Otherwise Stuttgart is an easy-going spot. It's cheaper than Dresden or Munich (though it was expensive during the Strauss week); the eating at the restaurants is about one-half the price of first-rate establishments in New York (and not as good by a long shot); lodgings are also cheap, and often nasty--Germany is not altogether hygienic, notwithstanding her superiority over America in matters musical; but the motor-cars are simply miraculous to the New Yorker accustomed to the bullies, bandits, and swindlers who pretend to be chauffeurs in our metropolis. For twenty-five cents you can ride nearly a half-hour in Stuttgart in cars faultlessly conducted. A two and a half hours' trip round the town--literally--in the hills, through the park cost seven marks (one dollar and seventy-five cents)--and even then the driver was distinctly apologetic 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.