So long as ye intellectual egoists and egoistic purists [the gods of Valhalla] shall blossom in your artificial atmosphere, there must needs be somewhere a ‘stuff’ from whose vital juices ye may distil your own sweet perfumes [We see here Alberich’s complaint that Wotan and the gods of Valhalla ignore the Nibelungs, yet intend to draw bliss from Alberich’s sacrifice of love, by co-opting the power of his Ring which alone makes their heavenly life in Valhalla possible, without paying Alberich’s price.]; and this stuff, from which ye have sucked out all its inbred scent, is but that foul-breathed rabble [the Nibelungs, with Mime their exemplar] whose very approach inspires you with disgust [note Siegfried’s loathing for Mime], and from whom ye only ward yourselves by that very perfume ye have squeezed from its native comeliness [Alberich’s Ring, #19, was transformed into Valhalla, #20a, which then became the gods’ refuge from Alberich’s host of night]. (…) And – saddest tale of all! – when in this disproportionately burdened section of the Folk the [P. 209] sheerest utilitarianism has thus become the moving spirit of its energy, then must the revolting spectacle be exhibited of absolute Egoism enforcing its laws of life on every hand … [witness Alberich driving his Nibelung Hoard to mine his hoard of treasure without rest].” [442W-{9-12/49} The Artwork of the Future: PW Vol. I, p. 208-209]
In the course of completing the libretto of the Ring, of course, culminating in Wagner’s attempt to create an allegory for the origins of human culture in The Rhinegold, Wagner gradually gave up the optimistic idea that there was once, or ever could be, a purely-human nature which human culture (which, after all, was a product of that allegedly formerly innocent human nature) had corrupted. Mime’s mythological account of such a time in R.3, when he narrated the story of how Alberich’s Ring power brought about the Fall of the Nibelungs from a once paradisal existence, was Wagner’s attempt to posit such a purely-human nature. But it dawned on Wagner as he wrote the Ring that man’s egoism is a legacy of natural necessity, evolution, itself, and therefore inevitable and natural. In any case, it is this artificiality, hypocrisy, egoism, from which Siegfried now feels freed in the fresh, humming forest.
Siegfried is experiencing what we might describe as the “Naïve,” i.e., a direct instinctual relationship with nature seemingly unmediated with conceptual interpretation. And this calls up nostalgic longing for the true parents he never knew and overwhelming gratitude that his true Waelsung heritage has liberated him from Mime’s repugnant claims. The point of Siegfried’s upbringing by Mime (note the contrast with Wotan’s upbringing of Siegfried’s father Siegmund in the forest) is that in Wagner’s view the individual genius in the modern world suffers from alienation, for he finds himself almost universally among trivial, egoistic, small men who are inherently incapable of grasping his naïve, straightforward relationship with the world. The overwhelming majority of men, whom Mime represents, are incapable of responding to the world in a purely aesthetic sense, because they construe all experience in terms of their desire to satisfy narrow, vulgar needs, while the artist-hero is presumably able to give himself to the world of experience without pre-judgment and without seeking the practical profit which might be obtained from the exploitation of things and experiences. Because true geniuses of this type are so rare, so widely dispersed in time and space, as Wagner sometimes put it, most geniuses are very isolated and lonely. So when they do find the means to re-connect with their true heritage, the heritage left them by prior geniuses of their stamp (this heritage represented by Siegmund’s sword Nothung, and Mime’s memories of the Waelsung twins in life), their sense of identity as a unique individual with special gifts, and sense of alienation from the majority of men such as Mime, is greatly increased.
