Scriabin is of this tormented choir; as Arthur B. Davies, our own mystic, primitive painter. And Charles Martin Loeffler. It may be the decadence, as any art is in decadence which stakes the parts against the whole. That ecstasy may be aroused by pictures of love and death, as in the cases of Poe and Baudelaire, Wagner and Strauss, should not, therefore, be adjudged morbid. In the Far East they hypnotize neophytes with a bit of broken mirror, for in the kingdom of art, as in heaven, there are many mansions. It was possibly a relic of his early admiration for the Baudelaire poems that set Wagner to extorting ecstasy from his orchestra by images of love and death, though doubtless the temperament which seeks assuagement in such a comminglement--a temperament more often encountered in mediæval art than now--was natural to Wagner. He makes his Isolde sing madly and mournfully over a corpse, and, throwing herself upon the dead Tristan, she dissolves into the ecstasies of sweet, cruel love; in Salome, Richard Strauss closely patterns after Wagner; there is the head of a dead man--though on a charger--and there follows a poignant ecstasy not to be found in all music. Both men play with similar counters: love and death, and death and love. In Pisa may be seen (attributed by Vasari) Orcagna’s fresco, The Triumph of Death. It has been set to grotesque music by Liszt in his Dance of Death. Let us not forget the great Italian, Gabriele d’Annunzio, whose magnificent prose, from The Triumph of Death to Forsé Che Si, Forsé Che No, is a pæan to the tutelar gods of humanity, love and death. The sting of the flesh and the way of all flesh are intermingled in Rodin’s astounding fugue, The Gate of Hell. First things and Last things, love and life, bitterness and death, have ever ruled the arts; and all great art is anarchic, cosmos and chaos cunningly proportioned. But between the sublime and the silly there is only a hair’s breadth. If not guided by tact and vision, the ecstatic in art and literature may degenerate into the erotic, and from the erotic to the tommyrotic is only a step. All this tumultuous imagery, this rhapsody Hunekeresque, is prompted by a photograph of Mary Garden, whose enigmatic eyes collide with my gaze across the Time and Space of my writing-desk. Your memory is wooed by the golden trumpets of Byzance, and when Mary speaks she wears the sacred Zaïmph of Salammbo. Voltaire, in Candide, was wise when he advised us: “Il faut cultiver notre Jardin.” IX PAINTED MUSIC