Despite its psychology, it is always music for music’s sake. There is formal structure—Loeffler’s form—and a distinct climax. The sparing use of the exotic-toned viola d’amore is most telling. The fanfares, recalling the dim triumphs of the dusty dead, are superbly effective; and the cantilena is ever touching. It is all poetic, “atmospheric” music, yet it is none the less moving and dramatic. Here then is the present situation: Wagner preaching in his music dreams; Tschaïkowsky passionately declaiming the cumulative woes of mankind in accents most pathetically dramatic; Brahms leisurely breasting the turbid billows of this maelstrom and speaking in golden tones the doctrine of art for art’s sake; and, finally, Richard Strauss, a _Übermensch_ himself, seeking with furious and rhythmic gestures to divert from the theatre the art he loves—who shall say whither all this will lead? After Wagner—music for music’s own symphonic sake, and not for impossible librettos, acting-singers, and scene-painters. II WAGNER AND THE FRENCH Stendhal—Henry Beyle—once wrote:— “Romanticism is the art of presenting to people the literary works which in the actual state of their habits and beliefs are capable of giving them the greatest possible pleasure; classicism, on the contrary, is the art of presenting them with that which gave the greatest possible pleasure to their grandfathers.” That the reaction from a brutal realism, a minute photography of nasty details, would come in Parisian art was a foregone conclusion to any acute observer of the history of literature, art, and music since Goethe’s imperial mind set the fashion of things in the early years of the last century. The splendor of Théophile Gautier’s famous “gilet rouge,”—he declared that it was a pink doublet,—which graced the memorable days of the first violent representations of Ernani, was naught but a scarlet protest against the frozen classicism of Cherubini the composer, the painters Ingres and David, and the worship of writers like Boileau, Racine, and Malherbe. A wild rush toward romanticism was inevitable after the colorless elegiacs of Lamartine. And the grand old man at Weimar, in the twilight of his glorious career, summed up the whole movement of 1830 by saying:—“They all come from Châteaubriand.”