By the way; being a collection of short essays on music and art in general, taken from the program-books of the Boston Symphony Orchestra

MAY AND MAY
5 HOTHAM ROAD
LONDON. S.W. 15_

Music and
Music Literature

ABOUT MUSICIANS

BY THE WAY

Being a Collection of Short Essays on Music

and Art in General taken from the

Program-Books of the Boston

Symphony Orchestra

VOL. II.
BY

William Foster Apthorp

BOSTON
Cofeland and Day

M DCCC XCVIII

HL

60

A 58
V.I

ENTERED ACCORDING TO THE ACT OF
CONGRESS IN THE YEAR 1898 BY
COPELAND AND DAY IN THE OFFICE
OF THE LIBRARIAN OF CONGRESS
AT WASHINGTON

TO
MY MOTHER

Contents

ABOUT MUSICIANS: PA«B
THE OLD DECHANTEURS 3
THE OLD STRICT CONTRAPUNTISTS 7
SOME NOT WHOLLY RANDOM SPECULA-
TIONS ABOUT PAGANIN I II

MENDELSSOHN'S HEART'S ABHORRENCE 23

AN ANECDOTE OF GUNGL 27

TWO ANECDOTES OF VON BULOW 29

BRAHMS 31

TCHAIKOVSKY IN PARIS 43
MUSICAL REMINISCENCES OF BOSTON

THIRTY YEARS AGO 48

ABOUT ART IN GENERAL:

RANDOM THOUGHTS ON ARTISTS IN

GENERAL 85

POLYPHLOISBOIO THALXsSES 97

CANONS 105

CULTURE 114

THE SQUARE ROOT OF MINUS ONE 125

THE COMPLEX 136

THE LUDICROUS 144

GLEANINGS FROM THE COURT LI-
BRARY IN UTOPIA 157

ABOUT MUSICIANS

VOL. II. — I

ABOUT MUSICIANS

THE work of the Dechanteurs went for- The Old
ward slowly ; it could not well do other- Dechanteurs
wise. In their day, theorists had more to do
than to discover the laws of musical composi-
tion : they had also to find out some way
of writing music. A whole new system of
musical notation had to be worked out and
established. The great triumph of scholastic
musicians, from Guido d'Arezzo in the
eleventh century down to the middle of the
fourteenth, was the establishment of what is
known as the system of Mensural Notation.

The Integral Calculus, the theory of Doubly
Periodic Functions, Analytic Mechanics, the
Metaphysics of Hegel or Fichte, are all tole-
rably ponderous and abstruse subjects ; but for
something positively brain-racking in its vast
complexity give me the theory — let alone the

4 ABOUT MUSICIANS

The Old practice — of Mediaeval Mensural Notation !

Dechanteurs AS Walter Besant once said of the French
Equivocal Rhyme, it seems as if something
penal might be done with it. Solitary incar-
ceration, on a diet of stale bread and water,
with an occasional allowance of more stimu-
lating brain-food, — say, boiled haddock, —
and a treatise on Mensural Notation, with no
hope of liberation till the subject had been
fully mastered, would suffice to deter a man
from any crime. The Schleswig-Holstein
Question was child's-play in comparison !

No wonder the old scholastic musicians,
with this dire task on their hands, wrote
music in which no mortal can find inspiration !
How difficult the task was, may be apprecia-
ted when we consider that they who undertook
it had worse than nothing to start with.
Musical notation, at the time when Guido
d'Arezzo began his labours, was a terribly
complex system, all but impossible to master,
requiring years and years of study to under-
stand. Yet, with all its harassing complica-
tions, it was so vague, so deficient in definite

ABOUT MUSICIANS 5

meaning, that music written in it, were it but The Old
a simple melody, was open to many different Decbanteurs
interpretations. No singer, no matter how
learned and expert, could be even approxi-
mately sure of reading it right. The com-
poser's intentions were quite problematical,
and the notation could serve as little more than
a system of mnemonics, like the Peruvian
Quipus, enabling a singer to retain in his
memory what had been taught him orally by
the composer.

Consider also that, for a long time, all
efforts were directed toward improving the old
system, instead of directly inventing a new
one ; that, in this way, complications were
heaped upon complications, and every advance
was a deeper plunge into this Slough of De-
spond, until at last the Mensural Note was hit
upon, as the only hope of getting out of it.
Consider further that, even when the men-
sural note was established, as a sure means of
communicating musical ideas, not one tithe of
its possibilities were suspected. In their gra-
dual development of Mensural Notation com-

6 ABOUT MUSICIANS

The Old posers and theorists would go only just far
Decbanteurs enough barely to satisfy the needs of the music
of their own day ; every new development of
the Discantus necessitated a fresh overhauling
of the system of notation, at times an entire
remodelling of the same from the very begin-
ning. Consider all this, I say, and you will
begin to see what a piece of work it was.

Here were hard-working musicians, just
beginning to catch a glimpse of what Music
could be, making discoveries the value of
which was highly problematical even to them-
selves, and yet with no definite musical nota-
tion wherewith to write down their new ideas !
No wonder Music was considered to be a
" branch of Mathematics." For three cen-
turies the Dechanteurs and their successors did
all the drudgery, the wood-hewing and water-
drawing, of musical development. Well,
this comparatively ignoble work had to be
done ; so all honour to them who did it !

ABOUT MUSICIANS

THE beauty to be found in the old music The Old
of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries Strict Con-
is mainly this : absolute perfection of melodic traPunttsts
outline, thorough repose, perfect simplicity of
effect, no matter how complex the musical
organism : above all, the greatest imaginable
stoutness of musical construction. The enor-
mous technical skill of the old masters of this
period lay in their entire command over their
musical material, and their consequent thrifty
use of it. They had the keenest eye for every
possibility of beauty that lay hidden in this ma-
terial, and knew how to develop these dormant
potencies into musical existence and life. For
the expression of passion and individual emo-
tion they had no musical means. That sub-
jective quality in modern music which seems to
lift the veil from before the sanctuary of
the composer's very heart, and initiate us into
the mystery of his personal emotional life, was
foreign to their writing. But what their music
did express more transcendently than it has
been expressed since, is that impersonal, super-
earthly state of being for which the Hindoos

8 ABOUT MUSICIANS

The Old have found the word Nirvana, and in Chris-
Strict Con- tian Philosophy is called Ecstasy. Leaving
rapun is s aside tne question of specific aesthetic beauty,
the music of later periods may be characterized
as an ideal mirror in which Man sees a trans-
figured reflection of himself, of human joys,
sorrows, passions, struggles, defeats, victories.
This older music is a mirror, tilted at such an
angle that, in it, we see reflected the blue of
heaven itself.

It has been objected that the old composers
expended a large part of their powers upon
solving mere technical difficulties, in work-
ing out sheer musical puzzles. Well, this
was hardly avoidable. For a couple of cen-
turies, musicians had been hard at work on
the Discantus ; their experiments in this style
of writing had led up to the discovery of the
true principles of Counterpoint. The tech-
nical difficulties of this style had been so far
conquered that composers could write in it
with sufficient ease and freedom to give some
scope to their musical imagination and inven-
tiveness. The musical form was firmly es-

ABOUT MUSICIANS

tablished, and found to be excellent. How The Old
natural was it, then, for composers to try to Strict Con-
push this form to its furthest practicable limits, traPunttsts
to try to find out what new subtleties it might
be capable of, and thus exhaust its aesthetic
possibilities ! The simplest laws of Imitative
Counterpoint were at first mere trammels on
the composer's genius ; but time and practice
showed them to be natural and productive of
admirable results, when intelligently and skil-
fully followed. What was at first a galling
shackle soon became a source of power ; might
it not be found that new and more intricate
contrapuntal devices, more difficult still to
work with, would in their turn prove them-
selves fresh sources of power, when once
thoroughly mastered ? At the very worst,
the technical skill developed in mastering them
would, of itself, make the game worth the
candle. So composers set to work with a
will, imposing upon themselves the most
difficult, varied, and intricate contrapuntal
tasks, in the hope that their more and more
complex musical web might in time furnish

io ABOUT MUSICIANS

The Old material for a worthy garment for creative
Strict Con- genius to wear. It is true that this passion
trapuntists £Qr musjcai experimentalizing often led to
purely fantastic results ; many compositions
proved to be, in the end, mere curiosities as
technical tours de force. Many a contra-
puntal device was found to be nothing more
than a musical puzzle, of no artistic value.
But the true men of genius soon enough
stopped toying with such things ; not sorry,
however, to have made the experiment, if only
to have seen the folly of it for themselves.

On the whole, it seems to me that the real
value of many of these " Netherlandish tricks "
has been somewhat underestimated. These
apparently childish experiments, artificial and
fantastic though they now seem to us, gave
composers such an insight into the possibilities
of Counterpoint, that it is safe to say that the
great masters of later days, the Handels, Sebas-
tian Bachs, and Beethovens, would have been
able to write with far less freedom and mas-
tery, had not their musical material been
previously so thoroughly worked and rendered

ABOUT MUSICIANS n

pliable by the old Netherlander and Italians. The Old
Again, it is quite wrong to imagine that a Strict Con-
highly developed technique was the only good traP^n^s
result of these musical experiments in the Low
Countries. Some compositions of that period,
even in very intricate forms, can be ranked
only with what is purest and most beautiful
in Music. And, even though we call some
of their artistic failures mere bits of toying
with complex contrapuntal devices, sheer mu-
sical play, we must own that they are anything
but r £/'/*/' /-play, and, as Ambros says, that
only great minds could play so.

SOME years ago, I happened to come Some not
across an old volume of bound sheet-music, wholly ran-

consisting for the most part of songs such as dom 8Pecula'

, i IT j j • tions about

were currently sung at ballad-concerts and in n

. . . raganini

drawing-rooms in the twenties and thirties of

the present century. Among them was one,
called The Evening Gun, which I seemed to
remember hearing my father hum when I was
a very small youngster indeed; so, for old
association's sake, I took it to the pianoforte

12 ABOUT MUSICIANS

Some not and tried it through. Soon my father, who
wholly ran- happened to be in the next room, came in to
dom Specula- ask me where j had unearthed that old thing ?

tions about TT . . _r . . „

n • • -tie said, moreover : " You sing it all wrong !

I suppose the traditions of that sort of thing
are all gone now, and that people would
smile, if they heard those old songs sung as we
used to. But songs like that used to be sung
in as grand a style and with as much dramatic
emphasis as anything in Wagner opera nowa-
days. You Ve no idea how singers like
Braham and others of his day would pile on
the agonies ! " Now, it would as soon occur
to a singer to-day — unless it happened to be
some five-dollars-a-seat operatic star, singing a
popular encore-piece — to " pile on the ago-
nies " in The Evening Gun as it would to
sing Little Bo- Peep with tragic bathos ; the
song is the simplest imaginable bit of homely
melody.

I was reminded of my father's remarks
about it, when I soon afterwards heard the
late Julius Eichberg say, one afternoon :
" One thing seems to me to be entirely lost

ABOUT MUSICIANS r

and out of date nowadays : and that is what Some not
we used to call the grand violin style. Great wholly ran-

violin virtuosi now play, as a rule, much more specula

, , , , T tions about

great music than they used to, when 1 was a papan • •

boy ; the stuff that then formed their chief stock
in trade would not be tolerated now by serious
audiences. But, although they play better
music nowadays, they have lost the grand old
manner ; you no longer hear a violinist play
a phrase as if with the sublime conviction that
it reached all the way from Nova Zembla to
the South Pole!"

It was virtually the same thing ! If we
look through the old virtuoso music for the
violin, the music with which men like Artot,
de Beriot, Ernst, and others — not to men-
tion Paganini — used to drive audiences wild
with enthusiasm, and wring tears from every
eye, we wonder how those rather infantile
cantilenas could ever have been made to sound
grand. As violin music, they are much like
what The Evening Gun was, as a song. It
was the style of playing that made them sound
big and impressive, as if each puny phrase

ABOUT MUSICIANS

Some not
w holly ran-

om Specula-
tions about
Paganini

extended " from the aurora borealis to the pre-

cession of the equinoxes." We nowadays
CQuld not jjsten tQ ^ ^^ f ^. . ^

smile, so enormous would seem the discrepancy
between matter and manner. But, in the old
days, it was de rigueur ; and, so far from
smiling, people would weep delicious tears
over it.

The last remnant of this sort of violin-play-
ing in our day was probably to be found in
Ole Bull. He was, to be sure, an eccentric,
unquestionably great as his technical virtuosity
was ; ask any musician who ever heard him,
and he will tell you that Ole Bull's style was, to
say the least, excessive. But he had a very dis-
tinct and appealing personality, and used to
make people cry by the bucketful ; no man
drew larger audiences, nor drove them to wilder
raptures. He, too, would play a phrase as if
its extent and significance were boundless ; in
him you still found the old grand violin style,
though pushed to singular extremes.

But wait a bit ! I, for one, have never been
quite sure about the exact degree in which

ABOUT MUSICIANS 15

Ole Bull pushed this style to extremes. I Some not
have always had a suspicion — and still have wholly ran-

it strongly — that, if any of us could be dom SPfcula'

^1,1111-1 ii_ n • -, turns about

taken to Glubbdubdrib, and have Paganim's

ghost brought up before us and hear him
play as he used to play in the flesh, his
playing would remind us more forcibly of Ole
Bull than of any one else. Ole Bull has some-
times been described as " Paganini, only more
so ,-" but I have my grave doubts as to the
extent of the more so. Look carefully at the
anecdotic history of the two men, and you
will find quite surprising points of resemblance.
The peculiar, magical influence they exerted
upon the general musical public was very si-
milar ; it was, in a certain sense, diabolic and
partaking of the nature of witchcraft. Both
were purely solo players ; Paganini, to be
sure, had, at one time, a fondness for playing
the first violin part in Beethoven quartets : but
the result is reported to have been a tragi-
comic failure ; none of the three other players
could keep time with him, when he played as
he wished to — and when he played fairly and

1 6 ABOUT MUSICIANS

Some not squarely, he made no effect. I think that any
wholly ran- one who ever heard Ole Bull would guess that

dom specula- ^j quartet-playing must have amounted to pretty
tions about . . . .

p • • much the same thing. Again, let any musician

who never heard either Paganini or Ole Bull
play look through the music each one of them
wrote for himself; he will stand aghast at such
music's ever having moved great crowds to
enthusiasm and the verge of hysteria. Paga-
nini's has more to say for itself than Ole
Bull's ; but the so much lauded magic is now
discoverable in neither. This magic unques-
tionably resided in the overpowering personality
of the two players ; also, to a great extent, in
their peculiar styles of playing. And what I
suspect is that their styles were in many — per-
haps in most — respects very similar.

One thing that leads me to this is the fact
that Ole Bull, when a young man of twenty-
one, often heard Paganini in Paris, and warmly
admired him. To be sure, Paganini after-
wards spoke of Ole Bull's style as " original
and admirable ; " but it is no great stretch of
suspiciousness to guess that the " admirable "

ABOUT MUSICIANS 1

must have been largely of the Paganini sort, Some not
and that the "original" was the more so. wholly ran-

At all events, it is not likely that a virtuoso at dom SPfcula
, .,1 f , ttons about

the impressionable age of twenty-one should pa?anini

have been carried away by a genius like Paga-
nini, without the latter' s style making some
lasting impression upon his own. But even
the fact of the personal relations between Ole
Bull and Paganini was not necessary to help
me to my conclusion. The internal evidence
in the case is quite as strong, if not even
stronger. The relations of both men to the
musical public were so similar, the peculiar
impression they produced upon the general
run of listeners was so nearly identical, that
one is well-nigh forced to conclude that both
must have worked upon the public by much
the same means. That Paganini' s position
among musicians, in his day, was less isolated
than Ole Bull's, in his, need not mean much.
It is true that Paganini was warmly admired
by a class of musicians with whom Ole Bull
was never in touch : by men like Liszt and
Schumann, even by some out-and-out classi-

VOL. II. — 2

1 8 ABOUT MUSICIANS

Some not cists ; whereas Ole Bull had but few noteworthy

wholly ran- professional affiliations, and was looked upon
om pecu a- ag an artjst thoroughly sui generis, with whom

turns about

Pavanini res* music-making world could, upon

the whole, have nothing to do. But Paganini
belonged to an older generation ; his influence
upon violinists in his day was enormous, no-
tably upon the younger ones ; and the Paga-
nini style, or some reflection of it, must have
become pretty general among virtuoso players
even before the man himself had passed away.
Ole Bull, on the other hand, represented the
survival of this style — or of something very like
it — in times when the general run of violin-
playing had already taken another direction ;
and this necessarily gave him a more solitary
position in the world of music than that of his
great predecessor. What had been recognized
as individuality in Paganini, was called eccen-
tricity in him. The whole style had grown
obsolete and out of date.

My reason for bringing up Ole Bull at all
in this connection is that he is probably the
only example either I or most of my readers

ABOUT MUSICIANS 19

can remember of a style of violin-playing Some not
which has long since gone out of fashion ; he wbolly ran-

was undoubtedly an extreme example, but dom $Pfculff

... ~ . . . A i T i • i • ttons about

still sufficiently characteristic. And I think it p

more than probable that that ultra-strenuous-
ness of style which many of us can remember
in Ole Bull gives a better idea of the chief
characteristics of the old "grand style" than
any other modern instance that could be
named. There can be little doubt, either,
that Paganini himself was a rather extreme
example of this style, that he was more
inclined to "pile on the agonies" than any
other notable violinist of his day, or after,
until we come to Ole Bull. In short,
although Ole Bull gave one a decidedly exag-
gerated idea of what the old grand style was in
general, the idea he gave of what Paganini' s
playing was like must have been far less so ;
so little exaggerated withal as to be tolerably
exact in its main features.

Let it not be thought that this attempt of
mine to reconstruct Paganini' s musical physi-
ognomy from data, the relevancy of which

20 ABOUT MUSICIANS

Some not may not be clearly apparent at first sight, is
wholly ran- wholly gratuitous and untrustworthy. The
dom Specula- CQurse vioiin.piaying has followed, from
tions about _ . ., . r , . . ,

Pa?an:ni "aganmrs time down to our own, is not with-
out its parallel in that pursued by the art of
singing. It is not long ago that I got a letter
from an old-time opera-goer, who could still
remember the Rossini operas in their heyday,
and the great singers who sang in them. My
correspondent called my attention, among
other things, to the fact that Semiramide was
written, and generally rated, as a "grand
dramatic part ; " ,it was not meant for a light,
florid soprano sfogato, for one of the "canary-
birds ' ' of the lyric stage, but for a heavy
dramatic soprano — a singer like Tietjens or
Lilli Lehmann, for instance. All those florid
roulades, which we now regard as the most
unmitigated sort of vocal fire-works, fit only
for the rapid warbling of a light, agile voice,
were orginally sung more slowly, with full
vibrato, and the most grandiose dramatic ex-
pression. It takes something of a stretch of
the imagination for us to conceive nowadays of

ABOUT MUSICIANS 21

such things being sung dramatically and in Some not
the grand style ; but that they were so sung wholly ran-
is indubitable. The old " dramatic " colora- dom SPecula~

tions about
tura, sung with the full voice and at a mode- pafan -„ •

rate rate of speed, is now pretty much a thing
of the past; Semiramide's roulades are sung
nowadays by light voices, in mezza voce, and
at a break-neck pace ; the old grand style and
dramatic stress have passed away from music
of this sort, and made place for a sheer display
of vocal agility. I remember when Lilli
Lehmann astonished all Paris — in the winter of
1890-91 — with her singing of Constanze's
air in Mozart's Seraglio; one old musician
exclaimed in delight : " This is the first time
in many years that I have heard the old slow
coloratura, sung with the full power of the
voice, just as the great singers of old used to
sing ! ' J Some of us can remember the same
great artist's singing of " Bello a me ritorna"
in Bellini* s Nor ma, at the Boston Theatre ;
that was great dramatic singing, full of emo-
tional stress and the carefullest regard for
expressive details ; it was the old grand style,

22 ABOUT MUSICIANS

Some not whereas most other singers had shown us this

wholly ran- music only as the lightest sort of agile warbling.

dom Specula- Compared with what we now look upon

tions about . . .

Paranini as "ramatlc music, these things of Rossini s,
Bellini's, and Donizetti's strike us in much
the same way as the innocently puny cantilenas
in the Ernst, de Beriot, or Vieuxtemps
violin concertos, compared with the broader,
nobler, and more expressive cantilena of the
great classic and " modern -romantic " masters ;
and we wonder how either the Rossini or the
de Beriot sort of melody could ever have laid
claim to anything like grandeur. It was the
then prevalent style of singing and playing that
made these things seem grand and imposing ;
what the melody lacked in breadth and expres-
sive calibre was made up by the style of
performance, a style at once so broad and so
sophisticated, so grandly large and so replete
with cunning detail-work, that little we hear
nowadays can give us an adequate notion of it.
It was a style which, as Julius Eichberg once
said, "could make a phrase that was abso-
lutely dripping with idiocy sound like a sub-
lime and beautiful poeip j "

ABOUT MUSICIANS 23

To return once more to Paganini, that great Some not
man must have possessed this style, or some- wholly ran-

thing; very like it, to perfection. If we would

_ . tions about
discover any charm, magnetism, or effective- pafan- /

ness in his music to-day, we can do so only
by conjuring up in our imagination some faint
spectre of his playing. And very likely this
spectre can help us better than his playing it-
self could, if we were really to hear him in the
flesh ; for I am by no means sure that his
playing, could we hear it now, would not
provoke a smile in us, in spite of all the man's
wondrous personal charm and magnetism. I
fear the "much ado" of the style would be
impotent to hide from us the "nothing" of
the music.

FROM many of Mendelssohn's letters Mendelssohn's
we get sombre hints, and perhaps not Heart's
much more than hints ; yet, taken together Abhorrence
with what we know of the man, of his artistic
aims and principles, they are eloquent to who-
ever has ears to hear. Through many of his
letters there runs a current of abhorrence of a

24 ABOUT MUSICIANS

Mendelssohn's musical something — call it essence, spirit,
Heart's tendency, if you will — which had begun to

Abhorrence show ksdf in hig dme> which k were blind.

ness not to recognize as essentially identical
with the dominant musical spirit of the present
day. Mendelssohn did his best to stem its
progress. It aroused a more strenuous opposi-
tion in him than anything the mere " Philis-
tines " could do ; and both by precept and
example — in his compositions, in his playing,
conducting, and teaching — he fought against
it, tooth and nail. No doubt he combated it
as something utterly bad and vicious, rather
than as anything he feared might in the end
prove itself strong and victorious. He only
saw the beginnings of it, — in Liszt, Berlioz,
and others, — and his faith was too strong for
him seriously to fear that it would ever thrive.
For, to his mind, it was as a blasphemy against
all he held most sacred, all he believed to be
truest and most eternal in Music. He could
not foresee that Brahms — that is, the Brahms
we now know, the Brahms of the C minor
symphony — would one day come out of Schu-

ABOUT MUSICIANS 25

mann ; that the Berlioz spawn was to hatch Mendelssohn's
out Saint-Saens, Bizet, and who knows whom Heart's
else? that the occult forces then secretly at Abhorrence
work were to bring forth a Richard Wagner,
with his Nibelungen, Tristan, and Kunstioerk
der Zukunft. These were all hidden from
his sight by the impenetrable veil of the future.
But the seeds, the first germs of these he did
see ; and, though far from rightly estimating
their vitality, their inherent power of growth,
he abhorred them with a deep-rooted abhor-
rence, as he would the thing unclean. What
were the mere trivialities of the " Philistines "
compared to this new spirit in Music, which,
if it were not exorcised, must inevitably drag
the whole art down to utter destruction ? To
him the exorcism seemed simple enough, a
thing destined to be a mere matter of time.
To his faith, founded on Bach, Handel, and
Beethoven, this spirit might well seem mori-
bund, even in its infancy ; yet none the less
detestable for all that, and something in the
extermination of which it might, on the whole,
be well to assist Mature.

