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, in the spirit in which a sculptor may decide to paint a picture or a flute-player to play the fiddle, he has to learn all, or as much as he can, about the requirements of the stage, and even then if his work comes to rehearsal he has to accept corrections and make alterations at the instance of those who have been through the proper early training. No one had anything to teach Richard in these respects: he knew by what seems an infallible instinct, but which was mainly the result of all he had seen since his babyhood, precisely what was effective and what ineffective on the stage, what was possible and what impossible. He made no mistakes; even the "impossibilities" of the _Ring_ proved feasibilities and are now accomplished nightly without trouble in every opera-house of Europe. This training--for it was a training, perhaps the very best for the career before him--now went on as in Geyer's time. He still dwelt in Bohemia, but as the influence of his stepfather had been salutary, so now to an extent came in the influence of school. Hitherto we have had rather to consider his family than him; but now the little individuality begins to emerge, more and more clearly and distinctly, from that circle. He begins an independent existence, controlled in an overwhelming degree by the life of the theatre and home-life, but also leading a life of his own at school and very wilfully taking a line or lines of his own there. We can now begin to trace the growth of the mental, and especially the artistic, nature of one of the most stupendous geniuses the earth has produced. It is altogether unnecessary to try to piece together anything approaching an elaborate sketch of the activities and escapades of these days: this would involve laying violent and liberal hands on the fruits of the labours of Glasenapp and a dozen other pickers-up of unconsidered trifles, would yield us nothing essential and might drive the reader to an untimely end. Out of the strangely tangled skein of truth and obvious fiction which is called his "life" for this period I shall endeavour only to pick out such threads of fact as seem to me helpful.