This will hardly apply to Strauss's "Don Juan" or his "Till Eulenspiegel." Beauty has thus far been the acknowledged end of all art. Are these things beautiful? Is their æsthetic basis lofty and wholesome? Surely not. Yet old Horace was indisputably right. Life is short, and art is long. How many viewless ages yet shall run before the process be complete? Who are we, to make final conclusions and splutter our puny "Quod erat demonstrandum"? Let us wait. For the fleeting present we must hang pendulous between two positive extremes. Strauss is a symphonic poet or a symphonic poetaster. He is a dreamer of grandly grotesque visions, a Cervantes, a Rabelais, if you will, or a mere opium-eater without the genius of a De Quincey. Something of the mystic phantasy of De Quincey certainly lurks in the brain of him who wrote "Tod und Verklärung," and out of the contrapuntal abyss of "Zarathustra" emerges at the last something like the stupendous finale of the "Dream-Fugue":-- "Then was completed the passion of the mighty fugue. The golden tubes of the organ, which had as yet but muttered at intervals,--gleaming among clouds and surges of incense,--threw up, as from fountains unfathomable, columns of heart-shattering music. Choir and anti-choir were filling fast with unknown voices. Thou also, dying trumpeter, with thy love that was victorious and thy anguish that was finishing, didst enter the tumult; trumpet and echo--farewell love and farewell anguish--rang through the dreadful sanctus." Or is it all, this music of Strauss, a monstrous joke, and does the man laugh in his sleeve at the troubled world? Is he not only a musical Rabelais, but also that malodorous jest of a Rabelaisian brain, Gargantua himself? "One of his governesses told me that at the very sound of pints and flagons he would fall into an ecstasy, as if he were tasting the joys of Paradise; and upon consideration of this his divine complexion they would every morning, to cheer him, play with a knife upon the glasses, or the bottles with their stoppers, and on the pint pots with their lids; at the sound whereof he became gay, would leap for joy, and rock himself in the cradle, lolling with his head and monochordizing with his fingers." Till Eulenspiegel, Gargantua of Germany, noisome, nasty, rollicking Till, with the whirligig scale of a yellow clarinet in his brain and the beer-house rhythm of a pint pot in his heart, a joke upon a joke,--was he, and not the posing _Held_ of the "Heldenleben," the real Strauss? III.--WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN? We transfretate the Sequane at the dilucul and crepuscul; we deambulate by the compites and quadrives of the urb; we despumate the Latin verbocination; and like verysimilary amorabons, we captat the benevolence of the omnijugal, omniform and omnigenal feminine sex.