s simple, but
may be passed over in a few words. Wagner's income in Riga had not
been large--300 roubles--and it had been mostly swallowed up by his
German creditors; and even in the town he managed to owe money. ("Was
ever poet so trusted?" asked Dr. Johnson, referring to Goldsmith). Had
he given notice of his intended departure his Riga creditors could
have stopped him; so when the company returned to Riga after their
annual summer series of representations in Mittau Wagner did not
return. He made what is, I believe, called a "bee-line" for the
frontier, met there a friend, one Moeller, who helped him to dodge the
sentries and patrols, and in a few days reached Arnau. Very little
later, in July 1839, he, Minna and Robber the dog took ship at Pillau
and set sail for England. The date is one of the most memorable in the
lives of the musicians--quite as worthy of remembrance as the day on
which Haydn boarded the packet at Calais. Haydn's powers had been
ripened in the sunshine of Mozart's genius, but it is doubtful
whether, save for England, the twelve great symphonies would have been
written; Wagner's powers were beginning to ripen, but it is hardly
doubtful that the _Dutchman_ would never have been written but for the
voyage to England.

If he could have afforded it he probably would have travelled to Paris
by land. But travelling by land was quite out of the question; money
was then, as ever, scarce with Richard, and he realized that the
longest way round was the shortest--nay, the only--way there. He had
over three weeks of life on the ocean wave, and did not like it and
had no reason to like it. Uproarious storms raged unceasingly; the
ship was driven amongst the Norwegian crags for shelter; and the gloom
of these black, forbidding sea-precipices and fiords took possession
of his soul, mixing and giving pictorial shape to the weird old legend
of the phantom sailor doomed for ever to wander on the grey seas.
Glasenapp points out in an admirable passage that Sandwike, where
Daland goes ashore, is the name of the place where Wagner's ship put
in and he and the crew were regaled by a lonely miller with rum. There
is no rum in the _Dutchman_, but the atmosphere, terror and mystery of
the seas and rocky fiords of Norway are all there; and it was these
that inspired the _Dutchman_. He knew the tale in Heine's form of it,
and had thought of adapting it; but it was the sea gave the idea birth
in his imagination: without the