represented, respectively, by Mime and Siegfried, Wagner finds in the story of Wieland the Smith (previously cited in part):
“The fair sea-wife Wachilde had born a son to good King Viking: the three Norns came to greet the child, and dower it with gifts. The first Norn gave it strength of body, the second wisdom; and the grateful father bade them take their seat beside his throne. But the third bestowed upon the child ‘the ne’er contented mind that ever broods the New.’ Viking, aghast at such a gift, refused the youngest Norn his thanks; indignant, she recalled her gift, to punish his ingratitude. The son grew up to strength and mighty stature; and whate’er there was to know, he mastered it betimes. But never did he feel the spur to change or venture; with every turning of his life he was content, and found his home in all.” (…) That one rejected gift: ‘the ne’er contented mind, that ever broods the New,’ the youngest Norn holds out to all of us when we are born, and through it alone might we each one day, become a ‘Genius:’ but now, in our craze for education [i.e., Mime’s education of Siegfried in the mundane ways of the conventional world], ‘tis Chance alone that brings this gift within our grasp, -- the accident of not becoming educated (erzogen). Secure against the refusal of a father who died beside my cradle, perchance the Norn, so often chased away, stole gently to it, and there bestowed on me her gift; which never left poor untrained me, and made Life and Art and mine own self my only, quite anarchic, educators.“ [560W-{6-8/51} A Communication To My Friends: PW Vol. I, p. 290]
Undoubtedly Wagner saw himself in Siegfried, who instinctively prefers to educate himself rather than be tainted by an upbringing designed for the vulgar masses’ needs. We can see in Wagner’s last remark, that now education destroys genius, an echo of Siegfried’s complaint that though Mime wishes to teach him Siegfried desires to remain ignorant of his lessons. The point is that Mime represents the vulgar masses, the hostile philistine element among whom the truly creative genius must make his way, to whose needs and desires he must often cater to survive, yet whose lessons the man or woman of genius would rather never learn.
In the following remarkable extracts Wagner compares the truly original artist with the imitative mime, suggesting that all great artists begin as mimes but eventually develop into original re-interpreters of the world. This may well explain Mime’s insistence that Siegfried acknowledge a debt of gratitude to him for bringing Siegfried up. Similarly, Alberich, whom I posit as Wagner’s metaphor for the first consciously human being, begins with an objective relationship to the world, but his unconscious dreaming involuntarily and unwittingly gives birth to the illusion of godhead (Wotan, Light-Alberich), in whom the real (man and nature) is transmuted into the ideal (Godhead). Thus Mime tells Siegfried that Siegfried owes him much, but Siegfried, while acknowledging this, now desires to sever all links with his progenitor and advance to a new level which, Siegfried presumes, will owe nothing to Mime’s example. Such an idealistic artist comes to feel contempt for the merely imitative, realistic mime, his immature self, just as, according to Wagner, the fully evolved human being feels repugnance toward (his ancestor) the imitative ape:
[P. 80] “What scares the plastic and poetic artists from contact with the mime, and fills them with a repugnance not entirely unakin to that of the man for the monkey, is not the thing wherein they differ from him, but that wherein they resemble him. Moreover what the one imitates, and the other ‘interprets,’ is one thing and the same: Nature; the distinction lies in the How, and in the means employed. The plastic artist, who cannot reproduce his model, the poet who cannot reproduce the
