it was, and that Geyer in his grave went on helping those he loved.  Julius was safely bestowed at Eisleben; and the widow had Clara, Ottilie, Richard and Caecilie to look after—­quite enough, it is true, and calling for all the resources of her housewifery to make ends meet; but, still, nothing like the burden Geyer had taken up so courageously a few years before.  How much Rosalie and Albert could spare out of the small salaries paid in those—­and still paid in these—­days by German theatres is a matter entirely for conjecture:  it cannot have amounted to a mighty sum, the main point is that it served.  I deal with these details, because at the first glance one is puzzled to know however the family managed to pull through at all and avoid the workhouse.

At first Richard was sent to his step-uncle Geyer at Eisleben, where, he himself says, he did little in the way of learning.  Geyer tried to persuade him to work at his books and sent him to a school kept by one Alt, promising him he should go to the Kreuzschule at Dresden; but he had grown too fond of doing his reading on out-of-the-way lines; he was fond also of roaming the countryside.  There was endless trouble in discovering what to do with him and what to make of him.  At last a time came when Uncle Geyer could no longer keep him; and in response to inquiries Uncle Adolph answered virtually that he could and would do nothing.  So towards the end of 1822 Richard was sent home to Dresden, and there on December 2 he was entered at the Kreuzschule as Richard Geyer.  This, let me remark in passing, was and is common enough when a widowed mother has married a second time.  Several such cases are within my own experience; and malicious snarls at Wagner’s double name, as though at some period he had gone under an alias, are purely futile and worthy only of an advocate with a desperate case.

With this Wagner’s period of infancy ends and he enters on that of boyhood—­his life begins.  Henceforth we shall hear less of other members of his family—­though they will by no means drop out of the story completely, or all but completely, as they did when he came to his marrying days.

CHAPTER II

EARLY BOYHOOD

I

So far all we can learn about Wagner that is worth knowing amounts to this:  he was born into and passed his first years in the precincts of Bohemia, where the Bohemian atmosphere was tempered with officialism, court-etiquette, and the influence of a methodical and resolutely conscientious stepfather.  When Richard became a man and wrote on the theatre and theatrical life he showed an intimate knowledge of all details hardly possible to one who had not gone through this early experience:  scores of things that an ordinary educated Englishman learns with considerable surprise were to him the merest matters of course.  When an English composer resolves to write an opera,