dramatist, and that before “our art,” as he persistently calls music, had got a root in Germany, three great schools had flourished, the English, the Flemish and the Italian—­disregarding all this, he looked for the regeneration of the human species by means of the efforts of German artists alone.  It is comical, and, I say, very like lunacy.  Mr. Ernest Newman will have it that Wagner’s was only a very mediocre intellect.  The cold truth is that only a mighty intellect, gone wrong on one point, could have evolved the idea of such a new social system.  For, mark you, Wagner propounded no scheme for the regeneration of humanity:  he assumed that it could regenerate itself by wishing, or willing, and that then the thousand years of peace would commence, with Richard as conductor-in-chief.  He could not see that humanity cannot jump out of its shadow and regenerate itself, any more than gentlemen of intelligence gone wrong on one point can see that Bacon could not have written Shakespeare’s plays, or that perpetual motion is a crazy impossibility.

It is curious to picture the share Richard took in the Dresden ferment of 1848-49.  Of course, all Europe was in a condition of excitement; and the powers that were got their guns ready, and their men.  Political liberty was the thing aimed at:  the “outs” wanted to be in.  Every right-thinking man must be in sympathy with the “outs.”  The governments of Europe were in the hands of shameless place-seekers; the working men, the merchants, all other classes were supposed to labour and pay taxes for the benefit of these gentry.  Money was squandered on useless court-flummery while men were toiling sixteen hours a day for bread.  The aristocracy were resolved that this state of affairs 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