Well, he may have been so later on, but
it was not, I think, the last phase of his evolution. His actions speak
for themselves. On 14 June, 1848, in a famous speech to the National
Democratic Association, Wagner violently attacked the organisation of
society itself, and demanded both the abolition of money and the
extinction of what was left of the aristocracy. In _Das Kunstwerk der
Zukunft_ (1849) he showed that beyond the "local nationalism" were signs
of a "supernational universalism." And all this was not merely talk, for
he risked his life for his ideas. Herr Chamberlain himself quotes the
account of a witness who saw him, in May, 1849, distributing
revolutionary pamphlets to the troops who were besieging Dresden. It was
a miracle that he was not arrested and shot. We know that after Dresden
was taken a warrant was out against him, and he fled to Switzerland,
with a passport on which was a borrowed name. If it be true that Wagner
later declared that he had been "involved in error and led away by his
feelings" it matters little to the history of that time. Errors and
enthusiasms are an integral part of life, and one must not ignore them
in a man's biography under the pretext that he regretted them twenty or
thirty years later, for they have, nevertheless, helped to guide his
actions and impressed his imagination.
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