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 could 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