did not loom
nearly so large before the eyes of the people as these composers do:
the names of Salieri, Marschner, Meyerbeer, Spontini, Spohr and Weber
would be much more familiar than his; even in Vienna he was regarded
mainly as a deaf, surly old crank who had the support of highly placed
personages. So there is the amazing fact: Wagner, who worshipped
Weber's operas, had not, when fourteen years old, heard of the
existence of a musician a thousand times mightier than Weber. The
great hour was at hand.

First, however, he had to pass through a period of boyish disgust and
disappointment. At Dresden he had been a favourite with his masters,
and had worked hard. His own account of the methods, temper, and
intellectual qualifications of his masters seems to me eminently
reasonable. Their aim was to bring out whatever was best in their
pupils. His account of his first masters at Leipzig similarly bears
the stamp of truthfulness. They were a set of conceited academics
with only two ideas in the world: first, that they were the very
finest flower of Teutonic culture; second, that they must so impose
their personalities on the boys, so impress them with their ideal,
that every pupil would carry to his dying hour the stamp of the
culture of the Nicolai school. Utterly unsympathetic, narrow beyond
the dreams of the narrowest of modern schoolmasters, they were
frankly, virulently hostile to any one in whom they perceived--as they
always did perceive with the unerring instinct of stupidity to detect
cleverness--the smallest trace of originality of character, thought or
outlook on life. As a rule they seem to have been successful in
achieving their aim. An old German friend of mine told me he had
calculated that the Nicolai school turned out in ten years more
complete, complacent blockheads than any other school in Germany had
turned out in half-a-century; and my friend gave me many notable
instances of men who had soon won the proud distinction of being
unmistakable pupils of the Nicolai school. There were rebels, and
Wagner makes it clear that he was amongst them. To begin with, he had
been in the second class at the Kreuzschule. The more effectually to
imbue him with the Nicolai ambition of becoming a scholar, _i.e._ a
pedant, and a complete, if sausage-munching, German gentleman of the
period, they degraded him to the third. No doubt there were protests:
one cannot believe that Wagner the boy any more than Wagner the man
c