The second influence, that of the South, dates from April, 1886, and seems to have left an indelible impression upon Strauss.  He visited Rome and Naples for the first time, and came back with a symphonic fantasia called Aus Italien.  In the spring of 1892, after a sharp attack of pneumonia, he travelled for a year and a half in Greece, Egypt, and Sicily.  The tranquillity of these favoured countries filled him with never-ending regret.  The North has depressed him since then, “the eternal grey of the North and its phantom shadows without a sun."[168] When I saw him at Charlottenburg, one chilly April day, he told me with a sigh that he could compose nothing in winter, and that he longed for the warmth and light of Italy.  His music is infected by that longing; and it makes one feel how his spirit suffers in the gloom of Germany, and ever yearns for the colours, the laughter, and the joy of the South.

[Footnote 168:  Nietzsche.]

Like the musician that Nietzsche dreamed of,[169] he seems “to hear ringing in his ears the prelude of a deeper, stronger music, perhaps a more wayward and mysterious music; a music that is super-German, which, unlike other music, would not die away, nor pale, nor grow dull beside the blue and wanton sea and the clear Mediterranean sky; a music super-European, which would hold its own even by the dark sunsets of the desert; a music whose soul is akin to the palm trees; a music that knows how to live and move among great beasts of prey, beautiful and solitary; a music whose supreme charm is its ignorance of good and evil.  Only from time to time perhaps there would flit over it the longing of the sailor for home, golden shadows, and gentle weaknesses; and towards it would come flying from afar the thousand tints of the setting of a moral world that men no longer understood; and to these belated fugitives it would extend its hospitality and sympathy.”  But it is always the North, the melancholy of the North, and “all the sadness of mankind,” mental anguish, the thought of death, and the tyranny of life, that come and weigh down afresh his spirit hungering for light, and force it into feverish speculation and bitter argument.  Perhaps it is better so.

[Footnote 169:  Beyond Good and Evil, 1886.  I hope I may be excused for introducing Nietzsche here, but his thoughts seem constantly to be reflected in Strauss, and to throw much light on the soul of modern Germany.]

* * * * *

Richard Strauss is both a poet and a musician.  These two natures live together in him, and each strives to get the better of the other.  The balance is not always well maintained; but when he does succeed in keeping it by sheer force of will the union of these two talents, directed to the same end, produces an effect more powerful than any known since Wagner’s time.  Both natures have their source in a mind filled with heroic thoughts—­a rarer possession, I consider, than a talent for either music or poetry.  There are other great musicians in Europe; but Strauss is something more than a great musician, for he is able to create a hero.