III

In September, 1857, the newly married Von Bülows paid the Wagners a visit, and as the guest-chamber of the cottage was occupied they took up temporary quarters at an inn, "The Raven" (Wotan's ravens!) Cosima, young, impressionable, turned her face to the wall and wept when Wagner played and sang for his friends the first and second acts of Siegfried. Even then she felt the "pull" of his magnetism, of his genius, and doubtless regretted having married the fussy, irritable Von Bülow—who had gone down in the social scale in wedding a girl of dubious descent. (In Paris Liszt for many years was only a strolling gipsy piano-player to whom the Countess d'Agoult had "condescended.")Mathilde Wesendonk entertained the Von Bülows, who went away pleased with their reception, above all deeply impressed by the exiled Wagner. They so reported to Liszt, and Von Bülow did more; as the scion of an old aristocratic family, he made many attemptsto secure an amnesty for Wagner, as well as making propaganda for his music. Which favours Wagner, who was the very genius of ingratitude, repaid later.In one point Herr Ludwig is absolutely correct: the composer was supported by his friends from 1849 to the year when King Ludwig intervened. The starvation talk was a part of the Wagner legend, even the Paris days were greatly exaggerated as to their black poverty. Wagner was always a spendthrift.From November, 1857, to May, 1858, Wagner set to music the five poems of Mathilde, veritable sketches for Tristan. Early in September, 1857, the relations between Minna and Mathilde had become strained. Wagner accused his wife of abusing Mathilde in a vulgar manner; worse remained; he had sent a letter by the gardener to Frau Wesendonk and the jealous wife intercepted it, broke the seal, read the contents. To Wagner, this was the blackest of crimes; yet can you blame her? To be sure, she had no conception of her husband's genius. For her Rienzi was his only work. Had it not succeeded? So had Tannhäuser and Lohengrin, also The Flying Dutchman, but Rienzi was her darling. How often she begged him to write another opera of the same Wagnerian calibre he has not failed to tell us. Otto Wesendonk's wife she firmly believed was leading him into a quagmire. What theatre could ever produce The Ring?One thing, however, Minna did not do, as most writers on the subject say she did: she did not show the fatal letter to Wesendonk at the time, but only to Wagner. Later she made its meanings clear to the injured husband, which no doubt provoked the explosive phrase quoted above.The youthful Karl Tausig, bearing credentials from Liszt, appeared on the scene in May, 1858, and the entire household was soon in an uproar. Luckily, Wagner had persuaded Minna to take a cold-water cure at a sanatorium some distance from Zurich, so he could handle the wild-eyed Tausig, whose volcanic piano performances at the age of sixteen made the mature composer both wonder and admire. Tausig smoked black cigars, a trait he imitated from Liszt, and almost lived on coffee. Here is a curious criticism of him made by Cosima Von Bülow, who, it must be remembered, was both the daughter and wife of famous pianists. She said: "Tausig has no touch, no individuality; he is a caricature of Liszt." This, in the light of Tausig's subsequent artistic career, sounds almost comical; it also shows the intensely one-sided temperament of a remarkable woman, who banished from her life both von Bülow and her father, Franz Liszt, when Wagner entered into her dreams. The fortitude she displayed after her Richard's death in 1883 was not tempered by any human feelingtoward her father. His telegrams were unanswered. She denied herself to him. She became a Brünnhilde frozen into a symbol of intolerable grief.Of her personal fascination the sister of Nietzsche, Elizabeth Foerster-Nietzsche, told me, when I last saw her at Weimar. Von Bülow succumbed to this charm; Rubinstein also (query: perhaps that is the reason he so savagely abused Wagner in his Conversations on Music?), and, if gossip doesn't lie, Nietzsche was another victim.On September 17, 1858, after a general row, Wagner left his home on the green hill, his "Asyl," for ever. Why? Plenty of conjectures, no definite statements. He makes a great show of frankness in his diaries, in his autobiography; but they were obviously "edited" by Baireuth. Tristan and Isolde remains as evidence that a mighty emotion had transfigured the nature of a genius, and instead of an erotic anecdote the world of art is richer in the possession of a moving drama of desire and woe and tragedy. At the Berlin premiere of Tristan the old Kaiser Wilhelm remarked: "How Wagner must have loved when he wrote the work;" which is sound psychology.IIIThe two books discussed are constructive in nature; not so the book by Emil Ludwig, Wagner, or the Disenchanted, which is frankly destructive. Since The Wagner Case by Nietzsche—and not Nietzsche at his best—there has not been written a book so overflowing with hatred for Wagner, the man as well as the musician. Ludwig is the author of poems, plays, and a study of Bismarck, the latter a noteworthy achievement. He is thorough in his attacks, though he does not measure up to Ernest Newman in his analysis of Wagner's poetry, libretti, and philosophy. The English critic's studies remain the best of its kind, because it is written without parti-pris.Ludwig slashes à la Nietzsche, though he cannot boast that poet's diamantine style. He accuses Wagner of being paroxysmal, erotic—a painter of moods; he couldn't build a Greek temple like Beethoven—weak as a poet, inconclusive as a musician. For Tristan and Die Meistersinger he has words of hearty praise. The Ludwig book stirred up a nest of hornets, and one lawsuit resulted. A newspaper critic presumed to criticise, and the sensitive poet, who calls Wagner every bad name in the Schimpf Lexicon, invoked the aid of the law. We know only too well, thanks to that ill-tasting but engrossing autobiography, that Wagner was amonster of ingratitude. Hasn't Nietzsche, against his own natural feeling, proclaimed the futility of gratitude? Perhaps he learned this lesson from his hard experience with Wagner. We also know that Wagner wanted to run the universe, but after a brief note from Ludwig II he left Munich rather than face the angry burghers.He attempted to coerce Bismarck, but there he ran up against a wall of granite. Bismarck was a Beethoven lover, and he abhorred, as did Von Beust, revolutionists. Thereat Wagner wrote sarcastic things about the uselessness and vanity of statesmen. He didn't treat Ludwig II right when he announced from Venice that he wasn't in sufficient health and spirits to grant the King's request for a performance of the prelude to Lohengrin in a darkened theatre with one listener, Ludwig II. (By the way, Ludwig II never sat through a performance alone of Parsifal. Once and once only, years before the completion of the work, he heard a performance of the prelude in Munich given for his sole benefit.) Wagner's gruff letter wounded the sensitive idealist. In 1866, a few weeks after the death of Minna Wagner-Planer, Cosima von Bülow-Liszt followed Wagner to Switzerland. Probably the hostile attitude of Liszt in the affair was largely inspired by the fact that when Richard and Cosima married, the latter abjured Catholicism and became a Protestant. Liszt, a religious man(despite his pyrotechnical virtuosity in the luxurious region of sentiment), never could reconcile himself to this defection on the part of a beloved child.It angered Nietzsche to discover in Wagner a leaning toward mysticism, toward religion: witness the mock-duck mysticism and burlesque of religious ritual in Parsifal. After Feuerbach came Arthur Schopenhauer in the intellectual life of Wagner. This was in 1854. His friend Wille lent him the book. Immediately he started to "Schopenhauerise" the Ring, thereby making a hopeless muddle of situation and character. The enormous vitality of Wagner's temperament expressed itself in essentially optimistic terms. He was not a pessimist, and he hopelessly misunderstood his new master. Wotan must needs become a Schopenhauerian; and Siegfried, a pessimist at the close.Nietzsche was right; Schopenhauer proved a powerful poison for Wagner. And Schopenhauer himself laughed at Wagner's music; he remained true to Rossini and Mozart and advised Wagner, through a friend, to stick to the theatre and hang his music on a nail in the wall; but when his library was overhauled several marginalia were discovered, one which he contemptuously wrote on a verse of Wagner's: "Ear! Ear! Where are your ears, musician?"Wagner, when Liszt adjured him to turn to religion as a consolation, replied: "I believe only in mankind." Ludwig compares thisdeclaration with some of the latter opinions concerning Christianity, of which Wagner has said many evil things. Wagner's life was a series of concessions to the inevitable. He modified his art theories as he grew older, and with fame and riches his character deteriorated.He couldn't stand success—he, the bravest man of his day; the undaunted fighter for an idea crooked the knee to caste, became an amateur mystic and announced his intention of returning to absolute music, of writing a symphony strict in form—which, for his reputation, he luckily did not attempt. He was a colossal actor and the best self-advertiser the world has yet known since Nero. But I can't understand Herr Ludwig when he asserts that from 1866 to 1883 the composer did nothing but compose two marches, finish Siegfried and Götterdämmerung. Rather a large order, considering the labours of the man as practical opera conductor, prose writer, poet-dramatist, and composer. And then, too, the gigantic scheme of Baireuth was realised in 1876.Comparatively barren would be a fairer phrase. After Tristan and Isolde, what could any man compose? A work which its creator rightfully said was a miracle he couldn't understand. After the anecdotage of Wagner's career is forgotten, after Baireuth has become owl-haunted, Tristan and Isolde will be listened to by men and women who love or have loved.It isn't pleasant to read a book like Ludwig's,truthful as it may be in parts. Nor should he call our attention to the posthumous venom of the composer as expressed in his hateful remarks concerning Otto Wesendonk. There Wagner was his own Mime, his own Alberich, not the knightly hero who would not woo the fair Irish maid till magic did melt his will. Richard Wagner was once Tristan.CHAPTER XXVIIMY FIRST MUSICAL ADVENTUREMusic-mad, I arrived in Paris during the last weeks of the World's Fair of 1878, impelled there by a parching desire to see Franz Liszt, if not to hear him. He was then honorary director of the Austro-Hungarian section. But I could not find him, although I heard of him everywhere, of musical fêtes and the usual glittering company that had always surrounded this extraordinary son of fortune. One day I fancied I saw him. I was sadly walking the Rue de Rivoli of an October afternoon, when in a passing carriage I saw an old chap with bushy white hair, his face full of expressive warts, and in his mouth a long black cigar, which he was furiously puffing. Liszt! I gasped, and started in pursuit. It was not an easy job to keep up with the carriage. At last, because of a blocked procession, I caught up and took a long stare, the object of which composedly smiled at me, but did not truly convince me that he was Franz Liszt. You see there were so many different pictures of him; even the warts were not always the same in number. When I am in the Cambyses vein I swear I've seen Liszt. Perhaps I did.Liszt or no Liszt, my ambition was fired, and at the advice of Frederick Boscovitz, a pupil of Liszt and cousin of Rafael Joseffy, I went to the Conservatoire Nationale, with a letter of introduction to the acting secretary, Emile Rety. I was told that I was too old to enter, being a few months past eighteen. I was disappointed and voiced my woes to Lucy Hamilton Hooper, then a clever writer and correspondent of several American newspapers. Her husband was Vice-Consul Robert Hooper and he kindly introduced me to General Fairchild, the consul, and after a cross-examination I was given a letter in which the United States Government testified to my good social standing (I was not a bandit, nor yet an absconder from justice) and extreme youth. Armed with this formidable document, I again besieged the gates of the great French conservatoire—whose tuition, it must be remembered, is free. I was successful, inasmuch as I was permitted to present myself at the yearly examination, which took place November 13 (ominous date). To say that I studied hard and shook in my boots is a literal statement. I lived at the time in an alley-like street off the Boulevard des Batignolles and lived luxuriously on five dollars a week, eating one satisfying meal a day (with a hot bowl of coffee in the morning) and practising on a wretched little cottage piano as long as my neighbours would stand the noise. They chucked boots or any old faggot they couldfind at my door, and after twelve hours I was so tired of patrolling the keyboard that I was glad to stop. Then, a pillow on my stomach to keep down the pangs of a youthfully gorgeous appetite, I would lie in bed till dinner-time. O Chopin! O consommé and boiled beef! O sour blue wine at six cents the litre!At last the fatal day dawned, as the novelists say. It was nasty, chilling, foggy autumnal, but my long locks hung negligently and my velveteen coat was worn defiantly open to the wind. I reached the Conservatoire—then in the old building on the Rue du Faubourg Poissonière—at precisely nine o'clock of the morn. I was put in a large room with an indiscriminate lot of candidates, some of them so young as to be fit for the care of a nurse. Like lost sheep we huddled and as my eyes feverishly rambled I noticed a lad of about twelve with curling hair worn artist fashion; a naughty haughty boy he was, for he sneered at my lengthy legs and audibly inquired: "Is grandpa to play with us!" I knew enough French to hate that little monster with a nervous hatred. There was a tightened feeling about my throat and heart and I waited in an agitated spirit for my number. A bearded and shy young man came in from examination and was at once mocked by the incipient virtuoso in pantalettes. Another unfortunate, with a roll of music! Then the little devil was summoned. We sat up. In tenminutes he returned with downcast mien, flushed face, tears in his eyes, and tried to sneak out of the room, but too late. After shaking hands all round we solemnly danced in a circle about the now sobbing and no longer sinister child. Who says youth is ever generous?"Number thirteen!" sang out a voice, and I was pushed through a narrow entry and a minute later was standing on the historic stage of the Paris Conservatoire. The lighting was dim, but I discerned a group of persons somewhere in front of me. A man asked me to sit down at the grand piano—of course, like most pianos, out of tune—and I tremblingly obeyed his polite request. At this juncture a woman's voice inquired: "How old are you, monsieur?" I told her. A feminine laugh rippled through the gloom, for I wore a fluffy little beard, was undeniably gawky, and looked conspicuously older than my years. That laugh settled me. Queer, creepy feelings seized my legs, my eyes were full of solar spectrums, my throat a furnace and my heart beat like a triphammer. I was not the first man, young or old, to be knocked out by a woman's laugh. (Later I met the lady. She was Madame Massart, and the wife of the well-known violin master, Massart, of the Conservatoire.) Again the demand, "Play something." It was a foregone conclusion that I couldn't. I began a minuetto from a Beethoven Sonata, hesitated, saw fiery snakes and a kaleidoscope of comets, then pitched into a presto by the unfortunate Beethoven, and wassoon stopped. A sheet of manuscript was placed before me. I could have sworn that it was upside down, so as a sight-reading test it was a failure. I was altogether a distinguished failure, and with the audible comment of the examining faculty ringing in my ears, I stumbled across the stage into welcome darkness, and without waiting to thank Secretary Rety for his amiability I got away, crossing in a hurry that celebrated courtyard in which the hideous noises made by many instruments, including the human voice, reminded me of a torture circle in Dante's Inferno.The United States had no reason to be proud of her musical—or unmusical—son that dull day in November, 1878. When I arrived in my garret I swore I was through and seriously thought of studying the xylophone. But my mood of profound discouragement was succeeded by a more hopeful one. If you can't enter the Paris Conservatoire as an active student you may have influence enough to become an "auditeur," a listener; and a listener I became and in the class of Professor Georges Mathias, a genuine pupil of Chopin. My musical readers will understand my good luck. From that spiritual master I learned many things about the Polish composer; heard from his still supple fingers much music as