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 no exaggeration of Wagner’s doctrine and plans.  The one truth which emerges and speaks unequivocally is that Richard, deeply dissatisfied with the theatre of the day, and tracing its sad degeneracy to the corrupt state of society, wished to see society upraised, not that men and women might live more happily, but that a finer, nobler theatre might flourish.  The most magnificent egotist of the century, it seemed to him the prime concern of mankind that Richard Wagner’s works should be understood and loved.  Being an egotist also, if I may say so, on a national scale, he thought humanity could only be redeemed by German art.  Disregarding the fact that Germany has had no painters, no poet of the first rank, no genuine