had
better stay away.

And now, attentive Reader, we have reached the point at which some
foolish person is sure to interrupt us by declaring that The Rhine Gold
is what they call "a work of art" pure and simple, and that Wagner never
dreamt of shareholders, tall hats, whitelead factories, and industrial
and political questions looked at from the socialistic and humanitarian
points of view. We need not discuss these impertinences: it is easier
to silence them with the facts of Wagner's life. In 1843 he obtained
the position of conductor of the Opera at Dresden at a salary of L225 a
year, with a pension. This was a first-rate permanent appointment in the
service of the Saxon State, carrying an assured professional
position and livelihood with it In 1848, the year of revolutions,
the discontented middle class, unable to rouse the Church-and-State
governments of the day from their bondage to custom, caste, and law by
appeals to morality or constitutional agitation 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