l then
find rest, commodity, and reputation--what matters it--if he find there
but few perfect truths--what matters (men say)--he will find there
perfect media, those perfect instruments of getting in the way of
perfect truths.

This choice tells why Beethoven is always modern and Strauss always
mediaeval--try as he may to cover it up in new bottles. He has chosen
to capitalize a "talent"--he has chosen the complexity of media, the
shining hardness of externals, repose, against the inner, invisible
activity of truth. He has chosen the first creed, the easy creed, the
philosophy of his fathers, among whom he found a half-idiot-genius
(Nietzsche). His choice naturally leads him to glorify and to magnify
all kind of dull things--stretched-out geigermusik--which in turn
naturally leads him to "windmills" and "human heads on silver
platters." Magnifying the dull into the colossal, produces a kind of
"comfort"--the comfort of a woman who takes more pleasure in the fit of
fashionable clothes than in a healthy body--the kind of comfort that
has brought so many "adventures of baby-carriages at county
fairs"--"the sensation of Teddy bears, smoking their first
cigarette"--on the program of symphony orchestras of one hundred
performers,--the lure of the media--the means--not the end--but the
finish,--thus the failure to perceive that thoughts and memories of
childhood are too tender, and some of them too sacred to be worn
lightly on the sleeve. Life is too short for these one hundred men, to
say nothing of the composer and the "dress-circle," to spend an
afternoon in this way. They are but like the rest of us, and have only
the expectancy of the mortality-table to survive--perhaps only this
"piece." We cannot but feel that a too great desire for "repose"
accounts for such phenomena. A MS. score is brought to a
concertmaster--he may be a violinist--he is kindly disposed, he looks
it over, and casually fastens on a passage "that's bad for the fiddles,
it doesn't hang just right, write it like this, they will play it
better." But that one phrase is the germ of the whole thing. "Never
mind, it will fit the hand better this way--it will sound better." My
God! what has sound got to do with music! The waiter brings the only
fresh egg he has, but the man at breakfast sends it back because it
doesn't fit his eggcup. Why can't music go out in the same way it comes
in to a man, without having to crawl over a fence of sounds, thoraxes,
catgu