So things went on.  Richard’s mother, Richard, Louise, Ottilie and Caecilie formed the household; Uncle Adolph and Aunt Sophie lived not far off; and they had plenty of friends.  They lived at first in the Pichhof outside the Halle gate and later removed into the town.  Richard wandered about the city, seeking the scenes of his babyhood; and his mother pointed out to him the spot where she saw Napoleon rush off, without his hat, to make his:  escape after the battle of liberation, while Richard was in his cradle.  The Rannstadt gate, where his grandfather spent his life collecting dues, was still standing, though it was soon to vanish; and the house of the Red and White Lion on the Bruehl, where Richard was born, was now in the very heart of the Jew quarter.  The costumes, speech and gesticulation of these strange animals left an indelible impression on him, and were, perhaps, incidentally responsible for the notorious Judaism in Music of 1850, and all the fallacies contained in that deplorable essay.  Richard got his own way in most things, and the seeds were sown of the self-confidence, egotism, selfishness—­call it what you will—­that was to carry him through unheard-of difficulties and troubles in later life, and was often, unfortunately, to show as an objectionable, even odious, feature in his character.  He still laboured at his tragedy, killing off his personages and turning their noses into dust with the careless facility and cheerfulness of buoyant boyhood.  He had always been fond of roaming the country, and he continued to nourish that love of the pleasant earth which forced him to keep up the habit all his life and resulted in the glorious pictorial music of the Ring.  He struggled in vain to conquer the piano-keys, and, indifferent to the fable of the fox and the grapes, came to the satisfying conclusion that the instrument was not worth mastering.  We must remember that through Louise he was in constant touch with the theatre, and it is evident that he kept up the connection after her marriage to Brockhaus the bookseller in 1828, for when the theatre was entirely reformed next year Rosalie came as a principal lady and Heinrich Dorn, who speedily became his friend, as conductor.  Drama, literature, school-tasks, open-air rambles, talks with Uncle Adolph—­these constituted his life.  Now another element was to enter and overwhelm all the rest.

CHAPTER III

EARLY LIFE (CONTINUED)

I

In the second half of the eighteenth century some enthusiasts at Leipzig had founded a series of concerts, with a very small orchestra, which were given in “Apel’s house”; in 1781 they migrated to the Gewandhaus, and by this name the concerts were afterwards known.  In still later days Mendelssohn became conductor, and for brilliance and neatness the concerts were famous throughout the world; then Reinecke came and they became the most slovenly in the world—­in this fine quality of slovenliness not even our London Philharmonic Society could hope to rival them; also, as Reinecke was an acrid reactionary, no modern music could get a hearing there.  However, that did not greatly matter; and the world owes the Gewandhaus concerts an everlasting debt of gratitude.