ge villain.
But all this represents a development of which one gathers no forecast
from Wagner or Marx. Both of them prophesied the end of our epoch, and,
so far as one can guess, prophesied it rightly. They also brought its
industrial history up to the year 1848 far more penetratingly than the
academic historians of their time. But they broke off there and left
a void between 1848 and the end, in which we, who have to live in that
period, get no guidance from them. The Marxists wandered for years
in this void, striving, with fanatical superstition, to suppress the
Revisionists who, facing the fact that the Social-Democratic party was
lost, were trying to find the path by the light of contemporary history
instead of vainly consulting the oracle in the pages of Das Kapital.
Marx himself was too simpleminded a recluse and too full of the
validity of his remoter generalizations, and the way in which the rapid
integration of capital in Trusts and Kartels was confirming them, to be
conscious of the void himself.

Wagner, on the other hand, was comparatively a practical man. It is
possible to learn more of the world by producing a single opera, or even
conducting a single orchestral rehearsal, than by ten years reading in
the Library of the British Museum. Wagner must have learnt between Das
Rheingold and the Kaisermarsch that there are yet several dramas to be
interpolated in The Ring after The Valkyries before the allegory can
tell the whole story, and that the first of these interpolated dramas
will be much more like a revised Rienzi than like Siegfried. If
anyone doubts the extent to which Wagner's eyes had been opened to the
administrative-childishness and romantic conceit of the heroes of
the revolutionary generation that served its apprenticeship on the
barricades of 1848-9, and perished on those of 1870 under Thiers'
mitrailleuses, let him read Eine Kapitulation, that scandalous burlesque
in which the poet and composer of Siegfried, with the levity of a
schoolboy, mocked the French republicans who were doing in 1871 what he
himself was exiled for doing in 1849. He had set the enthusiasm of the
Dresden Revolution to his own greatest music; but he set the enthusiasm
of twenty years later in derision to the music of Rossini. There is
no mistaking the tune he meant to suggest by his doggerel of Republik,
Republik, Republik-lik-lik. The Overture to William Tell is there as
plainly as if it were noted down in full score.