There is no sense in this
device; and its adoption shows the same recklessness as to the original
intention which we find in the music of the last act of The Dusk of the
Gods. [*]

* Die Gotterdammerung means literally Godsgloaming. The
English versions of the opera are usually called The Dusk of
the Gods, or The Twilight of the Gods. I have purposely
introduced the ordinary title in the sentence above for the
reader's information.

WHY HE CHANGED HIS MIND

Wagner, however, was not the man to allow his grip of a great
philosophic theme to slacken even in twenty-five years if the theme
still held good as a theory of actual life. If the history of Germany
from 1849 to 1876 had been the history of Siegfried and Wotan transposed
into the key of actual life Night Falls On The Gods would have been the
logical consummation of Das Rheingold and The Valkyrie instead of the
operatic anachronism it actually is.

But, as a matter of fact, Siegfried did not succeed and Bismarck did.
Roeckel was a prisoner whose imprisonment made no difference; Bakoonin
broke up, not Walhall, but the International, which ended in an
undignified quarrel between him and Karl Marx. The Siegfrieds of 1848
were hopeless political failures, whereas the Wotans and Alberics and
Lokis were conspicuous political successes. Even the Mimes held their own
as against Siegfried. With the single exception of Ferdinand Lassalle,
there was no revolutionary leader who was not an obvious impossibilist
in practical politics; and Lassalle got himself killed in a romantic
and quite indefensible duel after wrecking his health in a titanic
oratorical campaign which convinced him that the great majority of the
working classes were not ready to join him, and that the minority who
were ready did not understand him. The International, founded in 1861
by Karl Marx in London, and mistaken for several years by nervous
newspapers for a red spectre, was really only a turnip ghost. It
achieved some beginnings of International Trade Unionism by inducing
English workmen to send money to support strikes on the continent, and
recalling English workers who had been taken across the North Sea to
defeat such strikes; but on its revolutionary socialistic side it was a
romantic figment. The suppression of the Paris Commune, one of the
most tragic examples in history of the pitilessness with which capable
practical administrators and soldiers are forced by t