somewhat difficult to realize what things were like throughout Europe in 1843-49.  Perhaps the nearest approach to a true idea may be formed by those who heard our own precious Philharmonic Society under the late Cusins.  As in London in the ’eighties, so in Dresden in the ’forties.  Callous indifference to the beauty of fine music and complete slovenliness in every detail of the rendering of it went hand in hand.  If Europe to-day is stocked with competent conductors, that is a debt we owe to Wagner.  Himself one of the greatest conductors who has lived, he almost created a new art, and by his immediate and direct example and through his pupils Buelow, Richter, Levi and Seidl, not to mention his influence on Liszt, he certainly created the school which has now ousted the older inartistic men.  It was precisely this fact that maddened the older men and their friends.

Another discomforting circumstance was Wagner’s intense Germanism.  It was through his efforts that Weber’s remains were brought from the Roman Church in Moorfields and re-interred in Dresden (December, 1844); for the ceremony he compiled some funeral music and delivered an oration.  He was not content to claim Germany for the Germans:  he claimed all Europe, or at least all European art, for the Germans.  The Germans themselves were contentedly jogging on with the hybrid music of Spontini, Bellini, Donizetti, Meyerbeer and Mendelssohn; and Wagner never tired of telling them to create an art of their own, or really he would have to do it for them.  He did as well as talked and wrote; he produced the nearest thing he could find to pure German opera—­for instance, Marschner’s Adolph von Nassau in 1845.  Of course, he ceased not to press Weber upon his audiences; and Weber at that period appears to have gone temporarily out of favour.  Wagner lived in an atmosphere of depreciation and disapprobation which must have got upon his nerves and hastened the catastrophe—­that of his taking active part in the attempted revolution.  Sneers from artistic enemies outside; whimpering and nagging inside because he would not conform to court rules, and seek popularity as a good livery-wearing conductor should—­no wonder he gave a sigh of relief at quitting Dresden.

He had no option.  The Prussian troops were ruthless; the judges were paid to “punish” those whose crime was fighting for their ordinary rights; and as the judges’ billets would not have been worth twenty minutes’ purchase if they had not obeyed orders, they cheerfully obeyed them.  It is a fine thing to accept a handsome salary to do dirty work and to call the doing of it doing your “duty”:  duty is a fine word that has covered a million crimes since it was invented.  Bakunin, who said Richard Wagner was “a visionary”—­obviously meaning a harmless fool—­and many others got long terms of imprisonment.  Wagner had left the town without leave, and for that offence he was dismissed from his post at the opera.  Next, the police issued a warrant for his arrest.