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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring by George Bernard Shaw: quarter to the antagonist of his hero. His Wotan, whom he calls
Jupiter, is the almighty fiend into whom the Englishman's God had
degenerated during two centuries of ignorant Bible worship and
shameless commercialism. He is Alberic, Fafnir Loki and the
ambitious side of Wotan all rolled into one melodramatic demon
who is finally torn from his throne and hurled shrieking into the
abyss by a spirit representing that conception of Eternal Law
which has been replaced since by the conception of Evolution.
Wagner, an older, more experienced man than the Shelley of 1819,
understood Wotan and pardoned him, separating him tenderly from
all the compromising alliances to which Shelley fiercely held
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