is it into?) the firmament of Heaven. Once, when I
heard this passage played at a concert, a woman sitting beside me rolled
over like a log, and had to be hauled out by the ushers.

Yes; Strauss is the man to reorchestrate the symphonies of Schumann,
particularly the B flat, the Rhenish and the Fourth. I doubt that he
could do much with Schubert, for Schubert, though he is dead nearly a
hundred years, yet remains curiously modern. The Unfinished symphony is
full of exquisite color effects--consider, for example, the rustling
figure for the strings in the first movement--and as for the C major, it
is so stupendous a debauch of melodic and harmonic beauty that one
scarcely notices the colors at all. In its slow movement mere
loveliness in music probably says all that will ever be said.... But
what of old Ludwig? Har, har; here we begin pulling the whiskers of Baal
Himself. Nevertheless, I am vandal enough to wonder, on sad Sunday
mornings, what Strauss could do with the first movement of the C minor.
More, if Strauss ever does it and lets me hear the result just once,
I'll be glad to serve six months in jail with him.... But in Munich, of
course! And with a daily visitor's pass for Cousin Pschorr!...

The conservatism which shrinks at such barbarities is the same
conservatism which demands that the very typographical errors in the
Bible be swallowed without salt, and that has thus made a puerile
dream-book of parts of Holy Writ. If you want to see how far this last
madness has led Christendom astray, take a look at an article by Abraham
Mitrie Rihbany, an intelligent Syrian, in the _Atlantic Monthly_ of a
couple of years ago. The title of the article is "The Oriental Manner of
Speech," and in it Rihbany shows how much of mere Oriental extravagance
of metaphor is to be found in many celebrated passages, and how little
of literal significance. This Oriental extravagance, of course, makes
for beauty, but as interpreted by pundits of no imagination it surely
doesn't make for understanding. What the Western World needs is a Bible
in which the idioms of the Aramaic of thousands of years ago are
translated into the idioms of today. The man who undertook such a
translation, to be sure, would be uproariously denounced, just as Luther
and Wycliffe were denounced, but he could well afford to face the storm.
The various Revised Versions, including the Modern Speech New Testament
of Richard Francis Weymouth, leave much to be desired.