26 ABOUT MUSICIANS

Mendelssohn's Do not think, for a moment, that I am sta-
Heart's ting the case too strongly. Of the few survi-

Abborrence yjng musicians who were once intimate with
Mendelssohn, who remember him in the daily-
activity of his musical life, I am sure there is
not one but would agree that, if Mendelssohn
were suddenly to return to this earth to-day
and see our musical doings, hear the composi-
tions we take delight in, know the men we
crown as heroes, — our Wagners, Liszts, Ber-
liozes, Brahmses, Dvoraks, Rubinsteins, — he
would think to find himself in the midst of the
crumbling ruins of a devastated art, the shat-
tered and prostrate columns of a desecrated
temple. Remember, also, I am expressing no
personal opinion. I am judging no one,
neither Mendelssohn nor the men who have
come after him, in many ways almost supplanted
him. I am merely trying to show how the
general musical production of our day — above
all, how the reigning musical spirit and tendency
of our day — would appear if viewed through
Mendelssohn's eyes. This new musical spirit,
which breathes through almost all of our con-

ABOUT MUSICIANS 27

temporary composition, sets our responsive Mendelssohn's
hearts a-beating. But Mendelssohn would have Hearfs
looked upon it as verily to pneuma akatbarton! -Abhorrence

JOSEF GUNGL, the Munich waltz com- An Anecdote
poser, once had the ill luck unwittingly to of Gungl
make a boomerang joke that told most upon
himself. He was rehearsing a new waltz of
his own, one morning, and, stopping the or-
chestra just after the first phrase of the waltz
proper, — after the introduction, — cried out :
" Gentlemen of the first violins ; at the begin-
ning of this phrase please make your bows
jump well from the string. Play it with a
dash. Don't be timid about it, but make your
bows jump on the up-stroke ! " The men
caught his idea easily enough ; after the pas-
sage had been repeated two or three times, it
went to his satisfaction. In the evening came
the performance. It should be known that
Gungl, like Johann Strauss and other conduc-
tors of that stamp, conducted violin in hand, now
beating time with his bow, now playing him-
self, when any particularly tempting passage in

28 ABOUT MUSICIANS

An Anecdote the first violin part came h^s way. At the
of Gungl performance in question he conducted the in-
troduction to his new waltz with the bow,
holding his violin majestically against his left
hip, like a field-marshal's staff". Then came
the four preparatory measures of the waltz it-
self, the regular " rum- turn-turn, rum-tum-
tum" of the basses, second violins, and violas.
These, too, he conducted, using his violin-bow
like a baton. But, just before the first phrase
of the melody, where all the bows had to
"jump," he put the violin up to his chin and,
applying the bow to the strings, turned toward
the first violins, to play the phrase with them.
This brought him to a position in which he
stood with his left side turned toward the
audience. In the energy of his attack upon
the first two notes of the phrase, — where the
"jump" was to come, — his bow slipped
through his fingers and sped through the air
about twenty feet into the hall. Of course
the audience laughed ; but the orchestra, re-
membering Gungl's directions at rehearsal,
grew suddenly mute, — for you can not play

ABOUT MUSICIANS 29

on wind instruments when you are tittering, An Anecdote
and, as for the string-players, their arms were °f Gungl
occupied in holding their sides. It was some
time before Gungl heard the last of his "jump
of the bow."

INTENTIONAL musical jokes are prover- Two Anec-
bially given to missing fire. But von Biilow dotes of
once played a sly trick, in the presence of an von
American audience, that struck home like a
flash. It was on his first visit to the United
States, in 1875-76. He was playing at one
of his concerts in New York, in which he was
" assisted " by other talent. Just before his
first number on the program, an individual
credibly described as " an absolutely terrible
(scbrecklicb) songstress ' ' scorched the ears of
the audience with an equally terrible song.
This torture over, von Biilow comes upon the
platform, seats himself at the pianoforte, and
begins preluding on the theme :

3o ABOUT MUSICIANS

Two Anec-
dotes of
von Bulow

a passage from the Ninth Symphony, to which
the words are, f( Brothers, no longer these
tones, but let us strike up other and more
joyful ones ! " The audience caught on at
once, and the hall fairly shook with mingled
hand-clapping and laughter.

On one of von Biilow' s visits to Vienna, —
to give a course of pianoforte recitals there, —
a ^#tfj/-unofficial committee of music-lovers
was formed to look after the great little man,
and see that he should not lack entertainment
on his off nights. One evening they took him
to hear the first performance of an oratorio by
Anton Bruckner, the veteran Viennese composer.
A few evenings later they took him to see
Karl Millocker's then new operetta, Der Eet-
telstudent. Coming out from the theatre, von
Biilow expressed a wish for a glass of beer.
So he was taken to a noted Ausscbank, or beer-
saloon, where, after some trouble, the party
managed to find a vacant table. The beer

ABOUT MUSICIANS 31

was ordered and brought, cigars and cigarettes Two Anec-
were lighted ; all of a sudden one of the party dotes of
whispered in von Billow's ear : " See there ! von Ml
there's Millocker himself, two tables off from
us ! " Von Biilow was much interested, and,
after making sure that he saw the right man,
sprang up from his chair and cried out : " Herr
Millocker ! Herr Millocker ! I am Bulow.
Delighted to make your acquaintance. Just
heard your Eettehtudent. Immense ! splen-
did ! You ought to thank God on your
knees that your name is not Bruckner ! "

BRAHMS stands, in a sense, alone among Brahms
contemporary composers. One may even
say that no great composer ever held exactly
the position Brahms does among musicians at
the present time. The peculiarity of his
position lies in the fact that, though thoroughly
imbued with the artistic spirit of his day,
though wholly modern in feeling, Brahms's
modes of musical expression seem at first sight
directly to contravene this spirit, and to
belong to another age. This paradox is,

32 ABOUT MUSICIANS

Brahms however, only apparent ; for the discrepancy

between his feeling and his modes of expression
is merely superficial, and vanishes utterly if we
take the trouble to look beneath the surface.

There can be no doubt that the composer
who has left the deepest impression on the
music of the present day was Richard Wagner.
He was unquestionably the most complete
incarnation of the modern musical spirit. He
had all its strenuousness of feeling, all its
nervous energy, passionateness, and restlessness ;
he had, too, that wonderful sense for colour,
that tendency to look upon colour as one of
the chief factors of artistic expression, which
is almost distinctively characteristic of our age.
He had the essentially modern instinct to
subordinate the plastic element in Art to the
emotional, to value force of expression more
highly than symmetry of form, to rate truth-
fulness of expression higher than all else. In
a word, his modes of expression were essentially
dramatic. In this — apart from the vigour and
calibre of his genius — we find all-sufficient
explanation of the enormous influence he has

ABOUT MUSICIANS 33

exerted upon musical composition outside of Brahms
Germany ; that is, in France and Italy. The
opera, and dramatic composition in general,
have for generations and generations held the
first place in the musical activity of these
countries ; both France and Italy may be said
to have been, in a manner, predestined to feel
and respond to so potent a dramatic influence
as Wagner's, even though his modes of musical
expression were, in one way, quite foreign to
their soil. Although what may be called
Wagner's habitual musical idiom, his musical
dialect, was essentially un-French and un-Italian,
it was so intrinsically and thoroughly dramatic
that both Italians and Frenchmen were pecu-
liarly able to understand it.

Now, Brahms is, at bottom, quite as modern
in feeling as Wagner ; in him we find all the
passionate strenuousness, the emotional stress of
the Bayreuth master ; his fondness for forcible
expression is no less marked, and he exhibits
but little more inclination to sacrifice it to
purely musical beauty. Neither can it be truly
said that his habitual modes of musical expres-
VOL. ii. — 3

34 ABOUT MUSICIANS

Brahms sion are really less appropriate to this modern

spirit of his than Wagner's were. Only, the
important difference is to be noted that, in
Brahms, the dramatic element in expression
falls out almost completely. In short, Brahms
seems to be the only living composer of high
distinction who has remained utterly untouched
by the specifically Wagnerian influence ;
modern though his feeling be, his modes of
musical expression are not only purely musical,
but essentially undramatic in character. This
is one thing that makes him as truly original
and individual in his expression as Wagner
was. It also abundantly explains the faint re-
sponse his music has called forth in France and
Italy, in both of which countries he is still
virtually unknown, save to a few specialists.
The undramatic quality in his musical expres-
sion renders it as incomprehensible in France
or Italy as the distinctly German idiom of his
music is foreign there.

Though it is unquestionable that Brahms's
modes of expression are, for the most part, in-
veterately undramatic, and he has from the first

ABOUT MUSICIANS 35

given ample evidence of looking upon Music as Brahms
an independent and self-sufficient art, fully able
to accomplish its own ends by its own means,
it is none the less true that unmistakably dra-
matic elements, at least elements of vivid drama-
tic suggestiveness, crop up now and then in his
writing. Now and then, if perhaps not often,
one finds a passage in Brahms that plainly finds
its reason of being in an underlying dramatic
idea.

Take, for instance, the opening of the first
movement of his F major symphony (No. 3,
opus 90). Here we find the immediate jux-
taposition of two themes, — or say, of theme
and counter- theme, — one in F major, the
other in F minor. Considered from a purely
musical point of view, this is little else than a
solecism ; the unharmonic cross- relation be-
tween the A-natural of one theme and the
A-flat of the other has no purely musical justi-
fication. For note that this is no mere acci-
dent of contrapuntal voice-leading, justified

— like many a cross-relation in Sebastian Bach

— by the nature of the musical scale itself; it is,

36 ABOUT MUSICIANS

Brahms on the contrary, something firmly established in

principio, something characteristic and func-
tional in the whole scheme and development of
the movement. To explain it as a mere
whimsical tour de force, as a curious trick in
polyphonic writing that it entered the com-
poser's head to attempt, is to shoot wide of the
mark ; no composer of Brahms' s dignity does
that sort of thing nowadays, the bare supposi-
tion is unworthy and impertinent. The only
artistic justification of this extraordinary juxta-
position of two themes in the same key,
but in different and conflicting modes, is
that Brahms — consciously or unconsciously —
looked upon each of these themes as the dra-
matic impersonation of a special phase of
emotion, and sought to represent, in their
juxtaposition and combined development,
something of the nature of a conflict between
two opposing principles. Call these princi-
ples Light and Darkness, Joy and Sorrow,
Good and Evil, or only Major and Minor ;
the exact determination of them matters not a
whit. All that is needful to justify the ap-

ABOUT MUSICIANS 37

parent musical solecism is to recognize that a Brabms
conflict between two opposing forces lay some-
how in the composer's mind, and that his two
seemingly irreconcilable themes were conceived
as dramatic, or ^#rfj7- dramatic, embodiments of
these forces. The theme starts out joyously in
the major, with its glowing major 3rd ; the
forbidding counter-theme creeps upon it from
below, in the minor, as if to say, with lago :

. . . O, you are well-tun' d now!
But I '11 set down the pegs that make this music,
As honest as I am.

Again, one finds in Brahms's music frequent
moments of such vivid, irresistible, extra-
musical — poetic or picturesque — suggestive-
ness, that one can hardly escape the suspicion
that some corresponding extra-musical image
must have hovered, at least sub-consciously,
before the composer's mental vision as he
wrote them.

But more definitely dramatic than this
Brahms has never been. Whatever of extra-
musical suggestiveness one may find in his

38 ABOUT MUSICIANS

Brabms writing at times, he has given no outside clew

to lead the listener to a specific interpreta-
tion of a composition, and has never written
anything even distantly approaching *' program-
music ; ' ' few composers have written so ex-
ceedingly few works with suggestive titles as
he. On the whole, he invests his music with
somewhat less frequent romantic, extra-musical
suggestiveness than one finds either in Bach or
Mendelssohn, let alone Schumann. His music,
in general, is pure music and little or nothing else.
It has often been wondered at that a man
of Brahms' s power, genius, and originality
should have done so little pioneer work in the
way of seeking for and developing new mu-
sical forms ; that he should still be content to
work, almost without exception, in the old
traditional cyclical forms of sonata, symphony,
concerto, and their correlatives in the domain
of instrumental chamber-music, and evince an
equal indisposition to seek for new forms in
his vocal writing. But it seems to me that
those who have wondered at this fail to appre-
ciate the originality of the work Brahms has

ABOUT MUSICIANS 39

done in these forms ; he treats them with Brahms
absolute freedom, in some ways with con-
spicuous novelty of conception ; that this
freedom of treatment is in no wise revolution-
ary nor subversive, does not make it any the
less free. What Brahms has to say is inde-
feasibly his own ; and his finding that he can
say it freely and completely in the traditional
cyclical forms does not detract one whit from
his originality. He is far more at home in
these forms than Schumann was ; his instinct
seems to run in parallel lines with their very
scheme. They are no shackles whatever on
his inventiveness nor his imagination ; he seems
to have taken to them naturally, and to ex-
press himself as easily in them as the old
classic masters themselves. One can, there-
fore, see no good reason for his abandoning
them.

Brahms' s work is in general characterized
by enormous solidity and stoutness of con-
struction. In his earlier period he threw
himself somewhat open to the charge of
abstruseness ; yet, though this charge is not

40 ABOUT MUSICIANS

Brahms wholly unfounded, it has often been exagger-

ated. His whole style was so individual, and
withal so novel, that it took the world some
time to get used to it ; a good deal that seemed
abstruse and incomprehensible in his earlier
works seems quite clear now. In this matter
he has had the same experience that all ori-
ginal composers have had, time out of mind.
Still, it is not to be denied that there was
some abstruseness of style in the works of his
earlier period, beside not a little of youthful
" storm and stress." But it may be said of
him, as Schumann once said of Mendelssohn,
" the more he writes, the clearer and more
transfigured (Dimmer klarer und verklarter)
does his expression become ! " Especially in
his later works does Brahms show himself to
be well-nigh the only composer since Beethoven
who has known how to preserve something of
the old Hellenic serenity in his music. Even
Schumann did not quite succeed in this ; and,
as for others since his day, their tendency has
been in the opposite direction.

Although Brahms is noteworthy for adhe-

ABOUT MUSICIANS 41

ring to the traditional cyclical forms, the free- Brahms
dom with which he treats them is none the less
noticeable. And, though he in general care-
fully preserves both the chief outlines and the
distinctive characteristics of whatever form he
may have selected, his choice of forms — say,
for the separate movements of a symphony or
quartet — is at times strikingly unconventional.
His avoidance of the traditional minuet and
scherzo forms is peculiarly noteworthy ; in all
four of his symphonies there is not one move-
ment that can rightly be called a scherzo.
One movement in his D major symphony
(No. 2, opus 73) has some of the character-
istics of the minuet ; but its rhythm equally
recalls the old Landler waltz. The finale of
his E minor symphony (No. 4, opus 98) is
a set of variations on an eight-measure passa-
caglia ; a hitherto unheard-of form for a
symphonic finale ! Characteristic also is
Brahms' s fondness for moderate Allegros ; the
modern "slow Allegro" might almost be
called his natural gait. He applies it to the
first movements of three of his four symphonies ;

42 ABOUT MUSICIANS

Brahms only the third begins with a frank Allegro con

brio. As a rule, it is only in short middle
movements — substituted for the traditional
scherzo — and now and then in a finale that
he writes in a really brisk tempo. It is
noticeable that, whenever he does write a
genuine Allegro molto or Prestoy Hungarian
traits of melody or rhythm are pretty sure to
crop up sooner or later. But his music is in
general essentially Teutonic; Slavic or Magyar
touches are to be found only here and there.

It was for some time a legend that the in-
tellectual element largely preponderated over
the emotional in Brahms's writing. Some
tinge of reason may seem to have been given
to this legend by the fact that his music always
is profoundly intellectual ; perhaps also by the
essentially undramatic nature of his habitual
modes of expression, by a certain reserve of
style and an occasional touch of something
very like asceticism. But the legend is really
none the less ridiculous, and hardly calls for
refutation ; for it is of the things that die
of themselves. With all its intellectuality,

ABOUT MUSICIANS 43

Brahms' s music is rich in the truest and deep- Brahms
est emotional quality, internal warmth, what
the Germans call Gemiith, and passion. The
charge of " cold intellectuality," brought
against Brahms, belongs to the same category
as the charge of melodic poverty that has been
brought against every original composer who
ever wrote : a flash in the pan of purblind
criticism.

I HAPPEN ED to be one of the audience Tchaikovsky
at Tchaikovsky's first concert in Paris in in Paris
the course of the winter of 1 890—9 1 . It was
one of the regular Sunday afternoon concerts
of the Association Artistique (better known as
the Colonne Concerts) at the Chatelet.
Colonne's orchestra was in full force, and the
Russian composer conducted an almost endless
program of his own orchestral works, inter-
spersed with a few songs. I now forget what
the program was, only two numbers remaining
fixed in my memory. One of these was a set
of variations on an original theme ; the other,
not especially interesting in itself, was still

44 ABOUT MUSICIANS

Tchaikovsky interesting as an example of the vast difference
in Parts m some respects between musical life in Paris

and in any important musical centre in the
United States. This number was the (here)
familiar Andante in B-flat major from the D
major quartet, opus 1 1 , played by all the
strings of the orchestra. Against it was
marked on the program : " Premiere audition a
Paris." Great heavens ! We in America
had been hearing this poor little Andante
scraped to death for at least fifteen years, —
it was first played in Boston by the Liste-
mann Quartet at one of von Biilow' s concerts
in the Music Hall in 1875-76, — it has
become the very " Stella confident e " of quar-
tet-players, to the point that no self-respecting
quartet dares nowadays put it on the program
of anything more serious than the Commence-
ment Day of a young ladies' seminary ; and
the Parisians are just getting their first taste of
it now ! I should probably not have noticed
this particularly, had I not heard in the
course of the same season the " first perform-
ance in Paris " of Niels Gade's C minor

ABOUT MUSICIANS 45

symphony, Karl Goldmark's Landliche Hocb- Tchaikovsky
zeit, and Handel's Israel in Egypt, and been i
credibly informed that the only important
orchestral work by Brahms that had ever been
given there was his D major symphony ! I
began to think that we in America were not
so very much behind the times, after all.
But this is merely by the way.

Tchaikovsky's appearance at the head of an
orchestra was striking. Tall and slim of
figure, with short, thick iron-grey hair, mous-
tache, and imperial, there was something mili-
tary in his bearing, in the grave, dignified
response he bowed to his reception by the
audience. You felt instinctively that here
was a man who knew what he was about, and
was not to be trifled with. It was just at the
beginning of the Russian enthusiasm in Paris ;
and his reception, as he stepped up to the con-
ductor's desk, was of the heartiest. But,
though by no means ungracious in manner, he
looked tolerably used to that sort of thing, and
as if, on the whole, hand-clapping was not
what he had mainly come for. He seemed

46 ABOUT MUSICIANS

Tchaikovsky to take his reception for granted, much as a
in Paris crowned head would have done, and lost no

time in rapping his orchestra up to the
"ready!" point. His beat in conducting
was unostentatious, he used his left arm but
little. But his down-beat was admirably
clear and precise, and, whenever he gave the
signal for the thunder to break loose, the
whole orchestra seemed to shiver. It soon
became evident that the man was positively an
electric battery, launching lightning-flashes right
and left from that terrible baton of his, egging
his men on to the utmost fury of fiery intensity.
I shall never forget the terrific onslaught of
the first violins upon one variation in rapid
sixteenth-notes. It was like Anton Rubin-
stein, at his devilmost, playing the pianoforte !
Yet throughout the concert the orchestra
played with as fine a finish as I ever heard
them do under Colonne, their regular conduc-
tor. It took no Russophilism to help him
work the audience up to the frenetic pitch of
delight. Remember that the present Russian
school, with Tchaikovsky at their head, owe

ABOUT MUSICIANS 47

much to Berlioz; and Berlioz's music is Tchaikovsky
particularly popular in France. In listening **
to these Russian works, new to them though
they might be, the audience still could feel
themselves to be on tolerably familiar ground.
Whatever was exotic in the style was tempered
to them by many well-known and favourite
elements ; and the superior solidity of musical
workmanship, the finer depth of inspiration,
— compared with most of the music recently
written by the Berlioz tail in Paris, — all com-
bined to make even a ready-made enthusiasm
easy to blow to a white heat.

And Tchaikovsky did this as few men could
have done ! No doubt he showed himself at
his best ; for, when Gallic enthusiasm reaches
the boiling-point, there is no possibility of mis-
taking it : it is of the most frankly outspoken
sort, and during exciting passages the audience
work nearly as hard as the orchestra, letting
out the fervour that is in them through no
silent safety-valve. This can not fail to react
favourably upon a conductor ; Tchaikovsky and
his Chatelet audience were like two logs in
the fire, mutually keeping each other hot !

48 ABOUT MUSICIANS

Musical rT"^HESE are, in the strictest sense of the
Reminiscen- _|_ term, what they purport to be : Remi-
ts of Boston niscenceSt i have consulted nothing but my
Thirty Tears
, J own memory.

It is hard for us older ones to realize that a
whole generation of concert-goers has sprung
up, who do not remember the old symphony
concerts of the Harvard Musical Association
— let alone those of the older Orchestral Union
and the still older Germania. I can still re-
member the Germania concerts under Karl
Bergmann's regime, just before he went to
New York and was succeeded by Mr. Zer-
rahn. I can not, to be sure, remember much
about them, only one or two incidents being
firmly engraved on my memory. At one of
the public afternoon rehearsals, — for we had
afternoon rehearsals then, as now, — all the
seats on the floor of the Music Hall had been
taken up, and the small audience occupied the
galleries. There used to be no printed pro-
grams at these rehearsals, but Bergmann would
announce the several numbers viva voce —
often in the most remarkable English. One

ABOUT MUSICIANS 49

of the numbers on the occasion I now speak Musical
of was the Railway Galop, — composer for- Reminiscen-

gotten, — during the playing of which a little c" °f Eoston

L /L Thirty Years
mock steam-engine kept scooting about (by * J

clock-work ?) on the floor of the hall, with
black cotton-wool smoke coming out of its
funnel. I have a vague recollection, too, of
another rehearsal, just before which something
nefarious had happened to the heating appara-
tus, so that the temperature was down in the
forties. Dresel played a pianoforte concerto
with his overcoat on, the sleeves partly rolled
up, and the bright red satin lining flashing in
the faces of the audience. Brignoli sang some-
thing, too ; in a black cape that made him look
like Don Ottavio — and persisted in singing
with his back to the audience.

