Wagner had courage adequate to sustain him in following his conceptions through ridicule, want, and almost utter friendlessness. No discouragement could divert him from the even tenor of his chosen course. His early operas, although their texts were treated with unwonted respect, gave little intimation of the revolution which was to be accomplished by their author, and it is extremely doubtful whether Wagner at this period had a shadowy conception even of that later ideal, which time and experience developed, in which music and the pictorial element were not only to collaborate with, but were to reproduce the situations and sentiments of his poems. This kind of tone painting, in which the composer endeavors to endow his musical phrases with definite significance, is justifiable and effective when they are so closely associated in performance with the motive text as to derive directness from its more tangible character. Such efforts must not be classed with so-called program music. "Der Fliegende Holländer", "Rienzi," and "Tannhäuser" might have been produced through the co-operation of Weber and Meyerbeer, with Wagner's individuality as a flavor. In them the voices are given melodies in clear-cut form, and they contain pompous Meyerbeerisms almost approaching the bizarre. This Wagner flavor, which consisted largely of a disregard of harmonic laws and key relationships, as dictated by the pedantic school, caught the public, but it aroused the violent opposition of older musicians. They denounced Wagner as a crazy ignoramus and his operas as abominations. Viewed from a theoretical stand-point, there was that in Wagner's earlier works which in a measure justified his critics. He was not a good contrapuntist, and he consequently violated tenets of musical structure when conformity would have been more adequate. The relations borne by plastic musical diction to the elementary rules of tonal science are so little understood, and a clear understanding of these relations is so important, that I feel justified in reiterating in different form what was said in a former chapter,--viz., that musical theory as a whole is but the codification of nature's adjustments. Extraordinary requirements license exceptional means and modes, but when composers abandon the letter of musical tenets and substitute therefor the higher law of compensation, they enter upon a field in which pitfalls abound, and through which nothing but keen judgment, founded upon experienced erudition, can safely guide them. This law of compensation allows us to disregard elementary laws, when the nature of the situation in hand is such as to warrant and reconcile our musical sense to combinations or successions, which would without this justification sound crude and faulty. The habit of what is called free writing is most pernicious, for compensation must legitimize each irregularity or we lapse into incoherency.