Chopin had interpreted it. Delicate and discriminating in style, M. Mathias had never developed into a brilliant concert pianist; sometimes he producedeffects on the keyboard that sounded like emotional porcelain falling from a high shelf and melodiously shattering on velvet mirrors. He also taught me that if a pianist or violinist or singer is too nervous before the public, then he or she has not a musical vocation—the case of Adolf Henselt to the contrary notwithstanding. But better would it be for me to admit that I failed because I didn't will earnestly enough to succeed.CHAPTER XXVIIIVIOLINISTS NOW AND YESTERYEARWith the hair of the horse and the entrails of the cat, magicians of the four strings weave their potent spells. What other instrument devised by the hand of man has ever approached the violin? Gladstone compared it with the locomotive; yet complete as is the mechanism of the wheeled monster, its type is transitional; steam is already supplanted by electricity; while the violin is perfection, as perfect as a sonnet, and in its capacity for the expression of emotion next to the human voice; indeed it is even more poignant. Orchestrally massed, it can be as terribly beautiful as an army with banners. In quartet form it represents the very soul of music; it is both sensuous and intellectual. The modern grand pianoforte with its great range, its opulence of tone, its delicacy of mechanism is, nevertheless, a monster of music if placed beside the violin, with its simple curves, its almost primitive method of music-making. The scraping of one substance against another goes back to prehistoric times, nay, may be seen in the grasshopper and its ingenious manner of producing sound. Butthe violin, as we know it to-day, is not such an old invention; it was the middle of the sixteenth century before it made its appearance, with its varnished and modelled back.Restricted as is its range of dynamics, the violin has had for its votaries men of such widely differing temperaments as Paganini and Spohr, Wilhelmj and Sarasate, Joachim and Ysaye. Its literature does not compare with that of the piano, for which Bach, Beethoven, Schumann, Chopin, and Brahms have written their choicest music, yet the intimate nature of the violin, its capacity for passionate emotion, crowns it—and not the organ, with its mechanical tonal effects—as the king of instruments. Nor does the voice make the peculiar appeal of the violin. Its lowest note is the G below the treble clef, and its top note a mere squeak; but it seems in a few octaves to have imprisoned within its wooden walls a miniature world of feeling; even in the hands of a clumsy amateur it has the formidable power of giving pain; while in the grasp of a master it is capable of arousing the soul.No other instrument has the ecstatic quality; neither the shallow-toned pianoforte, nor the more mellow and sonorous violoncello. The angelic, demoniacal, lovely, intense tones of the violin are without parallel in music or nature. It is as if this box with four strings across its varnished belly had a rarer nervous system than all other instruments. It is acry, a shriek, a hymn to heaven, a call to arms, an exquisite evocation, a brilliant series of multi-coloured visions, a broad song of passion, or mocking laughter—what cannot the violin express if the soul that guides it be that of an artist? Otherwise, it is only a fiddle. It is the hero, the heroine, the vanguard of every composition. As a solo instrument in a concerto, its still small voice is heard above the din and thunder of the accompaniment. In a word, this tiny music-box is the ruler among instruments.Times have changed since 1658 in England, when the following delightful ordinance was made for the benefit of musical genius, or otherwise:"And be it enacted that if any person or persons, commonly called Fiddlers, or minstrels, shall at any time after the said first of July be taken playing, fiddling, or making music in any inn, alehouse or tavern, or shall be proffering themselves, or desiring, or entreating any person or persons to hear them play ... shall be adjudged rogues, vagabonds, and sturdy beggars."Decidedly, England was not then the abode of the muses, for the poor actor suffered in company with the musician. You wonder whether this same penalty would be imposed upon musical managers ... they certainly do "entreat" the public to listen to their "fiddlers." Yet in 1690 when Corelli, the father of violinplaying, led the band at Cardinal Ottoboni's house in Rome, he stopped the music because his churchly patron was talking, and he made an epigram that has since served for other artists: "Monsignore," remarked this intrepid musician, when asked why the band had ceased, "I feared the music might interrupt the conversation." How well Liszt knew this anecdote may be recalled by his retort to a czar of Russia under similar circumstances.Until a few months ago I had not heard Eugene Ysaye play for years. In the old days he had enchanted my ears, and in company with Gerardy, the violoncellist and Pugno the pianist had made music fit for the gods. Considering the flight of the years, I found the art of the Belgian comparatively untouched. Like Liszt, like Paderewski, Ysaye has his good moments and his indifferent. He is the Paderewski of the strings in his magical interpretations. And unlike his younger contemporaries, he still carves out the whole block of the great classics, sonatas, and concertos. He plays little things tenderly, exquisitely, and the man is first the musician, then the virtuoso.I heard neither Paganini nor Spohr. Joachim, Wilhelmj, Wieniawski, and Ysaye I have heard and seen. My memory assures me of keener satisfactions than any book about these giants of the four strings could give me. The first violinist I ever listened to was in the early seventies.I was hardly at the age of musical discrimination. Yet I remember much. It was at the opera, a matinee in the Philadelphia Academy of Music. Nilsson was singing. I can't recall her on that occasion, though it seems only the other day when Carlotta Patti sang the Queen of the Night in The Magic Flute, and limped over the stage—possibly the lameness fixed the event in my mind more than the music.A "front" set was dropped between the acts at this particular matinee—I do not recollect the name of the opera—and through a "practicable" door came an old gentleman with a violin in his hands. He was white-haired, he wore white side-whiskers, and he looked to my young eyes like a prosperous banker. He played. It was as the sound of falling waters on a moonlight night. I asked the name of the old gentleman. My father said, "Henri Vieuxtemps," which told me nothing then, though it means much to me now. What did he play? I do not know. Yet whenever I hear the younger men attack his Fantaisie Caprice, his Ballade and Polonaise, his Concertos, I think proudly: "I have heard Vieuxtemps!" He was a Belgian, born 1820, died 1881. His style was finished, elegant, charming. He was a pupil ofDe Bériotand represented, with his master, perfection in the Belgian school.After an interval of some years, I heard theonly pupil of Paganini, as he called himself, Camillo Sivori. It was in Paris, 1879. The precise day I can't say but my letter from Paris which appeared in the PhiladelphiaEvening Bulletinwas dated January 31, 1879. I still preserve it in a venerable scrap-book. I was in my 'teens but I wrote with the courage of youthful ignorance as follows: (It almost sounds like a musical criticism.) "Although it was generally supposed that Sivori, the great violinist, would not play this season in Paris, he, nevertheless delighted a large audience, last Sunday, at the Concert Populaire, with his lovely music. He is no longer a young man, but the vigour and fire of his playing are immense. He gave, with the orchestral accompaniment, a Berceuse, his own composition, with unapproachable delicacy. It was played throughout with the mute. In contrast came a Mouvement Perpetuel. Sivori's tone is not like that of Joachim or Wilhelmj, but it is sweeter than either. It reminds one of gold drawn to cobweb fineness. As an encore he played the too well known Carnival of Venice. That it was given in the style of his illustrious master, Paganini, who may say? But it was amazing, painful, finally tiresome." That same season I heard Anna Bock, Boscovitz, Diémer, Planté, Theodore Ritter, the two Jaells, fat Alfred and his thin wife.Sivori (1815-1894), dapper, modest, stood up in the vast spaces of the Cirque d'Hiver,which was engaged every Sunday by Jacques Pasdeloup and his