ould refrain from declamation under a grievance; but with such
impervious skulls and thick hides protests would be unavailing. The
mischief was done: he was numbered amongst the rebels, the lost souls,
the unhappy beings who dared to have notions of their own. He
neglected his studies and sought refuge in his drama. I wonder if he
found, or made, an opportunity of satirizing his precious professors
in it.

At home his life cannot have been much better. Good Hausfrau Geyer
cannot have understood where the shoe pinched: she can only have seen
how he was wasting his time. The tragedy was discovered and there seem
to have been solemn family deliberations regarding the probable fate
of the reprobate. His Uncle Adolph seems to have acted as the great
consoler. He, at any rate, knew better than to think a boy was on the
way to the bottomless pit simply because he could not get on with a
gang of dull pedagogues. Now and later he lectured Richard in a kindly
if sententious way; and he must have fostered the boy's natural strong
spirit of revolt. Adolph loathed authority, especially the authority
of irresponsible court officials; and in some of his preserved letters
he lashes these gentry, the scum of humanity and the parasites of
courts, with scathing sarcasm. His sarcasm had no practical result,
because the officials never saw it--if they had they would have
shrugged their fat shoulders and gone to draw their comfortable
salaries. But he taught Wagner that officialdom is the curse of the
human race; and in after years that certainly had some practical
results--at the moment calamitous to Wagner; in the long run
beneficial to him and the human race. Perhaps of all forms of
authority that which Adolph found least tolerable, that which he
taught Richard to loathe and hate and spit upon, was official
authority in art matters. Nowadays, when public opinion counts for
something, when those who pay the taxes insist on having some small
say as to the way in which they are spent, the intendant of a German
theatre is by no means the lordly court-parasite he was once. Yet even
now he often flouts his paymasters, feeling fairly secure under court
protection. We can easily imagine the high-and-mighty jack-in-office
he must have been in Adolph's time.

Wherever he made his power felt it blasted honest art and checked
honest art endeavour. It was fitting that Richard should have dinned
into him--as I have no doubt he did--his uncle's views