But nothing came of all these fine propositions ; they were
not even examined, and Wagner, irritated at the small amount
of attention which his labors excited, turned more than ever
towards the revolutionary party. He consorted with several
of his leaders, with Semper, director of the school of archi-
tecture; with Kichly, the philologist; with Roeckel, director
of a new democratic journal ; he joined secret societies, and
went away to deliver a grand discourse at the Dresdener
Vaterlandsverein, with the object of giving the projected
revolution more of an artistic and less of a political character ;
for which he was regarded by the leaders of the party as a
visionary and shallow-pated artist. For his part, he did not
judge them much more favorably, and allowed them to see it;
but he had none the less received a reprimand for his conduct
from the authorities, who judged that a royal capellmeister had
something better to do than to go about haranguing at the
clubs. At this moment of his life, isolated in a society which
could not understand him, he had conceived the idea of
depicting his own voluntary annihilation in a drama of Jesus
of Nazarethy in which Jesus would not have been a God
descended upon earth to die, but a man capable of enjoying
life, and whom the unworthiness of this world had so dis-
gusted, that he sought death as a deliverance. He did not
carry out this idea for a poem, because, as he says, a drama of
that nature would have, been forbidden bylaw, since society
would not have submitted to so radical a change.
