evolution in France.  By his deeds, by his example, and by his spirit, he was among the first to stir up interest in the musical education of France to-day.  He has done more for the advancement of our music than the entire official teaching of the Conservatoires A day will come when, by the force of things and in spite of all resistance, such a man will take the place that belongs to him at the head of the organisation of music in France.

* * * * *

I have tried to unearth M. d’Indy’s strongest characteristics, and I think I have found them in his faith and in his activity, I am only too aware of the pitfalls that have beset me in this attempt; it is always difficult to criticise a man’s personality, and it is most difficult when he is alive and still in the midst of his development.  Every man is a mystery, not only to others, but to himself.  There is something very presumptuous about pretending to know anyone who does not quite know himself.  And yet one cannot live without forming opinions; it is a necessity of life.  The people we see and know (or say we know), our friends, and those we love, are never what we think them.  Often they are not at all like the portrait we conjure up; for we walk among the phantoms of our hearts.  But still one must go on having opinions, and go on constructing and creating things, if we do not want to become impotent through inertia.  Error is better than doubt, provided we err in good faith; and the main thing is to speak out the thing that one really feels and believes.  I hope M. d’Indy will forgive me if I have gone far wrong, and that he will see in these pages a sincere effort to understand him and a keen sympathy with himself, and even with his ideas, though I do not always share them.  But I have always thought that in life a man’s opinions go for very little, and that the only thing that matters is the man himself.  Freedom of spirit is the greatest happiness one can know; one must be sorry for those who have not got it.  And there is a secret pleasure in rendering homage to another’s splendid creed, even though it is one that we do not ourselves profess.

RICHARD STRAUSS

The composer of Heldenleben is no longer unknown to Parisians.  Every year at Colonne’s or Chevillard’s we see his tall, thin silhouette reappear in the conductor’s desk.  There he is with his abrupt and imperious gestures, his wan and anxious face, his wonderfully clear eyes, restless and penetrating at the same time, his mouth shaped like a child’s, a moustache so fair that it is nearly white, and curly hair growing like a crown above his high round forehead.

I should like to try to sketch here the strange and arresting personality of the man who in Germany is considered the inheritor of Wagner’s genius—­the man who has had the audacity to write, after Beethoven, an Heroic Symphony, and to imagine himself the hero.