With Mr. Zerrahn's accession to the con-
ductorship comes an hiatus in my memory ; I
was in Europe, and my reminiscences knot on
again with the year 1860. Boston then had
the Orchestral Union, the Handel & Haydn
Society, the Mendelssohn Quintet Club, and,
for pianoforte-playing, what was sometimes

VOL. II. — 4

5o ABOUT MUSICIANS

Musical jokingly called the Ottoman Quartet. The

Reminiscen- four leading resident pianists — Otto Dresel,

c"fBo**on B. J. Lang, Hugo Leonhard, and J. C. D.
Thirty Tears , r , r . . r

* •* Parker — were fond of playing pieces for two

pianofortes, eight hands (a otto mani ), in
public now and then ; hence the nickname,
with which Dresel's Christian name may also
have had something to do. The Mendelssohn
Quintet Club, the only organization which
gave instrumental chamber-music in those days,
consisted of Wilhelm Schulze (first violin),
Carl Meisel ( second violin) , Thomas Ryan
{first viola and clarinet). Goring (second viola
and jto), and Wulf Fries (^ cello). Only
two of these artists were original members of
the Club : Ryan and Fries. August Fries,
the original first violin, had gone back to Nor-
way (or was it to Sweden or Denmark ?),
and the Hungarian, Riha — so spelled out of
compassion for Anglo-Saxon inability to wres-
tle successfully with his real name, Drzjr —
was dead. I think he was one of the original
violas ; perhaps second violin. Schulze was
also leading first violin in the orchestra, as

ABOUT MUSICIANS 51

Ryan and Wulf Fries were leading viola and Musical
'cello. Reminiscen-

What a time of it that old Orchestral Union c" °f Eoston
, , , rp, . TT7 j j Thirty Tears

had ! 1 heir concerts came on Wednesday -.

afternoons, and were well attended at first.
But, with the war, the audiences began to
drop off, as times grew harder. The orches-
tra was an exceedingly variable quantity : there
were only two horns, and a second bassoon was
not to be thought of. The second bassoon-
part had to be played on a 'cello ; and unini-
tiated visitors used sometimes to wonder what
that solitary 'cello was doing in the midst of
the wood -wind. Hamann, the first horn, had
little technique, but a good tone, and was
moreover an excellent musician ; he had a
fad of playing the easier Mozart, Haydn, and
Beethoven horn-parts on a real plain horn,
which he had had made to order, and regarded
with unconcealed affection. I think there
were hardly ever more than six first violins :
I certainly remember one performance of
Beethoven's A major symphony with only
three first violins and two second. The soli-

52 ABOUT MUSICIANS

Musical tary bassoonist was conspicuous by his singu-

Reminiscen- larky, not by his virtuosity. At a benefit con-

C£i? B°^0n cert tendered to Mr. Zerrahn, at which a small

Thirty Tears

^ picked " chorus or young ladies sang the

" Lift thine eyes " terzet from Elijah,
the few measures of introductory tenor reci-
tative were played as a bassoon solo. The
hapless bassoonist got most of the notes wrong ;
I do not think I ever heard such a tremulous
tone issue from any other wind instrument.

But nothing could fluster Mr. Zerrahn ; I
never saw him lose his head, nor any perform-
ance come to grief under his baton. And,
with the orchestral material and few rehearsals
of those days, things were on the verge of
coming to grief pretty often. At one of
the Handel & Haydn festivals — I think, the
first one, the demi- centennial — the then
famous boy-soprano, Richard Coker, sang Mey-
erbeer* s " Robert, toi quefaime" at an after-
noon concert. He was accompanied on the
pianoforte by his father. When about half-
way through the air, Coker, Sr., discovered to
his dismay that the remaining sheets of the

ABOUT MUSICIANS 53

music were missing ; Mr. Zerrahn immediately Musical
sprang to the conductor's desk, waved his Reminisce*-

baton, and the rest of the air was accompanied c" °f S**t6H

Thirty Tears
by the orchestra from memory. *

I remember another instance of Mr.
Zerrahn' s presence of mind. It was at a
performance of Mendelssohn' s Hymn of Praise
by the Handel & Haydn. The tenor had just
finished that air with the incomprehensible
words, closing with the oft-repeated question,
" Watchman, will the night soon pass ? " In
reply to this, the soprano should strike in un-
accompanied, in D major, with "The night
is departing ! " twice repeated ; the wood-
wind coming in piano on the second "de-
parting," and the whole orchestra fortissimo
on the final syllable. Well, on this occasion,
the soprano was standing a little farther forward
on the stage than Mr. Zerrahn ; so she could
not see his beat without turning her head.
She struck in bravely with her " The night is
departing ; ' ' but unfortunately not in D major
— it was fairly and squarely C major : a whole
tone flat ! A shudder ran through the

54 ABOUT MUSICIANS

Musical orchestra and a good part of the audience :

Remimscen- what was Mr. Zerrahn to do with the ensuing

C" f ****** chorus in D major? His mind was made up

Thirty Tears . . \

* ma second ; he motioned to the wood-wind

not to come in with their chords, and stood
there, waiting patiently for the hapless soprano
to finish her phrase, and let the orchestra
come in with its D major fortissimo afterwards,
instead of on the last syllable. And now
came one of the most comical tugs of war I
have ever witnessed between singer and con-
ductor. Of course the soprano was wholly
unaware of having made a mistake ; so, not
hearing the usual 6—4 chord on her second
"departing," she thought the wind-players
must have counted their rests wrong, and held
her high G — which ought to have been an
A — with a persistency worthy of a better
cause, to let them catch up with her. She
held that G on and on, looking as if she would
burst ; but still no 6—4 chord ! At last —
it seemed like hours — human lungs could
hold out no longer, and the breathless soprano
landed panting with her final "ting" on C-

ABOUT MUSICIANS

55

natural, amid a death-like silence of the or- Musical
chestra. You could have heard a pin drop. Reminiscen-
Just as she was turning round to see why she ces °f B°ston

had thus been left in the lurch by the accom-
paniment, Mr. Zerrahn's baton came down
with a swish, and the orchestra thundered
out its D major ; this unlocked for tonality
evidently gave the poor soprano a shock, as if
a glass of ice-water had suddenly been thrown
in her face. At last she realized what she had
been doing.

We had opera in those days, too. Max
Maretzeck was the great operatic gun then,
both as impresario and conductor ; I think
his company still kept up the old title of
"Havana Troupe." The Boston Theatre
was its battle-field ; the dress-circle — that is,
all of the first balcony behind the first two
rows of seats — was cut up into open boxes, the
partitions coming up no higher than the arms
of the seats. But I never could discover that
people "took a box;" the seats were sold
separately, just as if the partitions did not exist.
The entrance to the top gallery was fifty cents,

*

5 6 ABOUT MUSICIANS

Musical though it was afterwards raised to a dollar.

Reminiscen- The opera orchestras were pretty small, and
ces of Boston not of the best quality but as the huge

Thirty Tears ,
* J modern opera scores had not come in, the

parts were generally well enough filled.
There was a bass-tuba for Robert le Diable,
and there were generally four horns.

The mise en scene was, for the most part,
primitive enough. The scenery generally be-
longed to the theatre, and in those days the
Boston Theatre had not launched out upon its
gorgeous stage settings — except for things like
the Black Crook or White Fawn. The "bujo
loco" of the septet in Don Giovanni was
always represented by a blue-and-gold baronial
hall ; and who that ever saw it can forget that
street-scene, with the red brick wall, which
figured in almost every opera, no matter in
what part of the world nor in what age the
scene was laid ?

The costumes belonged either to the principal
artists or to the company, and were of varying
degrees of splendour. There was one fixed
rule : the soprano heroine invariably wore a

ABOUT MUSICIANS 57

decollete ball-dress — white, if Fortune smiled ; Musical
black, if down on her luck. Epoch, country, Reminiscen-

in-doors or out-of-doors, rain or shine, made '"of Boston
^rr 11- 11 Thirty Years

no difference ; the heroine — unless she was a ^ Q J

peasant — stuck to that ball-dress as for dear
life.

But the performances were often capital,
and there was much good singing. I can just
remember Medori, an heroic soprano of equally
heroic proportions, generally reputed to be
second only to Adelina Patti. She had a bad
tremolo in her otherwise fine voice, when I
heard her ; but was unmistakably an artist.
Her successor in the grand soprano parts was
Carrozzi-Zucchi, a fiery, beetle-browed Italian,
with apparently unlimited vocal power, and
flamboyantly dramatic in her singing. If I
remember aright, she had the failing of being
unable to pronounce the consonant R. I am
pretty sure it was she, for one incident I re-
member tallies exactly with her style. It was
in Verdi's Ernani : Elvira had just finished the
slow cantilena — '« Ernani, involami " — of
her grand aria, and was about to launch forth

5 8 ABOUT MUSICIANS

Musical upon the cabaletta, which begins " Tutto

Reminisce*- sprezzo cbe d? Ernani nonfavella a questo cuore
cesof Boston Q despise all that does not speak of Eraani to this

. * heart ")." Here Carrozzi-Zucchi's defective R

Ago J

played her a trick. In her most furiously

dramatic manner, with a fine scowl darkening
her expressive face, she rushed up to the foot-
lights and thundered forth " Tutto sp'ezzo cbe
d* E'nani, &c. (I smash all that, &c.)," to
the blank astonishment of a little Italian who
happened to be in the seat next mine ; I
overheard him exclaim under his breath,
" Davvero spezzarebbe tutto ! (Indeed she
would smash everything !)."

The first cast of Gounod's Faust in Boston
was memorable. It has seldom been equalled
in our city.

Faust MAZZOLENI

Mefistofele .... BIACHI

Valentino BELLINI

Margherita .... KELLOGG

Siebel SULZER

It was announced on the play-bills that "In
order to give eclat to the performance, Signer

ABOUT MUSICIANS 59

Bellini has consented to accept the compara- Musical
lively small part of Valentine." Mazzoleni Reminiscen-

was no longer in his first youth; he was a ^es of Boston

., ' Thirty Tears

robust tenor, with a rather too metallic voice * J

. . -dg°

of very peculiar quality, and sang uncommonly

well ; he was a good actor, and his love-making
was superb — indeed he had been a lawyer by
profession, before taking to the boards, and
was an adept at pleading. Until Capoul came,
years after, no other such stage lover was to be
seen here in opera. Biachi was a rich-voiced
basso cantante and also an excellent actor; I
doubt if his Mefistofele has been surpassed here
since ; he gave the part its full caustic humour,
but without a suspicion of buffoonery. Bellini
was a conventional actor, though he had a
grand stage-presence and manner ; but he had
the most glorious baritone voice I ever heard in
my life, and was a capital singer. And how
charming Kellogg was in those, her younger,
days ! when she sang Margherita in Faust,
Zerlina in Don Giovanni and Fra Diavolo,
Amina in la Sonnambulay Elvira in / Puri-
tani, and had not yet aspired to the heavy

60 ABOUT MUSICIANS

Musical dramatic business ! Her light soprano voice

Reminiscen- was purity itself, and she sang to perfection.
ces of Boston Rer Margherita stands unapproached in my
Thirty Tears . . , r '

* memory — that is, unapproached from a bar-

bier- Carre- Gounod point of view ; for there
was nothing of Goethe's Gretchen in it.
Enrichetta Sulzer — Mrs. Annibale Biachi in
private life — was in no wise remarkable,
though she sang Siebel well enough. But the
whole cast worked together like a charm ; the
ensemble was admirable.

The success of Faust was immediate and
overwhelming ; probably Goethe's poem was
largely answerable for it, for Gounod's music
was in a then new and unfamiliar style, and old
opera-goers used to complain that " there was
only one tune " — SiebePs flower-song " in
the whole work." The soldiers' chorus was
regularly encored.

Singers like Mazzoleni, Bellini, Biachi,
Medori, Carrozzi-Zucchi, and others — I
wonder, by the way, if any one still remem-
bers the stentor- voiced Maccaferi,who used to
make the rafters tremble in Petrella's lone —

ABOUT MUSICIANS 61

were of the bird-of-passage sort ; they seldom Musical
appeared for more than two or three seasons. Rtmtniseeii*

But Brignoli we had nearly always with us — c" °f Boston

„. , Thirty Tears

that is, when the opera came. His was a phe- * *

nomenal voice ; of the pure lyric tenor quality,
but of robust calibre and power. His singing
was the perfection of vocal art ; he could sing
anything, from Elvino to Manrico, from Don
Ottavio to Ernani. He had little sensibility
and no dramatic power ; he seldom, if ever,
sang with what is commonly called "expres-
sion ; " but the silvery beauty of his voice and
the perfection of his vocal art and phrasing
made up for it. He could probably have
shared with Rubini the well-earned reputation
of being the worst actor that ever walked the
boards. He did not even try to act; now
and then, in love-scenes, he would take the
soprano* s hand and clasp it to his expansive
chest — at times to the soprano's conspicuous
discomfiture ; for, when Brignoli had once got
hold of it, it was no easy matter to get it away
again — but this was about all he ever did.
His stage walk was notorious ; one would have

62 ABOUT MUSICIANS

Musical thought that gait acquired in following the

Reminiscen- plough. He was the idol of the public.

tes of Boston Curiousiy enough, with all his consciousness of
Thirty Tears . . .

* ~* artistic mastery and popularity, he never could

get over his stage fright ; he was the most im-
pudent-looking man in the world, but really
one of the most timid. Adelaide Phillipps
once told me that she often had actually to
push him out from the side-scenes, or he
would never have screwed up the courage
to go on.

Morensi, the mezzo-soprano, was also an
excellent singer. I heard her years after she
left this country, with Adelina Patti, Fraschini,
and Delle Sedie, in Rigoletto at the Italiens
in Paris. She was a great Donna Elvira in
Don Giovanni, although she conscientiously
left out every high B-flat in her part, and put
a rest in its place. Her voice only went up to
A. Susini, the old basso of the Havanna
Troupe, was rather in the sear and yellow
leaf then ; I only heard him once or twice in
buffo parts. He married Miss Hinkley, whose
untimely death cut short a brilliantly promising
career.

ABOUT MUSICIANS 63

Adelaide Phillipps was as much a regular Musical
operatic stand-by in those days as Brignoli
himself. She began as a dancer at the Boston
Museum, but soon developed a rich, luscious ^
contralto voice, which she had admirably
trained. It was probably to her early ballet
training that she owed her conspicuously
commanding bearing and grace of movement
on the stage. She was a grand singer and one
of the best actresses of the day on the lyric
boards. Her Maffeo Orsini, in Lucrezia
Borgia, will never be forgotten by any who
saw it. Probably no one since Alboni ever
sang " // segreto per esser felici ' ' with such
rollicking dash and cavalier elegance as she.
Trebelli was not in it with her !

The operatic repertory was not very varied.
Bellini, Donizetti, and Verdi were the chief
stand-bys then. Gounod's Faust was the
most successful, if not the only successful,
novelty ; Meyerbeer's Dinar ab did not take
well with the public, and Petrella's lone was
but a flash in the pan. Two standard operas,
very popular then, seem quite lost to the pres-

64 ABOUT MUSICIANS

Musical ent repertory ; a loss much to be regretted, for

Reminiscen- tney are truly great works. These were Doni-

ces of Boston zetti>s Lucrezia Borgia ^d Verdi's Ernani.

Thirty Years _ . .

* J 1 he prologue to Lucrezta is an unsurpassed gem

in its way ; and the third and fourth acts of
Ernani contain some of the greatest music Verdi
ever wrote. Donizetti's Poliuto and Dom Sebas-
tiano seemed for a moment on the brink of
success ; but they soon ceased to draw well.
The surest cards, after all, were Mozart's Don
Giovanni and Verdi's // Trovatore. The
trouble with Don Giovanni was its enormous
cast: "tauter premiers sujets ! (nothing but
leading artists !)," as the good Maretzek
would sadly exclaim. I remember, how-
ever, one admirable performance of it under
Maretzek, with a cast that has seldom been
beaten here.

Don Giovanni . . . BELLINI

II Commendatore . . WEINLIG (I think)

Donna Anna . . . MEDORI

Don Ottavio . . . LOTTI

Donna Elvira . . . STOCKTON

Leporello .... BIACHI

Zerlina KELLOGG

ABOUT MUSICIANS 65

Henrietta Stockton was the one weak spot Musical
in the cast ; Lotti was fairly adequate, and Reminiscen-

the others were superb. Bellini, to be sure, c"fBo*ton
<r r^- 7, ; j / Thirty Tears
would insist upon rattling off*' Finch ban dal * J

vzrzo" at lightning speed, and giving out a
stentorian F-sharp in the closing cadence of
the serenade. Medori's "Or sai chi r onore "
fairly took your breath away with its dramatic
fire. But we had no good Donna Elvira rill
Morensi came, a year or two later.

Bellini's Sonnambula, Norma, and / Puri-
tani held their own well and were very popu-
lar. Rossini's Barbiere drew splendidly, but
was seldom given — for lack of good florid
tenors ; " Ecco ridente ' ' was a stumbling-
block hard to get over ! Ah ! I had almost
forgotten another successful and delightful
novelty : the Riccis' Crispino e la Comare.
This charming little opera buff a had a great
run ; Clara Louise Kellogg was a simply
bewitching Annetta.

Evening dress was rather the exception than
the rule at the opera in those days, although
the gas was not turned down during the acts ;
VOL. ii. — 5

66 ABOUT MUSICIANS

Musical and gay opera-cloaks would alternate with

Reminiscen- waterproofs — those waterproofs for which the

ces of os on goston femaje has become so justly famous.
Thirty Tears _,
^ German opera was represented by the

Annschiitz company, with Bertha Johannsen,
Marie Frederici — her maiden name was
Friedrichs, and she was Mrs. Himmer in
private life, — Pauline Canissa, Franz Himmer,
Theodor Habelmann, and Joseph Hermanns.
Johannsen was a really great artist, and sang
Donna Anna, Beethoven's Leonore, and other
grand soprano parts superbly ; she was a
mighty actress, too. Frederici made an enor-
mous hit as Agathe, in der Freiscbutz, and was
much admired in Gounod's Margarethe ; she
had a wondrously rich mezzo-soprano, run-
ning up to high B-flat and with contralto
fullness of tone down to G ; but she was, on
the whole, little of an artist, and only did
what she was told, with poll-parrot fidelity.
Hermanns — who had been picked out of the
Covent Garden chorus on account of his
grand bass voice and imposing stature — made
a tremendous hit as Mephistopheles. His

ABOUT MUSICIANS 67

voice had a peculiar resonant quality — very Musical
much for a bass what Mazzoleni's was for a Reminiscen-

tenor — and people used to take out their
watches to time his trill in the serenade. He 4 0
was next to nothing of an artist ; but I fancy
I was alone in finding his Mephistopheles
execrable. The only part he did really well
was Rocco, in Fidelia.

Faust — the Walpurgisnight-scene in which
was persistently advertised as a special feature,
and never once given, — Fidelia, the Frei-
scbutz, Boieldieu's Weisse Dame, Nicolai's
Lustigen Weiber von Windsor, and Mozart's
Don Juan were the favourite operas. When
Carl Formes was added to the troupe, a year
or two later, Meyerbeer's Robert der Teufel
was revived for him ; his Bertrand was a
wonder of singing and acting. And to hear
him rattle off " Scbaudernd zittern meine Glie-
der, Angst scblagt meinen Muth darnieder "
in the septet in Don Juan — in steady cre-
scendo up to fortissimo, and with every syllable
distinct — was a caution! He was a great
artist, although on the downward path when

68 ABOUT MUSICIANS

Musical I heard him. Advancing age had a peculiar

Reminiscen- eflect UpOn him : it did not diminish the

ces of Boston be nor volume of his voice Jn the least,

Thirty Years . , „ i.» « • »"• r ,

j0 but it gradually robbed him of the power

of singing in tune.

One of the great events of the period about
which I am now writing — 1 860-70 in
round numbers — was the demi-centennial
festival of the Handel & Haydn Society in
1865. What I especially remember about
this particular festival was the orchestra. The
orchestral resources of Boston had never been
conspicuous, either for quality or numbers ;
since the beginning of the war, the orchestra
of the Orchestral Union and those which
made us yearly visits with opera companies
had been miserably small. I doubt if any of
my generation, certainly of those whose ex-
perience did not extend to New York or the
other side of the Atlantic, had ever heard a
well-balanced orchestra. Our notions of or-
chestral effect were derived from what we
heard. I remember distinctly how impossible
it was for me, at the time I speak of, to under-

ABOUT MUSICIANS 69

stand what older musicians meant by calling Musical
the strings the " main power " in an orchestra. Reminiscen-

In all orchestras I had heard, the wood-wind c" f Bo**9*

. Thirty Tears

— let alone the brass and percussion — was ^

more powerful dynamically than the often
ridiculously small mass of strings ; especially
as the then wind-players seldom cultivated
the art of playing piano. But, for this demi-
centennial of the Handel & Haydn, our local
orchestra was increased to nearly a hundred
by the addition of players engaged from New
York and elsewhere. I shall never forget the
overwhelming effect of the third and fourth
measures of the symphony to Mendelssohn's
Hymn of Praise — where the unison trombone-
phrase of the first two measures is answered
fortissimo in full harmony by the entire orches-
tra. Nothing I have heard since, in Berlioz's
or Wagner's most resounding instrumentation,
has sounded so positively tremendous to me as
this first onslaught of an orchestra with a large
mass of strings ! This was the beginning,
not of large, but of what might be called
normal orchestras in Boston. At the sym-

70 ABOUT MUSICIANS

Musical phony concerts of the Harvard Musical As-

Reminiscen- sociation, founded not long afterward, the
cesoj os ton orchestra range(i from £ftv to sixtv piayers

£VQ (for full modern scores) ; before the Handel

& Haydn demi-centennial, our orchestra had
run as low as twenty-four, and seldom ex-
ceeded thirty-five. When we had eight first
and eight second violins, we thought no small
beer of ourselves ! The advance in quality
was, however, by no means commensurate
with the increase in numbers ; for years our
orchestra remained a good deal of a " scratch
team ' ' — what a distinguished visiting violin-
ist once called " une agr'egation fortuite d* ele-
ments b'et'erogenes (a fortuitous aggregation of
heterogeneous elements)."

