do the amazing, the surface thing, and plies himself to every ephemeral and shallow current of modern life. For Strauss has not only not deepened and matured and increased in stature. He has not even stood still, remained the artist that once he was. He has progressively and steadily deteriorated during the last decade. He has become a bad musician. He is the cruel, the great disappointment of modern music, of modern art. The dream-light has failed altogether, has made the succeeding darkness the thicker for the momentary illumination. Strauss to-day is seen as a rocket that sizzled up into the sky with manicoloured blaze, and then broke suddenly, and extinguished swiftly into the midnight.
It is not easy, even for those who were aware from the very first that Strauss was not the spirit "pardlike, beautiful and swift," and that there always were distinctly gross and insensitive particles in him, to recognize in the slack and listless person who concocts Joseph's Legende and the Alpensymphonie, the young and fiery composer, genius despite all the impurities of his style, who composed Fill Eulenspiegel and Don Quixote; not easy, even though the contours of his idiom have not radically altered, and though in the sleepy facile periods of his later style one catches sight at times of the broad simple diction of his earlier. For the later Strauss lacks preeminently and signally just the traits that made of the earlier so brilliant and engaging a figure. Behind the works of the earlier Strauss there was visible an intensely, fierily experiencing being, a man who had powerful and poignant and beautiful sensations, and the gift of expressing them richly. Behind the work of the latter there is all too apparent a man who for a long while has felt nothing beautiful or strong or full, who no longer possesses the power of feeling anything at all, and is inwardly wasted and dull and spent. The one had a burning and wonderful pressure of speech. The other seems unable to concentrate energy and interest sufficiently to create a hard and living piece of work. The one seemed to blaze new pathways through the brain. The other steps languidly in roadways well worn. He is not even amusing any longer. The contriver of wonderful orchestral machines, the man who penetrated into the death-chamber and stood under the gibbet, has turned to toying with his medium, to imitating other composers, Mozart in Der Rosenkavalier, Haendel in Joseph's Legende, Offenbach and Lulli (a coupling that only Strauss has the lack of taste to bring about) in
