Germans understood any of these
men, they would have hanged them. Fortunately they did not understand
them, and therefore only neglected them until they were dead, after
which they learnt to dance to their tunes with an easy conscience.
For their sakes Germany stands consecrated as the Holy Land of the
capitalist age, just as Italy, for its painters' sakes, is the Holy Land
of the early unvulgarized Renascence; France, for its builders'
sakes, of the age of Christian chivalry and faith; and Greece, for its
sculptors' sakes, of the Periclean age.

These Holy Lands are my fatherlands: in them alone am I truly at home:
all my work is but to bring the whole world under this sanctification.

And so, O worthy, respectable, dutiful, patriotic, brave, industrious
German reader, you who used to fear only God and your own conscience,
and now fear nothing at all, here is my book for you; and--in all
sincerity--much good may it do you!

London, 23rd. October 1907.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

The preparation of a Second Edition of this booklet is quite the most
unexpected literary task that has ever been set me. When it first
appeared I was ungrateful enough to remonstrate with its publisher for
printing, as I thought, more copies than the most sanguine Wagnerite
could ever hope to sell. But the result proved that exactly one person
buys a copy on every day in the year, including Sundays; and so, in the
process of the suns, a reprint has become necessary.

Save a few verbal slips of no importance, I have found nothing to alter
in this edition. As usual, the only protests the book has elicited are
protests, not against the opinions it expresses, but against the facts
it records. There are people who cannot bear to be told that their
hero was associated with a famous Anarchist in a rebellion; that he
was proclaimed as "wanted" by the police; that he wrote revolutionary
pamphlets; and that his picture of Niblunghome under the reign of
Alberic is a poetic vision of unregulated industrial capitalism as it
was made known in Germany in the middle of the nineteenth century by
Engels's Condition of the Laboring classes in England. They frantically
deny these facts, and then declare that I have connected them with
Wagner in a paroxysm of senseless perversity. I am sorry I have hurt
them; and I appeal to charitable publishers to bring out a new life of
Wagner, which shall describe him as a court musician of unquestioned
fashi