Wagner wrote the words of these four operas immediately after the Dresden revolution; the poem was privately published four years after his flight from the city. During the years of his exile he affords us a sublime example of a great man contending with obstacles for the sake of an ideal. He went ahead to compose his masterpiece in the face of poverty and debt, ridicule and ignominy. His works were absolutely new, they required an absolutely new method of presentation; so, even when he could get a chance of production, he had to face the stupidity and malice of singers and conductors and managers, who were sure in their own conceit and resented instructions from an upstart. We find him in 1860, almost at the end of his exile, receiving from Louis Napoleon an opportunity to put on “Tannhäuser” in Paris. Now this opera is a music sermon in reprehension of sensual love; it portrays the ruin and ultimate repentance of a medieval knight who is lured into the Venusburg, the lurking place of the old heathen goddess. And this Sunday school lesson in music was to be presented in the great opera house, whose boxes were rented by members of the Jockey Club, the gilded youth of Paris who supported the opera in order to provide publicity for their mistresses in the ballet! The clash was embittered by the fact that the members of the Jockey Club came late from their supper-parties, and wanted to see their mistresses dance; therefore it was an iron-clad law of the opera that the ballet came in the second act. But in Wagner’s Sunday school lesson the knight is lured into the Venusburg in the first act, and the composer stubbornly refused to change his story. Therefore the young gentlemen of the Jockey Club yelled and hooted and blew penny-whistles all through the performance, and kept that up night after night. They even took the trouble to come on Sunday to make sure of breaking up Wagner’s show. It would be pleasant to have to record that this hero of the social revolution stood by his guns until the end of his life; but alas, he weakened, and sold out completely to the enemy. Bernard Shaw excuses him on the ground that the social revolution was not yet ready, and that the revolutionists were impractical men. But I say that it was Wagner’s task to help make the social revolution ready, and to train the revolutionists by setting them an example of probity. Instead of that, he decided that the establishing of his own reputation was more important than the salvation of society. He accepted amnesty from the Saxon king, and came back and made himself into a great captain of the music industry, and a national and patriotic hero.