True, he learned enough arithmetic to know how many marks made twenty
and how many francs a louis; but the classics provided him with the
pabulum his growing mind hungered for. His Greek professor took a
special interest in him, which is not surprising when we remember that
at the age of thirteen he translated twelve books of the Odyssey as a
holiday task. Besides this he worked at philology and the ordinary
school curriculum. It is just possible--just, I say--that had the
family remained longer in Dresden he might never have turned to the
Scandinavian sagas at all, but have become an eminent scholar and the
composer of mediocre symphonic music. That, luckily, is one of the
might-have-beens, and we need not mourn over it. Music he was very far
from dropping. He had played a Weber scene while his stepfather was
dying; and he continued to bang away at overtures with such a
fingering, as Mr. Bernard Shaw has said, as of necessity would be
employed by the average worker at a circular-saw. But the great
awakening was not yet. He had first to give the world the mightiest
drama ever conceived by the mind of an energetic, bright,
self-confident boy.

I do not think there is on record a single instance of a great
engineer having manifested artistic preferences in his youth, or of a
great painter having misspent his boyhood in making toy machines.
Always, from the very beginning, the boy unconsciously, without
reflection, instinctively, helplessly, starts away in the direction he
is destined to follow as a man; and though some potential great poets
may be thwarted and ultimately discouraged and lost to the world, by
far the more common phenomenon is that of young geniuses overcoming or
brushing aside or dodging all obstacles at all costs (to themselves
and every one else) and finding their true road, the path nature
shaped them to tread. At the first glance Wagner might seem a