His was a strange, complex nature, with many contradictory qualities. He was called “the German Aristophanes.” He met in the end a ghastly fate; a spinal disease, the penalty of his casual loves, slowly ate him up, and for years he lay on what he called “a mattress grave.” First he could scarcely walk, then he could scarcely see, and all the time he suffered hideously. But his mind lasted to the end, and he saw all things clearly, including his own grim fate. “The Great Author of the Universe, the Aristophanes of Heaven, wished to show the petty, earthly, so-called German Aristophanes that his mightiest sarcasms are but feeble banter compared with His, and how immeasurably He excels me in humor and in colossal wit.” CHAPTER LXVII SIEGFRIED-BAKUNIN In my interpretation of artists so far I have had to rely, for better or for worse, upon myself; no one else, so far as I know, has analyzed art works from the point of view of revolutionary economics. “Tolstoi?” suggests Mrs. Ogi. “Tolstoi considered them from the point of view of Christian primitivism, a quite different thing. But now at last I have help; the economic interpretation of Richard Wagner has been done by Bernard Shaw in a little book, ‘The Perfect Wagnerite,’ published more than twenty-five years ago. So I feel like a small boy taking shelter from his enemies behind the back of his big brother.” “If you would talk like that more frequently,” says Mrs. Ogi, “you wouldn’t have so many enemies!” Richard Wagner was a towering genius, a master of half a dozen arts, perhaps the greatest compeller of emotion that has ever lived. He invented a new art-form, the “music-drama,” in which the arts of the musician, the poet, the dramatist, the actor, the scene-painter, and the costumer are brought together and fused into a new thing, “the music of the future.” It is a terrific engine for the evocation and intensification of human feelings; in creating it, and forcing its recognition by the world, Wagner performed a Titan’s task. He was born in 1813, which made him thirty-five years of age when the revolution of 1848 drove King Louis Philippe from the throne of France and sent an impulse of revolt all over Europe. Wagner at this time was the conductor of the Royal Opera House at Dresden, having a life position with a good salary and a pension. Previous to that time he had had a ghastly struggle with poverty; a young and unknown genius, he had almost starved to death in a garret in Paris. He had married an actress, who had no understanding whatever of his power, but who had starved with him, and now clung with frenzy to security. He himself had the full consciousness of his destiny as an artist; he had already written three great operas, and had sketched his later works. He had thus every reason in the world to protect his future, and to shelter himself behind the art for art’s sake formula.