The simple imitative method of the pristine descriptions in tone has become neurotic mimicry, and the melodic and harmonic idioms hint that the modern ear is suffering from acute myringomycrosis, a cheerful affliction caused by the growth of fungi on the ear drum. Fungi are plentiful in damp and noisome places, and these seem to be the artistic haunts of the imaginations of the Ibscene realists in music. This so-called "romantic" music of to-day owes a considerable debt to the Abbé Liszt, whose undertakings in the domain of art are overestimated by his adulators and undervalued by his detractors. But there is no practical denial of the fact that Liszt fashioned a system and set up a manner in his symphonic poem. Richard Strauss might have been possible without Liszt, but as matters stand we are bound to acknowledge the debt of the composer of "Don Juan" to the composer of "Tasso." Yet how far beyond Liszt has the psychologic composition of to-day advanced? Liszt did undertake to make his music tell stories, and that is a thing which, with all deference to Liszt, music cannot do and never has done. You have to read Byron's "Mazeppa" to understand Liszt's, just as you have to read Bürger's "Lenore" if you wish to understand so naïve a story-teller as Raff's "Lenore" symphony. How much more necessary is it to read Maeterlinck's "Death of Tintagiles" in order to understand Charles Martin Loeffler? Not a bit. But Liszt never dreamed of analyzing soul states and those mysterious conflicts of soul and body which form the materials of psychomachy. He never sought to trace the origin of life nor the seat of the vital spark. The abbé was something of a mystic, too, but he knew he was not a genius. A very able dissimulator, a pious Mephistopheles, a Machiavellian master of musical arts, and the father of Cosima Wagner, he exploited his external impositions with consummate skill; and when he sat down to compose, he swore fealty to the highest ideals with all the sincerity of Iago swearing vengeance at the side of the kneeling Othello. He sent forth into the easy world his purple and yellow masterpieces, and the world called them royal. A little drawing and a great deal of color was what he offered, and the public saw in his splotches of sound Turneresque mystery and mastery. The dear public still loves these works, and will probably continue to do so for many years. And in one respect the public is right. Liszt never tried to be too definite. He left something to the imagination, and when the public has not any imagination, it imagines that it has, and that it is discerning things in Liszt's works which Liszt himself never discovered.