Now, music of the highest order must make its first appeal to the imagination; its first impact must be upon the cortical centres. It must not alone set the feet rhythmically pattering, it must not merely stir us to emotional thrilling. Not in the sensuous abandon of dance rhythms, but by thought,—that is, by musical thought, in a chain of tonal imagery, is the aim of the new music. Walter Pater believed, Plato-wise, that music is the archetype of the arts. It was an amiable heresy. But music must stand solitary—it is often too theatric, as poetry is often too tonal. It must be intellect suffused by emotion. Its substance is not the substance of its sister arts. What music has long needed, what Wagner and the church writers before him sought to give it, is definiteness. The welding of word and tone does not produce true musical articulateness. We recognize this in Tristan and Isolde, where incandescent tone quite submerges the word, the symbol of the idea. Erotic music has never before so triumphed as in this Celtic drama. And it is like the fall of some great blazing visitor from interstellar space; it buries itself beneath the smoking earth instead of remaining royally afloat in the pure ether of the idea. The arts cannot be thus fused. When faith moved nations, the world witnessed the marriage of word and tone in the ritual of the church; no music has been so definite since Palestrina’s as Wagner’s—until the music of Richard Strauss was heard. In it we encounter a definiteness that is almost plastic, though never baldly literal. As we noted in our rapid survey, the ethic quality of Beethoven, the philosophic quality of Brahms, the dramatic quality of Wagner, are all aside from the purpose of Strauss. He seeks to _express_ in tone alone. The new melody is but an old name for—characterization. And now we reach at last the core of Strauss, who is a psychological realist in symphonic art, withal a master symbolist; back of his surface eccentricities there is a foundational energy, an epic largeness of utterance, a versatility of manner, that rank him as the unique anarchist of music. He taps the tocsin of revolt, and his velvet sonorities do not disguise either their meagre skein of spirituality or the veiled ferocities of his aristocratic insurgency.