he 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 could neither do it nor stop
talking and allow somebody else to do it. True, the penalty of following
Thiers was to be exploited by the landlord and capitalist; but then the
penalty of following Pyat was to get shot like a mad dog, or at best get
sent to New Caledonia, quite unnecessarily and uselessly.

To put it in terms of Wagner's allegory, Alberic had got the ring back
again and was marrying into the best Walhall families with it. He had
thought better of his old threat to dethrone Wotan and Loki. He had
found that Nibelheim was a very gloomy place and that if he wanted to
live handsomely and safely, he must not only allow Wotan and Loki to
organize society for him, but pay them very handsomely for doing it. He
wanted splendor, military glory, loyalty, enthusiasm, and patriotism;
and his greed and gluttony were wholly unable to create them, whereas
Wotan and Loki carried them all to a triumphant climax in Germany in
1871, when Wagner himself celebrated the event with his Kaisermarsch,
which sounded much more convincing than the Marseillaise or the
Carmagnole.

How, after the Kaisermarsch, could Wagner go back to his idealization of
Siegfried in 1853? How could he believe seriously in Siegfried slaying
the dragon and charging through the mountain fire, when the immediate
foreground was occupied by the Hotel de Ville with Felix Pyat endlessly
discussing the principles of Socialism whilst the shells of Thiers were
already battering the Arc de Triomphe, and ripping up the pavement of
the Champs Elysees? Is it not clear that things had taken an altogether
unexpected turn--that although the Ring may, like the famous Communist
Manifesto of Marx and Engels, be an inspir