WADDINGTON
WAITE
medical works and made many discoveries.
He was a high authority on the nervous
system. D. May, 17, 1887.
WADDINGTON, Samuel, B.A., poet. B. Nov. 1844. Ed. St. Peter s School, York, and Oxford (Brasenose College). Waddington followed Pusey in his earlier years, and intended to enter the Church ; but more Eationalistic impulses pre vailed " (R. le Gallienne, in the introduction to Waddington s poems in Miles s Poets and Poetry of the Century). He became private secretary to Lord Balfour of Bur- leigh, and in 1892 to Mr. Thomas Burt. He has compiled English Sonnets by Living Writers (1881), and written Arthur Hugh dough (1883) and Sonnets and Other Verses (1884). In many of his poems (" Mors et Vita," " Soul and Body," etc.) Mr. Waddington gives fine expression to his Agnosticism in regard to a future life.
WAGNER, Wilhelm Richard, German composer. B. May 22, 1813. Ed. Leipzig Kreuzschule and University. Wagner cultivated music and literature from a very early age, and in his fifteenth year he attempted to write a Shakespearean tragedy. In 1833 he became choir-master at Wiirzburg, and he held that position in various provincial towns until 1839. He then spent three years, in a vain struggle for recognition, at Paris. Eienzi (1842) and The Flying Dutchman (1843) brought him some measure of success ; and in the latter year he was appointed one of the conductors of the Dresden opera. He composed Tannhduser in 1845 and Lohen grin in 1848 though the merits of Tann hduser had been so disputed that he could not get Lohengrin produced until 1850. A zealous and advanced social thinker, Wagner took part in the revolutionary movement of 1848-49, and at its failure he was forced to fly to Zurich. He composed the famous Ring between 1853 and 1864, and the great Wagnerian con troversy opened among the musicians of Europe. Wagner was still so unsuccessful 857
financially that he had to fly to Switzer
land from his creditors. King Ludwig of
Bavaria then adopted him, and the Ring
was produced at Bayreuth in 1876, with
brilliant success. In 1882 Parsifal was
produced at Bayreuth. It is acknowledged
by all his biographers that Wagner had
been anti-Christian in his youth and
prime ; and it is well known how Nietzsche
and other Rationalists bitterly charged him
with desertion when he produced Parsifal,
which embodies a gospel of chastity,
renunciation, and salvation by suffering.
His biographers, however, almost all admit
that this creed of his last years when his
intelligence was notoriously failing was
based rather upon the philosophy of
Schopenhauer. Wagner saw its identity,
to some extent, with Christianity, and was
to that extent ethically a Christian ; but
he never returned to the Christian Church.
Otto Hartwich, who writes specially on
the subject, can only conclude : " Wagner
was a Christian in a large sense, though
not a man of the Church. He had little
taste for the otherworldly speculations of
dogmatic theology, and none at all for
the Church s pressure on faith and con
science " (R. Wagner und das Christentum,
1903, p. 135). David Irvine comes to
much the same conclusion in his Parsifal
and Wagner s Christianity (1899). Ernest
Newman (A Study of Wagner, 1899) shows
that Wagner had adopted Feuerbach s
Atheism in his earlier years, but as his
intellectual life decayed he became ex
tremely sentimental and deeply, but very
vaguely, religious. It was merely an
ethical development, not unnatural in a
man of his years. His art was superb to
the end, but his finest intellectual and
moral work had been done while he was
an Agnostic. D. Feb. 13, 1883.
WAITE, Charles Burlingame, A.M., American jurist. B. Jan. 29, 1824. Ed. Knox College (111.), Galesburg, and Rock Island. He studied law, and was admitted to the American Bar in 1847. For fifteen years he practised, chiefly in Chicago, 858
