ologetic when he showed his register.

Stuttgart, oddly enough, is a centre for all the engraving, etching,
and mezzotint sales. I say, oddly, because the art museum contains the
worst collection of alleged "old masters" I ever encountered off Fifth
Avenue. Hardly an original in the whole lot, and then a third-rate
specimen at that. But the engraving cabinets and the Rembrandt
original drawings are justly celebrated. And now with the two new
theatres, or opera-houses, Stuttgart ought soon to forge to the front
as an art centre in Germany. Thanks to its energetic King and
cultivated Queen.

The question with which I began this little talk--is Richard Strauss
retrograding in his art?--may be answered by a curt negative. One
broadside doesn't destroy such a record as Richard's. Like that
sublime bourgeois Rubens, like that other sublime bourgeois Victor
Hugo, like Bernini, to whose rococo marbles the music of Richard II
is akin, he has essayed every department of his art. So expressive is
he that he could set a mince-pie to music. (Why not, after that
omelette in Ariadne?) So powerful is his imagination that he can paint
the hatred of his epical Elektra or the half-mad dreams of Don
Quixote. He is easily the foremost of living composers, and after he
is dead the whirligig of fortune which has so favoured him may
pronounce him dead for ever. But I doubt it.

IX

MAX LIEBERMANN AND SOME PHASES OF MODERN GERMAN ART

I

The importance of Max Liebermann in any critical consideration of
modern German art is prime. Meister Max, no longer as active as he
was, for he was born in 1847, is still a name to conjure with not only
in Berlin, his birthplace and present home, but in all Germany, and,
for that matter, the wide world. He is intensely national. He is a
Hebrew, and proud of his origin. He is also cosmopolitan. In a word,
he is versatile.

Some years ago, through the enthusiasm and enterprise of the late Hugo
Reisinger and several other art lovers, New York had an opportunity of
enjoying a peep at German paintings in the Metropolitan Museum. It was
rather a disappointing exhibition, principally because the men shown
were not represented at their best. Lenbach was not, nor Boecklin, nor
a dozen others, though Menzel was. That is, we admired one of Menzel's
least characteristic efforts but his most brilliant of canvases, the
stage of the