About this time, and earlier, star-concerts
were all the rage ; and I must say — due
allowance being made for the inveterately in-
artistic plan — we had some pretty good ones.
As opera managers did not quite dare to en-
gage stars of the very first magnitude for their
troupes, — not caring to compete with Lon-
don, Madrid, and St. Petersburg in the matter

ABOUT MUSICIANS 71

of salaries, — it was at these star-concerts that Musical
we first heard some of the greatest singers of Reminiscen-

the day. If their success in concert was un- c"fBo*ton

Thirty Tears
questionable, the opera people would then *

screw up courage to engage them next season.
One of the best and most successful of these
concert combinations was the Bateman troupe
— as it was also one of the most ill-assorted
from an artistic point of view. It brought us
Euphrosyne Parepa, then at the apex of her
glory ; Carl Rosa, the violinist, then at the
beginning of his career ; Eduard Dannreuther,
the pianist; Levy, the eighth world-wonder
of the cornet-a-pistons. Rosa was decidedly
more of an artist than he was a violin vir-
tuoso ; but we thought a good deal of his
playing then, and he certainly played a deal
of good music. He was engaged as solo
violinist at one of the first Harvard Musical
concerts; and the applause knew no bounds
when, after playing his last solo, he, in the
fullness of his artistic heart, took a seat beside
Wilhelm Schulze at the head of the first
violins, to play the third Leonore overture —

72 ABOUT MUSICIANS

Musical the last number on the program — with the

Reminisce*- orchestra. Dannreuther was a classical pianist,

ces of oston tnoug]1 by no means a virtuoso : he soon left

Thirty Tears .

* * the company in disgust with his surroundings,

and went back to England. Parepa and Levy
were the great guns of the troupe. Parepa* s
wonderful voice, — her G in alt figured on all
the posters, — perfect method, and grand, if
rather cold, style carried everything before
them ; and Levy's double-tonguing in triplets
turned the popular head as nothing else could.
Encores were Article XL. in the creed of
audiences then, and I doubt if Parepa made as
many conquests with " Ocean, thou mighty
monster ! " as with " Five o'clock in the
Morning." John L. Hatton was the accom-
panist of the troupe. I remember one concert
at which Bateman, in his most First-Gentle-
man-in-Europe manner, stepped forward on
the platform, medical certificate in hand, de-
ploring in tragic accents worthy of his daughter
the sudden indisposition of an important mem-
ber of the company, and winding up with the
announcement : " Madame Parepa, with her

ABOUT MUSICIANS 73

usual nobility of nature, has kindly consented Musical
to stand in the gap ; and my old friend, your Re minis cen-

old friend, EVERYBODY'S old friend, John **&****

TT i. • • • 11 T- i i>r Thirty Tears

Hatton, will sing his inimitable ' Little Man x J

dressed all in Grey.' " And he did sing it,
too, to every one's delight, accompanying
himself, and preluding it with the first few
measures of Bach's G minor fugue !

The Great Organ seldom figured at variety
concerts. I believe an extra charge was made
for the use of it, and managers thought they
could do quite as well without it. But organ
concerts came thick and fast ; almost every
organist in the city and suburbs had his turn
at the big (and unwieldy) instrument. After
a while, it began to form part of the most
adventurous combinations ; I remember one
evening when a fantasia on themes from Wal-
lace's Mar it ana was played as a duet for
mouth-harmonica and the Great Organ ; a
combination, as the program informed us,
'* never before attempted in the history of
Music ! "

The Handel & Haydn demi-centennial came

74 ABOUT MUSICIANS

Musical in the spring of 1865; before the year was

Reminiscen- out) tne Harvard Musical Association began

C™, . °^t0n its symphony concerts — or did these concerts

Thirty Tears . * J, ^T

^ begin after New Year ? I forget ; at any rate,

they began either in December, 1865, or in
January, 1866. But, before speaking of these
concerts, I must mention another institution
which passed away a year or two before, and
had done a great deal of good amid hard strug-
gles and difficulties. This was the old Phil-
harmonic. I can not remember exactly on
what basis the old Philharmonic concerts —
not to be confounded with those of the Boston
Philharmonic Society, founded much later —
existed ; I am under the impression that they
were mainly, if not wholly, a private enter-
prise of Mr. Zerrahn's. They were subscrip-
tion concerts, given in the evening, with (I
think) a preliminary public rehearsal in the
afternoon. They were given in the Music
Hall, for the most part, though at times in the
Boston Theatre, and were for years the prin-
cipal orchestral concerts in the city. The
orchestra was somewhat larger than that of the

ABOUT MUSICIANS 75

Orchestral Union. The concerts foundered Musical
during the hardest years of the war, a little
after the Wednesday afternoon concerts of the
Orchestral Union had struck colours ; when -.
they stopped, I think the Orchestral Union
plucked up courage again, and continued giving
concerts until the H. M. A. began.

The symphony concerts of the Harvard
Musical Association began flourishingly, and
their success went on increasing for some years.
Crowded houses were the rule. This success
did not, however, continue far into the seven-
ties ; the audiences began to drop off, subscrip-
tions to decrease, and little by little the stig-
mata of unpopularity began to show themselves
on the institution. There were several reasons
for this, most, if not all, of which may be
summed up in the one fact that the H. M. A.
concerts were the connecting link between the
old and the new musical Boston. They re-
presented our transition period.

The Association started out on pretty severe
classical and conservative principles ; and, when
the time came for going with the general cur-

76 ABOUT MUSICIANS

Musical rent of musical thought and feeling, they con-

Remmiscen- tinued to be strongly conservative and even

reactionary. The Head- Centre — if not the
Thirty Tears , , J . r .

^ heart and soul — or the Association was the

late John S. Dwight ; and his musical princi-
ples are still too well known to need dilating
upon here. Many influential members of the
Association were eager to have it join hands
with what was then generally called the party
of progress ; but Dwight was inexorable, and
would not yield an inch. No committee-man
could, in the end, make headway against his
triumphant "system of inertia;" the spirit of
the concerts remained conservative to the end.
Another reason for the growing unpopu-
larity of the concerts was still less in the
Association's power to overcome. In 1869
Theodore Thomas began making our city fly-
ing visits with his New York orchestra, then
unquestionably one of the finest in the world ;
and his concerts gave us Bostonians some rather
humiliating lessons in the matter of orchestral
technique. The H. M. A. was naturally slow
in taking these lessons to heart; indeed it only

ABOUT MUSICIANS 77

did take them to heart when it was already Musical
too late to profit by them, after the yearly in- Reminiscen-

come from the concerts had so dwindled awav ces. Y -tsoston

. . . - ' Thirty Tears
that it was well-nigh hopeless to think of af- ^

fording the needful money for engaging better
orchestral material and having more rehearsals.
In fact, the only practical influence I can re-
member the Thomas concerts having upon the
H. M. A. was that, for some years, both con-
ductor and a large part of the orchestra seemed
bitten with the extreme-pianissimo mania ; we
had a series of the most astounding half-audible
pianissimo string-effects, even in Beethoven
symphonies. That silly little muted-string
transcription of Schumann's Traumerei, which
Thomas played again and again, had turned all
heads ! Still the public could not but draw
its own comparisons between the playing of
the Thomas Orchestra and that of our own ;
and such comparisons only added to the already
serious unpopularity of the H. M. A. "Dull
as a symphony concert" almost passed into a
proverb.

Of course the opposition somewhat overdid

7 8 ABOUT MUSICIANS

Musical the business. The H. M. A. orchestra did

Reminiscen- not play by any means so badly as some people
CM of Boston wQuld have had you believe . neither were the

A 0 programs so dull and " ultra- classical " as they

were commonly reputed to be. Not a little
of the " New Music ' ' was played ; and,
curiously enough, — considering the loud and
repeated demands for it, — generally very
coldly received by the audience. There
was really a good deal of variety in the H. M.
A. programs. When Wilhelm Gericke first
came here and looked over the programs of the
H. M. A. for the seventeen years of their
existence, his astonishment at the vast field
covered by them was unbounded. " I don't
see what is left for me to do ! " he exclaimed,
" you seem to have had everything here already,
much more than we ever had in Vienna! "
But the public was disgruntled, the Association
had got a bad name, and people in general
noticed the old things on the programs much
more than they did the new ones. The rats
were leaving the sinking ship, and fewer and
fewer music-lovers cared to book for a passage.

ABOUT MUSICIANS 79

Yet, in face of all this, one curious fact Musical
remains : through the whole seventeen years of Reminiscen-

its symphony concerts, the Harvard Musical ces °f Boston
... , , ... . , Thirty Tears

Association came out ahead pecuniarily ; with /jffn J

all the miserably small audiences of the later
years, it never lost a cent on its concerts !
The success of the first few years was enough
to carry the concerts through, besides allowing
the Association to spend a tidy sum every year
on increasing its library.

I like now to look back upon some of the
enthusiasms of those earlier years of the H. M.
A. concerts ; for we had our enthusiasms then,
as now. Few musical events in this city have
surpassed — in the furor of enthusiasm it called
forth — the first performance of Niels Gade's
C minor symphony. That scherzo, with its
ever-recurring joyous refrain, carried everything
before it ! Schumann's Genoveva overture
made almost as strong and unexpected an im-
pression, if in a more restricted circle ; I think
the Genoveva marked the turning-point in
the public's attitude toward Schumann here.
Before it, the general run of music- lovers in-

8o ABOUT MUSICIANS

Musical clined to look upon Schumann as incomprehen-

Reminiscen- sjbly new-fangled ; after it, people began to

^7 f B°*ton prick up their ears and listen to him with more
Thirty Tears r .

A Q and more sympathy and comprehension. The

Genoveva was even enough to induce them to
listen respectfully to his C major symphony,
which was brought out here at the same con-
cert— and, by the way, how like Pandemo-
nium-let-loose the first movement sounded,
with the then playing ! Like the very rags
and tatters of music ! Goldmark's Sakuntala
turned nearly all heads ; Mr. Zerrahn and the
orchestra were particularly wild over it, and I
think it was given three times in half a season.
Saint-Saens's Phaeton had an almost equal
success, and notably with the players. I
remember Schulze saying, one day after a
rehearsal, " It may not be of any very solid
value ; but it is tremendous fun. I tell you,
when those trills come our way, in the violins,
they make us fee! like kings!" Brahms' s C
minor symphony made us stare, though ! I
doubt if anything in all music ever sounded
more positively terrific than that slow intro-

ABOUT MUSICIANS 81

duction to the first movement did to us then. Musical
Some twenty or thirty years before, Schumann's Reminiscen-

t-fa major variations had seemed about the ne '°

, J _ rbtrty Tears

plus ultra of " cats -music ;' but they were ^

nothing to the Brahms C minor. Naturally
the imperfect performance had much to do with
the fearful impression the work made upon us
at the time ; but the novelty of the style was for
a great deal in it, too. I think the only Boston
musician who was really enthusiastic over the
Brahms C minor from the beginning was B.
J. Lang. But the rest of us followed him soon
enough ; I myself bringing up in the rear, after
six years or so. It took considerably longer
than that, though, for Brahms to win anything
like a firm foothold in Boston. It was the old
story over again. Schumann had to fight long
for recognition from the public ; Wagner did
anything but come, see, and conquer. Liszt
and Berlioz frightened almost all listeners at
first. And, when Brahms came, he seemed the
hardest nut to crack of all ! Tchaikovsky took
us by storm, when von Bulow first played his
B-flat minor concerto here, and the Andante of

VOL. II. — 6

82 ABOUT MUSICIANS

Musical his D major quartet soon became the " Stella

Reminiscen- confidente of quartet-players." But Tchai-

C^,j °-f °J. °n kovskv stock was not long in falling a goodish
Thirty K ears ' , • , • •

way below par ; and it took it some time to

rise again. If the Harvard Musical Associ-
ation's concerts stuck pretty fast to the classics,
they had at least an excuse in the coldness with
which almost all the new things were received
— no matter how loudly press and public might
have clamoured for them. The public per-
sistently cried for the new things, and turned up
its nose when it got them.

ABOUT ART IN GENERAL

ABOUT ART IN GENERAL

AFTER Max Nordau, in that curious Random
Degeneration of his, had done his best Thoughts on
to show that many modern artists — poets, Artists in
painters, composers, novelists, playwrights, (jeneral-
etc., etc. — were degenerate and more or less
insane, it was some comfort to hear his dis-
tinguished teacher, Cesare Lombroso, say, in
his review of Nordau' s book, that the author
had erred in detecting signs of insanity merely
in this or that noteworthy modern man of
genius, and erred especially in implying that
these signs of insanity were in any way to the
discredit of the geniuses in question ; for insanity
was the invariable and inseparable accompani-
ment of genius of every sort, and always had
been. This was some comfort, at least to
those of us who deem modern Art and artists
not wholly despicable, when compared to

86

ABOUT ART IN GENERAL

Random
Thoughts on
Artists in
General

older Art and artists. For, if genius is
always more or less insane, insanity can not
justly be called distinctive of, nor in any way
a reproach to, modern genius.

It is perhaps just this touch of insanity, or
quasi-insanity, in artists that acts as the most
impassable barrier between them and the rest
of humankind. For note the curious fact :
this quasi-insanity does not, as a rule, manifest
itself in the artist's relation to his art so strongly
as in his attitude toward life and society in
general. We ordinary mortals can often
understand the artist's relation to his art quite
well ; except in some few excessive cases, it
strikes us as quite normal and explicable, —
if anything, somewhat better poised and less
ecstatic than we should have expected. But
it is in his relations to every -day life that
he seems less explicable, that we fail to
understand him so sympathetically ; it is here
that his quasi-insanity manifests itself most
perplexingly.

A noted artist, speaking one day of the
pleasure he had had at a certain country-house,

ABOUT ART IN GENERAL

Artists in
General

especially in the hostess's society, said : Random
" There are women who know more or less Thoughts on
about Art, and understand it tolerably well
— not quite so well as they think they do,
perhaps, but still pretty well ; such women
are, between you and me, holy terrors, as a
rule ! But there are other women who under-
stand artists ; and they are the ones I find
charming." There is a good deal of meaning
in the distinction here drawn ; it is not merely
imaginary. It surely does not take genius to
understand genius, or its works, "tolerably
well ;" most of us, who have little or none
of it, would kick, if any one were to impugn
the intelligence and sincerity of our attitude
toward the great works of genius in the world.
But to understand the art-production is not
quite the same thing as to understand the art-
producer. It is not impossible that the women
of whom my friend spoke, as "understanding
artists," may have a streak of rudimentary,
quasi-latent genius in their composition ; not
enough to enable them to produce, nor even
reproduce, artistically, but enough to give them

88

ABOUT ART IN GENERAL

Random a sympathetic inkling of that touch of insanity

Thoughts on which is inseparable from genius, an inkling

Artists in which makes it possible for them to get some-

General . . - . . , . r.

thing of an inside view of its various manifes-
tations, and recognize their undercurrent of
logic. Of course, I do not mean to confine
this sympathy with artists to women ; one
finds it in not a few men, as well. It seems
to bear no relation whatever to its possessor's
understanding of Art ; it is in no sense an
understanding of Art itself, but an inborn intel-
ligent sympathy with the artistic temperament.
Perhaps the commonest manifestation of
quasi -insanity in artists is the view they take
of themselves. One of the commonest forms of
" degeneracy " Nordau points out is megalo-
mania. Now, the artist's view of himself is,
as a rule, absolutely geocentric in its egotism ;
it is this egotism which most veils the artist
from the ordinary man, who, in many cases,
can only see the egotism, but not the artist
behind it. Likely enough, few artists will
plead guilty to this charge of superabundant
egotism ; that is quite natural. It is, in the

ABOUT ART IN GENERAL 89

end, to be recognized as a normal trait of Random
genius, as part and parcel of the quasi-insanity Thoughts on
which genius implies ; abnormal only when Artlsts *n

•IJL j- jj -LI. •• General

judged by ordinary standards, with the artistic

temperament left out of consideration. And
the artist, feeling it to be normal, from his
point of view, is unable to appreciate that it
exceeds the bounds of such egotism as is the
common possession of all of us. With this
excessive egotism go the nervous irritability,
tetchiness, and at last jealousy which mark the
artistic temperament.

— " Do you think Mr. can possibly

feel hurt at this ? " I once heard a certain
committeeman ask, speaking of an artist who
was not present. "Did you ever know of
an opportunity for feeling hurt that any artist
would let slip ?" was the rejoinder.

No doubt, the very nature of an artist's
employment, the enormous concentration his
studies, practice, and productive work demand,
the prominence of his position before the
public, the wear and tear of protracted emo-
tional activity upon the nervous system, are all

9o

ABOUT ART IN GENERAL

Artists in
General

Random calculated to foster this irritable tetchiness ; no

Thoughts on doubt, too, the artist's hard-earned experience
of the infinite labour it takes to achieve pro-
minence naturally tends to make him jealous
of popular favour bestowed upon others, who
seem to him to have won it more jauntily than
he. All this may be argued, and much more.
Whether the artist be a producer, or only a
reproducer, — and artistic reproduction is in
itself a sort of production, — his works are, in
a sense, his children ; and few of us can be
brought to feel, in our heart of heart, that there
is not something extraordinary about our own
progeny. It takes a marvellous bad child to
damp its parents' pride in it ! But, though
all these influences may be admirably apt to
foster the artist's egotism, to develop his
megalomania, it does not seem to me that they
are sufficient to create it ; at least the germs of
this portentous egotism must be congenital,
part and parcel of that quasi-insanity which —
so Lombroso tells us — is inseparable from
genius.

It is probably an insuperable lack of under-

ABOUT ART IN GENERAL 91

standing of, and sympathy with, this common Random
manifestation of artistic insanity that renders a Thoughts on
satisfactory indulgence in the society of artists ^tlsts in

,-rr i r TT

so difficult to many of us. How many men
and women are there not, whose love for Art
leads them to seek the companionship of
artists, but who find it impracticable to get
upon terms of mutual freemasonry with them ?
Why ? Because the average man tires, after a
while, of companions whom he has constantly
to handle with the most delicate of gloves, so
as not to wound their susceptibilities. On the
other hand, artists soon tire of him, because
they dislike having their susceptibilities con-
tinually wounded. Moreover, the lack of
common instinct will probably prevent the
outside art-lover* s mastering the problem of
the artist's tetchiness. He sees artists handle
one another, as it strikes him, without any
gloves at all ; why, then, should he have
to put them on ? — he, in whom nothing but
the friendliest spirit is presumable, in whom
professional jealousy is out of the question.
The trouble is that he is trying to deal

ABOUT ART IN GENERAL

Random
Thoughts on
Artists in
General

practically with a mental disease of the intrica-
cies of which he is ignorant ; he has to do
with a temperament the extreme sensitiveness
of which, in some directions, is all the less
comprehensible to him, that he finds it unex-
pectedly callous in others — in which he, like
enough, may be somewhat sensitive himself.
He fails to grasp the subtile logic of the insanity
of genius ; he is in constant peril of giving the
artist a thwack upon his sorest spot, and may
often hesitate even to stroke him where he
might have kicked him with impunity. The
possibility of any freemasonry between him and
artists is virtually null.

After all, the matter is as broad as it is long.
If, as I have said, the average outsider fails to
grasp the subtile logic of the insanity of genius,
the artist often fails as signally to comprehend
the simpler logic of the sanity of no-genius.
The every-day man's relations to life and
society may be as incomprehensible to him as
his are to the other. It is the old question
over again : which of the two is really the
insane one ? To the caged lunatic, the rest of

ABOUT ART IN GENERAL 93

the world is as insane as he is to those outside Random
his bars ; the question is practically settled by Thoughts on

the majority — but who knows ? The artist Artists, in

, . , , , . . . ,. General

may think the art-layman s misappreciation or

his sensitiveness inexplicable and even brutal ;
so incomprehensible, indeed, that he can not
help looking for some ulterior motive in the
other* s quite unintentionally wounding his
feelings. The suspiciousness of artists in this
matter seems at times well-nigh preternatural ;
but it is merely a part of the insanity of
genius.

I may have seemed to use the word genius
somewhat too loosely here ; for the sort of
insanity of which I have spoken is unquestion-
ably met with in many an artist to whom the
world would unite in refusing so high an
attribute as genius. Some artists seem, in
truth, to have the insanity of genius, without
the genius of their insanity. I am no specialist
in this matter ; but may hazard a guess. We
all know, at least, that, as artists go, the gravity
of their insanity is no measure of the calibre
of their genius — nor vice versa. My guess

94

ABOUT ART IN GENERAL

Random
Thoughts on
Artists in
General

is that the peculiar mental derangement which
is one of the conditions of genius may often
manifest itself quite conspicuously without any
accompanying manifestation of genius itself.
As the quantitative proportion of genius to
insanity is different in different subjects, it seems
quite possible that the genius itself may often
be so' nearly null as to be practically inappre-
ciable, while there may still be enough of it
to account for the insanity. The characteristic
mental derangement may be plainly recogniza-
ble, even in cases where the genius itself eludes
direct diagnosis.

A not uncommon manifestation of what I
may call the egotism of genius is the well-
known proneness of artists (apparently) to
undervalue each other's work. Of generous
appreciation of each other, artists unquestion-
ably show a great deal at times ; this must
be conceded them. But they are habitually
terrible flaw-pickers, too ; when they praise a
fellow-craftsman, it is generally with a reser-
vation. No doubt, most of us praise in the
same way . But the artist* s reservation — which

ABOUT ART IN GENERAL 95

may, after all, be merely a mental one, more Random
implied by his manner than directly expressed Thoughts on
in words — nearly always gives one the Artlsts m
impression that his fellow-craftsman has failed
just where he himself would have done better.
People are too ready to call this sheer jealousy ;
but it seems to me quite natural, no jealousy is
needed to explain it. There is an ideal
underlying all artistic performance, whether
productive or reproductive ; and the artist is
more completely, more vividly conscious of his
own ideals than he can be of the exact quality
of his own performance. Of the quality of
another's performance he is, however, an
excellent judge ; whereas he can know the
other's ideals only through the character of
this performance. So, when brought face to
face with the performance of his fellow- crafts-
man, he — no doubt unconsciously — tends
to compare it, not with his own actual or
potential performance, but with his own ideals.
It is not unnatural that the other's performance
should suffer somewhat by the comparison.
That the over-keen sensitiveness, tetchiness,

96

ABOUT ART IN GENERAL

Random egotism, and jealousy of artists are quite nor-

Tbougbts on maj manifestations of the insanity of genius
Artists tn seems to me evident enough. It seems to me
equally evident that these faults are not justly
to be judged by the common standard of ordi-
nary men. With and in spite of all this
superacute egotism and sensitiveness, this ever-
watchful jealousy, see how well artists, upon
the whole, get on together. One would
think that men so constituted could be nothing
but powder and match to one another, that
their mutual intercourse would be a mere
series of explosions. This is, however, far
from being the fact ; we outsiders are much
more likely to be matches to the artist's pow-
der than one artist is likely to be to another's.
The only plausible explanation seems to be
that artists, being all insane with the same
insanity, well and sympathetically understand
what I have called the subtile logic of that
insanity ; they feel instinctively that what
would wound them will wound their colleague
also — and act accordingly. And they know
what will wound as we outsiders cannot.

ABOUT ART IN GENERAL 97

We are hopelessly shut out from the free- Random
masonry of genius, and can never quite com- Thoughts on
prehend the workings of its accompanying r l s *
insanity.

