True, you must know Æschylus, and therein lies the weakness of all this kind of music, its temptation and its danger. If we may go so far, how are we to be estopped from prying further into the mysteries of musical depiction? How this field has tempted the Frenchmen, and how little they have found in it! After all, Saint-Saëns is not so bad. Think of the intricate platitudes, the prolix prosiness and lofty emptiness of Bruneau's "Penthesilée" and "La Belle aux Bois Dormant" (poèmes symphoniques au sérieux, mes amis), while Godard, Joncières, Paladilhe, and others have dipped respectfully into the romantic _potage_ and barely soiled their fingers. But all have striven to paint in tones, and have at any rate gone as far as sketching in detail. Possibly the time will come when music will be a universal language. Certain cadences will be accepted in China, in Sussex, or in New Jersey, as signifying such and such emotions or ideas, and certain resolutions of suspensions will have a meaning current in St. Petersburg, Vienna, and Cincinnati. But that time has not yet come, and the programme note is still an essential accessory either before or after the offence of the intimate symphonic poem. The composers, while acknowledging this, continue to go forward along the path which they have chosen. Music is daily moving away from the broad mood pictures of Beethoven toward some form in which every phrase shall have its part and place in the exposition of soul secrets. The Frenchmen have made but little success, as we have seen, for they have treated their composition, not as literary music, but as literature itself. If the work of Richard Strauss has any permanent significance at all, it is that the æsthetic basis of the Liszt and Tschaïkowsky compositions, the Goldmark overtures and the polished tone poems of the Frenchmen is false, and that every attempt to rear upon it a lasting art form must be futile. Here need be no discussion of the stupendous achievements of Strauss's orchestration, nor the astounding hideousness of his harmonic plan. Who was it said recently that the good Mr. Loeffler of Boston thought music in a scale of his own? The Loeffler scale--C, D, E, F sharp, G sharp, A sharp, C. How sharper than a serpent's tooth! Strauss thinks in a harmony of his own. A harmony? A cacophony. The clash of jarring discord is as honey on the palate of his ear. The tonic triad is not a stranger to him, but its devilish consonance of the major third is to his mind, as it was to the pious fancies of the mediæval fathers, the spirit of tonal evil, the seductive embodiment of sensual sweetness.