orchestra. (Jacob Wolfgang was the real name of this conductor who braved the wrath of his audiences by putting Wagner on his programmes; and one afternoon we had a pitched battle over Rimsky-Korsakoff's Symphonic Poem, Sadko.) Sivori played a tarantella; every tone was clearly heard in the great, crowded auditorium. Pupils of De Bériot and Paganini I have heard, though I hardly recall the style of the former and nothing of the latter. But there was little of Paganini's fiery attack in Sivori; possibly he was too old. Fire and fury I later found in Wieniawski.I must not omit the name of Ole Bull (1810-1880), for, though I heard him as a boy, I best remember him in 1880, when he gave his last concerts in America. In the fifties, while on a visit to my father's house, he went on his two thumbs around a dining-table, lifting his body clear from the ground. His muscular power was remarkable. It showed in the dynamics of his robust and sentimental playing. Spohr discouraged him as a boy, but later spoke of his "wonderful playing and sureness of his left hand; unfortunately, like Paganini, he sacrifices what is artistic to something that is not quite suitable to the noble instrument. His tone, too, is bad...." For Spohr any one's tone was, naturally enough, bad, as he possessed the most monumental tone that ever came from a violin.The truth is that Ole Bull was not a classical player; as I remember him, he could not play in strict tempo; like Chopin, he indulged in the rubato and abused the portamento. But he knew his public. America a half-century ago, particularly in the regions he visited, was not in the mood for sonatas or concertos. Old Dan Tucker and the Arkansaw Traveller were the mode. Bull played them both, played jigs and old tunes, roused the echoes with the Star Spangled Banner and Irish melodies. He played such things beautifully, and it would have been musical snobbery to say that you didn't like them. You couldn't help yourself. The grand old fellow bewitched you. He was a handsome Merlin, with a touch of the charlatan and a touch of Liszt in his tall, willowy figure, small waist, and heavy head of hair. Such white hair! It tumbled in masses about his kindly face like one of his native Norwegian cataracts. He was the most picturesque old man I ever saw except Walt Whitman, at that time a steady attendant of the Carl Gaertner String Quartet concerts in Philadelphia. (And what Walt didn't know about music he made up in his love for stray dogs; he was seldom without canine company.)Those were the days when Prume's La Mélancolie and Wieniawski's Légende were the two favourite, yet remote, peaks of the student's répertoire. How we loved them! Then came Wieniawski with Rubinstein in 1872-1873,and such violin playing America had never before heard—nor has it since, let me hasten to add. This Pole (1835-1880) was a brilliant master. His dash and fire and pathos carried you off your feet. His tone at times was like molten metal. He had a caressing and martial bow. His technique was infallible, his temperament truly Slavic, languorous, subtle, fierce. Wieniawski always reminded me of a red-hot coal. How chivalric is his Polonaise—that old war-horse! How elegiac his Légende! His favourite pupil was Leopold Lichtenberg, the greatest violin talent that has been thus far unearthed in America. Lichtenberg had everything when a youth—temperament, brains, musical feeling, and great technical ability.After Wieniawski followed Wilhelmj, who did not efface his memory, but plunged one into another atmosphere; that of the calm, profound, untroubled, and classic. No doubt Spohr's tone was larger, yet this is difficult to believe. Wilhelmj drew from his instrument the noblest sounds I ever heard; not Joachim, not Ysaye excelled him in cantabile. He was the first to play Wagner transcriptions—no wonder Wagner made him leader of the strings at Bayreuth in 1876. How he read the Beethoven Concerto, the Bach Chaconne. Or the D flat Nocturne of Chopin—in D. Or the much abused Mendelssohn E Minor Concerto—with Max Vogrich accompanying him atthe piano. A giant in physique, when he faced his audience there was something of the majestic, fair-haired god Wotan in his immobile posture. He never appealed to his public as did Wieniawski; there was always something of chilly grandeur and remoteness in Wilhelmj's play. The last time I saw him was at Marienbad, shortly before his death, where, a stooped-shouldered, grey-haired old man, he was taking a Kur. He walked slowly, his hands clasped behind him, in his eyes the vacant look of one busy with memories. He reminded me of Beethoven's pictures.Joseph Joachim, that mighty Hungarian, was past his prime when I heard him in London. He played out of tune—some of his pupils have imitated his failing—but whether in a Beethoven quartet, concerto, sonata with piano, he always stamped on your consciousness that Joseph Joachim was the greatest violinist that had ever lived. This is, of course, absurd, this unfair comparison of one artist with another. Yet it is human to compare, and if a violinist can evoke such a vision of perfection, then he must be of uncommon powers. Maud Powell, a distinguished pupil of Joachim, has asserted that it took her three years before she could recover herself in the presence of Joachim's overwhelming personality. Yet he struck me as not at all assertive. He seemed an "objective" player,i. e., you thought only of Beethoven, of Brahms, as he calmly delivered himself of theirOlympian measures. The grand manner is now out of fashion. We care more for exotic rhetoric than for simple and lofty measures. Sarasate and Dengremont charmed me more; Wieniawski set my blood coursing faster; but in Joachim's presence I felt as if near some old Grecian temple hallowed by the presence of oft-worshipped gods.Remenyi was a puzzle. He could play divinely, and scratch diabolically. He belonged to that old romantic school in which pose and gesture, contortion and grimace occupied a prominent place. I had an opportunity to study Remenyi (whose Austrian name was Hoffman) (1830-1898), at close quarters. He brought to my father's house in the early eighties his favourite instruments, and such a wild night of music I never heard. He played hour after hour, everything from Bach to Brahms—and incidentally scolded Brahms for "stealing" some of his, Remenyi's, Hungarian dances! (Which is a joke, as Brahms only followed the examples of Liszt and Joachim in avowedly employing Hungarian folk melodies). He did such tricks as dashing off in impeccable tune his arrangement of the D Flat Valse of Chopin in double notes at a terrific tempo. Violinists will understand the feat when I tell them that the key was the original one—D flat. He made the walls shiver when he struck his bow clangorously in the opening chords of the Rackoczy March. What a hero then seemedthis stout, little, prancing, baldheaded man with the face of an unfrocked priest. How he could talk in a half-dozen different languages; he had travelled enough and encountered enough celebrated people to fill a dozen volumes with his recollections. He was a violinist of unquestionable power; that he deteriorated in his later years was to have been expected. Liszt understood and appreciated Remenyi from the first; he nicknamed him "the Kossuth of the Fiddle."To recall all the celebrities of the violin I have heard since 1870 would be hardly possible. I've forgotten most of them, though I do remember that wonderful boy, Maurice Dengremont, who ended his life, so rich in possibilities, it is said as a billiard marker. He was spoiled by women, for he was a comely lad. Another wonder-child kept his head, and to-day fascinating Fritz Kreisler is a master of masters and a favourite in America without peer. He first appeared at Boston and in 1888. In Paris I recall Marsick and his polished style; the gallant Sauret, Johannes Wolf, and the brilliant and elegant Timothée Adamowski. And in 1880, Marie Tayau and her woman quartet, a member of which was Jeanne Franko, the sister of the conductors and violinists, Sam Franko and Nahan Franko; Cæsar Thomson, the miraculous; C. M. Loeffler—subtle player, subtle composer; Sarasate with his sweet tone; Brodsky and his masculine manner;Willy Burmester and his pallid pyrotechnics; the learned Schradieck, the Bohemian Ondricek, the dashing Ovide Musin, Bernhard Listemann, Carl Halir; Gregorowitsch, the languid; brilliant Marteau; Alexander Petschinikoff, the Russian; the musicianly Max Bendix; the astonishing John Rhodes, the wonder-worker Kubelik and his icy perfections; Kocian, Willy Hess, Efrem