Happy Thought. — To quote carelessly " Po- Polypbloisboio
luphoisboio Thalasses" and say with enthusiasm, tbalasses
" Ah, there's an epithet ! How grand and full
is the Greek language!'1 — F. C. BURNAND,
More Happy Thoughts.

— "Hullo !" said Felix, "there's the big
thing that's so much talked about."

Five rows of people were gazing at the big
thing. — EMILE ZOLA, Madame Neigeon.

When the late lamented Jumbo was in New
York he attracted so much attention that his
colleagues, although but little inferior in size,
had " no show " whatever. Everybody crowded
around Jumbo, stuffing him with bushels of
oranges and apples, while the other elephants
were entirely ignored In aesthe-
tics, this Jumboism, this exaggerated desire for
mammoth dimensions, seems to be a trait of the
human mind which it is difficult to eradicate. —
HENRY T. FINCK, Chopin and Other Musical
Essays.

: VOL. II. 7

98 ABOUT ART IN GENERAL

Polypbloisboio T) ROB ABLY few of us are quite safely cui-
tbalasses J[ rassed against the attack of magniloquence.

Few of us can quite dissociate the idea of big-
ness from the idea of strength. We see too
many instances of strength and size going to-
gether for that. Prize-fighters, for instance,
are classed, not according to their muscle, but
according to their weight and inches ; though
the blow of a feather-weight may at times be
estimable at more foot-pounds than that of a
heavy-weight, the former would probably find
few backers against the latter. The small boy
who thrashes a big boy is de facto a hero, his
admiring friends being, as a rule, quite will-
ing to overlook the very possible fact that he is
really stronger than his bulkier victim. Cur-
rent slang — that infallible index of popular
thought — has done its best to substitute the
word "big" for the word "great" in
American English. Size will ever have its
admirers. And, as it is with size, — and its
usual concomitant, weight, — so is it also with
the spiritual correlatives of size and weight:
pompousness, grandiosity, magniloquence.

ABOUT ART IN GENERAL 99

To transport this so general admiration for Polypbloisboio
the bulky, the ponderous, the grandiose into tbalasses
our mental attitude toward works of art is
dangerous ; dangerous, but all too common !
Yet it seems to me that, in our day, this is
not the only, nor perhaps the most serious,
peril to which our practical aesthetics is
exposed. A more subtile and insidious dan-
ger may come from a too thoughtless reaction
against this aesthetic Jumboism ; an over-reck-
less disgust with the vulgar cult of the Big may
end in the preciosity of a wanton, self-con-
scious cult of the Little. A too lavish harping
on the fact that bulk and strength are divorci-
ble may at last lead us to forget that they are
often united. It may also induce a morbid,
undiscriminating distaste for bulk per se ; even
to the pitch of disgruntling us with strength
itself — as a too common attribute of bulk.
After getting ourselves into this mental posture,
we may easily go a step farther, and, in our
new-fledged admiration for the Little, forget
that delicacy is oftener a concomitant of
strength than of weakness, and acquire a

ioo ABOUT ART IN GENERAL

Polypbloisboio sickly fondness for the weak, the anaemic, the

tbalassu impotent.

The big is often strong ; nay, some things
owe all their strength to their size, all their
beauty and impressiveness. The Pyramids
would be nothing on a reduced scale. Bulk
is not necessarily vulgar, neither is magnilo-
quence. Fustian is vulgar, if you will ; but
there is a magniloquence which is not fustian.
And, if you come to vulgarity, is the most
orotund fustian of the camp-meeting howler
as intrinsically vulgar as the shrivelled, drawl-
ing would-be-elegance of the drawing-room
snob ? Of all aesthetic vulgarity, preciosity is
the worst ; it is a self-conscious vulgarity that
is ashamed of its better self, vulgarity double-
distilled. And, of all known or knowable
forms of preciosity, the farthest past praying
for is that which burns incense at the altar of
weakness.

One of the least respectable forms of pre-
ciosity in art matters is, to my mind, the now
prevalent fad for the sketch — in contradistinc-
tion to the finished picture. It is, in the last

ABOUT ART IN GENERAL 101

analysis, little else than a phase of the cult of Polypblohboio
weakness. Do not misunderstand me. There tbalasses
are sketches in the world, in which the
artist's genius gives us a glimpse of loftier
things than it reveals to us in his finished pic-
tures ; sketches which half-articulately stammer
forth a sublimer message than has yet been
couched in the completer utterance of well-
rounded periods. In some sketches you seem
to catch a glimpse of genius, nobly nude;
whereas, in the finished picture, you but see
genius clothed. But, upon the whole, why is
this ? Mainly because scarcely any painter
has yet had the artistic strength to develop his
puissant, semi-articulate sketch into a wholly
articulate picture, without letting some of the
initial potency of the sketch evaporate in the
process. That is about all ! In the superior
strength of the sketch the painter's weakness
stands confessed. His ideal aim is to give full
utterance to what is in him ; not merely to
stammer it forth in a half-articulate way ; his
business is to reveal his ideal to you, not
merely vaguely to shadow it forth. If he can

102 ABOUT ART IN GENERAL

Polyphloisboio succeed in fully revealing only a part of that
tbalasses of which he can give you a hasty glimpse, so

much the weaker he. And, if our admiration
for some great sketches above the pictures de-
veloped from them implies nothing worse than
a willingness on our part to extenuate and
condone the painter's weakness, the popular
fad for the Sketch — with a capital S, — for
the Sketch per sef turns this condonation to a
veritable cult. Such a cult can thrive only
at the expense of a general cheapening and
deterioration of our art ideals.

I find a similar deplorable preciosity in the
now common disposition to attribute an exagger-
ated value to the musical phrase. People are
too fond of saying things like "A single phrase
of So-and-so's is worth a whole symphony of
So-and-so-else's." Mind you, I do not say
that such an expression of opinion is necessarily
false ; I know of some musical phrases worth
more than Peru and Golconda, and of a sym-
phony or two, worth less than nothing at all.
Verily there be phrases and phrases in Music ;
some, valuable of and by themselves alone, —

ABOUT ART IN GENERAL 103

for their plastic beauty, their dignity and Polypblotsboio
grandeur, their poignant truth of emotional
expressiveness, — others, again, valuable for
the potency and power of growth there is in
them, valuable as seeds from which a whole
mighty composition can be made to grow.
But I can not help suspecting, in general, that
expressions of opinion of the sort I have just
quoted are really morbid ; they imply to me
that what might have been a healthy reaction
against musical Jumboism has been allowed to
run to peccant lengths, that the patient, though
well enough cured of what Jumboism he may
have suffered from, is now experiencing the
toxic effect of the remedies he has too prodigally
taken, and has fallen from Jumboism into pre-
ciosity. Or, maybe, frightened at the ravages
he has seen Jumboism make in the aesthetic
system of others, he has made an excessive use
of prophylactics, resulting in a tendency to
musical microlatry. Or again, his may simply
be a case of congenitally weak musical diges-
tion, such as is best treated with spoon-
victual.

104 ABOUT ART IN GENERAL

Polypbloisboio As for the intrinsic artistic value of extended
tbalasses compositions, — long symphonies, elaborately

worked-out fugues, etc., — this is merely a
question of the value of the thematic material,
plus the question whether they have attained
their great bulk by a process of natural, normal
growth, or have been artificially inflated to
monster-balloon size with sheer gas. It is all
very fine to say that, in this simple song or
that unpretentious prelude, only a page or
half a page long, the composer has given you
matter of the weightiest import, in a nut-shell.
Possibly he has ; but there are some things
which absolutely will not go into a nut-shell,
and things of infinite moment, too. St. Au-
gustine saw that the sea would not go into a
hole in the ground !

^Esthetic Jumboism is a direful disease ;
but, to my mind, not so bad as its antithesis,
aesthetic microlatry. Jumboism is, in general,
quite sincere, if sincere in a mistaken direction ;
but microlatry is terribly liable to exhibit
symptoms of affectation and cant. Esthetic
microlatry and preciosity seldom go alone ; you

ABOUT ART IN GENERAL 105

find them oftenest associated together. And Polypbloisboio
from all taint of preciosity good Lord deliver tbalasses
us ! After all, Jumboism, with its cognate
admiration for the magniloquent and " poly-
pbloisboio tbalasses ' ' in general, is essentially a
bourgeois trait ; it belongs, for the most part,
if not quite distinctively, to what Zola has
called " cette horrible classe bourgeoise qui ne
peut rien faire simplement et qui s' endimancbe,
quand elle mange un melon (that horrible bour-
geois class, which can do nothing simply, and
dons its Sunday best to eat a melon)." But
preciosity belongs to the dandy, — of all mor-
tals the least respectable.

WE all have heard of the canons of Canons
Art ; though exactly what they are
is not so easy to discover. They would
seem to be rather fragile things, for Art itself
has progressed through the ages at the expense
of an enormous breakage of them. You can
track the march of an art through time by the
shattered canons in its path, as you can that of
a picnic party through the woods by the broken

106 ABOUT ART IN GENERAL

Canons egg-shells. Yet every single one of these de-

molished canons was once held sacred, held to
be a thing infrangible, good for a safe voyage
through eternity. At the least crack in any
one of them a terrific outcry was raised, sum-
moning all hearts of oak to rally round the
legitimist banner, for Art was in danger ; just
as we hear the dread news that the Country is
in peril from our every-year's national Tun-
genagemot. But Ars longa, canones breves ;
Art still lives and mocks at danger, in spite of
her broken canons.

Yet, may it not be said, on the other hand,
that an art without canons, an absolutely law-
less art, must be no art at all ? Where there
are no laws, one would think that only one of
two things can exist : either autocracy or an-
archy. To the autocratic pitch, to the point
of unquestioning obedience to the dictates of a
single, irresponsible ruler, no art has ever yet
brought it ; perhaps also, never quite to the
anarchic pitch. One concludes, therefore,
that Art can not but obey some laws, — often of
the unformulated, unwritten sort, — and that

ABOUT ART IN GENERAL 107

to discover these laws, and formulate them dis- Canons
tinctly would be a not undesirable performance.
But this discovery has had its difficulties.
Probably no single entire law of Art has ever
yet been fully discovered, but only parts and
portions of laws. The formulating these parts
and portions, too, the reducing them to osten-
sible rules and canons, has been done, for the
most part, with a wisdom that saw no farther
than its own nose. Rules have been made to
fit isolated cases, and then proclaimed as valid
for all cases and all time — with the results we
know. No man has yet had the penetration of
insight, the scope of vision, to see enough of a
law of Art to be able to express it in a rule fit
to outlive the ages and be more perennial than
bronze. One may even expect that such
penetration and scope of vision will be refused
to man, to the end of time.

Yet, amid this continual breaking of canons,
— partial formulations of laws, pretending to
completeness ; temporary makeshifts, claiming
to be everlasting, — it is to be noted how many
rules, as yet unbroken, gain weight and

io8 ABOUT ART IN GENERAL

Canons authority by insensibly establishing themselves

as conventions. The half-conscious plebisci-
tum of artists decrees that the truth contained in
them is worth recognizing ; and, from being
partial, perhaps tyrannical, expressions of laws,
they become willingly accepted conventions,
conformity to which soon grows to be a matter
of habit. In this condition, they exert their
most potent, also their most beneficent sway.
Convention is not to be rashly undervalued ;
without it, we should all be in but ill case. Our
very language is nothing more than a long-in-
herited convention ; there must needs be some-
thing conventional in the expressive methods of
Art, or people would not understand them.

There are no relations in life in which at
least something has not to be taken for granted ;
and the art which can take a widely recognized
convention for granted is in the safest condition.
It is only when conventions cease to answer to
the needs of the times, cease to be true ex-
pressions of the general feeling, that they be-
come irksome, and the few advanced leaders cry
for their abolition ; only when the canon that

ABOUT ART IN GENERAL 109

has become conventional can no longer be be- Canons
lieved in, and the place of belief is usurped by
cant. But, abolish the worn-out convention
as you will, it must be replaced by another,
which other, too, will be based on a canon
whose truth may be as largely alloyed with false-
hood as the old one. Only, the truth it con-
tains will be better adapted to the needs of the
age ; it will more exactly express the feeling of
the artistic world at large, and correspond
more adequately to its demands. But note
this : as the power of pure faith wanes in the
world, and the craving for investigation,
reasoning, and the exercise of judgment waxes
loud, the authority of the new canon will be
but feeble, till it can embody itself in a new
recognized convention. The condition of Art
meanwhile — between the death of the old
convention and the establishment and recogni-
tion of the new — will seem to the thoughtless
very like one of anarchy. A simple canon,
no matter how well formulated, can exert little
sway nowadays over the doings of men ; it
must first prove its viability before the world

no ABOUT ART IN GENERAL

Canons will accept it. And, where there is no rule, it

seems as if nothing but anarchy can be. Yet,
to my mind, this supposed condition of anarchy
does not really exist.

Remember that analogies are ever liable to
limp a little ; you can find hardly one that
stands and walks squarely on both feet.
When we speak of anarchy in Art, it is only
by analogy with anarchy in the State. And
I here use the word " anarchy ' ' in its current
sense, not only of a state of no recognized
rule, but of a state of no-rule which, from
being such, is intrinsically and admittedly
hurtful to mankind. Its badness lies in its
practical workings more than in any theoretical
considerations. Anarchy in the State virtually
means far more than there being no recognized
laws, no recognized government, and every
man ruling himself ; this is what it means
theoretically, but practically it means every
man not only ruling himself, but trying to
rule all his fellows into the bargain, and make
the whole world walk his gait. But there is
little of this in the so-called anarchic periods of

ABOUT ART IN GENERAL in

an art. The artist does, in any case, what he Canons
pleases : in times when convention holds sway,
he does it conventionally ; when convention is
dead, he does it unconventionally, but suits
himself all the same. His innovations hurt
no one, and there is little recalcitration, save
from the critics ; and, whew ! who cares a
rap for them ? Possibly the " passionate
press-agent ; " and his regard for them is of
a somewhat mixed quality. Here the theo-
retical and practical sides of anarchy coincide ;
but so innocuous a state of anarchy as that is
hardly worthy the name !

The important gist of the matter is, after
all, this : the new canon — whether before or
after its embodying itself in a recognized con-
vention — will in all probability be no more
complete, universal, nor lasting an expression
of a law of Art than the old one it has dis-
placed ; it will probably be quite as partial
and temporary. More than this, the old con-
vention, which had ceased to be adequate to
the needs of the times, was probably not in-
adequate all over and all through ; it had be-

ii2 ABOUT ART IN GENERAL

Canons come irksome in some ways, enough so to

make men clamour for its abolition ; but, in
abolishing it, at least something good and
viable was lost, something the loss of which
the world can not endure forever. It is likely,
too, that this lost something will not be con-
tained in the new convention ; so that this one
also will have to be abolished in time, that the
loss may be made good. In its progress, Art
is ever thus dropping stitches, which it will in
time have to go back and take up again. No
convention, no matter how superannuated and
effete, no matter how unfit for the world's
complete adherence, is wholly and irredeem-
ably bad ; if it were so, it could never have
been good ; for, change as he may, the human
animal remains always the same at bottom. It
is by — perhaps unavoidably — abolishing the
good with the bad in an effete convention that
we prevent the new, fresh convention being
altogether excellent. It is only more adequate
to our present needs than the old one ; that is
all we can truly say in its favour, and that is
enough. It furnishes the most convenient

ABOUT ART IN GENERAL u3

channel for the art- workers of the day to let Canons
their inspiration flow through, affords them
the fittest form in which to embody it. So
soon as they begin to feel that, in losing
something in the old convention, they have
lost something of intrinsic, permanent value,
they will not be slow in going back to take
up the dropped stitch again. You may trust
them for that.

No doubt, the great art -workers, who are
really the principal abolishers and promulgators
of conventions in Art, do not always act with
impeccable prudence nor the longest foresight.
But Art is a field where feeling and enthusiasm
— and their almost inevitable concomitant,
sharpness of temper — have more to say than
reason and circumspection. The original
artist is so overjoyed to be rid of the harassing
old, and be on with the welcome new, that
he wishes the old good riddance forever and aye
without compunction. Perhaps also it is true
that, in Art, no man can acquire sufficient force
of energy to rise to the pitch of kicking out the
old, and embracing the new, unless he have

VOL. II. — 8

ii4 ABOUT ART IN GENERAL

Canons a somewhat exaggerated, morbid, undiscrimi-

nating yearning for the one and hatred of the
other. Something of the insanity of a fixed
idea may be needful for the purpose. Few
men advocate a revolution against what they
deem merely inconvenient ; man gets to the
pitch of revolt only against what he has found
intolerable. So the art-worker abolishes, not
what he finds merely useless, but what he
can no longer by any means endure. Then,
to be sure, he abolishes it, root and branch ;
probably to be followed by another who will
in time lovingly examine the old ploughed-up
roots, to see if there be no green shoots sprout-
ing from them ; in which examination he is
more than likely to be successful.

Culture \\T^J nave a^ hearc* °f the pursuit of happi-

* * ness, and know what the upshot thereof
is proverbially likely to be. Poets have sung
its hopelessness, painters and composers have
celebrated the same on canvas and in tones,
philosophers have proclaimed it in discouraging
prose. Not that happiness is unattainable in

ABOUT ART IN GENERAL 115

this world, but that the surest way not to find Culture
it is to seek it. The very hotness of your
pursuit but adds swiftness of stroke to the fair
phantom's wings.

Much the same may be said of that not
easily definable thing which is called culture.
Knowledge you can seek and get ; by due
pertinacity of effort you may make yourself
learned at will. But culture is more elusive ;
you may ransack the learning of the ages with-
out ever acquiring it.

Perhaps artistic culture is really no more
elusive than other sorts ; but, in our country
and to our race, it sometimes seems so. This
does not prevent our striving after it with
sturdiest zeal ; we give ourselves no end of
trouble to attain it — with what results, others
had best decide. Still, as some of our efforts
in this pursuit of culture are unquestionably
failures, it may not be quite futile to try and
speculate, why.

A too common error is to confound knowl-
edge with culture. Not long ago, I heard
an instructor in English literature at one of our

n6 ABOUT ART IN GENERAL

Culture larger universities complain bitterly of the

apparent hopelessness of his task. "It is
frightful/' said he, " to look at all those eager,
thoughtful faces ; to think that those earnest
people have come to me to be initiated into the
mysteries of English style, and to see with
what well-meaning obstinacy they do their
best to render themselves impervious to teach-
ing ! One and all seem possessed with the
idea that I am going to give them a formula,
a recipe." One can see that his pupils had
come for knowledge, that to them a formula,
or recipe, represented knowledge in its most
condensed and portable form. What they
asked for was information that could be
pigeon-holed in their minds, and taken out for
use when occasion required.

But it is as true of Art — of which Litera-
ture is but one special department — as it was
in the Garden of Eden, that "the tree of
knowledge is not that of life." Only a
Mephistopheles could write in an art-student's
album : " Eritis sicut artifex, sclent es bonum
et malum." No doubt, knowledge is a pre-

ABOUT ART IN GENERAL 117

paration for culture, probably an indispensable Culture
one ; for it is hardly conceivable that culture
and ignorance should go hand in hand. But
knowledge is not culture, for all that.

Do any of my readers remember the learned
quotation from Huxley, displayed in job-type
by a certain restaurant in Boston, some twenty
years ago ? I forget the exact words, but the
gist of it was that, when a man eats mutton, a
process goes on inside him by which that
mutton is transmuted into man ; it becomes no
longer mutton, but the man's own blood,
flesh, and bone. This process is digestion and
assimilation.

There is a mental correlative of this process
of digestion and assimilation, by which knowl-
edge is not merely stored in the mind, but so
absorbed into its very fibre that it is transmuted
into feeling and instinct. And, as the consti-
tution of a man's bone, flesh, and blood is
inevitably influenced by the kind of food he
eats, — although it remains, in every case,
his own blood, flesh, and bone, — so is the
character of his mental fibre and constitution

nS ABOUT ART IN GENERAL

Culture directly conditioned by the knowledge he has

digested and assimilated. But note this : his
mental fibre remains unchanged until his
knowledge has been so digested and assimilated.
He may store away knowledge without end in
his mind, and still remain the same man that
he was in the beginning ; it is only after what
I have called the process of mental digestion
and assimilation, after the transmutation of
knowledge into feeling and instinct, that his
acquired knowledge begins to affect his very
self and change his mental fibre. It is just this
thoroughly digested, assimilated, and trans-
muted knowledge that we properly call culture.
Culture is, in the end, a matter of feeling and
trained instinct ; never purely a matter of
thought. It is a matter of perception.

What my friend of the university meant by
his hapless pupils " doing their best to render
themselves impervious to teaching ' ' is pro-
bably this : their eager craving for a formula,
or recipe, was nothing more nor less than a
hunger for knowledge in the most condensed
and portable, but also unfortunately in the least

ABOUT ART IN GENERAL 119

digestible, shape possible. Pin your faith to Culture
an art-formula, and you forthwith destroy your
immediate artistic receptivity. Never is a man
so blind to the true quality and character of a
work of art as when he allows an intellectual
conviction to stand between himself and it.
He views it, at best, through coloured specta-
cles ; and, to his eyes, it assumes their colour,
the only colour to which those spectacles are
not opaque.

I would not dispute the possible usefulness
of art-formulas ; for unquestionably they have
their use. My aim is rather to determine, as
far as I can, just what their usefulness is.
And I attempt this with all the more zeal that
the matter seems to me to have been often
looked upon, especially of late years, in a to-
tally false light. Zola has well said that a
formula is but an instrument, from which the
predestined man can draw most eloquent mu-
sic. Absolutely true ! But it is of use only
to the creative artist ; it is of no use whatever
to those to whom he appeals through his crea-
tive work. An art- formula is but a condensed

120 ABOUT ART IN GENERAL

Culture intellectual and rational expression of the crea-

tive artist's instinctive point of view, of his
mental and emotional attitude toward his par-
ticular art. It is of use to him in so far as it
enables him to become fully conscious of what
his instincts are, enables him rationally to ac-
count for them to himself. If his formula is
more, or less, than such an intellectual and
rational expression of his instincts, if it is only
an expression of an intellectual conviction of
his, it is of no earthly artistic use even to him.
For, if a purely intellectual conviction is blind-
ing, when it stands between the ordinary man
and a work of art, it is doubly and trebly so,
when it obtrudes itself between the creative
artist and his own work.

I have said that an art-formula, or recipe,
represents knowledge in its least digestible
shape ; that is, it represents knowledge in the
shape in which it is least transmutable into
feeling and instinct. Remember that such a
formula presents its instinctive and emotional
side only to the creative artist who has found
himself irresistibly impelled to formulate and

ABOUT ART IN GENERAL 121

adopt it ; to the rest of the world it presents Culture
only its purely intellectual and rational ob-
verse. It is apprehended only through the
intellect and reason, and can strike no deeper
into the mind than these go. It is, in the
last analysis, but an item of knowledge that
must remain forever nothing more than knowl-
edge ; it is insoluble by that process of mental
digestion and assimilation by which knowledge
is transmuted into feeling and instinct, and can
accordingly never become a factor of true
artistic culture. The mind that is stored with
insoluble art-formulas may strive after culture
till dissolution comes, but will never attain it ;
for these indigestible and unassimilable items
of knowledge only clog and paralyze the acti-
vity of the one thing absolutely indispensable
to culture : the activity of instinct.

