d young, the "arrow of longing for the
Superman." It is a long while since any gracious, lordly light has
irradiated his person. In recent years he has become almost the very
reverse of what he was, of what he gave so brave an earnest of becoming.
He who was once so electric, so vital, so brilliant a figure has become
dreary and outward and stupid, even. He who once seemed the champion of
the new has come to fill us with the weariness of the struggle, with
deep self-distrust and discouragement, has become a heavy and oppressive
weight. He who once sought to express the world about him, to be the
poet of the coming time, now seems inspired only by a desire to do the
amazing, the surface thing, and plies himself to every ephemeral and
shallow current of modern life. For Strauss has not only not deepened
and matured and increased in stature; he has not even stood still,
remained the artist that once he was. He has progressively and steadily
deteriorated during the last decade. He has become a bad musician. He is
the cruel, the great disappointment of modern music, of modern art. The
dream-light has failed altogether, has made the succeeding darkness the
thicker for the momentary illumination. Strauss to-day is seen as a
rocket that sizzled up into the sky with many-colored blaze, and then
broke suddenly and extinguished swiftly into the midnight.

It is not easy, even for those who were aware from the very first that
Strauss was not the spirit "pardlike, beautiful and swift" and that
there always were distinctly gross and insensitive particles in him, to
recognize in the slack and listless person who concocts "Joseph's
Legende" and the "Alpensymphonie," the young and fiery composer, genius
despite all the impurities of his style, who composed "Till
Eulenspiegel" and "Don Quixote"; not easy, even though the contours of
his idiom have not radically altered, and though in the sleepy facile
periods of his later style one catches sight at times of the broad,
simple diction of his earlier. For the later Strauss lacks pre-eminently
and signally just the traits that made of the earlier so brilliant and
engaging a figure. Behind the works of the earlier Strauss there was
visible an intensely fierily experiencing being, a man who had powerful
and poignant and beautiful sensations, and the gift of expressing them
richly. Behind the work of the latter there is all too apparent a man
who for a long while has felt nothing beautiful or st