loveliness in music probably says all that will ever be said.... But what of old Ludwig? Har, har; here we begin pulling the whiskers of Baal Himself. Nevertheless, I amvandal enough to wonder, on sad Sunday mornings, what Strauss could do with the first movement of the C minor. More, if Strauss ever does it and lets me hear the result just once, I'll be glad to serve six months in jail with him.... But in Munich, of course! And with a daily visitor's pass for Cousin Pschorr!...
The conservatism which shrinks at such barbarities is the same conservatism which demands that the very typographical errors in the Bible be swallowed without salt, and that has thus made a puerile dream-book of parts of Holy Writ. If you want to see how far this last madness has led Christendom astray, take a look at an article by Abraham Mitrie Rihbany, an intelligent Syrian, in the Atlantic Monthly of a couple of years ago. The title of the article is "The Oriental Manner of Speech," and in it Rihbany shows how much of mere Oriental extravagance of metaphor is to be found in many celebrated passages, and how little of literal significance. This Oriental extravagance, of course, makes for beauty, but as interpreted by pundits of no imagination it surely doesn't make for understanding. What the Western World needs is a Bible in which the idioms of the Aramaic of thousands of years ago are translated into the idioms of today. The man who undertook
