" 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.
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