VI
After the Paris articles of 1841 Wagner wrote little or nothing upon the æsthetics of his art for some ten years. For a time, indeed, he wrote practically no prose of any kind. He left Paris for Dresden in April 1842. At the end of that year he wrote his Autobiographical Sketch for Laube's Zeitung für die elegante Welt. His pen was then silent until 1844, in which year we have the Account of the bringing home of Weber's remains from London to Dresden, and the Speech at Weber's Grave. To 1846 belongs the programme he wrote for the performance of Beethoven's choral symphony on Palm Sunday at Dresden.[326] No doubt his duties at the Dresden Opera, which he seems to have fulfilled with great thoroughness and conscientiousness, left him little time for anything else but these and the composition of Tannhäuser and Lohengrin. When he at length took up the pen again it was not to expound a system of musical æsthetics but to preach a social evangel, and to come to the first grips with the new dramatic ideas that had been slowly maturing in him. In May 1848 he submits to the Minister his Project for the Organisation of a German National Theatre for the Kingdom of Saxony. In September he sketches two operatic poems, Siegfried's Death and Friedrich Barbarossa, the former of which he works out in detail by November. Early in January the religious drama Jesus of Nazareth is sketched. In the summer of 1848 he writes the essay on the Wibelungen.
During these years his discontent with the social and political conditions of the times had been slowly rising. Though it would be unfair to Wagner to attribute this discontent solely to the miserable circumstances of his own life, it is certain that his poverty, his debts and his disappointments had a good deal to do with making him a rebel against the established order of things. Mr. H. S. Chamberlain holds that Wagner was already a "revolutionist against the artistic world of the present" in Paris in 1840. It is quite possible, for Wagner was even poorer in Paris at that time than he was a few years later in Dresden. Gustav Levy agrees with Mr. Chamberlain, but even his own sympathetic summary of the case unconsciously makes it clear that Wagner's personal experiences and circumstances had something to do with making a revolutionary of him. "Beginning of November (1847), Wagner returns (from Berlin)[327] in a state of discouragement. The incessant difficulties in the way of winning appreciation for his works, and his consequently ever-increasing financial embarrassments, as well as the persistent enmity of the press, the lack of support he received from Meyerbeer, and the refusal of Lüttichau[328] to take up his reform of the Opera, bring on an illness: he thinks of suicide. Everything in him presses powerfully towards the spiritual revolution, to the freeing of art from the fetters of un-German feeling and conventional, deeply-rooted ignorance (Unverstand)."[329]