Nothing but the most complete success, and nothing but the most beneficial revolution could justify such a creed or such a life as Wagner’s.  Both were eminently justified.  He reaped a superb reward, but he earned every mite of it.  When his days of power and of glory came, however, he spent them with another woman than the one who had gone through all his struggles with him; had suffered all that he suffered, without any aid from hope, without any belief in his personality or his creeds, supported only on the courage and the dog-like fidelity of a German Hausfrau to her Mann.

Wagner was as plainly destined for war as any Richard the Third, born with hair and teeth.  For he was born in the midst of the Napoleonic wars at Leipzig, in 1813, and the dead bodies on the battle-field were so many that they raised a pestilence, which carried off Wagner’s father when the child was six months old; and also threatened the life of his elder brother and of the babe himself.  His life was one long truceless war.  He once said to Edouard Schure:  “The only time I ever went to sea, I barely escaped shipwreck.  Should I go to America, I am sure the Atlantic would receive me with a cyclone.”

Wagner’s first love was his mother.  In fact, Praeger, his Boswell, said:  “I verily believe that he never loved any one else so deeply as his liebes Muetterchen.”  She must have been a woman of winning manners, for, though she had seven children, the oldest fourteen, she got another husband before her first one was a year in his grave; the second was an actor.  Wagner was so fond of his mother that through his life he never could see a Christmas tree alight without tears.

There were other loves that busied his heart.  He was remarkably fond of animals, particularly of dogs.  He suffered keenly when his parrot Papo died; he wrote his friend Uhlig:  “Ah, if I could say to you what has died for me in this devoted creature!  It matters nothing to me whether I am laughed at for this.”  His dog Peps died in his arms, and he wrote Praeger:  “I cried incessantly, and since then have felt bitter pain and sorrow for the dear friend of the past thirteen years, who has walked and worked with me.”  One of Wagner’s last plans was to write a book to be called “A History of My Dogs.”  Anecdotes galore there are of his humanity to dogs and cats and other members of our larger family.

Wagner had also a famous passion for gorgeous colours; his music shows this.  He liked fine stuffs peculiarly, and even in his pauperdom wore silk next to his skin.  When fortune found him, he made a veritable rainbow of himself with his dressing-gowns, and even with many-coloured trousers.  His stomach was not so fond of luxury, and he was not addicted to wine or beer, and for long periods drank neither at all.  He injured his health by eating too fast, though this was not, as in Haendel’s case, from gluttony, but from absent-minded interest in his work.  Yet there is something strangely human and captivating in the story that, when he was eight years old, he traded off a volume of Schiller’s poems for a cream puff.