Richard Wagner | Page 4

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