sche, as we have seen, for the subject of one of his symphonic poems, "Also sprach Zarathustra"; in "Tod und Verklärung" we find him scene-painting the soul; "Don Juan" is full of reflections concerning the soul. He is desperately in earnest, doctrinal almost, made uneasy by his convictions. He thinks with all his might, and he sets his thoughts to music. But does he think in music, and what does his thinking come to?

In one of his compositions, a "melodrame" for the piano, intended as a musical accompaniment to the words of Tennyson's "Enoch Arden," after that hopelessly wrong fashion which Schumann set in his lovely music to "Manfred," Strauss has shown, significantly as I think, the spirit in which he approaches literature. It is a kind of running commentary in footnotes, not a new creation in another art. The music tries to express something which is not in itself but in the words of the text, never for a moment transcending those words, carrying them, as music can carry words, into new regions. The ingenuity with which it is put together is like the ingenuity which a detective novelist expends upon his plot. The motives are woven with the utmost care: they return, cross, are combined, broken, exalted, turn to the sob of waves or the sound of weddingbells; they add italics and capitals to all the points of the story; the web is intricate, and every mesh holds firm. But what of the material itself? It is pretty, common, and effective; it has everything that is obvious in sentiment and matter of fact in expression. The notes do not live, each with its individual life; they have been set in order for a purpose, as an accompaniment to a speaking voice and to the words of a poem.

Strauss has no fundamental musical ideas (ideas, that is, which are great as music, apart from their significance

to the understanding, their non-musical insignificance) and he forces the intensity of his expression because of this lack of genuine musical material. If you intensify nothing to the nth degree, you get, after all, nothing; and Strauss builds with water and bakes bread with dust. "Tod und Verklärung" is a vast development towards something which does not come; a preparation of atmosphere, in which no outline can be distinguished; a stage for life, if you will, but a stage on which life does not enter: the creator has not been able to put breath into his world. All the colors of the orchestra, used as a palette, flood one with their own fires and waves; it is as if an avalanche of water swept over one; but out of this tossing sea only here and there a poor little shivering melody puts up its head and clings half-drowned to a spar. I think of all the painters who have tried to paint without drawing, and I think of Blake's warning:

He who does not imagine in stronger and better lineaments, and in stronger and better light, than his perishing mortal eye can see, does not imagine at all. . . . Leave out this line (the bounding line, Blake calls it, the hard and wiry line of rectitude and certainty) and you leave out life itself; all is chaos again, and the line of the Almighty must be drawn out upon it before man or beast can exist.

Strauss, it seems to me, lacks this rectitude and certainty of the bounding line, and that is why his music washes over one without coloring one's mind with its own dyes. On coming back after listening to the music of Strauss, one's brain is silent, one's memory hears nothing. There is a feeling as if one had passed in front of some great illumination, as if one had feasted on colors, and wandered in the midst of clouds. But all is over, not a trace remains; there is no pulse

ticking anywhere in one's body. One says calmly how interesting, how curious, this was; a new thing, a thing one must judge fairly, a wonderful thing in its way; but the instant, inevitable thrill, straight to the backbone, the new voice, which one seems to recognize when one hears it for the first time: where are these? If I cared more for literature than for music, I imagine that I might care greatly for Strauss. He offers me sound as literature. But I prefer to read my literature, and to hear nothing but music. Strauss reminds me, at one time of De Quincey or Sidney Dobell, at another of Gustave Moreau or of Arnold Böcklin, and I know that all these names have had their hour of worship. All have some of the qualities which go to the making of great art; all, in different ways, fail through lack of the vital quality of sincerity, the hard and wiry line of rectitude and certainty. All are rhetorical, all produce their effect by an effort external to the thing itself which they are saying or singing or painting.

Strauss, like De Quincey, has a great mastery over sensation. He can be bewildering, tormenting, enervating, he is always astonishing; there is electric fluid in his work, but all this electric fluid scatters itself by the way, never concentrates itself to the vital point. He gives you sensation, but he gives it to you coldly, with a calculation of its effect upon you. He gives you color in sound, but he gives you color in great blotches, every one meant to dazzle you from a separate angle; so that it is hardly extravagant to say, as a friend of mine said to me, that his music is like, not so much a kaleidoscope, as a broken kaleidoscope.

III.

Strauss has many moments in which he reminds me of Schumann, and not

only the moments in which he tries to bring humor into music. Turn from the "Annie" motive in "Enoch Arden" to the "Eusebius" of the "Carnival," and you will readily see all the difference there can be between two passages which it is quite possible to compare with one another. The "Annie" motive is as pretty as can be, it is adequate enough as a suggestion of the somewhat colorless heroine of Tennyson's poem; but how lacking in distinction it is, if you but set it beside the "Eusebius," in which music requires nothing but music to be its own interpreter. But it is in his attempts at the grotesque that Schumann seems at times actually to lead the way to Strauss. It is from Schumann that Strauss has learnt some of those hobbling rhythms, those abrupt starts, as of a terrified peasant, by which he has sometimes suggested his particular kind of humor in music.

"Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks" is meant to be a musical joke, and it is like nothing so much as a Toy Symphony, in which the toys are imitated by the instruments of a full orchestra. This kind of realism, far from being a new development in music, was one of the earliest games of the art in its childhood. There never was a time when music did not say "Co-co-ri-co" and "Cuckoo." After Haydn, the joke began to seem outworn. Berlioz took it up again, with his immense seriousness, and brought terror out of pleasantry, and sublimity out of ugliness. Strauss has gone back to the mechanical making of humor. A descending major seventh represents, on Strauss' own authority, "Till strung up to the gibbet." When, as in "Feuersnot," Strauss writes a common little dance tune, and suggests to us, by the elaborate way in which it is developed, and by the elaboration of the surrounding music, that he means it for a realistic representation of the bourgeois as

he is, I am reminded of Mr. George Gissing, and of his theory that the only way to represent commonplace people in art is to write about them in a commonplace way. That was not Wagner's way of working in "Die Meistersinger." That was not Balzac's way of working in "Les Paysans." In much of "Till Eulenspiegel" the orchestra jokes after the approved German fashion, chimera bombinans in vacuo. German humor is unrelated to any normal or, indeed, existing thing, it is spun out of the brain without the help of the senses. "Till" mocks with a vast inverted seriousness. But it is without beauty, and the grotesque becomes art when beauty comes into it. Look at the carvings in a Gothic cathedral, look at a Japanese bronze or a monster in a Japanese print. The delicacy which you will find there, lurking in those horrid folds, is what distinguishes great work from common, in the grotesque as in all other forms of art. It is the difference between Puck and the gnome painted on the walls of a German beer-cellar. Strauss tricks out his gnome with all the colors of the lime-lights, but the gnome remains a mis-shapen creature out of the earth, when the lights are over.

Yet how amazingly clever the thing is, how the orchestra unbends, plays pranks, turns head over heels for the occasion! Music is a grave thing, and laughs unwillingly. Strauss compels it to do what he wants, and it does what he wants, with the ferocity of a caged wild beast doing tricks under the whip of the keeper.

Strauss does things with the orchestra which no one has ever done before; he delights you with his effects as effects, and though I am complaining of this very fact, I wish to credit him with all that it means, for good and evil. When people call Strauss' music ugly they are mistaking the question at issue. Technique carried to the

point to which Strauss carries it has a certain incontestable value, and it matters little whether it is employed on good or bad material. There is such a thing as having a genius for technique, and while even genius for technique never produces a satisfactory result, the plain, simple result of greatness, it produces a result which is sufficiently interesting to detain you by the way. Strauss calls off your attention from the thing itself to the way in which the thing is done; yes, but I am prepared to admire, with all due reservation, the way in which it is done. The way in which Strauss writes for the orchestra gives me a separate pleasure, just as the way in which Swinburne writes verse, quite apart from what either has to say. Strauss chooses to disconcert the ear; I am ready to be disconcerted, and to admire the skill with which he disconcerts me. I mind none of the dissonances, queer intervals, sudden changes; but I want them to mean something vital, musically, I want them to convince me of what they are meant to say. The talk of ugliness is a mere device for drawing one aside from the trail. Vital sincerity is what matters, the direct energy of life itself, forcing the music to be its own voice. Do we find that in this astonishingly clever music?

I do not find it. I find force and tenacity, a determined grip on his material, such as it is, the power to do whatever he can conceive. But I feel that that constructive power which weaves a complex but tightly woven network of sound is at its best but logic without life; that though the main ideas (to which, I am assured by a musical critic from whom I always regret to differ, "all the wonderful detail work is subservient") are expressed with admirable force and coherence, they are not great ideas, they are exterior, lifeless, manufactured

ideas. In subordinating single effects to the effect of the whole he is only, after all, showing himself a great master of effect. He is that, as De Quincey is that, with the same showy splendor, the same outer shell of greatness. What I do not find in his work is great material, or the great manner of working; and as he sets himself the biggest tasks, and challenges comparison with the greatest masters, he cannot be accepted, as much smaller men can be accepted, for what they have done, perfect within its limits.

