Wagner as Revolutionist - Page 2

for Liberal reforms, made common cause with the
starving wage-working class, and resorted to armed rebellion,
which reached Dresden in 1849. Had Wagner been the mere musical
epicure and political mugwump that the term "artist" seems to
suggest to so many critics and amateurs--that is, a creature in
their own lazy likeness--he need have taken no more part in the
political struggles of his day than Bishop took in the English
Reform agitation of 1832, or Sterndale Bennett in the Chartist or
Free Trade movements. What he did do was first to make a
desperate appeal to the King to cast off his bonds and answer the
need of the time by taking true Kingship on himself and leading
his people to the redress of their intolerable wrongs (fancy the
poor monarch's feelings!), and then, when the crash came, to take
his side with the right and the poor against the rich and the
wrong. When the insurrection was defeated, three leaders of it
were especially marked down for vengeance: August Roeckel, an old
friend of Wagner's to whom he wrote a well-known series of
letters; Michael Bakoonin, afterwards a famous apostle of
revolutionary Anarchism; and Wagner himself. Wagner escaped to
Switzerland: Roeckel and Bakoonin suffered long terms of
imprisonment. Wagner was of course utterly ruined, pecuniarily
and socially (to his own intense relief and satisfaction); and
his exile lasted twelve years. His first idea was to get his
Tannhauser produced in Paris. With the notion of explaining
himself to the Parisians he wrote a pamphlet entitled Art and
Revolution, a glance through which will show how thoroughly the
socialistic side of the revolution had his sympathy, and how
completely he had got free from the influence of the established
Churches of his day. For three years he kept pouring forth
pamphlets--some of them elaborate treatises in size and
intellectual rank, but still essentially the pamphlets and
manifestoes of a born agitator--on social evolution, religion,
life, art and the influence of riches. In 1853 the poem of The
Ring was privately printed; and in 1854, five years after the
Dresden insurrection, The Rhine Gold score was completed to the
last drum tap.

These facts are on official record in Germany, where the
proclamation summing up Wagner as "a politically dangerous
person" may be consulted to this day. The pamphlets are now
accessible to English readers in the translation of Mr. Ashton
Ellis. This being so, any person who, having perhaps heard that
I am a Socialist, attempts to persuade you that my interpretation
of The Rhine Gold is only "my socialism" read into the works of
a dilettantist who borrowed an idle tale from an old saga to make
an opera book with,