and though the
Weber idiom is prevalent, he used it unconsciously, as children in
learning to speak acquire the accent of the elders about them or the
dialect of the neighbourhood in which they are reared. I say the tunes
lack external grace, and I might go further: all the themes, all the
passages that follow (rather than grow out of) the themes, are
characterized by a certain clumsiness. This followed, as night the
day, from the attempt to copy and to be original at the same time. He
could not obey his instinct and write directly and simply: he must
needs warp and twist the obvious, and disguise, even from himself, its
essential commonplaceness. A remarkable instance is his use of the
Dresden Amen in _Rienzi_ as compared with his use of it in
_Tannhaeuser_. In the latter it is plain, diatonic and immensely--in
the best sense--effective; in _Rienzi_, in spite of the vigour of its
presentation, the effect is weakened by the way in which it is bent
away to a chromatic something which is neither frankly Italian nor
honestly German. Again, he composed with an audience in his mind's eye
that could only take in one melody or theme at a time. The melody
might be in an upper part, a middle, or in the bass. In one or another
it always is, and the rest of the musical tissue is only
accompaniment. Hence a heaviness, a lumbering motion of the harmonies,
which is irritating to our ears now that we are accustomed to webs he
spun in later days when music no longer consisted to him of top parts
and bottom parts, but of a broad stream of parts, all of equal
importance, and all flowing along together, preserving each its
individuality, and each individual blending with the others to produce
the total effect. In _Rienzi_ the bass often remains the same for bars
together, while in an upper part a florid tune flourishes its tail, so
to speak, for the public amusement. An ugly trick he indulged in at
this time was giving to the voice the notes of the instrumental
bass--a remnant of the eighteenth-century way of writing for the bass
voice.

Artistically _Rienzi_ was a sin. Remembering that _Die Feen_ had been
written years before, it is useless to contend that Wagner did not
know he was aiming at something lower than the best he could produce.
He never again fell away from his highest and truest self, though he
was sorely tempted.

II

The simple, terrible old legend of the Flying Dutchman had in it no
elements of drama. The irascibl