Zimbalist, Albert Spalding, Arthur Hartman, and a myriad of spoiled youths, Von Veczsey, Horszowski—all have crossed the map of my memory. And Franz Kneisel and the Kneisel Quartet, dispensers of musical joys for decades, but alas! no more. Alas! I would not barter memories of their music-making for a wilderness of virtuosi. I must not forget Joseph White, the Cuban violinist, who was with Theodore Thomas one season. His style was finished and Parisian. He was a mulatto and a handsome man. The night I heard him he played the Mendelssohn concerto, and at the beginning of the slow movement his chanterelle broke. Calmly he took concert master Richard Arnold's proffered instrument and triumphantly finished the composition.Three violinists abide clear in my recollection: Wieniawski, Wilhelmj, and Ysaye. The last named is dearer because nearer, contrary to the supposed rule that the older the thing the worse it is. Ysaye is the magician of the violin. He holds us in a spell with thatelastic, curving bow of his, with those many coloured tones, tender, silky, sardonic, amorous, rich, and ductile. He interprets the classics as well as the romantics; Bach, Beethoven, Brahms; Vieuxtemps as well as Sibelius. Above all else, his mastery of the violin's technical mysteries, looms his musical temperament. He has imagination.I have reserved the women for the last. A goodly, artistic company. It is not necessary to go back to the Milanolla sisters. We still cherish remembrances of Camilla Urso and her broad musicianly manner; the finished style of Normann-Neruda, Maris Soldat, the gifted and unhappy Arma Senkrah, Nettie Carpenter, Teresina Tua—who did not become a "Fiddle Fairy" when she visited us in 1887—Leonora Jackson, Dora Becker, Olive Mead, and Maud Powell. In Europe many years ago, I heard Marcella Sembrich, who, after playing the E Flat Polonaise of Chopin on the piano, picked up a violin and dashed off the Wieniawski Polonaise; these feats were followed by songs, one being Viardot-Garcia's arrangement of Chopin's D Major Mazourka. Sembrich is the blue rose among great singers. Gericke, Paur, Nikisch were at first violinists; so was Fritz Scheel, late conductor of the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra. Franz Kneisel is a conductor of great skill; so is Frederick Stock, who followed Theodore Thomas as conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Theodore Spiering formerlyconcert-master of the Philharmonic orchestra proved himself an excellent conductor. But that a little Polish woman could handle with ease two instruments and sing like an angel besides, borders on the fantastic. Geraldine Morgan is an admirable violin artiste who plays solo as well as quartet with equal authority.Maud Powell has fulfilled her early promise. She is a mature artiste, one who will never be finished because she will always study, always improve. A Joachim pupil, she is, nevertheless, a pupil of Maud Powell, and her playing reveals breadth, musicianship, beauty of tone and phrasing. She is our greatest American violin virtuosa.I wrote this of Mischa Elman (the first of the many Mischas and Jaschas who mew on the fiddle strings) after I heard him play in London: "United to an amazing technical precision there is a still more amazing emotional temperament, all dominated by a powerful musical and mental intellect, uncanny in one not yet out of his teens. What need to add that his conception of Beethoven is neither as lovely as Kreisler's nor as fascinating as Ysaye's? Elman will mature. In the romantic or the virtuoso realm he is past master. His tone is lava-like in its warmth. He paints with many colours. He displays numberless nuances of feeling. The musical in him dominates the virtuoso. Naturally, the pride of hot youth asserts itself, and often, self-intoxicated, heintoxicates his audiences with his sensuous, compelling tone. Hebraic, tragic, melancholy, the boisterousness of the Russian, the swift modulation from mad caprice to Slavic despair—Elman is a magician of many moods. When I listen to him I almost forget Ysaye." Yet when I heard Ysaye play last season it was Elman that I forgot for the moment. After all, a critic, too, may have his moods. And now comes another conqueror, the lad Jasha Heifetz from Russia, a pupil of Leopold Auer and an artist of such extraordinary attainments that the greatest among contemporary violinists—is it necessary to mention names?—have said of him that his art begins where theirs ends, and that they will shut up shop when he plays here. All of which is a flattering tribute, but it has been made before. Heifetz, however, may be the dark horse in the modern fiddle sweepstakes.CHAPTER XXIXRIDING THE WHIRLWINDOnce Swinburne, in a Baudelaire mood, sang: "Shall no new sin be born for men's troubles?" And it was an Asiatic potentate who offered a prize for the discovery of a new pleasure. Or was it a sauce?Mankind soon wearies. The miracles of yesteryear are the commonplaces of to-day. Steam, telegraphy, electric motors, wireless, and now wireless telephony are accepted as a matter of course by the man in the street. How stale will seem woman suffrage and prohibition after they have conquered. In the world of art conditions are analogous. The cubist nail drove out the impressionist, and the cubist will vanish if the futurist hammer is sufficiently heavy.Nevertheless, there is a novel sensation in store for those who make a first flight through the air. I don't mean in a balloon, whether captive or free; in the case of the former, a trip to the top of the Washington Monument or the Eiffel Tower will suffice; and while I rode in a Zeppelin at Berlin in 1912 (100 marks, or about $25, was the tariff) and saw Potsdam at my feet, yet I was unsatisfied. The passengers sat in a comfortable salon, ate,drank, even smoked. The travelling was so smooth as to suggest an inland lake on a summer day. No danger was to be apprehended. The monster air-ship left its hangar and returned to it on schedule time. The entire trip lacked the flavour of adventure. And that leads me to a personal confession.I am not a sport. In my veins flows sporting blood, but only in the Darwinian sense am I a "sport," a deviation from the normal history of my family, which has always been devoted to athletic pleasures. A baseball match in which carnage ensues is a mild diversion for me. I can't understand the fury of the contest. I yawn, though the frenzied enthusiasm of the spectators interests me. I have fallen asleep over a cricket match at Lord's in London, and the biggest bore of all was a Sunday afternoon bull-fight in Madrid. It was such a waste of potential beefsteaks. Prize-fights disgust, shell races are puerile, football matches smack of obituaries. As for golf—that is a prelude to senility, or the antechamber to an undertaker's establishment.The swiftness of film pictures has set a new metronomic standard for modern sports. I suppose playing Bach fugues on the keyboard is as exciting a game as any; that is, for those who like it. A four-voiced polyphony at a good gait is positively hair-raising. It beats poker. All this is a preliminary to my little tale.Conceive me as an elderly person of generouswaist measurement, slightly reckless like most near-sighted humans; this recklessness is psychical. Safety first, and I always watch my step; painful experience taught me years ago the perils that lurk in ambush for a Johnny-look-in-the-air.Flying in heavier-than-air machines fascinated me. The fantastic stories of H. G. Wells were ever a joy. When the Argonauts of the Air appeared, flying was practically assured, although a Paris mathematician had demonstrated with ineluctable logic that it was impossible; as proved a member of the Institute a century earlier that birds couldn't fly. It was an illusion. Well, the Wrights flew, even if Langley did not—Langley, the genuine father of the aeroplane.Living so long in France and Belgium, I had grown accustomed to the whirring of aerial motors, a sound not unlike that of a motor-boat or the buzzing of a sawmill. I became accustomed to this drone above the housetops, and since my return to America I have often wondered why in the land where the aeroplane first flew, so little public interest was manifested. To be sure, there are aero clubs, but they never fly where the interest of the greater public can be intrigued. Either there is a hectic excitement over some record broken or else the aviator sulks in his tent. Is the money devil at the bottom of the trouble? Sport for sport's sake, like art for art's sake,is rarely encountered. The