The Perfect Wagnerite | Page 5

begged again and again to be taken
to the bosom of my German comrades. I have pleaded that the
Super-Proletarians of all lands should unite. I have pointed out that the
German Social-Democratic party has done nothing at its Congresses for
the last ten years except the things I told them to do ten years before,
and that its path is white with the bones of the Socialist superstitions I
and my fellow Fabians have slain. Useless. They do not care a rap
whether I am a Socialist or not. All they want to know is; Am I
orthodox? Am I correct in my revolutionary views? Am I reverent to
the revolutionary authorities? Because I am a genuine free-thinker they
look at me as a policeman looks at a midnight prowler or as a Berlin
bourgeois looks at a suspicious foreigner. They ask "Do you believe
that Marx was omniscient and infallible; that Engels was his prophet;
that Bebel and Singer are his inspired apostles; and that Das Kapital is
the Bible?" Hastening in my innocence to clear myself of what I regard
as an accusation of credulity and ignorance, I assure them earnestly that
I know ten times as much of economics and a hundred times as much
of practical administration as Marx did; that I knew Engels personally
and rather liked him as a witty and amiable old 1848 veteran who
despised modern Socialism; that I regard Bebel and Singer as men of
like passions with myself, but considerably less advanced; and that I
read Das Kapital in the year 1882 or thereabouts, and still consider it
one of the most important books of the nineteenth century because of
its power of changing the minds of those who read it, in spite of its
unsound capitalist economics, its parade of quotations from books
which the author had either not read or not understood, its affectation of
algebraic formulas, and its general attempt to disguise a masterpiece of
propagandist journalism and prophetic invective as a drily scientific
treatise of the sort that used to impose on people in 1860, when any
book that pretended to be scientific was accepted as a Bible. In those
days Darwin and Helmholtz were the real fathers of the Church; and
nobody would listen to religion, poetry or rhetoric; so that even
Socialism had to call itself "scientific," and predict the date of the
revolution, as if it were a comet, by calculations founded on "historic
laws."
To my amazement these reasonable remarks were received as hideous
blasphemies; none of the party papers were allowed to print any word

of mine; the very Revisionists themselves found that the scandal of my
heresy damaged them more than my support aided them; and I found
myself an outcast from German Social-Democracy at the moment when,
thanks to Trebitsch, the German bourgeoisie and nobility began to
smile on me, seduced by the pleasure of playing with fire, and perhaps
by Agnes Sorma's acting as Candida.
Thus you may see that when a German, by becoming a
Social-Democrat, throws off all the bonds of convention, and stands
free from all allegiance to established religion, law, order, patriotism,
and learning, he promptly uses his freedom to put on a headier set of
chains; expels anti-militarists with the blood-thirstiest martial
anti-foreign ardor; and gives the Kaiser reason to thank heaven that he
was born in the comparative freedom and Laodicean tolerance of
Kingship, and not in the Calvinistic bigotry and pedantry of Marxism.
Why, then, you may ask, do I say that I am bound to Germany by the
ties that hold my nature most strongly? Very simply because I should
have perished of despair in my youth but for the world created for me
by that great German dynasty which began with Bach and will perhaps
not end with Richard Strauss. Do not suppose for a moment that I learnt
my art from English men of letters. True, they showed me how to
handle English words; but if I had known no more than that, my works
would never have crossed the Channel. My masters were the masters of
a universal language: they were, to go from summit to summit, Bach,
Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner. Had the Germans
understood any of these men, they would have hanged them.
Fortunately they did not understand them, and therefore only neglected
them until they were dead, after which they learnt to dance to their
tunes with an easy conscience. For their sakes Germany stands
consecrated as the Holy Land of the capitalist age, just as Italy, for its
painters' sakes, is the Holy Land of the early unvulgarized Renascence;
France, for its builders' sakes, of the age of Christian chivalry and faith;
and Greece, for its sculptors' sakes, of the Periclean