event.  Ask, reader, ask any of your friends to give an account of some striking occurrence of a year ago.  In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred it will not tally with yours.  You may be wrong or your friend may be wrong:  in either case some one’s memory has played a trick.  In this book I have omitted many a dozen picturesque touches, simply because there is no proof of their truth and every probability that they are false.  It is perhaps enough to remember that the hopes of liberty were crushed, that Roeckel, Wagner’s assistant and friend, was taken and afterwards sentenced to a long term of imprisonment, and that Wagner had to run for safety.  From every point of view it was as well he got away from Dresden.  If he had not got away he would have shared Roeckel’s martyrdom.  Had the revolution succeeded, a terrible disillusionment would have been his share of the spoils:  the revolutionists thought a fine opera of no more importance than did their enemies, and had Richard asked to be set up in his kingdom he would have quickly found the defenders of liberty as adroit in evading him and his claims as any court flunkeys could be.  It was well he got away from Dresden also because, as he afterwards said, the court livery had grown too tight for him.  He had had a comfortable income, and had he not been Richard Wagner he might have vegetated happily, in the Reissiger way, for life.  Minna would have been content.  Being Richard Wagner, he felt his soul strangled; and that Minna had for some time been worrying about what he might do next is shown by his remark to a friend—­that other people had their enemies outside their houses:  his enemy sat at his own table.

III

Things had not gone well at the theatre.  In spite of performances never before equalled in the town—­nay, probably because of them—­he had enemies all around, especially in the Jew-controlled press.  His carefulness about rehearsals was called fussiness; his determination that the singers should not at their own sweet pleasure mar fine operas with interpolations, alterations and “liberties” generally, was called interference with their rights.  Even when he played Beethoven’s Pastoral and Ninth Symphonies, as they had never been given before, he was impertinently taken to task by press scribblers for departing from the Mendelssohn tradition.  I have already expressed the opinion that Judaism in Music was a huge mistake; yet one must own that when one considers how the Jews consistently attacked him for venturing to challenge inferior Jew composers and conductors on their own ground, the thing seems almost excusable.  At any rate, it is surprising that he dealt so tenderly with Mendelssohn.  There is one point always to be borne in mind.  Wagner was assailed at this time not so much qua composer as qua conductor.  Now we of the generation of to-day—­the younger members, anyhow—­are so accustomed to really able conductors, that it is