At home his life cannot have been much better. Good Hausfrau Geyer cannot have understood where the shoe pinched: she can only have seen how he was wasting his time. The tragedy was discovered and there seem to have been solemn family deliberations regarding the probable fate of the reprobate. His Uncle Adolph seems to have acted as the great consoler. He, at any rate, knew better than to think a boy was on the way to the bottomless pit simply because he could not get on with a gang of dull pedagogues. Now and later he lectured Richard in a kindly if sententious way; and he must have fostered the boy's natural strong spirit of revolt. Adolph loathed authority, especially the authority of irresponsible court officials; and in some of his preserved letters he lashes these gentry, the scum of humanity and the parasites of courts, with scathing sarcasm. His sarcasm had no practical result, because the officials never saw it--if they had they would have shrugged their fat shoulders and gone to draw their comfortable 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.