government has taken up flying, but that is for pragmatic purposes. The aeroplane as a weapon of defence, not the aeroplane as a new and agreeable pleasure. We are not a disinterested nation; even symphony concerts and opera and the salvation of souls are commercial propositions. Else would our skies be darkened by flying machines instead of smoke, and our churches thronged with aviators.Walking on the famous and fatiguing Boardwalk of Atlantic City I suddenly heard a familiar buzzing in the air and looked up. There it was, a big flying boat like a prehistoric dragon-fly, speeding from the Inlet down to the million-dollar pier. Presently there were two of them flying, and I felt as if I were in a civilised land. On the trolleys were signs: "See the Flying Boats at the Inlet!" I did, the very next morning. I had no notion of being a passenger. I was not tempted by the thought. But as Satan finds work for idle hands, I lounged down the beach to the Kendrick biplane, and stared my full at its slender proportions. A young man in a bathing-suit explained to me the technique of flying, and insinuated that hundreds and hundreds had flown during the season without accident. Afternoon saw me again on the sands, an excited witness of a flight; excited because I stood behind the motor when it was started for a preliminary tryout—"tuning up" is the slang phrase ofthe profession—and the cyclonic gale blew my hat away, loosened my collar, and made my teeth chatter.Such a tornadic roar! I firmly resolved that never would I trust myself in such a devil's contrivance. Why, it was actually riding the whirlwind—and, perhaps, reaping a watery grave. What else but that? On a blast of air you sail aloft and along. When the air ceases you drop (less than forty-five miles an hour). And this in a flimsy box kite. Never for me! Not to-day, baker, call to-morrow with a crusty cottage! as we used to say in dear old "Lunnon" years ago. Nevertheless, the poison was in my veins; cunningly it began to work. I saw a passenger, a fat man, weighing two hundred and four pounds—I asked for the figures—trussed up like a calf in the arms of a slight, muscular youth, who carried him a limp burden and deposited him on a seat in the prow of the boat. I turned my head away. I am not easily stirred—having reported musical and theatrical happenings for a quarter of a century—but the sight of that stout male, a man and a brother (I didn't know him from Adam), evoked a chord of pity in my breast. I felt that I would never set eyes again on this prospective food for fishes. I quickly left the spot and returned to my hotel, determined to say, "Retro me, Sathanas!" if that personage should happen to show me his hoofs, horns, and hide.But he did not. The devil is a subtle beast. He had simply set jangling the wires of suggestion, and my nerves accomplished the rest. One morning, a few days later, I awoke parched with desire. I drank much strong tea to steady me and smoked unremittingly. Again, during the early afternoon, I found myself up the beach. "My feet take hold on hell," I said to myself, but it was only hot sand. I teased myself with speculations as to whether the game was worth the candle—yes, I had got that far, traversing a vast mental territory between the No-Sayer and the Yes-Sayer. I was doomed, and I knew it when I began to circle about the machine.Courteously the bonny youth explained matters. It was a Glenn H. Curtiss hydro-aeroplane, furnished with one of the new Curtiss engines of ninety horse-power, capable of flying seventy to ninety miles an hour, of lifting four hundred pounds, and weighing in all about a ton. Was it safe? Were the taut, skinny piano wires that manipulated the steering-gear and the plane durable? Didn't they ever snap? Of course they were durable, and, of course, they occasionally snapped. What then? Why, you drop, in spiral fashion—volplane—charming vocable! But if the engine?—same thing. You would come to earth, rather water, as naturally as a child takes the breast. Nothing to fear.Young Beryl Kendrick is an Atlantic Cityproduct—he was a professional swimmer and life-guard—and will look after you. The price is fifteen dollars; formerly twenty-five dollars, but competition, which is said to be the life of trade, had operated in favour of the public. Rather emotionally I bade my man good day, promising to return for a flight the next morning, a promise I certainly did not mean to keep. This stupendous announcement he received coolly. Flying to him was a quotidian banality.And then I noticed that the blazing sun had become darkened. Was it an eclipse, or were some horrid, monstrous shapes like the supposititious spindles spoken of by Langley devouring the light of our parent planet? No, it was the chamber of my skull that was full of shadows. The obsession was complete. I would go up, but I must suffer terribly in the interim.Why should I fly and pay fifteen good shekels for the unwelcome privilege? I computed the cost of various beverages, and as a consoling thought recalled Mark Twain's story of the Western editor who, missing from his accustomed haunts, was later found serenely drunk, passionately reading to a group of miners from a table his lantern-illuminated speech, in which he denounced the cruel raw waste of grain in the making of bread when so many honest men were starving for whisky. Yet did I feel that I would not begrudge my hard-earned royalties (I'm not a best-seller), and thus tormentedbetween the devil of cowardice and the deep sea of curiosity I retired and dreamed all night of fighting strange birds that attacked me in an aeroplane.I shan't weary you with the further analysis of my soul-states during this tempestuous period. I ate a light breakfast, swallowed much tea. Then I resolutely went in company with a friend, and we boarded an Inlet car. I had the day previous resorted to a major expedient of cowards. I had said, so as to bolster up my fluttering resolution, that I was going to fly; an expedient that seldom misses, for I should never have been able to face the chief clerk, the head waiter, or the proprietor at the hotel if I failed to keep my promise."Boaster! Swaggerer!" I muttered to myself en route. "Now are you satisfied? Thou tremblest, carcass! Thou wouldst tremble much more if thou knewest whither I shall soon lead thee!" I quoted Turenne, and I was beginning to babble something about Icarus—or was it Phæton, or Simon Magus?—brought to earth in the Colosseum by a prayer from the lips of Saint Peter—when we arrived. How I hated the corner where we alighted. It seemed mean and dingy and sinister in the dazzling sunlight—a red-hot Saturday, September 11, 1915, and the hour was 10.30A. M.A condemned criminal could not have noted more clearly every detail of the life he was about to quit. We ploughed through thesand. We reached the scaffold—at least it looked like one to me. "Hello, here's a church. Let's go in," I felt like exclaiming in sheer desperation, remembering Dickens and Mr. Wemmick. I would have, such was my blue funk, quoted Holy Scripture to the sandlopers, but I hadn't the chance.I asked my friend, and my voice sounded steady enough, whether the wind and weather seemed propitious for flying. Never better was the reply, and my heart went down to my boots. I really think I should have escaped if a stout man with a piratical moustache hadn't approached me and asked: "Going up to-day?" I marvelled at his calmness, and wished for his instant dissolution, but I gave an affirmative shake of the head. Cornered at last! Handing my watch, hat, and wallet to my friend, I coldly awaited the final preparations. I had forgotten my ear protector, but cotton-wool would answer the purpose of making me partially deaf to the clangorous vibration of the propeller blades—which resemble in a magnified shape the innocent air-fans of offices and cafés. I essayed one more joke—true gallows humour—before I was led like a lamb (a tough one) to the slaughter. I asked an attendant to whom I had paid the official fee if my widows would be refunded the money in case of accident; but this antique and tasteless witticism was indifferently received, as it deserved. Finally the young man gave me a raincoat,grabbed me around the waist, and bidding me clasp his neck he carried me out into shallow water and sat me beside the air-pilot, who looked like a mere lad in his bathing-clothes. My hand must have been trembling (ah, that old piano hand), for he inquiringly eyed me. The motor was screaming as we flew through the water toward the Inlet. I hadn't courage of mind to make a farewell signal