s should continue; the average citizens were resolved that it
should not. What did Wagner propose?--obedience to the puppet king and
a reformed opera! It is small wonder that he was considered a
visionary. He made at least one speech, talking about the State,
meaning thereby something very different from the meaning his audience
attached to the word; he heard speeches, and undoubtedly in all
sincerity read his own thoughts into them. He thought the millennium
was at hand. When the fighting began he joined the revolutionists;
though I can nowhere find proof that he shouldered a musket. Had he
done so it is extremely probable he would have shot the man behind
him. It is hard to get at the truth about these days of May. Perhaps
he did help to escort supplies; but with his excitable brain we must
remember that what he thought he saw and what he actually did see may
be two very different things. A good many other people who were in
Dresden at the time have let their pretty fancies run away with them;
for their accounts of Wagner's doings contradict one another to such
an extent that any attempt to reconcile them is futile. I must confess
to a boundless distrust of "recollections" set down or spoken at any
length of time after the event. Ask, reader, ask any of your friends
to give an account of some striking occurrence of a year ago. In
ninety-nine cases out of a hundred it will not tally with yours. You
may be wrong or your friend may be wrong: in either case some one's
memory has played a trick. In this book I have omitted many a dozen
picturesque touches, simply because there is no proof of their truth
and every probability that they are false. It is perhaps enough to
remember that the hopes of liberty were crushed, that Roeckel,
Wagner's assistant and friend, was taken and afterwards sentenced to a
long term of imprisonment, and that Wagner had to run for safety. From
every point of view it was as well he got away from Dresden. If he had
not got away he would have shared Roeckel's martyrdom. Had the
revolution succeeded, a terrible disillusionment would have been his
share of the spoils: the revolutionists thought a fine opera of no
more importance than did their enemies, and had Richard asked to be
set up in his kingdom he would have quickly found the defenders of
liberty as adroit in evading him and his claims as any court flunkeys
could be. It was well he got away from Dresden also because, as he
afterwards said, the c