Upon the whole, it is a matter for some
wonder, what terribly faulty and incomplete
things art-formulas are, as the world goes.
There never was one that did not have its
more or less patent Achilles heel. Take, for
instance, the Wagnerian formula ; it is cock ot

122 ABOUT ART IN GENERAL

Culture the walk to-day, but is it really any more irre-

fragable than the Donizettian ? Is it any less
conventional, in the last analysis ? Why, it
is based on a pure convention : that the cha-
racters in a drama shall sing, instead of speak-
ing. I do not say that this convention is bad
or indefensible, — few conventions are; — but
it is a convention, and nothing but a conven-
tion, for all that. Wagnerians laugh at Doni-
zetti for making his dramatis persona express
quite different, sometimes diametrically oppo-
site, sentiments by singing the same melody
over to different words. Absurd ! you say ?
But why, absurd ? He who takes upon him-
self to deny that totally different emotions can
be expressed through one and the same melody
must have read the whole history and philoso-
phy of Music upside down. It is dramatically
absurd, is it ? for poor insane Lucia to sing
what she does in that mad-scene of hers?
Ah ! my most excellent Wagnerian friend,
come, lay your hand upon your heart and tell
me, is she not — and precisely from your own
point of view — doing just the craziest thing
imaginable ?

ABOUT ART IN GENERAL 123

It seems to me that they who criticise the Culture
Wagnerian or the Donizettian formula are, in
reality, criticising something which has nothing
whatever to do with an accurate perception of
the artistic character and quality of Wagner's
music-dramas or Donizetti's operas. Neither
is good nor bad because of its formula ; and,
until you forget that formula, you will be
unable clearly to perceive the quality of
either.

I much fear that what sorely troubles most
of us Anglo-Saxons, in our relations to the
fine arts, is that precious tendency of ours to
take everything by its ethical side first. A
most useful mental habit for preserving the
sturdiness of character of a race ; but, like
many another useful thing, productive of con-
siderable damage, when misapplied. I do not
mean here that proclivity, which comes to the
surface from time to time, to look first to dis-
cover whether there be anything dangerous to
popular morals in this or that particular work
of art ; for many of us have got well over that
form of ethical itch. What I especially mean

i24 ABOUT ART IN GENERAL

Culture is the enormous value we incline to attribute

to anything in the shape of a conviction. No
one need doubt that a rational, firmly held
conviction is of incalculable value in many
contingencies of life ; but, in so thoroughly
unmoral — which is not the same as immoral
— a matter as Art, it has, upon the whole,
very little to say. This inordinate valuation of
a conviction too often holds us down to what
I will call mere art-learning, and prevents our
rising to the point of true artistic culture.

If the art-formula may be called a condensed
expression of knowledge in its least digestible
and assimilable shape, a so-called artistic con-
viction is the first result of attempting to digest
it. And trying to digest the indigestible is a
proceeding not conducive to health. Artistic
culture can not be attained in this way.
Perhaps the worst of convictions is that they
are terribly liable to become prejudices. The
true aim of artistic culture is to train the
instincts, not to eradicate them ; to heighten
their activity, not to block it. If the accumu-
lation of stored-up knowledge tends to make

ABOUT ART IN GENERAL 125

a man heavy-headed and emotionally logy, Culture
the thorough mental assimilation of that
knowledge, and its complete transmutation into
feeling and instinct, give him a nimbleness, an
immediateness of perceptive faculty, in com-
parison with which that of the child is but
rudimentary ; and this is what is meant by
true culture. By the force of culture man se
refait une — naivete! But this culture of
which I speak must be the genuine article,
not that worst of pseudo-anythings which is
quite properly mis-spelled " cultchaw." For
that, instead of being assimilated knowledge, is,
for the most part, sheer undigested ignorance.

THERE is more poetry in pure Mathe- The Square
matics than some persons give it credit R°ot °f
for. The very fact that it deals with the Minus One
abstract, the intangible, the imponderable, at
times even with the metaphysically non-extant,
with the inconceivable, is of itself not devoid
of poetic suggestiveness. We find in it ex-
pressions of abstract truth, often wondrously
symbolical of truths in our own experience.

126

ABOUT ART IN GENERAL

The Square
Root of
Minus One

What, for instance, can be more essentially
poetic than the asymptote — that straight line
which runs out to infinity along side of the
hyperbola, the line to which the curve draws
ever nearer and nearer, without ever reaching
it ? Is not this a symbol of the human soul,
striving, but in vain, after its ideal ? Take,
again, the "imaginary quantity ; " what can be
more alluring to thought, more stimulating to
the imagination ? It is inconceivable, unima-
ginable ; yet capable of being quite definitely
expressed, even of being handled and juggled
with as easily as if it were really something.
Its fascination is its elusiveness. It, as it
were, roguishly offers you its tail; then, when
you come with your pinch of salt, whisks it
away, and your salt falls upon vacancy.

The square (second power) of a positive
quantity is positive; that of a negative quantity,
positive likewise. The square of -f-2 (that is,
the product of 2 multiplied by 2) is +4 ; the
square of — 2 is also +4. Therefore the square
root of 4-4 is either +2 or — 2. In general,
the square root of a positive quantity is either

ABOUT ART IN GENERAL 127

positive or negative. But the square root of a The Square
negative quantity ? What, for instance, is the R°of °f
square root of —4 ? It can neither be positive Minu
nor negative ; that stands to reason. Then,
what can it be ? What is it ? Echo answers,
what ? Mathematics answers, imaginary.

The common mathematical expression of
the imaginary quantity, in general, is " the
square root of — I." Whatever mathematical
product, combination, series of positive and
negative quantities you may have, if this
imaginary quantity enters but once as a factor,
your whole product, combination, or series be-
comes imaginary. In the higher Mathematics,
all combinations or series of positive and negative
quantities are called "real ; " but, once intro-
duce the square root of minus one as a factor,
and the whole series or combination becomes
" ideal. " Every real series has its exactly
corresponding ideal series. As Professor
Benjamin Peirce used to say, every mathemati-
cal expression of a truth in the real world is
haunted, as by its own shadow, by the expres-
sion of a corresponding truth in the ideal world.

128 ABOUT ART IN GENERAL

The Square If this is not poetic to the core, I know
Root of not what is. Just see where Poetry will at

inus ne tjmes buiid her nest ; even on the heights of
pure Mathematics !

Professor Peirce's dictum is true in a wider
field than that of Mathematics, wide as that
is ; it may be so generalized as to include all
truth, not merely the mathematical expression
of a truth. Every truth in the real world has
its exact counterpart in a truth in the ideal
world.

Especially is this true in the domain of Art.
We talk about the Real and the Ideal in Art ;
too often forgetting how intimately the two
are related. Too many of us have somehow
got it fixed in our minds that only the real is
true ; that the ideal is but a distortion thereof,
and must necessarily contain an element of
falsehood. We look upon the ideal in Art as
a sort of beautiful white lie, whose mission it
is to console us for the shortcomings of the
real. Beautiful white lie ? No lie, of what-
soever colour, is beautiful. Mendacious art
is to be distrusted ; all the more, if it lie

ABOUT ART IN GENERAL 129

" ideally." This false conception of the ideal The Square
has been the parent of more bad art than all the R°°t °f
realists and naturalists have ever been guilty of; inus ^e
their foulest delving in ditches and gutters, their
most morbid revelling in the seamy side of
life, are pure snow, compared with the night-
mare imaginings of false idealists.

The true ideal in Art is not a distortion of
the real ; idealism is not the negation of real-
ism. On the contrary, the ideal must be
based on the real, and be true as it. The
ideal is an expression of the real, affected by
the square root of minus one, by that faculty
of the human mind which is called Imagina-
tion. It was surely not for nothing that this
square root of minus one was called the
imaginary quantity ; it is a true symbol of
the artist's imaginative faculty ; it transmutes
real truth into ideal truth.

The proper function of the imagination in
Art is to discover, or invent, means of making
the essence of reality, nature, and truth more
plainly cognizable and keenly felt ; not to con-
sole the cowardly in spirit by showing them
VOL. ii. — 9

1 3o ABOUT ART IN GENERAL

The Square fantastic shadow-pictures of what can never

Root of be.

Minus One Of such means, one — though perhaps not

the most potent — is Symbolism. Not a little
has been said, first and last, against symbolism
in Art ; yet I can see no harm in it, so long
as it is clearly recognizable as such, so long as
the symbol runs no risk of being mistaken for
anything but a symbol. Hard-and-fast real-
ists complain of the wings the old masters
painted on angels' shoulders — which is not
particularly sensible of them, by the way, for
what do realists know about angels, in any
case ? But let us waive that. I think I re-
member a child's book, of the Sandford and
Merton sort, in one of the stories in which a
would-be-instructive old gentleman strove to
impress upon his pupils' minds that winged
angels would be hideous in the anatomist's
eye ; I fancy something followed about the
insufficiency of the pectoral muscles. One
wishes at times that a law could be passed,
forbidding the writing of children's books by
people devoid of a sense of humour. What,

ABOUT ART IN GENERAL 131

in heaven's name, has an anatomist to do with The Square
angels ? Still, the point may be worth con- R°ot °f
sidering. Minus One

No one need be told that the angels' wings
in pictures by the old masters are purely and
simply symbolical, not fantastic attempts at
improving upon human anatomy. In most
cases, too, they are quite recognizably sym-
bolical : merely conventional, not scientifico-
ornithological wings. They ought not to
trouble the anatomist, for there is nothing in
them to appeal to the anatomist, one way or
the other. They are not in his line.

But I once saw a modern painting of a
Cupid, on whose shoulders were quite realistic
white dove's wings. That Cupid made your
flesh creep ! The wings were so exactly and
elaborately true to nature — that is, to pigeon
nature — that you felt at once that they could
not possibly grow out of the boy's shoulders ;
their evidently being the amputated wings of
some dead pigeon, artificially stuck there, gave
them an air of grewsomeness that forbade all
impression of beauty. Their symbolism was

1 32 ABOUT ART IN GENERAL

The Square lost. It would have been only a shade worse,
Root of if the painter had gone a step farther and tried

Minus One tQ correct tne patent insufficiency of those
horrible wings, as organs of flight, by giving
his Cupid pectoral muscles capable of flapping
them effectually, — I believe, a yard thick
has been calculated as about the requisite size,
— so that not even the dullest-eyed could mis-
take the boy for anything but a monstrosity.
But, if symbolism in Art is innocent, so
long as it is unmistakable as such, what shall
be said of other products of the so-called "pure
imagination," — by which term is generally
meant, the imagination which cuts itself loose
from reality, — in which no symbolical mean-
ing is discoverable ? How about Goethe's
Erlking and Shakspere's Ariel ? Such crea-
tures never existed, neither could they ever
exist ; yet are they any the less truly poetic,
and in the best sense ?

If we look closely, we shall see that such
creatures of the so-called pure imagination
are, strictly speaking, never an outcome of the
poet's unaided fancy. As Heine says,

ABOUT ART IN GENERAL 133

Der Stoff, das Material des Gedichts, The Square

Das saugt sich nicht aus dem Finger j Root of

Kein Gott erschaift die Welt aus Nichts, Minus One
So wenig, wie irdische Singer.1

The Supernatural in Art is but an after-reflec-
tion of what was once deemed real ; its basis is
the anthropomorphitic tendency of Man, during
the childhood of the race, to embody all
natural forces, the hidden causes of all natural
phenomena, in human shapes, and account for
them so — in default of a better explanation.
This poetic anthropomorphism was the forerun-
ner of scientific investigation. Its products
were firmly believed in as truth ; they could thus
form an all-sufficient basis for the artist's ima-
ginative presentation. The existence of fairies,
demons, gnomes, and hobgoblins was so vivid
to the mind of Man in past ages, that its vivid-
ness has been able to withstand the wear and
tear of centuries. Shakspere did not create his
Ariel out of nothing ; he found the stuff for

1 The stuff, the material, of the poem is not to be
sucked from your finger ; no god creates the world out of
nothing, any more than earthly singers.

i34 ABOUT ART IN GENERAL

The Square him ready-made in popular belief, probably,

Root of too, in his own belief.

Minus One There ig no falge idealism in Ariel nor the

Erlking ; they are not inartistic white lies, for
they present themselves quite frankly as super-
natural beings. To be sure, their idealism is
of a peculiar sort ; it is not quite an expression
of reality, affected by the square root of minus
one, but an expression of what was once sup-
posed to be reality, affected by the same
imaginary quantity. It reposes on a supposi-
tion, say, like that of the fourth dimension in
Quaternions ; but this is quite legitimate artis-
tically. And just here I am reminded that
this mathematical simile holds most singularly
good ; for it is in the Quaternion Calculus
that, as I have been credibly given to under-
stand, the imaginary square root of minus one
can be expressed with such definiteness that it
ceases to be inconceivable, and acquires all the
semblance of reality. In a similar way, when
once you have presupposed the supernatural in
Art, creatures like Ariel and the Erlking acquire
a reality in their idealism that enables you to

ABOUT ART IN GENERAL 135

recognize them as beings with whom you are The Square
personally acquainted. R**t of

In sharp contrast with these sprites, see Minus One
Gilliat, in Victor Hugo's Travailleurs de la
mer, as he watches the departing vessel from
his seat on the rock, until the rising tide covers
his eyes, and he can see no more. Gilliat
presents himself to you purely and simply as a
man ; he makes no claim to being supernatural.
So you feel the scene which Victor Hugo
describes with all his grandiose vividness to be
merely false and fantastic. Gilliat would have
been swept bodily away before the rising
water had reached his eyes ; even if he had been
firmly chained down to his rock, he would have
been drowned before his eyes were submerged.
In either case, the thing is physically impos-
sible. Here we have a piece of utterly false
idealism, wantonly distorting reality, for the
sake of a sham emotional effect ; Victor Hugo's
imagination seems to have been powerless to
show forth the tragic pathos of the situation
in a natural way, and he saw nothing for it
but to cut loose ' from reality and take a

1 36 ABOUT ART IN GENERAL

The Square desperate header into the untrue. The ideal

Root of falsehood he shows us corresponds to no real

Minus One truth>

The T ONCE happened to be present when two

Complex J_ friends — one of them, a musician, the other,

a merely general music-lover, but both of them,
passionate devotees of the pleasures of the
table — were amusing themselves with drawing
up a compilcated menu. Another friend, a
distinguished musician — whose tastes in the
matters of eating and drinking were, however,
of primordial simplicity — soon came up, and
began to look with a half-amused, half-con-
temptuous smile at the elaborate bill of fare,
which was fast approaching completion.
"When it comes to eating, " he said at last,
"you two fellows seem bent upon nothing so
much as making the most adventurous, com-
plicated, and unnatural combinations ! " To
which one of the two epicures — the musical
one — replied : " Now, do you know ? you
are the very last man who ought to make a re-
mark like that. Don't you see that that is just

ABOUT ART IN GENERAL 137

the way the most hopeless amateur talks about The
a fugue?" Complex

Yes, that is the way a good many people talk
— or think — about a fugue, a symphony, or,
in general, any of the higher and more complex
developments in Music. The cry for " noble,
perspicuous simplicity ' ' in Art is old as the
hills. Prince de Valori, for instance, says of
Rossini's Messe solennelle : "One needs a
little technical knowledge, but, above all things,
heart and poetry, to understand it. One does
not need, as for Beethoven's Mass in D, to
have rowed twenty years in the galleys of
counterpoint, to try to decipher it." There
you have it : " heart and poetry " on one side ;
and, on the other, the " galleys of counter-
point." Counterpoint, which is in general
nothing, if not complex, reduced to a condition
of mere shameful penal servitude ! It is the
old story : sweet simplicity going straight to the
heart, complexity, to the brain — and, what
is more, stopping short there !

Some of us are getting rather over-tired of
this old story ; we find it not only threadbare,

138 ABOUT ART IN GENERAL

The but radically false. Is the possession of a

Complex brain, or the delight in using the same, a sign of
lack of heart ? Moreover, are the workings of
the heart — that is, of what its votaries call
the heart, not the blood-pumping organ — any
less complex than those of the brain ? Are the
affections, emotions, passions more easily de-
cipherable, less intricate in their complexity,
than thought and reason ? Is what aims at
reaching the heart less likely to get there for
having to pass through the brain on its way ?
To each and all of these questions, a thousand
times, No !

Art is organic ; and the more complex or-
ganism is, generally speaking, the higher. If
organic complexity were a bar to poignancy of
appeal to the emotions, the earth-worm would
be a more moving spectacle than a beautiful
woman. The most thrilling love-story would
be, at first sight, " Madam, will you have
me?»_ "Yes, kind Sir, I will ! " and so,
an end of it.

When people cry aloud for "simplicity/*
what they really mean — or ought to mean —

ABOUT ART IN GENERAL 139

is unity of impression. But the most complex The
art-forms, when treated with genius, can pro- Complex
duce as perfect unity of impression as the
simplest. No doubt, there are complexities
in Art which some people are impotent to
unravel. But then, what of that? Scho-
penhauer says that, when a head and a book
carom together, and you hear a hollow sound,
it is not always the book's fault. If you lose
your bearings in a complex work of art, this
is not necessarily to the discredit of the latter
— it is just possible that the fault may be
yours.

" The chief end of Art is to move the
emotions," crieth the emotionalist. Possibly
it may be; but whose emotions, my good
friend ? Is Art to stop at the all-but-feeble-
minded, and have nothing to say to the
thinker? And shall all be done for him to
whom thinking — heaven save the mark ! —
comes hard, who can not feel while trying to
think, and nothing for him who feels most
strongly when he has something to think of?
There be some to whom mental vacuity is as

i4o ABOUT ART IN GENERAL

The abnormal and irksome a condition as hard

Complex thinking is to others. If Art gives them
nothing to think about, they will think of
something else.

In complex forms of art, the true desidera-
tum is that the complexity shall be really or-
ganic ; more than this, that the artist shall so
be master of his complex utterance that he can
say more by its means than by any other. If
the artist find himself caught and floundering
in the toils he has spread to catch you, so much
the worse for him ; the less artist he ! But
if the complexity of his work is truly organic,
if he is thoroughly master of his expression,
then, if what he has to say is emotional in its
very essence, never fear that he will lack re-
sponsive listeners — and they will be no fools,
either. Neither will they be men of no
"heart."

Upon the whole, the question of complexity
or simplicity is not quite the same in all the
fine arts. In the visual arts, whose manifes-
tations occupy space, — Painting, Sculpture,
Architecture, — it has somewhat different

ABOUT ART IN GENERAL 141

aesthetic bearings from in Music, Poetry, or The
the Drama. There is nothing in Painting, Complex
Sculpture, nor Architecture that corresponds
to musical development and working-out, or
to the gradual spinning and unravelling of a
plot in the Drama or Poetry. What com-
plexity of composition there may be in a
painting, statue, or architectural design is all
there at once ; it meets the eye at the same
moment, and the various component parts of
the design have to be grasped, as it were, at a
glance. If the first impression is confused and
disorderly, this is in so far damning that it is
unlikely to be cured by further study. To be
sure, long study of a complicated pictorial
composition may enable us better to understand
the artist's treatment of his subject, better to
comprehend the story he has tried to tell us in
form and colour ; but it will hardly render the
purely pictorial effect less confused than it was
at first. And this pictorial effect is the real
artistic gist of the picture.

In Music, on the other hand, great com-
plexity of plan — unless it involve the simul-

i42 ABOUT ART IN GENERAL

The taneous presentation of two or more themes —

Complex and the most elaborate development and work-
ing-out do not necessitate the ear's grasping
any but comparatively simple relations at any
given moment of time. The same is true of
Poetry and the Drama : the most involved plot
in the world may be unfolded in the simplest
language, and with the most patent perspicu-
ousness of incident. What complexity there
is is, for the most part, cumulative, the intri-
cate working-up of essentially simple primary
material. To grasp all its manifold relations
requires no effort of immediate coup d* aeil, as
in the visual arts, but largely an effort of
memory ; which latter becomes less and less
taxing with repeated hearings of the com-
position or poem, and at last vanishes alto-
gether. The careful study of a piece of music,
a drama, or poem, distinctly tends to cure
what may have been confusedness of impression
at first ; but, as I have said, the careful study
of a picture, statue, or building has, upon the
whole, little power of doing this.

Take, for instance, Mr. Sargent's frescoes

ABOUT ART IN GENERAL 143

in the new Public Library. Protracted study The
of them can indubitably do much to help us Complex
understand his conception, discover just what
his figures are doing, and detect their relation
to the poetic or historic idea which he took as
his point of departure ; but it can not reduce
the exceedingly complicated, and to some of
us confused, pictorial impression to simplicity.
If confusedness of impression was there in
the beginning, it will — humanly speaking —
survive all study and remain there to the end.
Not all the study in the world can give addi-
tional emphasis to a single outline, nor change
a single value. But you can not say this with
truth of a Bach fugue, a Brahms symphony, a
poem by Browning, nor a drama of Sardou's.
In your relations to these, increasing familiarity
distinctly does bring with it increased clearness
of mental vision, an ever-lessening effort of
comprehension.

Remember that, in our relations to each and
every art, it is not intellectual activity that is
any bar to a successful appeal to our emotional
nature, but intellectual effort. It is the con-

144 ABOUT ART IN GENERAL

The scious effort to understand that slackens the

Complex pulse, not the mere fact of our understanding

no matter how complex a development. No
complexity need trouble us a whit, after we
have succeeded in unravelling it, in grasping
the underlying idea, in responding to the im-
plied or expressed emotion.

The T) Y the Ludicrous I do not mean merely

Ludicrous J_)the Comic, the Laughable in general, but

the unintentionally incongruous, the sort of

thing that makes you laugh at the author, or

artist, rather than with him.

The Ludicrous, in this sense, has often been
excused on the ground of its being part and
parcel of a necessary convention, a convention,
without which, this or that particular form of
Art must fall to the ground. The Drama,
especially the Opera, has been full of conven-
tions of this sort at certain periods of its
history. Now and then it enters into some-
body's head to see the ludicrousness of
such a convention ; he points it out to the
world at large, and the world laughs at it

ABOUT ART IN GENERAL MS

with him, as if it had never accepted it as a The
matter of course. Ludicrous

Such a convention was the usual text of
opening choruses in operas and vaudevilles,
which generally began with the copula in the
first person plural. For years and years no
one saw anything incongruous in this; but
nowadays — in France, at least — the old,
time-honoured " Nous sommes des bergeres
(We are shepherdesses) " has passed into a
byword for no longer admissible nonsense.1
Yet this frank description of itself by the
chorus is, in the end, no more essentially
ludicrous than any soliloquy on the stage —
especially a soliloquy overheard by another
party.