to my companion. Too late, we're off! I thought, and at once my trepidation vanished.I had for some unknown reason, possibly because of absolute despair, suffered a rich sea-change. We churned the waves. I saw tiny sails studding the deep blue. Men fished from the shore. As we neared the Inlet, where a shambling wooden hotel stands on the sandy point, the sound of the motor grew intenser. We began to lift, not all at once, but gradually. Suddenly her nose poked skyward, and the boat climbed the air with an ease that was astonishing. No shock. No jerkiness. We simply glided aloft as if the sky were our native heath—you will pardon the Hibernicism—and as if determined to pay a visit to the round blazing sun bathing naked in the brilliant blue. And with the mounting ascent I became unconscious of my corporeal vesture. I had become pure spirit. I feared nothing. The legend of angels became a certainty. I was on the way to the Fourth Dimensional vista. I recalled Poincaré's suggestion thatthere is no such thing as matter; only holes in the ether. Nature embracing a vacuum instead of abhorring it. A Swiss cheese universe. Joseph Conrad has said "Man on earth is an unforeseen accident which does not stand close investigation." But man in the air? Man is destined to wings. Was I not proving it? Flying is the sport of gods, and should be of humans now that the motor-car is become slightly "promiscuous."The Inlet and thoroughfare at my feet were a network of silvery ribbons. The heat was terrific, the glare almost unbearable. But I no longer sneezed. Aviation solves the hay-fever problem. The wind forced me to clench my teeth. We were hurled along at seventy miles an hour, and up several thousand feet, yet below the land seemed near enough to touch. As we swung across the masts of yachts I wondered that we didn't graze them—so elusive was the crystal clearness of the atmosphere, a magic mirror that made the remote contiguous. The mast of the sunken schooner hard by the sand-bar looked like a lead-pencil one could grasp and write a message to Mars.Hello! I was become lyrical. It is inescapable up in the air. The blood seethes. Ecstasy sets in; the kinetic ecstasy of a spinning-top. I gazed at the pilot. He twisted his wheel nonchalantly as if in an earthly automobile. I looked over the sides of the cedar boat and was not giddy, for I had lived years at the top of an apartment-house,ten stories high, from which I daily viewed policemen killing time on the sidewalks; besides, I have strong eyes and the stomach of a drover. Therefore, no giddiness, no nausea. Only exaltation as we swooped down to lower levels. Atlantic City, bizarre, yet meaningless, outrageously planned and executed, stretched its ugly shape beneath us; the most striking objects were the exotic hyphenated hotel, with its Asiatic monoliths and dome, and its vast, grandiose neighbour, a mound of concrete, the biggest hotel in the world. The piers were salient silhouettes. A checker-board seemed the city, which modulated into a tremendous arabesque of ocean and sky. I preferred to stare seaward. The absorbent cotton in my ears was transformed into gun-cotton, so explosive the insistent drumming of the motor-engine. Otherwise, we flew on even keel, only an occasional dip and a sidewise swing reminding me that I wasn't footing the ordinary highway. The initial intoxication began to wear off, but not the sense of freedom, a glorious freedom; truly, mankind will not be free till all fly.Alas! though we become winged we remain mortal. We may shed our cumbersome pedestrian habits, but we take up in the air with us our petty souls. I found myself indulging in very trite thoughts. What a pity that war should be the first to degrade this delightful and stimulating sport! Worse followed. Whycouldn't I own a machine? Base envy, you see. The socialistic leaven had begun to work. No use; we shall remain human even in heaven or hell.I have been asked to describe the sensation of flying. I can't. It seems so easy, so natural. If you have ever dreamed of flying, I can only say that your dream will be realised in an aeroplane. Dreams do come true sometimes. (Curiously enough, I've not dreamed of flying since.) But as there is an end even to the most tedious story, so mine must finish.Suddenly the sound of the engine ceased. The silence was thrilling, almost painful. And then in huge circles, as if we were descending the curves of an invisible corkscrew, we came down, the bow of the flying boat pointing at an angle of forty-five degrees. Still no dizziness, only a sense of regret that the trip was so soon over. It had endured an eternity, but occupied precisely twenty-one minutes.We reached the water and settled on the foam like a feather. Then we churned toward the beach; again I was carried, this time on to solid land, where I had ridiculous trouble in getting the cotton from my harassed eardrums. Perhaps my hands were unsteady, but if they were, my feet were not.I reached the Inlet via the Boardwalk, making record time, and drew the first happy sigh in a week as I sat down, lighted a cigar, and twiddled my fingers at a waiter. Even if Ihad enjoyed a new pleasure I didn't propose to give up the old ones. Then my nerves! And when I meet Gabriele d'Annunzio I can look him in the eye. He flew over Trieste, but I flew over my fears—a moral as well as a physical victory for a timid conservative.CHAPTER XXXPRAYERS FOR THE LIVING(From the editorial page of the New YorkSun, December 31, 1916)It is a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead that they may be loosed from their sins; and it is as holy a prayer that begs from the god of chance his pity for the living. Aye! it is those who are about to live, not to die, that we should salute. Life is the eternal slayer; death is but the final punctuation of the vital paragraph. Life is also the betrayer. A cosmical conspiracy of deception encircles us. We call it Maya, and flatter our finite sense of humour that we are no longer entrapped by the shining appearance of things when we say aloud: Stay, thou art so subtle that we know you for what you are—the profoundest instinct of life: its cruel delight in pretending to be what it is not. We are now, all of us who think that we think, newly born Fausts with eyes unbandaged of the supreme blinders, Time and Space. Nature clothes the skeleton in a motley suit of flesh, but our supersharpened ears overhear the rattling of the bones. We are become so wise that love itself is no longer a sentiment, only a sensation; religionis first cousin to voluptuousness; and if we are so minded we may jig to the tune of the stars up the dazzling staircase, and sneer at the cloud-gates of the infinite inane. Naught succeeds like negation, and we swear that in the house of the undertaker it is impolite to speak of shrouds. We are nothing if not determinists. And we believe that the devil deserves the hindmost.We live in order to forget life. For our delicate machinery of apperception there is no longer right or wrong; vice and virtue are the acid and alkali of existence. And as too much acid deranges the stomach, so vice corrodes the soul, and thus we are virtuous by compulsion. Yet we know that evil serves its purpose in the vast chemistry of being, and if banished the consequences might not be for universal good; other evils would follow in the train of a too comprehensive mitigation, and our end a stale swamp of vain virtues. Resist not evil! Which may mean the reverse of what it seems to preach. The master modern immoralist has said: Embrace evil! that we may be over and done with it. Toys are our ideals; glory, goodness, wealth, health, happiness; all toys except health; health of the body, of the soul. And the first shall be last.The human soul in health? But there is no spiritual health. The mystic, Doctor Tauler, has said: "God does not reside in a vigorous body"; sinister; nevertheless, equitable. Thedolorous certitude that the most radiant of existences ends in the defeat of disease and death; that happiness is relative, a word empty of meaning in the light of experience, and non-existent as an absolute; that the only divine oasis in our feverish activities is sleep; sleep the prelude to the profound and eternal silence—why then this gabble about soul-states and the peace that passeth all understanding? Simply because the red corpuscles that rule our destinies are, when dynamic, mighty breeders of hope; if the powers and principalities of darkness prevail, our guardian angels, the phagocytes, are dominated by the leucocytes. Gods and devils, Ormuzd and