after the
failure of _Tannhaeuser_ in Paris. People try to find in _Tristan_ the
trace of some love-story of Wagner's, but Wagner himself says: "As in
all my life I have never truly tasted the happiness of love, I will
raise a monument to a beautiful dream of it: I have the idea of _Tristan
und Isolde_ in my head." And so it was with his creation of the happy
and heedless _Siegfried_.

* * * * *

The first ideas of _Siegfried_ were contemporary with the Revolution of
1848, which Wagner took part in with the same enthusiasm he put into
everything else. His recognised biographer, Herr Houston Stewart
Chamberlain--who, with M. Henri Lichtenberger, has succeeded best in
unravelling Wagner's complex soul, though he is not without certain
prejudices--has been at great pains to prove that Wagner was always a
patriot and a German monarchist. Well, he may have been so later on, but
it was not, I think, the last phase of his evolution. His actions speak
for themselves. On 14 June, 1848, in a famous speech to the National
Democratic Association, Wagner violently attacked the organisation of
society itself, and demanded both the abolition of money and the
extinction of what was left of the aristocracy. In _Das Kunstwerk der
Zukunft_ (1849) he showed that beyond the "local nationalism" were signs
of a "supernational universalism." And all this was not merely talk, for
he risked his life for his ideas. Herr Chamberlain himself quotes the
account of a witness who saw him, in May, 1849, distributing
revolutionary pamphlets to the troops who were besieging Dresden. It was
a miracle that he was not arrested and shot. We know that after Dresden
was taken a warrant was out against him, and he fled to Switzerland,
with a passport on which was a borrowed name. If it be true that Wagner
later declared that he had been "involved in error and led away by his
feelings" it matters little to the history of that time. Errors and
enthusiasms are an integral part of life, and one must not ignore them
in a man's biography under the pretext that he regretted them twenty or
thirty years later, for they have, nevertheless, helped to guide his
actions and impressed his imagination. It was out of the Revolution
itself that _Siegfried_ directly sprang.

In 1848, Wagner was not yet thinking of a Tetralogy, but of an heroic
opera in three acts called _Siegfried's Tod_, in which the fatal power
of gold was to be symbolised