Listen to his eternal feminine. When she plays the virtuous Kundry to his Hero of the "Heldenleben" or the Venus to his nomadic "Eulenspiegel" Tannhäuser, she sings in the wickedly purring major mode. But when heroic virtue slaughters ink-stained critics or scales the battlements of jarring worlds and plants the standard of manhood on a minaret of the universe, then titanic visions are expressed in crashing collisions of minor seconds or in strangled sixths and desiccated elevenths. Trumpets bleat through their noses, and clarinets chuckle in staccato treble; trombones rattle in raucous gurgles, and bassoons snort in hoarse expirations. But all this is superficial. This is the manner, not the matter of the Strauss music. How far can this master magician, this royal juggler with resolutions and suspensions, this acrobat of the flying chord, go with his endeavor to make music say for him the things that the entire decadent literature of modern Europe has striven to put down in plain words? If Strauss means anything, he means that Beethoven and Schumann were but the avant couriers of a vast march of progress into the bowels of delineation, the vitals of psychic communication. Liszt and Tschaïkowsky and Goldmark postulated a false theory of orchestral art because they clearly defined limitations. They promulgated by their practice the doctrine that only the broader moods of story could be represented in music. Strauss preaches that when Beethoven depicted in his fifth symphony the struggle of a soul and for the finer illustration of his thought united the scherzo with the finale, he opened the gateway to indefinite progress, and swung wide a banner with the old device, "Facilis descensus Averno." Suppose, however, that this paragraph in the artistic treatise of Strauss contains a germinal truth, does it of necessity follow that to advance along the opened path is to finish in the corruption and rank odor of the morgue? What has so got the start of the majestic art of music as to lead it to the grave? First of all, decadent poetry and fiction. When music began to strive to make itself a representative art, it confronted itself with a choice of objects. Primarily it had human life and experience as found in the composer's own soul, and this was the noblest source of all. "Look into thine own heart and write," is excellent advice for a composer. Then it had literature, the conservation of the experience and observation of man from the literary point of view. With these two sources it had to rest content, for neither sculpture nor painting offered anything other than the composition of life translated into other terms. The musician would better paint the Laocoön from his own conception than from the conception of the sculptor. He would but make music and water of Raphael's Madonna if he studied her instead of the Mary of the Holy Writ.