The scientific mind may after all find consolation in the all-illuminating truth that Friedrich and all his children were more or less passionately addicted to the theatre and attracted by it. It was Friedrich's one hobby; and though Friedrich's brother Adolph had a horror of it, the feeling was not aroused by it as an artistic institution, but as an agency for the intellectual, moral and worldly ruin of young men and women. In his leisure Friedrich arranged dramatic performances and took part in them, and, as amateurs go, he appears to have been highly successful. Histrionic persons were constant guests at his house on the Brühl—amongst them notably one, Ludwig Geyer, who became a fast friend of the family and played an important rôle, off the stage, with regard to that family soon after Richard's birth. Friedrich, during his later years, cannot have had much spare time for amateur theatricals or any other amusement. Napoleon was fighting his last desperate fights against the combined forces of reactionary Europe; all the powers of feudalism had combined to crush an emperor who had no royal blood in his veins; he raged over Germany like an infuriated beast with a genius for military tactics, scattering armies which dispersed only to join together and face him again. While Richard was in his cradle the whole of Saxony was filled with the squalor and misery and loathsome terrors of war. Leipzig was occupied by the French; Marshal Davoust was left there as commandant, with power of life and death, and all the other privileges of a military governor; and in the deputy-registrar of the law-court he found the man for the post of provisional chief of the police "of public safety." Who kept the public safe from the police I am unable to say. Fighting was going on perpetually in the neighbourhood; the dead and dying lay scattered in all directions; the stench bred epidemics more murderous than all Napoleon's cannon. Friedrich must have found his hands full day and night. Richard was baptized on August 16; the following day Napoleon won a victory which cost him dear; the 18th, being Sunday, was observed as such by a soldiery in need of a rest; on the 19th Napoleon was a beaten man, and ran to save his skin past the windows of the house of the Red and White Lion on the Brühl. Richard's mother had been trembling for her own safety and that of her children and husband; but when, as she herself afterwards told, she saw the dreaded conqueror bolt in haste without his hat, she breathed again. Whether she and the family were any better off under the deliverers is a question that does not concern us here: the point is that she thought she was. It was all one to Richard, who, aged three months, slept peacefully on.
After the deliverance Friedrich's work became even heavier than before. The town through its length and breadth was shattered and dilapidated; whole families were homeless and packed like rabbits in hutches; the slaughtered dead, men and beasts, could not be buried quick enough; black death stalked abroad in the guise of what was called hospital typhus—an epidemic fever of some kind. After the French flight, I take it, provisional chief-policeman Wagner had returned to his deputy-registrarship; but his toils were none the lighter for that. He exhausted himself; the appalling fever attacked him and he had no strength to resist it; and he died on November 22, exactly six months after the birth of Richard. Wagner's ill-luck, his wicked fairy, struck her first blow while his age had to be reckoned in months; she went on striking, and never ceased to strike, until he was beginning to grow a little weary and his age was reckoned in decades of years, and in terms of masterpieces accomplished and insults and ill-usage by no means patiently borne. It must have seemed hard to his widowed mother, after the uncertainties and horrors of the last years, that when at last a period of happy peace seemed about to dawn, uncertainties and griefs and worries of a fresh sort should come upon her.
Whether Frau Wagner ever actually drew any pension from the good burghers of Leipzig or the greedy state officials of Saxony seems, when all is said, very uncertain. In such times of stress and struggle great crown officers, laudably anxious about their own interests and the interests of their families, are apt to be rather careless, not to say callous, about the smaller fry. However, pension or no pension, with the aid of relatives and friends the Wagners pulled through. Chief and best amongst the friends was Ludwig Geyer.
A few words must be said about him. Born in 1780, he was ten years Carl Friedrich's junior. An actor who had taken up painting, or a painter who had taken up acting, in both arts he had won at any rate a local reputation. We know what was thought of his histrionic gifts from more or less competent contemporaries; but what to think of his paintings I do not know, for two reasons: I do not trust my own judgment in such a matter, and if I did, I have never seen any of Geyer's work. Of this, however, I am very sure: he cannot have been a good painter unless nature had worked a miracle in sending a good painter to Germany in the eighteenth or nineteenth century. German artists of the period must be classified not as sheep and goats, but as bad goats and worse goats. But if he was not a fine painter he was what is better, or, at any rate, more useful to the rest of human kind, a fine character: a noble, generous, self-sacrificing man. In haste on hearing of Carl Friedrich's death he came from Dresden to attend to the burying of the dead and the nourishing of the living. The details of this first period of Richard's ill-fortune do not amount to a great deal and are unimportant, since our subject is Richard, and his mother, brother and sisters only so far as their lives and characters influenced Richard. Albert, the eldest of the children, was now fourteen years old; he was at the Royal school in Meissen, and there he remained. Rosalie went to dwell with a friend of Geyer's, a lady who lived at Dresden. Louise was adopted by a Frau Hartwig, also at Dresden. Richard in his cradle remained with his mother and the younger members of the tribe in Leipzig.
And so presently life began to move on as before, while the dead man slept in his grave. But immediately fresh troubles came. Albert fell dangerously ill and was threatened with a total breakdown of his health; Richard was an ailing infant; and a change in the arrangements of the theatrical company which provided Geyer with a portion of his income compelled him to remain in Dresden continuously. This proved really a stroke of good fortune. Glasenapp, basing his calculations on I know not what authorities or documents, computes that his earnings as an actor at this time came to £156 a year, and there seems every reason to think he was at least fairly well paid for his portraits. It was not enough to be shared between two families, or, we had better say, to be devoted to the up-keep of two homes. He determined rapidly on a bold stroke. That he was in love with Frau Wagner is more than any one can declare with confidence; but she was an amiable, bright woman, a good mother and thrifty housekeeper; and it is likely enough that she had inspired a deep affection in a singularly loving man. After the recovery of Albert the widow had gone for a change to Dresden; and there Geyer resolved to marry her—and resolved quickly; for Carl Friedrich died in November 1813, and early in 1814 the marriage took place. Soon after, the new Frau Geyer returned to Leipzig; then the whole family migrated to Dresden, where Richard was to pass from babyhood into boyhood and spend the first fourteen years of his life.
II
The Geyer-Wagner family set up their tent in the Moritz-strasse in Dresden, which belonged to the seventeenth or eighteenth century—was in fact almost mediæval. Life must have been atrociously narrow and trammelled to any free spirit. But Germany did not produce many of that sort at the time, and those she did produce were quickly silenced in gaol. Whether Geyer had yearnings for outward liberty cannot be said; but if he had he gave no expression to them, being himself a court player and a semi-court painter. Undoubtedly the main thing to him was that in the drowsy court air he could at least earn the means of bringing up adequately the large family he had taken on his shoulders. He played constantly in all sorts of parts, and in his off hours painted; he also wrote a number of theatre pieces of varying type and importance—none of which concern us here. His wife enjoyed a period of peace in which to attend to her husband, children and house, as a faithful hausfrau should. If Geyer was industrious