THE RING OF THE NIBLUNGS

The Ring consists of four plays, intended to be performed on four
successive evenings, entitled The Rhine Gold (a prologue to the
other three), The Valkyries, Siegfried, and Night Falls On The
Gods; or, in the original German, Das Rheingold, Die Walkure,
Siegfried, and Die Gotterdammerung.


THE RHINE GOLD

Let me assume for a moment that you are a young and good-looking
woman. Try to imagine yourself in that character at Klondyke five
years ago. The place is teeming with gold. If you are content to
leave the gold alone, as the wise leave flowers without plucking
them, enjoying with perfect naivete its color and glitter and
preciousness, no human being will ever be the worse for your
knowledge of it; and whilst you remain in that frame of mind the
golden age will endure.

Now suppose a man comes along: a man who has no sense of the
golden age, nor any power of living in the present: a man with
common desires, cupidities, ambitions, just like most of the men
you know. Suppose you reveal to that man the fact that if he will
only pluck this gold up, and turn it into money, millions of men,
driven by the invisible whip of hunger, will toil underground and
overground night and day to pile up more and more gold for him