It is not needful to say much more about the music.  It shows a variety of influences; it shows also that Wagner, before he was thirty, was, as I have already said, a perfect master of the tricks of the trade.  In huge imposing effects he out-Meyerbeered Meyerbeer, out-Spontinied Spontini.  If his tunes have not the superficial gracefulness of Bellini it is because Wagner, in spite of himself, was driven by his daemon to aim at expressiveness, and, as in the Dutchman a very short time afterwards, fell between two stools.  His tunes lack the fluency of the Italians because he did, in a half-hearted way, want to utter genuine feeling; they are not finely, accurately and logically expressive as they are in Tannhaeuser and Lohengrin, because the Italian influence, and the necessity of writing to please the gallery, perpetually held him back.  The contours of the melodies are dictated from outside, consciously copied from alien models:  in the later works they are shaped by the inner force of his own mind, 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.