these loved pastorales.  Napoleon wept at a reading of Paul et Virginie, and delighted in the pallid music of Paesiello.  A man wearied by an over-active life seeks repose in art; a man who lives a narrow, commonplace life seeks energy in art.  A great artist writes a gay work when he is sad, and a sad work when he is gay, almost in spite of himself.  Beethoven’s symphony To Joy is the offspring of his misery; and Wagner’s Meistersinger was composed immediately 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.