A shot of another sort, not sheltered by any
convention, but evidently made with artless
unconsciousness, is to be found in one of the

1 Apropos of this, it seems a singular stroke of irony
that Wagner's earliest sketch for the music of his
Nibelungetiy yet discovered, should be the theme of
the Ride of the Valkyrior, written out on a single staff,
over words beginning : " Wir sind Walkiiren (We are /
Valkyrior)."

VOL. II. — 10

i46 ABOUT ART IN GENERAL

The old Porte-Saint-Martin dramas, where one of

Ludicrous the characters begins a speech with " Nous

autres rou tiers du may en age (We roadsters of

the Middle Ages)." It reminds one of the

famous coin, dated "A. c. 500."

Unlucky phonetic resemblances have brought
more than one dramatist to grief; the top
gallery is particularly sharp at catching on to
things of this sort. In another of the old
Porte-Saint-Martin plays of the 1830 period
there is a scene in which the hapless author
has put the following words into the mouth of
his heroine, unjustly confined in a dungeon :
" Mon pere a manger m* apporte (My father
brings me food)," which sounds so like " Mon
pere a mange ma porte (My father has eaten
my door)," that some one in the gallery
straightway called out : " Eh bien ! alors,
pourquoi done que tu ne files pas ? (Well then !
why don't you run away?)." What food
for ridicule will not that terrible top gallery find
out ? Who of us can not remember the de-
risive titter inevitably excited by Lear's "Nor
do I know where I did lodge last night ? ' '

ABOUT ART IN GENERAL 147

A fertile source of the unwarrantably ludi- The
crous in Literature and Poetry is clumsy trans- Ludicrous
lation. To be sure, translations seem, as a
rule, less ludicrous to the people for whose
benefit they are made than to those in whose
native language the original is written. Still,
one may fairly doubt, when Germans hear
Othello call Desdemona " eine ausgezeicbnete
TonkunstlerinJ* whether it sounds quite the
same in their ears as "an admirable musician "
does in ours. Surely a Frenchman may be
pardoned for not understanding, when the
"dissolving view of red beads'* on Mr.
Podsnap's forehead is rendered by " per spec tif
de petits boutons rouges et solubles ; " yet he will
probably not see just where the ludicrousness
comes in. In like manner, a German may be
more amazed than moved to laughter, on find-
ing Mr. Alfred Jingle' s "Punch his head, —
'cod I would, — pig's whisper, — pieman
too, — no gammon," turned into " Der Punscb
ist ibm in den Kopf gestiegen, — Stockjiscb
mbcb? icbt — Scbweinsrussel, — aucb Pastete
daxu, — obne Spinat / " I have never been

148 ABOUT ART IN GENERAL

The able quite to make up my mind whether to

Ludicrous gjve the palm to this magnificent translation,
or to that other imaginative flight of genius in
the first American edition of the libretto to
Verdi's Trovatore, in which the stage-direction
after the Anvil Chorus, " Tutti scendono alia
rinfusa giu per la china : tratto tratto, e sempre
a maggior distanza, ode si il loro canto " is ren-
dered : " All go down in disorder, and ever
from a greater distance are heard singing to
the Chinese tratto-tratto." 1

Inadvertent ludicrous shots are sometimes
made in the Drama by the author's uncon-
sciously putting himself, or his dramatis per-
son <e, to a certain extent into the position of
the audience. Florestan's first words in the
second act of Fidelio are a fair example.
Poor Florestan has been over two years in
his dungeon, when the curtain rises upon the
second act of the opera ; yet his first words
are: " Gott, welch ein Dunkel bier! (God,

1 I quote this from memory, and may have changed
a word or two j but about the ** Chinese tratto-tratto"
I am sure.

ABOUT ART IN GENERAL 149

what darkness is here !)." One would think The

he might have found that out before ! Ludicrous

In the representative arts, Painting and
Sculpture, the ordinary observer finds perhaps
less of the ludicrous, however much of it the
expert may find. There is a set of drawings
of scenes from Schiller by Kaulbach's pupils,
known as the Schiller Gallery, in one of which
the ingenuous artist has tried to depict a bridal
party coming down the steps of a church.
The bride — a particularly tall young woman
— has her left foot on one step, and the toe
of her right foot on the step below ; this
naturally puts her in a position in which her
left knee is slightly bent, and her right leg,
straight ; yet, mirabile dictu, the artist has
made her right hip higher than her left !
There is an old Italian picture of the Nativity
in which there is a wonderful semi-transparent
donkey ; the bricks of the wall behind him
show through his body. Many a sculptor has
calculated the enormous limp of the Apollo
Belvedere, if he were only to take the next
step ; one of his legs measures a good deal
longer than the other.

'5°

ABOUT ART IN GENERAL

The Curiously enough, some of the wildest bits

Ludicrous of ludicrous fantasticism in pictorial art are to
be found in the illustrations of some old books
of science. The Rev. J. G. Wood gives the
following account of an old engraving of a
rhinoceros, said to have been made by Albert
Diirer from a drawing from life, sent from
Lisbon — where, it appears, a live rhinoceros
was in captivity at the time.

The engraving is nine inches and a quarter in
length by six inches and a quarter in height,
counting the length from nose to tail, and the
height from shoulder to ground.

The horn is covered with tubercles pointing
upward, and appears to consist of distinct plates.
On the centre of the left shoulder is a short horn,
twisted like that of the narwhal, and pointing
forward. The body is covered with a kind of
plate-armour, very like that which was worn at
the period, especially for the fast-dying sport of
tilting. A very large plate hangs over the back,
something like a saddle, and is ornamented by
eight protuberant ridges, which look as if a giant
with very slender fingers had spread his eight-
fingered hand as widely as possible, and left it on

ABOUT ART IN GENERAL 1

the creature's back. The shoulder-joint is de- The
fended by a plate that descends from the top of Ludicrous
the shoulder, swells out at the junction of the leg
with the body, and nearly reaches the knee.
This plate plays on a rivet, which joins it to the
large plate that guards the neck, and from which
projects the little horn.

The hinder parts are covered by a huge plate
of indescribable form, as it shoots out into angles,
develops into sharp ridges, and sinks into deep
furrows in every imaginable way. It bears a
distant resemblance to the beaver or front of a
helmet, which could be lifted or lowered at
pleasure.

The legs are clothed in scale-armour, with a
row of plates down the front of each, and a rivet
is inserted in the centre of each plate. The
abdomen and each side of the mouth is defended
in the same manner. The throat is guarded by
a series of five over-lapping plates, so as to allow
the animal to move its head with freedom,
while, at the same time, no part of the throat is
left without defence. The feet are tolerably
correct, and the artist has got the proper number
of toes, each of which is very rightly enclosed in
a small hoof. The whole outline is sufficiently
good, and is drawn with a vigour that only

i5 2 ABOUT ART IN GENERAL

The increases our surprise at the exceeding untruth-

Lttdicrous fulness of the details. l

Some persons have thought to find much of
the Ludicrous in Music ; but I must own that
I personally can find very little of it. The
Ludicrous is always based on the incongruous ;
and the relations between Music and the
world we live in are so vague and ill defined
that there seems little chance of any glaring
incongruity slipping in. Take the Opera ;
when you have once gotten over its funda-
mental incongruity, that people shall sing,
instead of speaking, it seems a little over-fas-
tidious to stick at what they may take it into
their heads to sing. No, I can find exceed-
ingly little of the ludicrousness that comes from
incongruity in Music. Musical jokes there
may be — mostly of the technical sort ; jokes
which appeal to the sense of humour of musi-
cians, much as Mr. Serjeant Buzfuz's joke on

1 Sketches and Anecdotes of Animal Life, by the Rev. J.
G. Wood, second series, page 124. Wood goes on to
surmise that ' ' the artist must have sketched the outline
from life, and filled up the details at home."

ABOUT ART IN GENERAL 153

Mr. Pickwick — calling him a criminally slow The
coach, whose wheels would very soon be Ludicrous
greased by the jury — appealed to the green-
grocer, "whose sensitiveness on the subject
was very probably occasioned by his having
subjected a chaise-cart to the process in ques-
tion on that identical morning."

Intentional wrong notes may at times sound
funny in music ; but surely unintentional
wrong ones seldom do. One can hardly
imagine a musical incongruity having the sub-
limely comic effect of the slip of the huge and
magnificent Irishman, as the French Herald in
King John. He was a most splendid person,
but seldom entrusted with speaking parts ;
once, however, he was cast for the French
Herald in King John, his part being cut
down to the following two lines :

You men of Anglers, open wide your gates,
And let young Arthur, duke of Bretagne, in.

No one could have looked more majestic
than he, nor filled the centre of the stage
better, as he strode up before the city gates,

154 ABOUT ART IN GENERAL

The truncheon in hand, and called out, in the

Ludicrous richest Celtic brogue :

Ye min of Anglers, op'n woide y'r geahts,
An* lut young Airth'r, juke of Bretagne,
fthrenvgh !

Music can do much ; but she can not rise to
the pitch of that " t'threwgh ! "

GLEANINGS FROM THE
COURT LIBRARY IN UTOPIA

GLEANINGS

FROM THE

COURT LIBRARY IN UTOPIA

SHOWme the man who will admire a great
work fully and heartily, without knowing
the author's name, and I will call him a critic
worth having. So speaks the ingenuous lover
of truth. But it seems to me that the critic
still better worth having is he who will heartily
and fully admire a great work in spite of
knowing the author's name. — JEAN GUILLEPIN,
Ce qu'on puise dans un puits.

When Music, heavenly maid, was young,
she was a very innocent little maid indeed ;
neither did her entertainment cost much. But
she has well gotten over her pristine innocence
now ; and, though mortals are still found who

153 GLEANINGS FROM THE

are willing to espouse her with but incon-
spicuous dowry, her keep costs a king's ran-
som. FUNGOLFACTOR ScRIBLERUS, De Musictf

natura.

If one could only tell beforehand which of
the mad-seeming talents of the day were
destined to turn out great geniuses in the end,
then would criticism be a bed of roses — to
the critic ! But how foretell ? How pick out
the particular ugly duckling that will grow up a
swan ? To do this, the critic must probably
have a touch of madness, of the clairvoyant
sort, himself. — JEAN ROGNOSSE, Le critique
impeccable.

What can one say, after all, about instru-
mental and vocal music, save this ? — that
instrumental music is bound by nothing but
the inherent laws of its own being ; whereas
vocal music ought, in decency, to take cogni-
zance of the " laws," or whatever else you
may call them, of something outside of itself.
If it can, at a pinch, make foolish people believe
that, by obeying these laws, it absolves itself

COURT LIBRARY IN UTOPIA 159

from all allegiance to its own, this is but a
striking instance of popular credulity. — FUNG-
OLFACTOR SCRIBLERUS, De Musics tiatura.

The next world will surely afford us no
more subjects for criticism than we find in this.
If it offered us more, we should not find
suicide — as a means of getting thither — so
unattractive as we do now. — PLEUTHRO
PAPYRUS, Anarcbiana.

Is it a compliment, or something diametri-
cally different, to the Art of Music to assert
that her highest function is none other than
that of the raw onion — to make human in-
dividuals cry ? — GOTTFRIED SCHNEITZBORSTER,
Versucb eine pbysiologische Aesthetik zu
begrunden.

In reading Wagner, one finds much about
" das Reinmenschlicbe; ' ' and it sometimes
occurs to me that what Wagner calls the
"purely human'* may, in the end, be very
like what Don Giovanni meant by his
" Sostegno gloria d'umanita /" — IMMANUEL
FLOHJAGER, Ueber Etbik und Kunstwesen.

160 GLEANINGS FROM THE

I always distrust a man who begins by
apologizing for the fine arts, and gives plausible
reasons why they should be allowed to exist.
I suspect him of having an axe to grind. He
has some mental reservation, and is blind to
the great truth — which is none the less truth
for seeming paradoxical — that it is, for the
most part, in cases where an adequate apology is
impossible that people feel themselves called
upon to apologize. — KYON CHRONOGENES, De
stultitia.

The natural expression of emotion, especially
of grief or pain, is commonly accompanied by
uncouth, inarticulate noises and a distortion of
the features. When Music tries to express
violent emotion, it is noticeable that her serene
beauty often suffers a distortion which makes
for ugliness. — FUNGOLFACTOR SCRIBLERUS, De
Music <e natura.

Take a man who feels Music strongly, and
a man who knows Music not too deeply, and
you have as fine a chance for a misunderstand-
ing as the Father of Wrangling could wish

COURT LIBRARY IN UTOPIA 161

to see. — KYON CHRONOGENES, De relus
vulgaribus.

When will men of science learn that there
is a ne ultra crepidam for them, as well as for
cobblers ? When will acousticians learn that,
for them to prescribe what is good and
serviceable for the Art of Music, and what,
bad and detrimental, is on a par with a physi-
ologist's telling Nature what to do, and what
to avoid, in producing a horse ? As Nature
makes a horse, so does the composer of genius
make music : according to laws which the
acoustician may possibly hope to understand,
but which all his science is impotent to alter
by a hair's breadth. — GIROLAMO FINOCCHI,
La contadina scientijica.

— "I'll tell you what I mean," said
Guloston, laying aside his cigarette, to cut the
tip off a big cigar, "just have the patience to
listen, and I '11 tell you what I mean by a
symphonic dinner. It's no nonsense at all;
the real old-fashioned French dinner, the grand
diner of the old school, was — Oh ! that I

VOL. II. — II

162 GLEANINGS FROM THE

should have to say wa s ! — in the sonata
form."

— "How do you make that out?" asked
Harmon, sipping his chartreuse. "I 've heard
of symphonies in white, or blue, or pink ; but
hang me if ever I heard of a sonata in food ! "

— " Stop monkeying with your chartreuse
before you^'ve finished your coffee, like a brute
beast that has no soul, and I'll tell you,"
Guloston responded ; "a man who sandwiches
chartreuse like that, — it 's fifteen years old ;
see, the name is blown in the bottle, not
etched on it, and the stuff deserves to be drunk
with reverence, — I say, the man who sand-
wiches chartreuse like that between two sips
of black coffee doesn't deserve to know any-
thing about the higher artistic side of dining.
But never mind ; I will prove to you that
the regularly planned French dinner is in
the sonata form — there can be no doubt
about it."

— "Fire away," said the other, "I'm
quite willing to be educated in the higher
gastronomy."

COURT LIBRARY IN UTOPIA 163

— "Well, then! here it is,*' Guloston
went on, lighting his cigar at one of the can-
dles on the table, " here it is. In the first
place, you must know that the French dinner
of the old school, the good old school, was
divided into two parts, two services, as the
technical name is. The first began with the
Releves . . ."

— "I always thought the first began with
the soup," put in Harmon, " or oysters."

— " Not a bit of it ! There 's where you
make a fatal, an unpardonable mistake ! ' ' cried
Guloston, " an error that would knock my
theory on beam ends ! The first service
begins with the Releves, the grosses pieces
cbaudes ; then come the Entrees. The second
service begins with the Rots, plain meat or
game, with salad ; these are followed by the En-
tremets, the vegetables and sweets. Now, both
these two services must be in equilibrium, they
must counterbalance each other exactly ; there
must be as many rots in the second as there
have been relev'es in the first, as many entre-
mets as entrees. You understand that ? ' '

164 GLEANINGS FROM THE

— " Yes, I see that," replied Harmon,
"but I must say I 'm a bit curious about the
soup.'*

— "Ah! my dear fellow," went on
Guloston enthusiastically, " the soup and bars
d'ceuvres belong properly to neither service ;
the soup is nothing more nor less than a free
introduction to the whole dinner. As you
musical sharps say, the free introduction — in
slow tempo — is not a real factor of the form at
all ; it is only a preparation for what is to fol-
low. As for the bors d'ceuvres, their very
name shows that they are outside the circle
of the form : they are nothing but free light
1 skirmishing, and have no thematic importance.
They follow the soup, — or, if you take them
in the sense of the Italian antepasti, as we do
our oysters in this country, they come before
the soup, — and have no influence upon the
form whatever. They should be eaten frei-
phantasierend, just tasted, a bit here and a
bit there ; not dwelling upon any parti-
cular flavour, but skipping daintily from one
to another, like eating harlequin-ice. Hors

COURT LIBRARY IN UTOPIA 165

d'aeuvres, in the French sense, — that is, co-
ming after the soup, — might be compared to
a free, premonitory transition-passage leading
over from the introduction to the main body
of the movement. You understand so far,
Harmon ? "

— " Yes, I understand so far : the soup,
with the hors d* ceuvres or a?ztepastt,is the free
introduction. Now for the sonata form
proper !"

— " Now for the sonata form proper ;
exactly ! " said Guloston, blowing a ring from
his cigar. " The relev'es — of which there
ought to be two, one of fish and one of meat
— are the first and second themes. The en-
trees — of which there should be at least four,
if there have been two relev'es — represent the
free fantasia, the working-out in detail of those
two leading ideas offish and meat."

— " Wonderful ! " exclaimed Harmon,
tossing the stump of his cigarette into the fire,
and taking a sip of chartreuse unreproved,
before rolling another. " Wonderful ! But
how about your working-out of the two

1 66 GLEANINGS FROM THE

principal themes ? I see the meat part of it
clearly enough ; but how about the fish part ?
' The fish once done with, it doesn't return
again."

— "There's where you are totally and
barbarically wrong," Guloston replied; "the
idea that fish belongs exclusively to the
beginning of the first service is that of the
British barbarian and of his only slightly more
civilized American descendant. There may
be, and really should be, an entree of fish, as
well as of meat ; remember such things as
Thackeray lobster, or picked crabs; take lit-
tle bouchees of oysters or clams, or ecrevisses
bordelaise. Any small dish with a sauce and
garnish is an entree, and consequently belongs
in the second part of the first service — in the
working-out. You mustn't forget that the
releves are essentially grosses pieces, big dishes ;
they, too, have a sauce and garnish, but the
little things of a similar kind are entrees.
Well, with the entrees the first service, the
first part and free fantasia, comes to an end."
— " Then comes the Roman-punch —

COURT LIBRARY IN UTOPIA

with perhaps a cigarette, I suppose," suggested
Harmon. " Where do you make room for
that in your sonata form ? ' '

— " Aha ! y es-tu! " cried Guloston, de-
lighted. " A pupil who asks intelligent
questions is a pupil worth having ! Of
course, we have Roman-punch, and equally of
course, we have a cigarette with it. And, as
you seem to suspect, it is no regular nor ne-
cessary part of the form ; only a delightful
adjunct. The Roman-punch and cigarette
form a free poetic episode, not connected with
any of the leading themes ; you find such epi-
sodes now and then in symphonic first move-
ments, though perhaps not so often as in
dinners. But we can easily find an example.
Let me see ; yes, take the passage for the
muted violins with the tremolo on the violas in
the overture to Euryantbe : that is the Roman-
punch with a cigarette. The parallel could
not be more accurate ! "

— " Good for you, my boy ! " cried Har-
mon ; " you keep your head and heels like a
true master ! Who would have thought of

1 68 GLEANINGS FROM THE

such a parallel ! Well, let 's get on to our
second service, to the third part of the move-
ment — since the first service includes the first
part and the working-out."

— " Ah ! here you must follow me care-
fully," answered Guloston, "and for that
you had better fill up your glass of chartreuse
once more and pass me the bottle. Here the
parallel becomes less exact, I admit ; but it
holds good, all the same, if you don't insist
upon every /' being dotted and every / crossed,
like a mere Philistine pedant. Let us first
consider the rots, of which, as you will re-
member, there must be as many as there were
releves in the first service. These rots repre-
sent the return of the principal themes in the
third part of the movement. I admit that
there is no fish in them ; also that there is still
another difference between them and their
corresponding releves : the releves were dishes
with sauce and a garnish — of mushrooms,
truffles, or some other vegetables — and this
same idea of sauce and garniture, of a more
or less vegetable nature, was further carried

COURT LIBRARY IN UTOPIA 169

out in the entrees ; whereas the rots are plain
roast meat or game, without sauce or garnish
— unless you call the salad a garnish, and, if
the salad is not of the vegetable kingdom, what
on earth is it ? But let that pass for a
moment ; we should never ride a simile, or
parallel, between two different arts to death.
If we do, we come to grief, and all the poetry
of the thing is lost !

" Let us accept the two rots as the second
service representatives of the two releves in the
first ; like the releves, they are pieces de resis-
tance, solid meat, no matter how delicate ; they
mean a return to business, just as the return of
the first theme does at the beginning of the
third part of a symphonic movement. They
are followed by the entremets — vegetables and
sweets — which are equal in number to the
entrees of the first service, and so serve as a
sort of ideal counterpoise to them. Now,
what are these entremets ? Evidently they
are the coda, the second free fantasia, as
Beethoven developed it in the Eroica, to
counterbalance the first one. And note just

170 GLEANINGS FROM THE

here how the difference in material between
the two services — there being a want of per-
fectly exact correspondence between the releves
and the rots, between the entrees and the
entremets, — instead of destroying my parallel,
makes it ideally stronger and more exact.
What is, after all, the main and characteristic
difference between the first and third parts
of a symphonic movement ? Principally a
difference in tonality, in key. The first part
quits the tonic after the first theme ; the third
part sticks to the tonic. Now, there is no-
thing to correspond to the idea of tonality in
gastronomy ; so our dinner has to mark the
difference between its first and second services
in some other way. And it does this by
means that are purely its own, purely gas-
tronomic. The coherent idea that runs through
the first service is the presentation and work-
ing-out of two forms of esculent material —
animal and vegetable food — together ; for the
sauces and garnishes are made up largely of
vegetable ingredients. The idea of the second
service, on the other hand, is the presentation

COURT LIBRARY IN UTOPIA 171

and working-out of the same, or similar, mate-
rial — animal and vegetable food — apart and
separately ; the rots being all animal, and the
entremets, all vegetable. In Music, sym-
phonic development proceeds from the simpler
to the more complex ; in Gastronomy, it pro-
ceeds from the complex to the simple — just
the reverse, you see. This is the main differ-
ence, depending wholly upon the different
media of the two arts. In each of the two,
this progression has its own reason of being,
based upon the nature of man's receptive power
— through the ear in one case, through the
gullet in the other. The ear is fatigued in a
very different way from the palate ; the ..."
— " Stop ! for heaven's sake, stop ! " cried
Harmon. " Let's stick to art, and stop short
of metaphysico-physiology ! I understand you
perfectly ; you are right as right can be.
Your dinner in sonata form has entered into
my comprehension, and I knock under with
the best grace in the world. You 've proved
your point to the satisfaction of any one whose
soul is large enough to take in the delights of

1 72 GEEANINGS FROM THE

the table and the glories of Music ! And
damned be the musician who has no love
for eating and drinking ! But wait a bit ;
what do you do with the dessert in your
symphonic scheme ? It strikes me, now that
I think of it, that the dessert would be the real
coda of a dinner."

