I

As the springtide of 1813 was melting into early summer the poet and musician of spring days and summer nights was born at the house of the Red and White Lion on the Bruehl in old Leipzig.  The precise date was May 22; and owing to many causes the 16th of August came round before, at the church of St. Thomas, the child was christened Wilhelm Richard Wagner.  The events and circumstances of the period have furnished the imaginative with many striking portents with regard to the future mighty composer; and, to do the prophets full justice, after the event—­long after the event—­they have widely opened their mouths and uttered prophecies.  Thus the name of the house, describing a beast such as never was on sea or land, distinctly warned a drowsy people that the monstrous dragon of Siegfried was about to take the road leading from Nowhere to Bayreuth.  The spring foretold the songs in Tannhaeuser and the Valkyrie; the summer, the nights in King Mark’s Cornish castle-garden and amongst the fragrant lime-trees in the streets of ancient Nuremberg; the horrors of the war raging at the very gates of Leipzig and Napoleon’s flight, the advent of the preacher who was to earn a long exile by advising the Saxon soldiers not to shoot their brethren.  Events provided material for these and many another score of prognostications:  only, fortunately, no one read events rightly at the time, and something fresh was left for the biographers to expend their ingenuity upon.

Richard Wagner came of a German lower middle-class stock.  There is not amongst his ancestry a single man distinguished in letters or any art.  His uncle Adolph, of whom some Bayreuth gentlemen make much, would not be remembered had he not been Wagner’s uncle.  Only by patient research has it been discovered that one or more of his forebears could so much as play the organ.  His father was an amateur theatrical enthusiast, and he too would have been utterly forgotten had he not been Wagner’s father.  His stepfather—­though this seems hardly to the point—­was an actor and portrait-painter; and his one claim to remembrance is that he was Wagner’s stepfather.  So, however scientifically minded we may be, however strongly disposed to account for the sudden appearance of a stupendous genius by the cheap and easy method of pointing to some distinguished ancestor and talking pompously of the laws of heredity, in Wagner’s case we are baffled and beaten.  He came like a thunderbolt out of a blue sky.  We must be content with the fact that he came.  His father and grandfather were state or municipal officials both; and bearing in mind Wagner’s frank detestation of officialdom, the scientist can scarcely draw much comfort from that.