to it and has not tried to cramp his inspiration into proscribed forms. There should be no more difficulty in understanding him than in understanding Beethoven once one arrives at listening with unbiased ears. The trouble is that too many of us have made up our minds not to listen to anything which does not conform with our own precious opinions.) At the risk of being misunderstood by some and for the sake of making myself clearer to others I hazard a frivolous figure. Say that Wagner’s formula for composition be represented by some expression; I will choose the simple proverb, “Make hay while the sun shines.” Humperdinck is content to change a single detail of this formula. He says, musically speaking, “Make _wheat_ while the sun shines.” Richard Strauss makes a more complete inversion. His paraphrase would suggest something like this, “Make brass while the band brays.” Strawinsky, wearied of the whole business (as was Debussy before him; genius does not paraphrase) uses only two words of the formula ... say “make” and “sun.” Later even these are negligible, as each new composer makes his own laws and his own formulas. The infinity of it! In time the work of Strawinsky will establish a _cliché_ to be scorned by a new generation (scorned in the sense that it will not be imitated, except by inferior men). That his music is vibrant and beautiful we may be sure and it has happened that all of it has been appreciated by a very worth-while public. He has done what Benedetto Croce in his valuable work, “Æsthetic,” demands of the artist. He has expressed himself ... for beauty is expression. “Artists,” says this writer, “while making a verbal pretence of agreeing, or yielding a feigned obedience to them, have always disregarded (these) _laws of styles_. Every true work of art has violated some established class and upset the ideas of the critics who have been obliged to enlarge the number of classes, until finally even this enlargement has proved too narrow, owing to the appearance of new works of art, which are naturally followed by new scandals, new upsettings, and--new enlargements.”