bewildered by the stress of the battle. And now ye presume that ye are
going to be permitted, tamquam re bene gesta, to praise such men! and
with words which leave no one in any doubt as to whom ye have in your
minds when ye utter your encomiums, which therefore "spring forth with
such hearty warmth" that one must be blind not to see to whom ye are
really bowing. Even Goethe in his day had to cry: "Upon my honour, we
are in need of a Lessing, and woe unto all vain masters and to the
whole aesthetic kingdom of heaven, when the young tiger, whose
restless strength will be visible in his every distended muscle and
his every glance, shall sally forth to seek his prey!"

V.

How clever it was of my friend to read no further, once he had been
enlightened (thanks to that chimerical vision) concerning the
Straussian Lessing and Strauss himself. We, however, read on further,
and even craved admission of the Doorkeeper of the New Faith to the
sanctum of music. The Master threw the door open for us, accompanied
us, and began quoting certain names, until, at last, overcome with
mistrust, we stood still and looked at him. Was it possible that we
were the victims of the same hallucination as that to which our friend
had been subjected in his dream? The musicians to whom Strauss
referred seemed to us to be wrongly designated as long as he spoke
about them, and we began to think that the talk must certainly be
about somebody else, even admitting that it did not relate to
incongruous phantoms. When, for instance, he mentioned Haydn with that
same warmth which made us so suspicious when he praised Lessing, and
when he posed as the epopt and priest of a mysterious Haydn cult;
when, in a discussion upon quartette-music, if you please, he even
likened Haydn to a "good unpretending soup" and Beethoven to