If now we turn from the songs of Richard Strauss to those of the much-lauded Hugo Wolf, we shall find that there is a difference in this very matter. Wolf's melodic ideas are singularly vague and deficient in directness of character. They do not come clean out upon the ear as the proclamation of a master's embodiment of a poetic thought; neither do they set a character or fix a mood. They easily lose themselves in the speculative convolutions of that philosophic declamation which is the peculiar fruit of contemporaneous cultivation in the field of song. Intervallic difficulties abound in these Wolf songs, and the harmonic basis is so strained at times that the ear is outraged by the withholding of the normal resolutions of the chords. But these things are part and parcel of the musical affectation of the time. Possibly twenty years hence these wrestings of musical nature will have become sweetened by the uses of adversity, and the ears of the very children will accept them as freely as they now do the lush harmonies of "Träume" and "Im Treibhaus." Wolf's artistic endeavor in song writing is clearly the same as that of Richard Strauss, but the achievement is far different. To throw songs by the two composers into close juxtaposition as is frequently done in recitals is to inflict a needlessly cruel punishment on Wolf. To interject into the programme one of the uncommon songs of Schubert, such as "Dem Unendlichen," is still more cruel, for this serves to show that the melodious Franz Peter could pen philosophic apostrophe and oratoric declamation with the best of the moderns, and yet remain more musical than any of them. Strauss, be it said to his credit, never omits the proposition of some sort of a musical theme. But his method is not that of the elder lyric school. He is a romanticist of the ultra-modern type, and carves out his musical forms over the pattern of his text with infinite labor. He lays down a theme which sets a character and indicates a point of aim; and then he develops, as I have already noted, by the method of transition, so that new material springs from the old in our very sight as the eastern conjurer's flowers grow from the bare earth. Wolf works on similar lines. He is not a conscious imitator, but his method is the Strauss method, the method of Schubert's "Delphine" buried under the twentieth-century manner. But Wolf lacks both the directness of Schubert and the ingenuity of Strauss. His work in many places rings false. It smells too often of the midnight forge and the hammer of the driven quill. Schubert's song bursts from him full grown, like Minerva from the head of Jove. Strauss's songs show reflection and aspiration and loving care in their finish. Wolf's echo with the sound of the workshop. They are by no means journeyman work, but they are hewn out with hard labor and they do not give forth the fragrance of utter spontaneity.