Wagner says: "I had merely to develop, according to their respective tendencies, the various thematic germs comprised in the ballad to have, as a matter of course, the principal mental moods in definite thematic shapes before me. When a mental mood returned, its thematic expression also, as a matter of course, was repeated, since it would have been arbitrary and capricious to have sought another motive, so long as the object was an intelligible representation of the subject, and not a conglomeration of operatic pieces." The _leit motiv_ system was not so extensively used by Wagner in his earlier works as in his later ones, when the system had become fully developed and he had obtained a complete mastery of its difficult musical technic. In his later works the orchestral score is largely made up of repetitions and elaborations of the various leading motives, and this has led to some grave misconceptions as to the nature and purpose of his system. Many writers have published handbooks purporting to explain the Wagner dramas. These handbooks contain musical reprints of the various thematic phrases, with names which Wagner never thought of giving them. The books simply follow the scores through, page by page, enumerating the various motives as they appear. The result of reading these books is naturally a belief that the principal business of the auditor's mind at the performance of a Wagner drama is to identify each leading motive which is heard, and by doing so to get at the composer's meaning. In other words, those handbooks cause many persons to suppose that the hearer of a Wagner score has to translate the music into definite terms, those terms being labels which will tell him what the music itself does not. This is an utter misconception of the Wagner system, and it has been one of the chief obstacles in the way of its ready acceptance by persons educated in music of the older sort.