In our shrewd categories of things intellectual and things emotional, we partition off too sharply brain and feeling, soul and body. Life is not a proposition by Euclid; nor is art. It is one of the functions of music to make us feel, another to make us think; the greatest masters are ever those who make us both feel and think in one vivid moment. This Beethoven has done, Wagner has done, and now Richard Strauss. You cannot call his music frigidly intellectual, as is often the music of Brahms, nor does it relapse into such debauches of frenetic passion as Tschaïkowsky’s—the imperial intellect of Strauss controls his temperament. He is, like Nietzsche, a lyric philosopher, but never, like Nietzsche, will he allow the problems of life and art to overthrow his reason. In the thunders of his scores, I seem to hear the annunciation of a new dispensation, of a new evangel of art which shall preach the beauty of the soul and the beauty of body; life on the other side of good and evil. * * * * * There are many to whom Richard Strauss’s tone-poem Ein Heldenleben proved musically baneful. Yet Strauss wears no mask. His own musical lineaments, convulsed in passion’s grimace, exultant with grandiose dreams, or distorted by deadly rage, are the naked expression of his fantastic soul. And to the orthodox his contempt for clear tonalities, his mockery of the very harmonic foundations of the art, his juggling with bizarre rhythms—in a word, his avoidance of the normal, the facile, the smug, and the unoriginal, is as great a crime against ethics as the lucidly insane proclamations of the Master Immoralist, Friedrich Nietzsche. Repeated hearings convince one regarding Strauss’s sincerity. He is working out his own artistic salvation on his own premeditated lines. He is the solitary soul of Hauptmann, and he is doomed to mockery until he is understood. It is impossible to escape the compelling magnetism of the man from Munich. He is still young, still in his storm and stress period. When the time for clarification comes, Strauss in this final analysis will emerge a very big man. His Hero’s Life has its ugly spots—critics and criticism are objectified in a cruelly sardonic fashion—and that battlefield will remain for this generation either sheer brutal noise or else the forefront of the higher æstheticism in music. One way or the other it matters little; the reputation of Strauss will not stand or fall by this poem. The main thing to record is the overwhelming impression of power, anarchistic if you will, that informs Ein Heldenleben. And all the more disquieting is the discovery that this Wizard of Dreams wears no antique musical mask—his own is tragic and significant enough.