In the life of a being so extraordinary as Wagner it is not surprising that he took many steps, each of which seemed the most momentous in his career; but I think on the whole we must reckon this one, from the amateur enthusiast to the fully equipped professional musician, the most important.  How long he would have been about it but for Weinlig’s timely aid cannot be said.  He was steeping himself in Beethoven.  He could not play the piano, but he could read scores:  Heinrich Dorn declared that he copied those of the overtures with his own hands.  He arranged the Ninth Symphony and offered it to Schott, who declined it, of course.  Another arrangement, for four hands, was afterwards accepted by Breitkopf, in exchange, it would seem, for a copy of the full score of the same work.  Possibly he had borrowed the copy he worked from—­or thumbed it until it fell to pieces.  Dorn said he never came across such a Beethoven enthusiast, and he felt sure something would come of it.  We know something did come of it.  Weinlig had taught him the principles of musical form as well as harmony and counterpoint, and thus made the grasping of the plan of each masterpiece an easier task; and to Weinlig the world owes a huge debt of gratitude.  Richard acknowledged the debt; and after Weinlig’s death in 1842 he dedicated The Love-feast of the Apostles to his widow.

II

Richard, when he was some years older, said bluntly he cared little for his family; and some of the Wagner-mad Bayreuth host point out that the family did little for him and did not understand him.  One might ask why they should be expected to do much:  they had plenty to do in looking after themselves.  But no questions and no appeals to sweet reasonableness are needed, for the very patent fact is that his family helped him to the uttermost limit of their means.  Geyer first, his widowed mother afterwards, then Rosalie and his brother Albert, without a doubt Louise—­all did their best to make his young existence comfortable and happy.  He got a much better education than in that epoch fell to the lot of the average student belonging to a family of such straitened means; when he wanted lessons in music he got them, and if the family did not pay for them I don’t know who did.  He was fed, clothed and apparently provided with pocket-money to hold his own with his fellow-students until at the age of twenty he began to earn a little money for himself; and it was Albert who gave him his first appointment.  Long after then he drained their resources and the resources of the families into which his sisters had married.  Wagner, as I have observed, was a spoiled boy and was made utterly selfish; and as years went on and he came to think music the salvation of Germany, and himself the salvation of music, by a simple logical process he arrived at a conclusion which justified his selfishness—­namely, that it was every one’s duty to support him,