e too long behind his
work not the heroic agonist, but the man who loved to languish in
mournful salons, attired in furred dressing gowns.

Indeed, if Wagner seems great it is chiefly as one of the most delicate
of musicians. It is the lightness of his brush stroke that makes us
marvel at the third act of "Tristan," the first scene of the "Walkuere."
It is the delicacy of his fancy, the lilac fragrance pervading his
inventions, that enchants us in the second act of "Die Meistersinger."
Through the score of "Parsifal" there seem to pass angelic forms and
wings dainty and fragile and silver-shod as those of Beardsley's "Morte
d'Arthur."

But the debt we owe him will always give him a vast importance in our
eyes. The men of to-day, all of them, stand directly on his shoulders.
It is doubtful whether any of us, the passive public, would be here
to-day as we are, were it not for his music.

Strauss

Strauss was never the fine, the perfect artist. Even in the first flare
of youth, even at the time when he was the meteoric, dazzling figure
flaunting over all the baldpates of the universe the standard of the
musical future, it was apparent that there were serious flaws in his
spirit. Despite the audacity with which he realized his amazing and
poignant and ironic visions, despite his youthful fire and
exuberance--and it was as something of a golden youth of music that
Strauss burst upon the world--one sensed in him the not quite
beautifully deepened man, heard at moments a callow accent in his
eloquence, felt that an unmistakable alloy was fused with the generous
gold. The purity, the inwardness, the searchings of the heart, the
religious sentiment of beauty, present so unmistakably in the art of the
great men who had developed music, were wanting in his work. He had
neither the unswerving sense of style, nor the weightiness of touch,
that mark the perfect craftsman. He was not sufficiently a scrupulous
and exacting artist. It was apparent that he was careless, too easily
contented with some of his material, not always happy in his detail.
Mixed with his fire there was a sort of laziness and indifference. But,
in those days, Strauss was unmistakably the genius, the original and
bitingly expressive musician, the engineer of proud orchestral flights,
the outrider and bannerman of his art, and one forgave his shortcomings
because of the radiance of his figure, or remained only half-conscious
of them.

For, once his p