The problem of getting away from Russia was by no means simple, but may be passed over in a few words.  Wagner’s income in Riga had not been large—­300 roubles—­and it had been mostly swallowed up by his German creditors; and even in the town he managed to owe money. ("Was ever poet so trusted?” asked Dr. Johnson, referring to Goldsmith).  Had he given notice of his intended departure his Riga creditors could have stopped him; so when the company returned to Riga after their annual summer series of representations in Mittau Wagner did not return.  He made what is, I believe, called a “bee-line” for the frontier, met there a friend, one Moeller, who helped him to dodge the sentries and patrols, and in a few days reached Arnau.  Very little later, in July 1839, he, Minna and Robber the dog took ship at Pillau and set sail for England.  The date is one of the most memorable in the lives of the musicians—­quite as worthy of remembrance as the day on which Haydn boarded the packet at Calais.  Haydn’s powers had been ripened in the sunshine of Mozart’s genius, but it is doubtful whether, save for England, the twelve great symphonies would have been written; Wagner’s powers were beginning to ripen, but it is hardly doubtful that the Dutchman would never have been written but for the voyage to England.

If he could have afforded it he probably would have travelled to Paris by land.  But travelling by land was quite out of the question; money was then, as ever, scarce with Richard, and he realized that the longest way round was the shortest—­nay, the only—­way there.  He had over three weeks of life on the ocean wave, and did not like it and had no reason to like it.  Uproarious storms raged unceasingly; the ship was driven amongst the Norwegian crags for shelter; and the gloom of these black, forbidding sea-precipices and fiords took possession of his soul, mixing and giving pictorial shape to the weird old legend of the phantom sailor doomed for ever to wander on the grey seas.  Glasenapp points out in an admirable passage that Sandwike, where Daland goes ashore, is the name of the place where Wagner’s ship put in and he and the crew were regaled by a lonely miller with rum.  There is no rum in the Dutchman, but the atmosphere, terror and mystery of the seas and rocky fiords of Norway are all there; and it was these that inspired the Dutchman.  He knew the tale in Heine’s form of it, and had thought of adapting it; but it was the sea gave the idea birth in his imagination:  without the sea the Dutchman is inconceivable.  The Dutchman, the whole of the Ring and the Mastersingers of Nuremberg are all operas in which the scenic environment is the inspiration.  Depend upon it, ere the ship had freed the Sound, and got into the comparative safety of the open North Sea, the Dutchman legend had formed itself in his mind ready for dramatic treatment.