salaries.  But he taught Wagner that officialdom is the curse of the human race; and in after years that certainly had some practical results—­at the moment calamitous to Wagner; in the long run beneficial to him and the human race.  Perhaps of all forms of authority that which Adolph found least tolerable, that which he taught Richard to loathe and hate and spit upon, was official authority in art matters.  Nowadays, when public opinion counts for something, when those who pay the taxes insist on having some small say as to the way in which they are spent, the intendant of a German theatre is by no means the lordly court-parasite he was once.  Yet even now he often flouts his paymasters, feeling fairly secure under court protection.  We can easily imagine the high-and-mighty jack-in-office he must have been in Adolph’s time.

Wherever he made his power felt it blasted honest art and checked honest art endeavour.  It was fitting that Richard should have dinned into him—­as I have no doubt he did—­his uncle’s views on these heroes; for later Richard had a fair amount of fighting to do with them, and in the end it was he more than any other one man who broke their power for ever by appealing to the great public.  This attitude is due to Richard’s preaching and example; and he learnt it from Uncle Adolph.  In one other respect Adolph’s influence was good:  he opened out to Richard’s vision immense fields of literature that the youngster had never heard of.  I have previously mentioned that all the culture of the Geyer family came through the theatre.  To this Richard added a small school-acquaintance with the classics; and now came Adolph to show him a huge, truly vital literature—­poetry and prose dealing with the life of our own epoch.  Adolph wrote reminding him of how finely Weber Had cultivated himself, of his breadth, of his outlook on history and mankind.  It is evident that Adolph, seeing the irresistible bent of the Wagners towards the theatre, and fearing that Richard might in time learn to be content with a life of ignorant theatre tittle-tattle, did his best to save him, not so much by warning him against the theatre—­which he certainly knew to be useless—­as by showing how many great and interesting things the world holds.  The preaching did not fall on deaf ears; and Richard always declared that in this regard he was incalculably indebted to his uncle.  One of Richard’s most strongly marked characteristics was the tenacity with which he held any idea that once entered his mind; and it is worthy of note that about this period he read E.T.A.  Hoffmann’s collected fantasies and Tieck’s Tannhaeuser.  From the first he unmistakably got the minstrels’ contest in his own Tannhaeuser; from the second, Tannhaeuser’s coming home after being cursed by the Pope.