— " Hm ! " said Guloston, looking
thoughtfully at the stump of his cigar, " des-
sert — fruit, ices, cheese, nuts, and all that
sort of thing — is something over and above,
something par dessus le marcb'e ; very desirable
and even necessary, if you will, but still, like
the soup and bors d'ceuvres, lying outside the
circle of the form. It has its symphonic
equivalent, too, although, to find it, we may
have to leave first movements of symphonies,
and turn to the overture — which is, after all,
in the same general form. You must know
overtures enough that end with a perfectly free
apotb'eose, as the French say ; with a free end-
ing that has no thematic connection with what
has gone before, and merely serves to round
off the whole with a brilliant or soothing fare-

COURT LIBRARY IN UTOPIA 173

well. Take the overture to Egmont ; that
ends in this way. I know that this sort of
thing is technically called a free coda ; but
you must admit that it has nothing in common
with the sort of coda Beethoven developed,
that second free fantasia to which I have com-
pared the entremets. If symphonic first move-
ments seldom end with a "dessert," it is
simply because they are first movements, and
something more is still to come ; that is why
we find the "dessert-coda" more frequently
in overtures — they are musically complete in
themselves. Oh ! the dessert presents no
real difficulty ; it lies outside the circle of the
form.

"And now, if you don't want any more
chartreuse, I'll beat you a game or two at
three-ball caroms. " — EDGAR MONTACUTE, A
Modern Proteus.

Some people who bore you by laying down
the law ex cathedra about Music have the
additional impudence to preface their remarks
with "Of course, I don't understand Music

174 GLEANINGS FROM THE

scientifically!" In nine cases out of ten,
they speak truer than they think for : they
not only do not understand Music scientifi-
cally, they do not understand it at all. — FUNG-

OLFACTOR SCRIBLERUS, De Stultltia.

" Music hath charms to soothe the savage
breast," saith Congreve. Most true ! But
why ? Because the savage is verily a savage ;
that is, a being whose predominant traits are
indolence and thirst for blood ; he is torn by
two conflicting impulses, the one of which
makes for laziness and inaction, the other, for
universal devastation. Music solves his great
life-problem. Music will do all the devasta-
ting business for him, the while he merely
looks on in sybaritic dole e far niente. If any
one doubt this, let him consider the ruin
wrought in populous parts of great cities by
mere civilized practice on the flute, and try to
imagine to what excruciating perfection this
nefarious art must be brought by savages ! —
HANS SCHWARTEMAG, Die scbonen Kunste etb-
nologiscb betracbtet.

COURT LIBRARY IN UTOPIA 175

The world is, thank heaven ! not quite full
of those "absolute" knaves, with whom we
must " speak by the card, or equivocation will
undo us." But gentry of their sort are to be
found in many highways and byways of life,
and make it their business that every / shall
have its dot, and every /, its cross. The little
school-mistress who insisted that the girl was
" called " Nancy, but '« named " Ann, was a
worthy soul ; but her worth was not enhanced
by rarity ; she was no unique specimen. She
was cousin-german to those uncomfortable peo-
ple to whom accuracy is sweet, and sugges-
tiveness, a siren of dubious respectability ; the
people who have missed their vocation if they
pass through life without being called to the
witness-stand.

Eminently respectable persons are not want-
ing who take it in high dudgeon that musicians
should speak of "colour" in relation to their
art ; they profess themselves quite at a loss to
understand what is meant by colour in Music.
You may tell them that colour in Music is,
by analogy, just what it is in Painting. They

176 GLEANINGS FROM THE

scout the idea ! The analogy is purely imagi-
nary, and, what is even worse, inaccurate ; it
does not hold water ! You may insist that
the term has been in use musically for centu-
ries, that every musician understands its mean-
ing ; that Klangfarbe is excellent German,
that the downright English have even taken
the trouble to translate it literally by the some-
what Carlylesque " clang- tint," but that for
ordinary mortals "colour" is a sufficiently
serviceable equivalent; in fine, that "colour"
means "quality of sound."

— "But, my very dear sir," they answer,
" you are all off ! There is no analogy at all
between the two things. Admitting the ana-
logy between light — that is, colour — being
the result of undulations of the luminiferous
ether, and sound, of vibrations of the air, there
is still no analogy between visual colour and
auditory sound-quality. Colour depends upon
the rapidity of the luminous undulations ; but
the rapidity of vibration in sound has to do
with pitcby with high and low, not with qua-
lity of tone. Why, just read your Helmholz,

COURT LIBRARY IN UTOPIA 177

and you will see that quality of tone depends
wholly upon ..."

You cut this short by saying that you know
all that perfectly well, that the whole musical
world knows it; and, having perhaps a pri-
vate grudge against Helmholz, — for reasons
unnecessary to mention here, — you may be
impudent enough to ask : " What of it ? "

— "What of it? Why, this of it! that
your analogy between colour and sound-quality
is on beam ends ! "

Then you take pity on the objectors, whose
mental vision has been so dazzled by the dry
light of Science that they can not see what is
right before their noses. You explain that, in
the Art of Painting, there are two elements :
form and colour; in the Art of Music there
are three : pitch, rhythm, and quality of
sound ...

— "Stop a bit !" they interrupt you,
"you've forgotten one: dynamic force of
sound.*'

— "Well! admit that, too," you go on,
" admit dynamic force as a fourth element ;

VOL. II. — 12

178 GLEANINGS FROM THE

and, while we are about it, we may as well
admit also rate of speed as a fifth. Now let
us pair off such of these various elements as
may fairly be considered analogous in the two
arts, and eliminate such as have evidently no
correlative. We may pair off form in Paint-
ing with what the world has agreed, for ages,
to call form in Music ; its constituent ele-
ments are pitch and rhythm. So form in
Painting cancels pitch and rhythm in Music ;
you agree to that ? ' '

— " Yes, yes ; we agree to that."

— "So far, good. Dynamic force of
sound in Music might correspond to vividness
of chiaro-'scuro in Painting. Shall we pair
them off, and let them cancel each other ? "

— « Well, yes; pair them off, too."

— " Now, is there anything in Painting
to correspond to rate of speed in Music ? to
effects of ritardando or accelerando ? "

— " No, we don't see that there is."

— " Then eliminate rate of speed, as it has
no analogy in Painting. What have we left ?
Simply this : colour on the Painting side, and

COURT LIBRARY IN UTOPIA 179

sound-quality on the Music side ; I say, the
two correspond. You see, it would not be
fair to eliminate any factor on one side of the
equation, so long as there remains a factor on
the other side that may possibly correspond to
it. And, when only one factor is left on
either side, we must pair off the two. Colour
in Painting accordingly corresponds to quality
of sound in Music ; q. e. d"

— "Ah! yes, if you put it that way.
But the correspondence is purely fanciful ; it
is based on no scientific fact."

— " Just so ; it is fanciful. It has nothing
whatever to do with any analogy between
ethereal undulations and atmospheric vibrations ;
it is arrived at, as you have seen, by pairing
off other, more patent, analogies between the
two arts, and by the artistic sense perceiving
that the element of sound-quality bears pre-
cisely the same relation to that of form, in
Music, that the element of colour does to form
in Painting. This analogy has satisfied musi-
cians completely, and not a painter that I ever
heard of has kicked against it ; so you and

i8o GLEANINGS FROM THE

your undulations and vibrations may go to
thunder ! "

Another point to which superaccurate
Philistines have taken exception is the use of
the terms "high" and "low" to denote
musical tones of rapid and slow vibration,
respectively. Philistines do I say ? Some
notable musicians, Berlioz among them, have
expostulated with the rest of the world for
using " high " and " low " in reference to
musical pitch. It has been argued that there
is no earthly reason for calling a tone produced
by striking one of the keys at the left-hand
end of the key-board " low " and speaking of
the tone produced by striking at the right-hand
end as " high." Ah ! dear gentlemen : put
your hand upon — not your heart, but —
your throat ; begin by singing what we, in
our perverseness, call a "high" note; then
sing step by step what we, with equal way-
wardness, persist in calling " down " the
scale. Be sure to keep hold of your throat
the while, and see if your Adam's-apple does
not actually and sensibly/^//. Now place your

COURT LIBRARY IN UTOPIA 181

hand upon your heart, ' — that you may not be
forsworn, — sing " down " another scale from
" top" to "bottom." Swear to me upon
your sacred honour that you do not seem to
yourselves to be singing farther and farther
down into your thorax and abdominal cavity.
Doesn't it feel so? Of course it does.

Good heavens ! men ; you might just as
well object to your own four-year-old's putting
himself astride of your walking-stick, and call-
ing it his horse. True, the youngster makes
two palpable misstatements : in the first place,
it is not a horse, and in the next place, it is
not his. I advise you to go and spank him
for it, just to give him a wholesome taste for
scientific accuracy. You say our analogies
limp ? What of that ? What looks to you
like limping may strike us as graceful sinuosity
of motion ! Go to ! — JOHN SQUEERS, A
Dissertation on the Imagination.

The speculative individual who inwardly
shouts for joy at discovering a new interpreta-
tion of a great work may in reality have been but

1 82 GLEANINGS FROM THE

gleaning from the exegetic waste-baskets of past
generations. But this is not necessarily so ;
there are so many ways of doing a thing wrong,
that he may really have hit upon a new one. —

FUNGOLFACTOR ScRIBLERUS, De Stultitta.
\

How little that is definite can be said about
a work of art without laying a certain stress
upon technicalities ! Yet how signally what
we may have to say on merely technical
points fails to reach the heart of the matter !
We dislike this or that work of art, and think
to account for our disliking by putting our
finger upon what we call its weak points.
But, in so doing, have we really accounted for
and given the true reason of our disliking ?
Meseems all we have accomplished is to show
why we are content to dislike it. — FUNGOL-
FACTOR SCRIBLERUS, De sentienda arte.

Show me the man to whom Virtue is as
cakes and ale, and whose mouth burns with
sweet Charity as with ginger ; and I will
rather ask him to dinner than dine with him.
— PLEUTHRO PAPYRUS, Anarchiana.

COURT LIBRARY IN UTOPIA 183

An interesting and withal instructive process,
in the observant study of national character, is
to note the words which a people has agreed
to use in a good, a bad, or merely an indiffer-
ent sense. To the Anglo-Saxon, for instance,
the word theatrical well-nigh inevitably im-
plies something insincere and unworthy ; to
the Frenchman, on the other hand, the word
tbeatral is freighted with no such implication.
All nations, however, seem to agree in detect-
ing an implied reproach in the word pedantic ; •
the hapless pedant catches it all round ! For
which let no sane mortal shed tears of pity.
For, if the tailor is but the ninth part of a man,
the pedant can hardly be much more ; he
being to Literature and Art what the tailor is
to society. The tailor would have all men,
and the pedant, all ideas, concealed in impec-
cably fashionable clothes ; and, to both, the
clothes are the matter of supreme importance.
— DIOGENE CAVAFIASCHETTO, Paralipomena.

If there be one man who will never discover
the Holy of Holies in the Temple of Art, that

i«4 GLEANINGS FROM THE

man is Mr. Impeccable. This is perhaps
providential ; for, could he but succeed in
finding his way thither, he would think to have
fallen into marvellous sinful company. — DIO-
GENES HODOBATES, Cynicisms.

Brissot says, " Music, which teachers for-
merly proscribed as a 'diabolical art,' begins
to make part of the general education."
Even so ! But the results of its making part
of this general education have not invariably
given the lie to the older teachers' estimate
of it. — HANS SCHWARTEMAG, Die scbonen
Kiinste etbiscb betracbtet.

The great men who have written what was
in them to write, and written it because they
had it to say, have at times had their meed of
unsought glory ; but the men who have written
for glory have oftenest gone thither. — MONT-
GOMERY BULLYCARP, Tbe Transcendental
Traveller's Guide.

I am a man of my own time ; I was born
into it, I live in it — and in it alone. My
time may be a hideous time, for aught I know

COURT LIBRARY IN UTOPIA 185

— or care ; but it is mine. The men of my
time speak the language I best understand ;
they speak it fluently, and I catch their slight-
est innuendoes without effort. Do I regret
other times and ages ? How can I ? If I
did, I should regret being myself! — JEAN
GUILLEPIN, Ce qu'on puise dans un puits.

What is the mystic telegraphic wire which
connects the performer with the listener ?
Over it pass all the more poignant musical
impressions, as by a sort of mysterious, tran-
scendental electricity. But why is it that this
transcendental telegraph between the music's
inmost soul and yours is so capricious ? Why
is it sometimes the best of conductors, and, at
others, none at all ? Or is there, in truth, no
such wire ? Can it be that what you mistake
for it is but a subjective condition of your own
stomach ? — GOTTFRIED SCHNEITZBORSTER,
Versuck eine pbysiologiscbe Aestbetik zu

A poetic musician, a musical poet : two
mighty good things, in their way ! That is,

186 GLEANINGS FROM THE

if the musician be a musician, and the poet, a
poet. — KYON CHRONOGENES, De rebus vul-
garibus.

You have worked hard, have you ?
Lodged in back garrets, filled your belly with
crusts, made merry on cold water and imagina-
tion scrimped, cut down expenses, developed
an astounding technique, written compositions
galore that shall outlive the ages? And all
for the love of Art ? Ah ! my hyperbolical
young friend, what do you take me for ? I
have heard all that before. — DIOGENES
HODOBATES, Cynicisms.

Thou hast finished thy work, and art sure
it is great music ? Then keep it to thyself,
and remain sure. For, if thou givest it to the
world, there is not one man in ten thousand
but will see no greatness in it ; — unless per-
chance thou give it a silly name, and let it end
diminishing, and ever diminishing, till the
muted strings are scarcely audible. — JOHN
SMITH, On the Practical Uses of Cunning.

COURT LIBRARY IN UTOPIA 187

They who were once content to be musi-
cians now aspire to be tone-poets. If I mis-
take not, Beethoven himself had something of
this hankering. Well, if the name is all they
are after, I have no objection. Only let them
look to it that they take not off the rose from
the fair forehead of an innocent art, nor sweet
melody make a rhapsody of words. — FUNGOL-

FACTOR SCRIBLERUS, De Stultltia.

Extol or dispraise a work of art, simply be-
cause thou hast been eavesdropping upon thy
betters and overheard them praise or condemn
it — that is hypocritical cant. Extol or dis-
praise a work of art, because thy unaided
reason has told thee it is good or bad — that
is sincere cant ; somewhat the feller sort, if
thou didst but know it, for it is cant wedded
to sincerity, and, like other spouses, going at
large under the husband's name. — IMMANUEL
FLOHJAGER, Ueber Etbik und Kunstwesen.

When the savage tries to imitate the man
of civilization, his imitation is of the ludicrous
sort mainly. He puts the various garments in

1 88 GLEANINGS FROM THE

which civilized man seeks concealment to ad-
venturous uses, not contemplated by tailor nor
milliner. We foolishly laugh at him ; whereas
it might be well for us to consider rather
whether civilized man be not equally apt a
subject for derisive cachinnation when he tries
to imitate the savage. Have some of our
composers, with their fond use of folk-melodies,
ever thought of this ? — HANS SCHWARTEMAG,
Die sckonen Kunste etbnologiscb betracbtet.

Ah ! my debonnaire brother. So I am
the fashion now, am I ? The ladies dote on
my howlings. Well, let me make hay while
the sun shines, for my hour may not be over-
long. Thy turn may come again at any time ;
till then, take thy rest. For thou hast ever
been kind to me ; and, when thy turn has
come, I will leave the field to thee with as
good a grace as my uncouthness permits, and
go howl in my cave as of yore. — DIOGENE
CAVAFIASCHETTO, // nuovo Valentino e Orsone.

Dear Sensibility, O la ! I heard a little lamb
cry, baa ! And forthwith went and pro-

COURT LIBRARY IN UTOPIA 189

claimed to the world that the little lamb had
made all poets and composers ridiculous.
Most of the world believed me, and pinched
the little lamb to cry, baa, again ; but there
were some who called me a fool ! — DIOGENES
HODOBATES, Cynicisms.

The poet and the composer have, in one
way, an easier time of it than the painter and
sculptor. The former can work over their
ideas as long as they list, without thereby im-
pairing the integrity of their original sketch.
But the painter or sculptor, working over his
sketch, may in a moment of too ambitious
conscientiousness obliterate a stroke of genius
forever. — FUNGOLFACTOR SCRIBLERUS, De
Artis natura.

"Without passion," said Theodore Par-
ker," this world would be a howling wilder-
ness." Without passion, genius loses half its
geniality. But passion is not genius, for all
that, any more than it is the world. They
who try to make sheer passion pass current
for genius are but sorry false-coiners at best.

1 9o GLEANINGS FROM THE

— JEAN GUILLEPIN, Ce qu* on puise dans un
putts.

<( Jenseits von Gut und Bose" says Nietz-
sche, " on the other side of Good and Evil."
And moralists frown, or laugh sardonically,
according to their temper. But has not the
world already gone far toward practically ac-
cepting Nietzsche's idea ? Does not society
often accept genius as an all-sufficient passport,
even without the visa of good morals ?

" Umwertbung der Wertbe," cries Nietz-
sche again, •' transvaluation of values. " But
why cry so loud for what will, and must,
come of itself? Meseems the works of any
great composer you please, and their fate in
this world, furnish a tolerable illustration of
the inevitableness of such a transvaluation. —
HANS SCHWARTEMAG, Die scbonen Kunste
etbiscb betracbtet.

It is with Music as it is with jokes. When
either needs an accompanying diagram, I be-
come suspicious. — DIOGENES SPATZ, Ueber
Kunst und Dummbeit.

COURT LIBRARY IN UTOPIA 19 1

Heaven save us from conventionality ! Well,
nothing else can ; that is sure enough. But,
were heaven to undertake the job on a whole-
sale scale, then were Babel returned — for a
season. — DIOGENE CAVAFIASCHETTO, // nuovo
Valentino e Orsone.

Hast thou an ambition to run an opera com-
pany " as it should be run " — and has never
been run before ? Well, thy ambition is
noble. Only remember that the literal Eng-
lishing of the Italian word " impresario * ' is
" undertaker.'* — MONTGOMERY BULLYCARP,
The Transcendental Traveller's Guide.

According to Richard Wagner, the Music-
Drama is the offspring of Poetry (the strong
man) and Music (the loving woman). Is
one reason why those of our later composers
who have espoused the Music-Drama evince
an anxiety to make their Works more dramatic
than musical, that they look upon Music as
their mother-in-law ? — DIOGENES SPATZ,
Ueber Kunst und Dummbeit.

192 GLEANINGS FROM THE

The world accepts and keeps an artist's
work on its own terms ; not on the artist's. —
IMMANUEL FLOHJAGER, Ueber Etbik und
Kunstivesen.

What is the secret of a singer's or player's
hold upon an audience ? Technique and vir-
tuosity, some will say ; others, temperament
and passion. But I say it is the surplus ner-
vous force he has, over and above that needful
for the physical performance of his task. —
GOTTFRIED SCHNEITZBORSTER, Versucb eine
pbysiologische Aesthetik zu begriinden.

Draw thy inspiration from whence thou
canst; be happy if it come to thee at all.
Yet remember that, the nearer the source, the
fresher it will be and the less costly. Thou
must ever pay a certain mileage on thy inspira-
tion ; look not far abroad for it, nor into dis-
tant ages, till thou hast made sure thou canst
not find it next door. — DIOGENE CAVAFIAS-
CHETTO, La Jilosojia delle cose rare.

The musical critic of genius, like Schumann
or Berlioz, is undoubtedly a desideratum in

COURT LIBRARY IN UTOPIA 193

every art-loving community ; but how rare a
bird he is ! Yet, in his absence, the straight-
forward, honest man of passable lights may do
much. Let him never forget what a combina-
tion of qualities it takes to justify a man's
passing judgment autocratically upon a new
work ; let him first test himself, before he
ventures to declare this good, and that, bad.
Upon the whole, in so far as criticism accom-
plishes anything, incalculably more harm can
be done by misplaced blame than by unwise
praise. A new work, damned at the outset
by the e< dastardly spurt of the pen," has but
a cloudy immediate future before it ; whereas
the composition that begins by shining with
the spurious lustre of unmerited praise acquires
thereby a prominence which exposes it to the
scrutiny of all.

Has it ever occurred to some critics that
they may err in asking too much ? It seems at
times as if no composer to-day could give any-
thing to the world, without being floored on
the very threshold of public recognition by
having Bach, Beethoven, or Wagner merci-
VOL. u. — 13

194 GLEANINGS FROM THE

lessly flung at his head. What need is there
of being always Titanic ? The Parthenon
casts no shadow upon Trinity Court. Our
delight in Paolo Veronese's Marriage at Cana
is not a whit lessened by memories of the
Sixtine Chapel ceiling. Michael Angelo's
Adam, carelessly lying on his hill-side, with
his gigantic strength of limb and that ineffable
depth of adoration in his face just crystallizing
into a gaze, looks as if he could sweep Paolo
Veronese and his works out of existence with
a single wave of his outstretched arm ; yet
the Veronese still enjoys a comfortable im-
mortality. But one would think that the St.
Matthew-Passion, Don Giovanni, the ninth
symphony, the B-flat trio, and Tristan und
Isolde stood like an appalling " Lasciate ogni
speranza " over the portal through which all
new music must pass, to reach the public
heart. Intolerable ! Why should the godlike
C minor symphony, that Olympian " Lamento
e trionfo" begrudge Liszt's Tasso its chival-
ric brilliance ? Is Tchaikovsky's first con-
certo the less vigourous, because Beethoven's

COURT LIBRARY IN UTOPIA 195

wondrous E-flat stands unapproached ? Let
this sort of criticism stop, that the world may
see more clearly what there is to see !

The critical Dryasdust, with the brain of a
Corliss engine and the soul of a gnat, who has
searched the learning of the schools to his own
confusion, and would measure divine Music
by his contrapuntal foot-rule, is an irritating
mortal, but does comparatively little harm.
Being merely a thinking-machine, he can
speak no vital word ; he can put two and two
together, and make a deafening cackle about
hatching out four, but can add little to the
stock of the world's experience. But the
untutored Enthusiast, whose swelling soul
spurns all earthly shackles, who soars bliss-
fully through the realms of High Art, hero-
worship, and the Sublime and Beautiful in
general, launching thunderbolts with one hand
and showering benedictions in the vaguest
manner with the other, — be will ever re-
main an astonishment to the thinking observer.
When the human mind, from amongst its va-
rious potential activities, chooses that of doing

I96 GLEANINGS

what it knows next to nothing about, — be it
the building of monuments, or the writing of
reviews, — there is no telling what sublime
heights of bewilderment it may not reach.
The untutored Enthusiast is often more narrow
than the musical scholastic himself; for, in
his giddy careering through space, he is too
unconscious of any landmark, save his own
preconceived notions, to see within what a
small circle the centripetal force of his igno-
rance confines his course. To read the writings
of some of these men, one would think that,
like Paracelsus's bomunculi, (t through Art they
receive their life, through Art they receive body,
flesh, bones, and blood, through Art are they
born ; therefore is Art in them incarnate and
innate, and they need learn it of no man, but
men must learn it of them ; for from Art they
have their existence, and have grown up like
a rose or flower in the garden." — FUNGOL-
FACTOR SCRIBLERUS, De stultitia.

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