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