That evening after the concert, at our now established gathering, Wagner was positively jubilant. He had been able to produce the “Ninth Symphony” in London as he wished, and he hoped the “traditions” would remain. He emphasized “traditions” in a slyly sarcastic manner, and well had he reason to do so. Traditions of Mendelssohn and Spohr were omnipotent, and omnipotent with the orchestra, and Wagner hoped the conservative English mind would retain “his” traditions of the “Choral Symphony,” among which would be found how he had sung the long recitative for the strings,--double-basses,--that ushers in the choral portion of the work. When Wagner first sang this part to the orchestra, they all engaged in a good-humoured titter, which speedily gave way to respect; for Wagner certainly was marvellously successful in explaining how he wanted a phrase played by first singing it,--a gift it undoubtedly was.
He said he would not do any work next day, and arranged that we should visit the city. We went first to the Guildhall. It was astonishing how he absorbed everything to himself, to his purposes, how his fancy freely exercised itself. Gog and Magog! they were his Fafner and Fasolt; then his humour leaped in advance of the period, and he laughingly asked me whether there was a “Götterdämmerung” in store for the City Fathers, and whether Guildhall, their Walhalla, supported by the giants Gog and Magog, would also crumble away through the curse of gold. We next went to the Mint. There, too, the central figure was Wagner; the main theme of discussion, Wagner. When the attendant put into his hands, as was the custom, a roll of cancelled bank notes, amounting to thousands of pounds sterling, he turned to me and said, “The hundredth part of this would build my theatre, and posterity would bless me.” His speech certainly savoured of the consciousness of genius. I do not think this is a euphemistic way of saying he had a good opinion of himself. I say it, because I feel it to be the truth. It was through this very consciousness that he triumphed over the many difficulties that beset him. Without it he could not have achieved what he did. The buoyancy of hope begotten of conscious strength is a powerful factor in the securing of success. The theatre he had in his mind then, I thought to be that which he had urged the Saxon authorities to establish, the scheme for which I was then well acquainted with, but his latter discourse showed how, during his exile, that original thought had amplified itself. Of our visit to St. Paul’s Cathedral I can recall but one observation of Wagner, to the effect that it was as cold and uninspiring as the Protestant creed--a strange remark from one whose own religious tendencies were Lutheran, and who could express his religious convictions so powerfully and poetically in his last work, “Parsifal.”