ent," and his hearers actually suffer as are supposed to
suffer his characters or moods or ideas. The old order has changed,
changed very much, yet I dimly feel that if this art is to endure it
contains, perhaps in precipitation, the elements without which no
music is permanent. But his elliptical patterns are interesting, above
all bold. There is no such thing as absolute originality. Even the
individual Schoenberg, the fabricator of nervous noises, leans heavily
on Wagner. Wagner is the fountainhead of the new school, let them mock
his romanticism as they may.

Is all this to be the music of to-morrow? Frankly, I don't know, and
I'm sure Schoenberg doesn't know. He is said to be guided by his
daimon, as was Socrates; let us hope that familiar may prompt him to
more comprehensible utterances. But he must be counted with nowadays.
He is significant of the reaction against formal or romantic beauty. I
said the same more than a decade ago of Debussy. Again the critical
watchmen in the high towers are signalling Schoenberg's movements, not
without dismay. Cheer up, brethren! Preserve an open mind. It is too
soon to beat reactionary bosoms, crying aloud, Nunc dimittis! Remember
the monstrous fuss made over the methods of Richard Strauss and
Claude Debussy. I shouldn't be surprised if ten years hence Arnold
Schoenberg proves quite as conventional a member of musical society as
those other two "anarchs of art."

VI

FRANK WEDEKIND

A very deceptive mask is literature. Here is your Nietzsche with his
warrior pen slashing away at the conventional lies of civilisation, a
terrific figure of outraged manhood, though in private life he was the
gentlest of men, self-sacrificing, lovable, modest, and moral to a
painful degree. But see what his imitators have made of him. And in
all the tons of rubbish that have been written about Tolstoy, the
story told by Anna Seuron is the most significant. But a human being
is better than a half-god.

Bearing this in mind I refused to be scared in advance by the
notorious reputation of Frank Wedekind, whose chief claim to
recognition in New York is his Spring's Awakening, produced at the
Irving Place Theatre seasons ago. I had seen this moving drama of
youth more than once in the Kammerspielhaus of the Deutsches Theatre,
Berlin, and earlier the same poet's drama Erdgeist (in the summer,
1903), and again refused to shudder