splendid of heroes I must call you, for it is destined to the strongest alone." And she relates how at the marriage-feast of Hunding, while the men drank, and the woman who "unconsulted had been offered him for wife by ignoble traffickers" sat sadly apart, a stranger appeared, an elderly man in grey garb, whose hat-brim concealed one of his eyes. But the brilliant beam of the other eye created terror in the bystanders—all save herself, in whom it aroused an aching longing, sorrow and comfort in equal measure. The sword in his hand he swung, and drove into the ash-tree up to the hilt, leaving it there, a prize to whomsoever should be able to draw it out. The men present had all made the essay in vain; guests coming and going since then had tried, equally without success. "There in silence waits the sword." There in the ash-tree. "Then I knew," Sieglinde concludes, "who it was had come to me in my sorrow. I know, too, who it is alone can conquer the sword. Oh, might I find him here and now, that friend; might he, from the unknown, come to me, most wretched of women! All I have ever suffered of cruel woe, all the shame and indignity under which I have bowed—sweetest amends would be made for it all! All I ever lost, all I ever mourned, I should have recovered it all—if I might find that supreme friend, if my arm might clasp that hero!" Siegmund, to whom it could not occur for the fraction of a second to doubt his strength to draw any sword from any tree, at these words catches her impetuously to his breast: "The friend now clasps you, fairest of women, for whom weapon and woman were meant! Hot in my breast burns the oath which, noble one, weds me to you!" and, in her very strain: "All I ever yearned for, I met in you! In you I found all I ever lacked. If you suffered ignominy and I endured pain, if I was outlawed and you were dishonoured, a joyful revenge now calls to us happy ones! I laugh aloud in a holy elation, as I hold you, radiant one, embraced, as I feel the throbbing of your heart!"

The great door of the hall, silently, without apparent reason, swings wide open, like a great curious eye unclosing to watch this beautiful marvel of their love, expanded so suddenly, like a huge aloe-flower. It lets in a flood of moonlight, and the glimmering vision of the vapourous green-lit nocturnal Spring-world. "Who went out? … Who came in?" cries Sieglinde, starting in alarm. "No one went," Siegmund reassures her, "but some one came: See, the Spring laughing in the room!" And he pours forth poetry of adorable inspiration, in explanation of the singular action of the door: Spring was outside, and Love, his sister, inside; Spring burst open the severing door, and now, brother and sister, Love and the Spring, are met!

It is touching, the capacity for happiness the two have accumulated in the long, thwarted years. An ecstatic joy marks this hour of forgetting all the world outside themselves; the love-music is all of a fine free sustained rapture. One poignant and subtle and profound thing she says to him: "Foreign and unrelated to me seemed until now everything I saw, hostile everything which approached me. As if I had never known them were always the things that came to me. … But you I knew at once, clearly and distinctly; my eye no sooner beheld you, than you belonged to me; and all that lay concealed within my breast, the thing which I verily am, bright as the day it rose to the surface; like a ringing sound it smote my ear, when in the cold lonesome strange world for the first time I beheld my Friend!"

Seated in the light of the full moon, they have freedom at last each to pore over the other's winning beauty. She is struck, fondly peering into his features, with the sense of having seen him before; and trying to think when and where reaches the assurance that it was on the surface of the pool which reflected her own image. Again, when he speaks, she is struck by the assurance that she has heard his voice before. She thinks, for a moment, that it was in childhood, … but corrects the impression by a second: she has heard it recently, when the echo in the woods gave back her own voice. His luminous eyes she has seen before: thus shone the glance of the grey guest at the wedding-feast, whom his daughter recognised by that token. Earnestly she asks this other guest: "Is your name in very truth Wehwalt?" "That is no longer my name since you love me!" he replies exuberantly, "I command now the sublimest joys! … Do you call me as you wish me to be called: I will take my name from you!" "And was your father indeed Wolf?" "A Wolf he was to cowardly foxes. But he whose eye shone with as proud an effulgence as, Glorious One, does yours, Wälse was his name!" Beside herself with joy, Sieglinde springs up: "If Wälse was your father—if you are a Wälsung, for you it was he drove his sword into the tree-trunk. Let me give you the name by which I love you: Siegmund shall you be called!" Siegmund leaps to seize the sword-handle: "Siegmund is my name, and Siegmund am I! (Sieg: victory.) Let this sword bear witness, which fearlessly I seize! Wälse promised me that I should find it in my greatest need. I grasp it now. … " Very characteristically, this greatest need, as he feels it, is not the need of a weapon with which to defend his life against Hunding; it is, in his soaring words: "Highest need of a holiest love, devouring need of a love full of longing, burns bright in my breast, drives me onward to deeds and to death. … Nothung! Nothung! So do I name you, sword! (Noth: need. Nothung: sword-in-need.) Nothung! Nothung! Out of the scabbard, to me!" With a mighty tug he draws it forth and holds it before the marvelling eyes of Sieglinde: "Siegmund the Wälsung stands before you, woman! As a wedding-gift he brings you this sword. Thus he wooes the fairest of women; from the enemy's house thus he leads you forth. Far from here follow him now, out in the laughing house of the Spring. There Nothung, the sword, shall protect you, when Siegmund lies overthrown, in the power of love!" "If your are Siegmund," cries the woman, "I am Sieglinde, who have so longed for you! Your own sister you have won at the same time as the sword!" Siegmund is given no pause by this revelation. At the realisation of this double dearness, the joy flares all the higher of the lawless pupil of Wotan. "Bride and sister are you to your brother. Let the blood of the Wälsungen flourish!" And with arms entertwined, forth they take their madly exulting hearts out into the "laughing house of the Spring."