I

When Wagner left Paris on the proceeds of some work for Schlesinger which still remained to be done, he had learnt three lessons.  The first, that it was foolish for an unknown man to go off into unknown lands, proved useful for a time.  That is, for a time he put up with many vexations rather than undertake such adventures.  No one likes to be starved and to see his wife starving, Wagner least of all men; and we shall see that, once settled in Dresden, he set his teeth and grinned and bore up against lack of appreciation and against actual insult, so determined was he that his Minna should, if possible, live in comfort.  This lesson had been emphasized by his experiences before he received a permanent appointment.  His creditors of the north, learning of the success of Rienzi, and little dreaming his profits to be L45, immediately began to worry him; and until he got the conductorship of the Royal opera-house his plight was little, if any, better than it was in the Paris days.  The second lesson was, that whatever might happen in the future, it was futile to raise his eyes to Paris:  Paris would not listen to him or to any sincere artist.  The third was that nothing was to be hoped at all from the modern opera.  That lesson he never forgot.  Unfortunately its teaching clashed with that of lesson number one, and for some time it was neglected.  But Dresden reinforced it as only a court-ridden town can, a town whose inhabitants were, almost to a man, the sort of flunkeys who hang around a Court.

Wagner did not wish to be kapellmeister—­on the contrary, wished most vigorously not to be kapellmeister.  What on earth he did wish to be, how he hoped to earn bread—­he who had had only one opera produced, and gained L45 by it:  it is idle to speculate concerning such questions.  Excepting that he laboured incessantly at his operas—­scheming and sketching, if not actually composing and writing—­he would seem at this stage of his growth to have been a Mr. Micawber, whose contemporary, of course, he was.  He flirted with von Luettichau, the intendant of the theatre, a fine specimen of a court barbarian.  Wagner neither would nor wouldn’t; and it was only when the theatre found it could not well do without him, and asked him to say definitely if he would, that he accepted the offer.  We can imagine how poor, stupid, unimaginative Minna would rejoice at the news.  She ought to have married a pork butcher, or would have behaved admirably as the mistress of a beerhouse or cafe; but as the wife of a man of genius—!  To be the wife of the kapellmeister of one of Germany’s principal opera-houses—­a court opera-house—­that was almost, if not quite, as good; and for the time she rested content with her lot.  And we may believe that Richard, too, felt a double gratification, even against his deepest and truest instincts.  The salary lifted a burden off his shoulders for a while; and was he not appointed to the very post his idol