goes on merrily enough.  The renewed altercation with the Giants calls for little remark.  When, however, the Giants demand the Ring and Wotan calls up Erda, the wisdom of the earth, a passage occurs which, though more or less of an irrelevant interpolation, gives Wagner a chance of putting forth his strength.  Erda rises to most mysterious music, counsels Wotan to surrender the Ring, and sinks down again to her sleep; and one forgets the irrelevancy in the thrill of this vision of the Mother Earth, the spirit that sleeps amongst the everlasting hills.  Finally the composer gets his great chance, and shows that, like Handel and his own Donner, he “could strike like a thunderbolt.”  The gods are all disheartened; mists have gathered; Donner—­our old friend Thor—­raises his hammer and smashes something; there is a flash of lightning and a peal of thunder; the mists and clouds clear away; and we see there the rainbow bridge over which the gods wend on their way to Valhalla.  We have Wagner the sublime pictorial musician.  The Rainbow motive is perhaps not very graphic in itself, but it serves as a basis for a delicious passage—­evening calm and sunset after storm—­comparable only with a parallel passage in Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony.  The storm itself is Wagner in the plenitude of his power.  It is short:  it is not “worked up”:  in a few strokes, brief and telling as Donner’s own hammer-strokes, the whole thing is done.  Then the Valhalla music, glorified by a gorgeous accompaniment, is heard again, only interrupted by the wail of the Rhinemaidens below, sorrowing for the loss of their pretty, harmless toy.  Wotan hears the cry, and passes on to feast in his castle.  Grim care goes with him; but he has the consoling idea of the free hero and the irresistible sword.  So ends the Rhinegold—­Fricka content to have both Wotan and Freia; the other gods not much concerned about anything; Wotan full of apprehensions and also of determination—­determination to rule without paying the price of rulership.

V

I have attempted nothing more than a broad and rough description of the Rhinegold.  The opera was planned as a prelude, and suffers from the defects of the plan, as well as from the fact that it was written before Wagner’s new method was ripe.  He wrote to Liszt that the music came up “like wild,” or, as an irreverent critic once observed, like mould on a pot of jam; and the second description is truer than the speaker thought.  The Rhinegold has aged faster than any other of the great works.  Alongside of the sublime we find the petty; after phrases as sweet and fresh as raindrops on young spring leaves we find stodgy, “made,” music; the atmosphere is not preserved.  But gigantic possibilities are opened out.  The Rhine music is afterwards used to splendid ends; the Spear motive, which makes its first appearance in rather a trivial form—­it might be a quotation from Weber or Spohr—­becomes