In the case of such a man as Wagner, you cannot explain this volte-face
as mere jingoism produced by Germany's overwhelming victory in the
Franco-Prussian War, nor as personal spite against the Parisians for the
Tannhauser fiasco. Wagner had more cause for personal spite against
his own countrymen than he ever had against the French. No doubt his
outburst gratified the pettier feelings which great men have in common
with small ones; but he was not a man to indulge in such gratifications,
or indeed to feel them as gratifications, if he had not arrived at a
profound philosophical contempt for the inadequacy of the men who were
trying to wield Nothung, and who had done less work for Wagner's own
art than a single German King and he, too, only a mad one. Wagner had by
that time done too much himself not to know that the world is ruled by
deeds, not by good intentions, and that one efficient sinner is worth
ten futile saints and martyrs.

I need not elaborate the point further in these pages. Like all men of
genius, Wagner had exceptional sincerity, exceptional respect for facts,
exceptional freedom from the hypnotic influence of sensational popular
movements, exceptional sense of the realities of political power as
distinguished from the presences and idolatries behind which the real
masters of modern States pull their wires and train their guns. When he
scored Night Falls On The Gods, he had accepted the failure of Siegfried
and the triumph of the Wotan-Loki-Alberic-trinity as a fact. He had
given up dreaming of heroes, heroines, and final solutions, and had
conceived a new protagonist in Parsifal, whom he announced, not as
a hero, but as a fool; who was armed, not with a sword which cut
irresistibly, but with a spear which he held only on condition that he
did not use it; and who instead of exulting in the slaughter of a
dragon was frightfully ashamed of having shot a swan. The change in the
conception of the Deliverer could hardly be more complete. It reflects
the change which took place in Wagner's mind between the composition
of The Rhine Gold and Night Falls On The Gods; and it explains why
he dropped The Ring allegory and fell back on the status quo ante by
Lohengrinizing.

If you ask why he did not throw Siegfried into the waste paper basket
and rewrite The Ring from The Valkyries onwards, one must reply that the
time had not come for such a feat. Neither Wagner nor anyone else then
living knew enough to achieve i