When Strauss takes the orchestra in both fists, and sets it clanging, I do not feel that sense of bigness which I feel in any outburst of Beethoven or of Wagner. It comes neither from a great height nor from a great depth. There is always underneath it something either vague or obvious. When an unexpected voice comes stealthily from among the wood-wind, or a harp twists through the 'cellos, or a violin cries out of an abyss of sound, it never "makes familiar things seem strange, or strange things seem familiar." It is all fearfully and wonderfully made, but it is made to satisfy a desire of making, and there is something common in the very effectiveness of the effects. All the windy, exalted music in "Feuersnot" is the same kind of writing as the florid Italian writing, the music of "Trovatore," mechanical exaltation, crises of the head, much more splendidly developed, from an even tinier point of melodic life. All this working up, as of a very calculated madness, may go to the head, from which it came; never to the heart, to which it was always a stranger. When I play it over on the piano, I get the excitement with which, if I were a mathematician, I should follow the most complicated of Euclid's problems. The Monthly Review.

It would be untrue to say that I do not get from it a very definite pleasure. But it is a dry and dusty pleasure, it speaks to what is most superficial in me, to my admiration of brilliant external things, of difficult things achieved, of things not born but made. It comes to me empty of life, and it touches in me no spring of life.

For my part, I know only one really reassuring test of the value of a work of art. Here is something on which time has not yet set its judgment: place it beside something, as like it as possible, on which the judgment of time seems to have been set, and see if it can endure the comparison. Let it be as unlike as you please, and the test will still hold good. I can pass from an overture of Wagner to a mazurka of Chopin as easily as from a scene in a play of Shakespeare to a song of Herrick. The one may be greater than the other, but the one is not more genuine than the other. But turn from the opera music of Strauss to the opera music of Wagner, and what is the result? I play twenty pages of the piano score of "Feuersnot," and as I play them I realize the immense ingenuity, the brilliant cleverness, of the music, all its effective qualities, its qualities of solid construction, its particular kind of mastery. Then I play a single page of "Parsifal" or of "Tristan," and I am no longer in the same world. That other flashing structure has crumbled into dust, as if at the touch of an Ithuriel spear. Here I am at home, I hear remote and yet familiar voices, I am alive in the midst of life. I wonder that the other thing could have detained me for a moment, could have come, for a moment, so near to deceiving me.

Arthur Symons.

"Al

To a small-a still inexplicably small -circle of readers the publication of a new book written by Mr. Joseph Conrad ranks as a notable event, an event the comparative infrequency of which makes it all the more remarkable in an age when many of our authors have an "output" as regular, and almost as copious, as a Welsh coal-mine. mayer's Folly," Mr. Conrad's first novel, appeared early in 1895, and "Youth," the most recent addition to his works, is only the fifth book which has come from his pen during the last eight years. That, as such matters are reckoned to-day, is slow production, and an examination of any one of the volumes which bear this author's name upon their title-pages will serve to convince that these books, at any rate, are written really written-as are but few of the works with which each succeeding publishing season inundates us. It is not merely that by no conceivable effort of fancy can the reader conjure up a picture of Mr. Conrad shouting his "copy" into a phonograph, or dictating it to a breathless stenographer; nor is it only that his work is honorably distinguished by its author's care, sincerity, and conscientious determination to give the public naught save his best, though these things are manifest in every line. Much more is meant, for indeed Mr. Conrad's stories resemble nothing so nearly as some elaborate piece of mosaic. Each of them is made up of an immense number of minute atoms, one and all of which bear witness to the skill and finished workmanship brought to their fashioning, one and all of which, apart from their individual beauty, are essential to the whole whereof they form the parts, so that that whole, lacking any tiniest fragment, would be marred

and incomplete. This is why Mr. Conrad's books, to be appreciated at their full worth, must not only be read, but must be read more than once. The mind of their author is so subtle, he has put into them so much thought, so much delicacy of touch, so much that is at once allusive and elusive, that at every reperusal some hitherto undetected nicety is revealed. And in this very fact, perhaps, is to be sought the secret not only of Mr. Conrad's success, but also of his failure. His success, within limits, has been undoubted; for his work cannot fail to make a deep impression upon every lover of literary technique, and to afford keen pleasure to all who are capable of prizing, as its rarity deserves, a creative and imaginative talent which in this case is surely not far removed from genius. On the other hand, however, the very refinements and subtleties inseparable from his habit of thought and literary method have caused his books to make but a faint appeal to the general public. Give a dog a bad name, and hang him; call a book "stiff reading," and let it go by the board! This, seemingly, has been the attitude of the majority of readers towards Mr. Conrad's works in the past. It remains to be seen whether his new book, "Youth, and Two other Stories," just published by Messrs. Blackwood (68.), will succeed in effecting anything in the nature of a wholesome conversion.

It is to be feared that the chances in favor of any such result are not over great, for "Youth," it must be confessed, furnishes as much "stiff reading" as any of its predecessors. is to say, the book makes a constant, insistent appeal to the intelligence of the reader: it cannot be taken up idly

That