Having proved to themselves and their following the correctness of the new methods, and the falsity of the old, these have largely abandoned plot and incident, and devoted their talents to psychology. Now while it is incontestable that Walter Scott could by no means have brought to the trivial and the commonplace the analytical mind of Henry James, still we venture that the world has lost nothing because of this. The poor plodding world looks downward; so its eyes must again and again be diverted from the trivial and the commonplace, and lifted toward an ideal which, even if overdrawn, is immeasurably better than none. While preferring to grope in the dark regions of the abnormal, the art of Strauss, the art of the modern psychologist has, as one might expect, often treated the trivial and the commonplace. Besides it is evident that neither in Salomé nor in «Thus spake Zarathustra» has it given to the world a normal ideal. With the great masters of the past it was always an ideal, the noblest within the range of their inspired vision. To Haydn it was the terrestrial Eden yet undarkened by the Fall. To Handel it was the Greater Adam, and His coming long foretold. To Bach it was Gethsemane, and its immortal, crowning passion of sorrow. To Mendelssohn it was the prophet and the saint those rich flowerings of his ancient race. To Wagner it was the eternal womanly prompting to noblest deeds of devotion and self-sacrifice. With men like these, the presentation of high moral ideals resulted from intuitive knowledge that the perpetuity of mankind, as something nobler than the brute kingdom, depends upon acceptance of these ideals, and therefore any so-called masterpiece which brings about confusion of ideals, would render the real purpose of art abortive. The music of such masters as Haydn and Mozart voices the pure emotions spontaneous in the breast of man. God-given emotions, never to be quenched, they will burst into utterance while throbs the human heart. The evolution of music, as of all art, accords with the evolution of man from a creature of primal impulses to one of a thousand involved emotions and interests. The latest methods of Strauss are fraught with peculiar peril to his art, as an epitome of life, in that a well-nigh exclusive use of obscure and chromatic harmonies is restricting that art to an expression of complex emotions only. Now, while through no composer however gifted can music revert to the prevailing simplicity of Handel, still, whatever its evolution, it must as an epitome of life, have moments of native and simple emotion. Therefore it was a sane and saving reaction which turned the efforts of Strauss from the abnormal to the smaller, more subdued models of the song writer, and also to that wholesome and human idyll, the Enoch Arden of Tennyson.