As an orchestral writer, Strauss has gathered to himself the technical knowledge of Berlioz, Liszt, and Wagner. Having enlarged his resources through original discovery, he dazzles by display of a virtuosity wholly unprecedented. Technically he is fully equipped for exploration; and thus he is pushing on into that new hemisphere the realm of sound. In our exposition we have endeavored to point out certain tendencies in the work of Strauss, tendencies which endanger realism in every art whatsoever, tendencies which we believe are turning Strauss from full and sane achievement, and so from his prospective goal the art of sound. That such an art is legitimate and actually within sight we have endeavored to show, as also the certainty that, once our possession, it will supplement and not supersede its predecessors. Failing to find in Strauss the lofty personage his worshippers deem him to be, we nevertheless have accredited him with real though peculiar genius, and this is but justice due. Living in a transition period largely of his own bringing about, he has produced both the unquestioned and the problematical. But that problematical can be ignored or forgotten no more than the problematical of Whitman. At very least, it will survive as a curiosity of tonal art. In his theoretical writings on the opera and the drama, Wagner likens music to the soulless nymph, a real woman only through the love of some man. Poetry, to Wagner, is that masculine endowing music with an immortal part. This novel finding of the poet-musician is but the outcome of a theory; an outcome which the patent facts easily and wholly refute. Instrumental music when treated by a virile master, like Wagner himself, can be masculine enough, while, in the hands of a versifier gifted chiefly with grace and smoothness, Poetry, the masculine art so called, becomes weakly feminine, or even a characterless thing not attaining to sex. Wagner's theories are founded on a philosophy essentially of Eastern origin, but, had he looked deeper, our speculator would have discovered that Eastern philosophy considers sex to be but an outward manifestation incident to the present stage of world evolution. The human soul, and also the soul of every art, contains within itself the potentiality of both male and female. Sex in the physical world is lack of equilibrium, the temporary preponderance in the soul of specific male or female characteristics outwardly exhibited, but, in the mental world, the offspring of highest genius would attain an equilibrium superior to distinction of sex. In art, as in man its author, the masculine, untempered by the feminine, becomes not wisely masterful, but harsh and brutal; hence the peril of Strauss. The feminine, untempered by the masculine, becomes not intuitive, but weakly capricious and wholly illogical; hence the peril of Debussy. The great authors, whichever their sex, have produced works wherein specific male and female characteristics modify one another.