He became the intimate friend and pensioner of the king of Bavaria; and for this king he wrote a highly confidential paper entitled “Of the State and Religion,” wherein he explained that he had once been a Socialist, but he now saw that the masses were gross and dull, incapable of high achievement. The problem was to get them to serve ends which they did not understand; they must be deceived, they must have illusions. The first mass-illusion was patriotism; they must be taught to reverence their king. The second mass-illusion was religion; they must believe they were obeying the will of God. The difficulty of government lay in the fact that the ruling class must see the truth, they could not believe either in the State or in God. For them there must be the higher illusions of the Wagnerian art. Needless to say, for this secret service King Ludwig paid generously, and we find Wagner spending his pension--I cite one item, three hundred yards of satin of thirteen carefully specified colors, at a cost of three thousand florins! He had craved luxury all his life, and in the end he got it--not merely silks and satins and velvets, for which he had a sort of insanity, but all kinds of splendor and homage, with kings and emperors to attend the opening performances of his operas. When the Franco-Prussian war breaks out we find our Siegfried-Bakunin drinking the cup of military glory and pouring out a “Kaiser-march”; we find him stooping to an operatic libretto in which he casts odium upon all the genius of France, not sparing even Victor Hugo. He reads Schopenhauer, and decides that he is a pessimist, and has always been a pessimist, and he tries to reinterpret his revolutionary “Ring” accordingly. He composes a religious festival play, a mixture of Christian mysticism and Buddhist fatalism, called “Parsival,” which made the fortune of his Bayreuth enterprise, a play-house built out of funds subscribed by his admirers. Wagner lived to old age, full of honors, and left a widow and a son, poetically named Siegfried. The widow died recently, but the son still survives, to bask in his father’s glory, and to gather in the shekels of the music pilgrims. It is possible to appreciate to the full the sublimity of the revolutionary Wagner without paying reverence to this family institution which he has left behind, or for the hordes of “Schwaermer” who come to eat sausages and drink beer and revel in emotions which they have no idea of applying to life. Is there anything in all the tragedies imagined by Richard Wagner more tragic than the fate which has befallen the young Siegfried-Bakunin--whose prestige and tradition are now the financial mainstay of the White Terror in Germany, the Jew-baiting, Communist-shooting mob of the “Hakenkreutzler,” or Bavarian Fascisti? CHAPTER LXVIII THE GOSPEL OF SILENCE