George Bernard Shaw - The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblungs Ring

In reading through this German version of my book in the Manuscript ofmy friend Siegfried Trebitsch, I was struck by the inadequacy of themerely negative explanation given by me of the irrelevance of NightFalls On The Gods to the general philosophic scheme of The Ring. Thatexplanation is correct as far as it goes; but, put as I put it, it nowseems to me to suggest that the operatic character of Night Falls OnThe Gods was the result of indifference or forgetfulness produced by thelapse of twenty-five years between the first projection of the work andits completion. Now it is clear that in whatever other ways Wagner mayhave changed, he never became careless and he never became indifferent.I have therefore inserted a new section in which I show how therevolutionary history of Western Europe from the Liberal explosion of1848 to the confused attempt at a socialist, military, and municipaladministration in Paris in 1871 (that is to say, from the beginning ofThe Niblung's Ring by Wagner to the long-delayed completion of NightFalls On The Gods), demonstrated practically that the passing away ofthe present order was going to be a much more complicated business thanit appears in Wagner's Siegfried. I have therefore interpolated a newchapter which will perhaps induce some readers of the original Englishtext to read the book again in German.

For some time to come, indeed, I shall have to refer English readers tothis German edition as the most complete in existence.

My obligation to Herr Trebitsch for making me a living German authorinstead of merely a translated English one is so great that I am boundto point out that he is not responsible for my views or Wagner's, andthat it is as an artist and a man of letters, and not as a propagandist,that he is conveying to the German speaking peoples political criticismswhich occasionally reflect on contemporary authorities with a Europeanreputation for sensitiveness. And as the very sympathy which makes histranslations so excellent may be regarded with suspicion, let me hastento declare I am bound to Germany by the ties that hold my nature moststrongly. Not that I like the average German: nobody does, even in hisown country. But then the average man is not popular anywhere; and asno German considers himself an average one, each reader will, as anexceptional man, sympathize with my dislike of the common herd. And ifI cannot love the typical modern German, I can at least pity andunderstand him. His worst fault is that he cannot see that it ispossible to have too much of a good thing. Being convinced that duty,industry, education, loyalty, patriotism and respectability aregood things (and I am magnanimous enough to admit that they are notaltogether bad things when taken in strict moderation at the righttime and in the right place), he indulges in them on all occasionsshamelessly and excessively. He commits hideous crimes when crime ispresented to him as part of his duty; his craze for work is more ruinousthan the craze for drink; when he can afford secondary education for hissons you find three out of every five of them with their minds lamedfor life by examinations which only a thoroughly wooden head could gothrough with impunity; and if a king is patriotic and respectable (fewkings are) he puts up statues to him and exalts him above Charlemagneand Henry the Fowler. And when he meets a man of genius, heinstinctively insults him, starves him, and, if possible, imprisons andkills him.

Now I do not pretend to be perfect myself. Heaven knows I have tostruggle hard enough every day with what the Germans call myhigher impulses. I know too well the temptation to be moral, to beself-sacrificing, to be loyal and patriotic, to be respectable andwell-spoken of. But I wrestle with it andas far as human fraility willallowconquer it, whereas the German abandons himself to it withoutscruple or reflection, and is actually proud of his pious intemperanceand self-indulgence. Nothing will cure him of this mania. It may endin starvation, crushing taxation, suppression of all freedom to trynew social experiments and reform obsolete institutions, in snobbery,jobbery, idolatry, and an omnipresent tyranny in which his doctor andhis schoolmaster, his lawyer and his priest, coerce him worse thanany official or drill sergeant: no matter: it is respectable, says theGerman, therefore it must be good, and cannot be carried too far;and everybody who rebels against it must be a rascal. Even theSocial-Democrats in Germany differ from the rest only in carryingacademic orthodoxy beyond human endurancebeyond even German endurance.I am a Socialist and a Democrat myself, the hero of a hundred platforms,one of the leaders of the most notable Socialist organizations inEngland. I am as conspicuous in English Socialism as Bebel is in GermanSocialism; but do you suppose that the German Social-Democrats tolerateme? Not a bit of it. I have begged again and again to be taken to thebosom of my German comrades. I have pleaded that the Super-Proletariansof all lands should unite. I have pointed out that the GermanSocial-Democratic party has done nothing at its Congresses for the lastten years except the things I told them to do ten years before, and thatits path is white with the bones of the Socialist superstitions I and myfellow Fabians have slain. Useless. They do not care a rap whether Iam a Socialist or not. All they want to know is; Am I orthodox? Am Icorrect in my revolutionary views? Am I reverent to the revolutionaryauthorities? Because I am a genuine free-thinker they look at me as apoliceman looks at a midnight prowler or as a Berlin bourgeois looksat a suspicious foreigner. They ask "Do you believe that Marx wasomniscient and infallible; that Engels was his prophet; that Bebel andSinger are his inspired apostles; and that Das Kapital is the Bible?"Hastening in my innocence to clear myself of what I regard as anaccusation of credulity and ignorance, I assure them earnestly thatI know ten times as much of economics and a hundred times as much ofpractical administration as Marx did; that I knew Engels personally andrather liked him as a witty and amiable old 1848 veteran who despisedmodern Socialism; that I regard Bebel and Singer as men of like passionswith myself, but considerably less advanced; and that I read Das Kapitalin the year 1882 or thereabouts, and still consider it one of themost important books of the nineteenth century because of its powerof changing the minds of those who read it, in spite of its unsoundcapitalist economics, its parade of quotations from books which theauthor had either not read or not understood, its affectation ofalgebraic formulas, and its general attempt to disguise a masterpieceof propagandist journalism and prophetic invective as a drily scientifictreatise of the sort that used to impose on people in 1860, when anybook that pretended to be scientific was accepted as a Bible. In thosedays Darwin and Helmholtz were the real fathers of the Church; andnobody would listen to religion, poetry or rhetoric; so that evenSocialism had to call itself "scientific," and predict the date of therevolution, as if it were a comet, by calculations founded on "historiclaws."