a temporary halt in Wagner and Bruckner
and Brahms. It may be that modern Germany is a difficult terrain, that
the violent change in conditions of life, the furious acceleration, has
created, for the time being, a soil unusually inimical to the disclosure
of perfect works of art. The blight on the entire new generation of
composers would seem to point to some such common cause. There is, no
doubt, a curious coincidence in the fact that in each of the four chief
German musicians of the recent period there should be manifest in some
degree a failure of artistic instinct. The coarsening of the
craftsmanship, the spiritual bankruptcy, of the later Strauss, the
grotesque pedantry of Reger, the intellectualism with which the art of
Schoenberg has always been tainted, and by which it has been corrupted
of late, the banality of Mahler, dovetail suspiciously. And yet, it is
probable that the cause lies otherwhere, and that the conjunction of
these four men is accidental. There have been, after all, few
environments really friendly to the artist; most of the masters have had
to recover from a "something rotten in the state of Denmark," and many
of them have surmounted conditions worse than those of modern
Bismarckian Germany. The cause of the unsatisfactoriness of much of the
music of Strauss and Schoenberg, Reger and Mahler, is doubtless to be
found in the innate weakness of the men themselves rather more than in
the unhealthiness of the atmosphere in which they passed their lives.

Still, the case of Mahler makes one hesitate a while before passing
judgment. Whereas it is probable that Richard Strauss would have
deteriorated no matter how friendly the age in which he lived, that
Reger would have been just as much a pedant had he been born in Paris
instead of in Bavaria, that Schoenberg would have developed into his
mathematical frigidity wherever he resided, it is possible that Mahler's
fate might have been different had he not been born in the Austria of
the 1860's. For if Mahler's music is pre-eminently a reflection of
Beethoven's, if he never spoke in authentic accents, if out of his vast
dreams of a great modern popular symphonic art, out of his honesty, his
sincerity, his industry, his undeniably noble and magnificent traits,
there resulted only those unhappy boring colossi that are his nine
symphonies, it is indubitably, to a great extent, the consequence of
the fact that he, the Jew, was born in a society that made Judais