t and colour; it
sparkled; if the champagne of it was of an inferior quality--often,
indeed, poor goose-berry--yet it bubbled and frothed gaily. Besides,
there were great sweeping tunes--such as the hackneyed prayer--and
plenty of really dainty, if very Weberesque, melodies. All that
Meyerbeer had to teach was there, and the stolid Dresdener gazed with
delight on the brilliance of the latest Parisian musical fashions. So
Wagner gained his first success, and deserved it. It was not the Paris
success he had dreamed of a few years before, when fame, money and all
worldly things desirable were to be his. But it meant bread-and-butter
without drudging for the publishers or the press; it meant the means of
living while he wrote masterpieces which were to set half the world
against him and eventually make him immeasurably the greatest musical
figure of his time. He was appointed Court kapellmeister, and there he
remained until 1849. Before proceeding to this next period of seven
years we must consider _The Flying Dutchman_.

This is his first music drama. He called it a romantic opera; but here
for the first time the drama grows out of an idea and the music out of
the drama. The thing suggested itself to him during that stormy trip to
London: the roaring waves, the whistling of the salt winds, the
loneliness of the bitter North Sea--these set his imagination aworking
on the old legend of the mariner doomed to sail the ocean until the Day
of Judgment. In this there was colour and atmosphere enough, but no
drama. The dramatic idea he took from Heine's sentimental version. In
this the Dutchman's lot is softened and mitigated by a possibility of
salvation. He can go ashore once in seven years, and if he can find a
maiden who will love him and be faithful unto death he will be released
from the necessity to wander. That is to say, his chances of redemption
depend upon constancy of some unknown young lady. All the Dutchman has
to do is to find her, make himself agreeable, and trust to luck. A more
childish notion never occurred to an intellectual man, nor a more
selfish one. The lady might have done nothing wrong; she was to be
punished for loving not wisely but too well; and there is nothing in the
old legend or in the Wagner-Heine form of it to show the Dutchman to
have been a deserving person. Yet, on the other hand, Wagner, with still
vivid memories of the agonies he had endured during his voyage, may have
thought the punishment