Why He Changed His Mind

Wagner, however, was not the man to allow his grip of a great
philosophic theme to slacken even in twenty-five years if the
theme still held good as a theory of actual life. If the history
of Germany from 1849 to 1876 had been the history of Siegfried
and Wotan transposed into the key of actual life Night Falls On
The Gods would have been the logical consummation of Das
Rheingold and The Valkyrie instead of the operatic anachronism it
actually is.

But, as a matter of fact, Siegfried did not succeed and Bismarck
did. Roeckel was a prisoner whose imprisonment made no difference;
Bakoonin broke up, not Walhall, but the International, which
ended in an undignified quarrel between him and Karl Marx. The
Siegfrieds of 1848 were hopeless political failures, whereas the
Wotans and Alberics and Lows were conspicuous political
successes. Even the Mimes held their own as against Siegfried.
With the single exception of Ferdinand Lassalle, there was no
revolutionary leader who was not an obvious impossibilist in
practical politics; and Lassalle got himself killed in a romantic
and quite indefensible duel after wrecking his health in a
titanic oratorical campaign which convinced him that the great
majority of the working classes were not ready to join him, and
that the minority who were ready did not understand him. The
International, founded in 1861 by Karl Marx in London, and
mistaken for several years by nervous newspapers for a red
spectre, was really only a turnip ghost. It achieved some
beginnings of International Trade Unionism by inducing English
workmen to send money to support strikes on the continent, and
recalling English workers who had been taken across the North Sea
to defeat such strikes; but on its revolutionary socialistic side
it was a romantic figment. The suppression of the Paris Commune,
one of the most tragic examples in history of the pitilessness
with which capable practical administrators and soldiers are
forced by the pressure of facts to destroy romantic amateurs and
theatrical dreamers, made an end of melodramatic Socialism. It
was as easy for Marx to hold up Thiers as the most execrable of
living scoundrels and to put upon Gallifet the brand that still
makes him impossible in French politics as it was for Victor Hugo
to bombard Napoleon III from his paper battery in Jersey. It was
also easy to hold up Felix Pyat and Delescluze as men of much
loftier ideals than Thiers and Gallifet; but the one fact that
could not be denied was that when it came to actual shooting, it
was Gallifet who got Delescluze shot and not Delescluze who got
Gallifet shot, and that when it came to administering the affairs
of France, Thiers could in one way or another get it done, whilst
Pyat