The Perfect Wagnerite by George Bernard Shaw

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 the pressure of facts to destroy romantic amateurs and theatrical dreamers, made an end of melodramatic Socialism. It was as easy for Marx to hold up Thiers as the most execrable of living scoundrels and to put upon Gallifet the brand that still makes him impossible in French politics as it was for Victor Hugo to bombard Napoleon III from his paper battery in Jersey.