engrin_. Before dealing
with these operas, Wagner's first very great ones, we must pass in
review the remainder of the Dresden days, ending with the insurrection
of May 1849 and the flight to Switzerland.

II

Nothing in Wagner's life has been less perfectly understood, or more
completely and wilfully misunderstood, than his share in this May
insurrection of 1849. He was never at any time a politician; of
politics he knew nothing, and he held the trade in profound,
undisguised contempt. He wrote much about the State, and in every
paragraph contrived to show the astounding breadth of his
ignorance--an ignorance of that kind which Dr. Johnson might have
described as not natural but acquired. Everlastingly he prattles
about the State until he throws us into a condition of imbecile
confusion. Then we resolutely sit down to his prose writings and track
his meaning or meanings. And at last we perceive this: the State in
his mind, the State he talked and wrote about, was something purely
ideal, such a State as has never existed, and at the present day,
nearly seventy years after Wagner's solitary plunge into practical
politics, seems as unlikely as ever to come into existence. He wanted
(1) an all-wise absolute monarch who should work the will of all his
subjects, no matter how conflicting their interests might be; (2) some
millions of these subjects to think alike on every conceivable
question--to think, that is, as Wagner thought; these millions to make
sublime sacrifice of themselves that Wagner's art-schemes might
prosper. All this, be it noted, was to be the barest basis and
beginning of the perfect State. How this point could be reached by our
imperfect human race was a question he scorned to discuss: he simply
assumed that it could be reached, and proceeded to further argument.
The point had to be attained in the first place; then humanity--by
which he meant German humanity--was to move upward, working out the
beast, talking German philosophy, reading what is called German poetry
(though Shakespeare might be tolerated), looking at what is called
German painting, listening to German music, dreaming thin, mystical
German dreams and munching thick German sausages. Thus should the
inhabitants of a small subsidiary State, whose kings could be, and
had been, made and unmade by other kings, create for themselves a new
heaven on earth and become the wonder of the world.

It is very like sheer lunacy. But this account is n