h of August came round before,
at the church of St. Thomas, the child was christened Wilhelm Richard
Wagner. The events and circumstances of the period have furnished the
imaginative with many striking portents with regard to the future
mighty composer; and, to do the prophets full justice, after the
event--long after the event--they have widely opened their mouths and
uttered prophecies. Thus the name of the house, describing a beast
such as never was on sea or land, distinctly warned a drowsy people
that the monstrous dragon of _Siegfried_ was about to take the road
leading from Nowhere to Bayreuth. The spring foretold the songs in
_Tannhaeuser_ and the _Valkyrie_; the summer, the nights in King
Mark's Cornish castle-garden and amongst the fragrant lime-trees in
the streets of ancient Nuremberg; the horrors of the war raging at the
very gates of Leipzig and Napoleon's flight, the advent of the
preacher who was to earn a long exile by advising the Saxon soldiers
not to shoot their brethren. Events provided material for these and
many another score of prognostications: only, fortunately, no one read
events rightly at the time, and something fresh was left for the
biographers to expend their ingenuity upon.

Richard Wagner came of a German lower middle-class stock. There is not
amongst his ancestry a single man distinguished in letters or any art.
His uncle Adolph, of whom some Bayreuth gentlemen make much, would not
be remembered had he not been Wagner's uncle. Only by patient research
has it been discovered that one or more of his forebears could so much
as play the organ. His father was an amateur theatrical enthusiast,
and he too would have been utterly forgotten had he not been Wagner's
father. His stepfather--though this seems hardly to the point--was an
actor and portrait-painter; and his one claim to remembrance is that
he was Wagner's stepfather. So, however scientifically minded we may
be, however strongly disposed to account for the sudden appearance of
a stupendous genius by the cheap and easy method of pointing to some
distinguished ancestor and talking pompously of the laws of heredity,
in Wagner's case we are baffled and beaten. He came like a
thunderbolt out of a blue sky. We must be content with the fact that
he came. His father and grandfather were state or municipal officials
both; and bearing in mind Wagner's frank detestation of officialdom,
the scientist can scarcely draw much comfort from that.