of a psychic deterioration that one
is forced to regard this unfortunate man. The thing that one sees
happening to so many people about one, the extinction of a flame, the
withering of a blossom, the dulling and coarsening of the sensibilities,
the decay of the mental energies, seems to have happened to him, too.
And since it happens in the lives of so many folk, why should it
surprise one to see it happening in the life of an artist, and
deflowering genius and ruining musical art? All the hectic, unreal
activity of the later Strauss, the dissipation of forces, points back to
such a cause. He declares himself in every action the type who can no
longer gather his energies to the performance of an honest piece of
work, who can no longer achieve direct, full, living expression, who can
no longer penetrate the center of a subject, an idea. He is the type of
man unfaithful to himself in some fundamental relation, unfaithful to
himself throughout his deeds. Many people have thought a love of money
the cause of Strauss's decay; that for the sake of gain he has
delivered himself bound hand and foot into the power of his publishers,
and for the sake of gain turned out bad music. No doubt, the love of
money plays an inordinate role in the man's life, and keeps on playing a
greater and greater. But it is probable that Strauss's desire for
incessant gain is a sort of perversion, a mania that has gotten control
over him because his energies are inwardly prevented from taking their
logical course, and creating works of art. Luxury-loving as he is,
Strauss has probably never needed money sorely. Some money he
doubtlessly inherited through his mother, the daughter of the Munich
beer-brewer Pschorr; his works have always fetched large prices--his
publishers have paid him as much as a thousand dollars for a single
song; and he has always been able to earn great sums by conducting. No
matter how lofty and severe his art might have become, he would always
have been able to live as he chose. There is no doubt that he would have
earned quite as much money with "Salome" and "Der Rosenkavalier" had
they been works of high, artistic merit as he has earned with them in
their present condition. The truth is that he has rationalized his
unwillingness to go through the labor-pains of creation by pretending to
himself a constant and great need of money, and permitting himself to
dissipate his energies in a hectic, disturbed, shallow existence, in a
t