ittle appreciated; and he was one of the first Germans to discover
the worth of Moerike, whom, later on, he made popular in Germany. Besides
this, he read English and French writers. He liked Rabelais, and was
very partial to Claude Tillier, the French novelist of the provinces,
whose _Oncle Benjamin_ has given pleasure to so many German provincial
families, by bringing before them, as Wolf said, the vision of their own
little world, and helping them by his own jovial good humour to bear
their troubles with a smiling face. And so little Wolf, with hardly
enough to eat, found the means of learning both French and English, in
order better to appreciate the thoughts of foreign artists.

In music he learned a great deal from his friend Schalk,[184] a
professor at the Vienna Conservatoire; but, like Berlioz, he got most of
his education from the libraries, and spent months in reading the scores
of the great masters. Not having a piano, he used to carry Beethoven's
sonatas to the Prater Park in Vienna and study them on a bench in the
open air. He soaked himself in the classics--in Bach and Beethoven, and
the German masters of the _Lied_--Schubert and Schumann. He was one of
the young Germans who was passionately fond of Berlioz; and it is due to
Wolf that France was afterwards honoured in the possession of this great
artist, whom French critics, whether of the school of Meyerbeer, Wagner,
Franck, or Debussy, have never understood. He was also early a friend of
old Anton Bruckner, whose music we do not know in France, neither his
eight symphonies, nor his _Te Deum_, nor his masses, nor his cantatas,
nor anything else of his fertile work. Bruckner had a sweet and modest
character, and an endearing, if rather childish, personality. He was
rather crushed all his life by the Brahms party; but, like Franck in
France, he gathered round him new and original talent to fight the
academic art of his time.

[Footnote 184: Joseph Schalk was one of the founders of the
_Wagner-Verein_ at Vienna, and devoted his life to propagating the cult
of Bruckner (who called him his "_Herr Generalissimus_ "), and to
fighting for Wolf.]

But of all these influences, the strongest was that of Wagner. Wagner
came to Vienna in 1875 to conduct _Tannhaeuser_ and _Lohengrin_. There
was then among the younger people a fever of enthusiasm similar to that
which _Werther_ had caused a century before. Wolf saw Wagner. He tells
us about it in his letters to his p