The Perfect Wagnerite | Page 6

age.
These Holy Lands are my fatherlands: in them alone am I truly at home:
all my work is but to bring the whole world under this sanctification.
And so, O worthy, respectable, dutiful, patriotic, brave, industrious
German reader, you who used to fear only God and your own
conscience, and now fear nothing at all, here is my book for you;

and--in all sincerity--much good may it do you!
London, 23rd. October 1907.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
The preparation of a Second Edition of this booklet is quite the most
unexpected literary task that has ever been set me. When it first
appeared I was ungrateful enough to remonstrate with its publisher for
printing, as I thought, more copies than the most sanguine Wagnerite
could ever hope to sell. But the result proved that exactly one person
buys a copy on every day in the year, including Sundays; and so, in the
process of the suns, a reprint has become necessary.
Save a few verbal slips of no importance, I have found nothing to alter
in this edition. As usual, the only protests the book has elicited are
protests, not against the opinions it expresses, but against the facts it
records. There are people who cannot bear to be told that their hero was
associated with a famous Anarchist in a rebellion; that he was
proclaimed as "wanted" by the police; that he wrote revolutionary
pamphlets; and that his picture of Niblunghome under the reign of
Alberic is a poetic vision of unregulated industrial capitalism as it was
made known in Germany in the middle of the nineteenth century by
Engels's Condition of the Laboring classes in England. They frantically
deny these facts, and then declare that I have connected them with
Wagner in a paroxysm of senseless perversity. I am sorry I have hurt
them; and I appeal to charitable publishers to bring out a new life of
Wagner, which shall describe him as a court musician of unquestioned
fashion and orthodoxy, and a pillar of the most exclusive Dresden
circles. Such a work, would, I believe, have a large sale, and be read
with satisfaction and reassurance by many lovers of Wagner's music.
As to my much demurred-to relegation of Night Falls On The Gods to
the category of grand opera, I have nothing to add or withdraw. Such a
classification is to me as much a matter of fact as the Dresden rising or
the police proclamation; but I shall not pretend that it is a matter of
such fact as everybody's judgment can grapple with. People who prefer
grand opera to serious music-drama naturally resent my placing a very
grand opera below a very serious music-drama. The ordinary lover of
Shakespeare would equally demur to my placing his popular
catchpenny plays, of which As You Like It is an avowed type, below

true Shakespearean plays like Measure for Measure. I cannot help that.
Popular dramas and operas may have overwhelming merits as
enchanting make-believes; but a poet's sincerest vision of the world
must always take precedence of his prettiest fool's paradise.
As many English Wagnerites seem to be still under the impression that
Wagner composed Rienzi in his youth, Tannhauser and Lohengrin in
his middle age, and The Ring in his later years, may I again remind
them that The Ring was the result of a political convulsion which
occurred when Wagner was only thirty-six, and that the poem was
completed when he was forty, with thirty more years of work before
him? It is as much a first essay in political philosophy as Die Feen is a
first essay in romantic opera. The attempt to recover its spirit twenty
years later, when the music of Night Falls On The Gods was added,
was an attempt to revive the barricades of Dresden in the Temple of the
Grail. Only those who have never had any political enthusiasms to
survive can believe that such an attempt could succeed. G. B. S.
London, 1901

Preface to the First Edition
This book is a commentary on The Ring of the Niblungs, Wagner's
chief work. I offer it to those enthusiastic admirers of Wagner who are
unable to follow his ideas, and do not in the least understand the
dilemma of Wotan, though they are filled with indignation at the
irreverence of the Philistines who frankly avow that they find the
remarks of the god too often tedious and nonsensical. Now to be
devoted to Wagner merely as a dog is devoted to his master, sharing a
few elementary ideas, appetites and emotions with him, and, for the rest,
reverencing his superiority without understanding it, is no true
Wagnerism. Yet nothing better is possible without a stock of ideas
common to master and disciple. Unfortunately, the ideas of