Ahriman, and other phantasms of the sky, may all be put on a microscopic slide and their struggles noted. And the evil ones are ever victors in the diabolical game. No need to insist on it. In the heart of mankind there is a tiny shrine with its burning taper; the idol is Self; the propitiatory light is for subliminal foes. Alas! in vain. We succumb, and in our weakness we sink into the grave. If only we were sure of the River Styx afterward we should pay the ferry-tax with joy. Better Hades than the poppy of oblivion. "Ready to be anything in the ecstasy of being ever," as Sir Thomas Browne sagely remarks.The pious and worthy Doctor Jeremy Taylor, who built cathedral-like structures of English prose to the greater glory of God and for theedification of ambitious rhetoricians, has dwelt upon the efficacy of prayer in a singularly luminous passage: "Holy prayer procures the ministry and services of angels. It rescinds the decrees of God. It cures sickness and obtains pardon. It arrests the sun in its course and stays the wheels of the chariot of the moon. It rules over all God's creatures and opens and shuts the storehouses of rain. It unlocks the cabinet of the womb and quenches the violence of fire. It stops the mouths of lions and reconciles our sufferance and weak faculties with the violence of torment and sharpness of persecution. It pleases God and supplies all our needs. But prayer that can do this much for us can do nothing at all without holiness, for God heareth not sinners, but if any man be a worshipper of God and doth His will, him He heareth."It should not be forgotten that Taylor, perhaps the greatest English prose-master save John Milton, was a stickler for good works as well as faith. He was considered almost heterodox because of his violence of speech when the subject of death-bed repentance became a topic of discussion; indeed, his bishop remonstrated with him because of his stiff-necked opinions. To joust through life as at a pleasure tournament and when the dews of death dampen the forehead to call on God in your extremity seemed to this eloquent divine an act of slinking cowardice. Far better face the evil one in a defiant spirit than knock foradmittance at the back door of paradise and try to sneak by the winged policeman into a vulgar bliss: unwon, unhoped for, undeserved. Therefore the rather startling statement, "God heareth not sinners," read in the light of Bishop Taylor's fervent conception of man's duty, hath its justification.But this atmosphere of proverbial commonplaces and "inspissated gloom" should not be long maintained when the coursers of the sun are plunging southward in the new year; when the Huntsman is up at Oyster Bay and "they are already past their first sleep in Persia." What a bold and adventurous piece of nature is man; yet how he stares at life as a frowning entertainment. Why must we "act our antipodes" when "all Africa and her prodigies are in us"? Ergo, let us be cheerful. God is with the world. Let us pray that during the ensuing year no rust shall colour our soul into a dingy red. Let us pray for the living that they may be loosed from their politics and see life steadily and whole.Let us pray that we may not take it on ourselves to feel holier than our neighbours. Let us pray that we be not cursed with the itching desire to reform our fellows, for the way of the reformer is hard, and he always gets what he deserves: the contempt of his fellow men. He is usually a hypocrite. Let us pray that we are not struck by religious zeal; religious people are not always good people; good people arenot envious, jealous, penurious, censorious, or busybodies, or too much bound up in the prospect of the mote in their brother's eye and unmindful of the beam in their own. Furthermore, good people do not unveil with uncharitable joy the faults of women. Have faith. Have hope, and remember that charity is as great as chastity.Let us pray for the misguided folk who, forgetful of Mother Church, her wisdom, her consolations, flock to the tents of lewd, itinerant, mumbo-jumbo howlers, that blaspheme the sacred name as they epileptically leap, shouting glory-kingdom-come and please settle at the captain's office.Though they run on all fours and bark as hyenas, they shall not enter the city of the saints, being money-changers in the Temple, and tripe-sellers of souls. Better Tophet and its burning pitch than a wilderness of such apes of God. Some men and women of culture and social position indorse these sorry buffoons, the apology for their paradoxical conduct being any port in a storm; any degrading circus, so it be followed by a mock salvation. But salvation for whom? What deity cares for such foaming at the mouth, such fustian? Conversion is silent and comes from within, and not to the din of brass-bands and screaming hallelujahs. It takes all sorts of gods to make the cosmos, but why return to the antics and fetishes of our primate ancestors, the cave-dwellers?This squirming and panting and brief reform "true religion"? On the contrary it is a throwback to bestiality, to the vilest instincts. A "soul" that has to be saved by such means is a soul not worth the saving. To the discard with it, where, flaming in purgatorial fires, it may be refashioned for future reincarnation on some other planet.Abuse of drink is to be deplored, but Prohibition is more enslaving than alcohol. Paganism in its most exotic forms is preferable to this prize-ring Christianity. One may be zealous without wallowing in debasing superstition. Again, let us pray for these imbeciles and for the charlatans who are blinding them. Neither arts and sciences nor politics and philosophies will save the soul. The azure route lies beyond the gates of ivory and the gates of horn.Let us pray for our sisters, the suffragettes, who are still suffering from the injustice of Man, now some million of years. Let us pray that they be given the ballot to prove to them its utter futility as a cure-all. With it they shall be neither happier nor different. Once a woman, always a martyr. Let them not be deceived by illusive phrases. If they had not been oppressed they would to-day be "free"! Alas! free from their sex? Free from the burden of family? Free like men to carry on the rude labours of this ruder earth? To what purpose? To become second-rate men, whennature has endowed them with qualities that men vainly emulate, vainly seek to evoke their spirit in the arts and literature! Ages past woman should have attained that impossible goal, oppression or no; in fact, adversity has made man what he is—and woman, too. Pray, that she may not be tempted by the mirage into the desert, there to perish of thirst for the promised land. Nearly a century ago George Sand was preaching the equality of the sexes, and rightly enough. What has come of it? The vote? Political office? Professions, business opportunities? Yes, all these things, but not universal happiness. Woman's sphere—stale phrase!—is any one she hankers after; but let her not deceive herself. Her future will strangely resemble her past.William Dean Howells was not wrong when he wrote: Woman has only her choice in self-sacrifice. And sometimes not even the choosing. Why? Why are eclipses? Why are some men prohibitionists? Why do hens cluck after laying eggs? Let us pray for warring women that their politically ambitious leaders may no longer dupe them with fallacious promises—surely a "pathetic fallacy." But, then, females rush in where fools fear to tread.And lastly, beloved sisters and brothers, let us heartily pray that our imperial democracy (or is it a democratic empire?), our plutocratic republic (or should we say republican plutocracy?) may be kept from war; avoid"the drums and tramplings of three conquests." But by the Eternal Jehovah, God of battles, if we are forced to fight, then let us fight like patriotic Americans, and not gently coo, like pacifists and other sultry south winds. A billion for "preparedness," but not a penny for "pork," say we.And by the same token let us pray that those thundering humbugs and parasites who call themselves labour leaders—the blind leading the blind—for ever vanish. Because of their contumacious acts and egregious bamboozling of their victims, because of their false promises of an earthly paradise and a golden age, they deserve the harshest condemnation.Like certain Oriental discourses, our little Morality which began in the mosque has rambled not far from the tavern. Nevertheless, let us pray for the living as well as the dead. Oremus!

In September, 1857, the newly married Von Bülows paid the Wagners a visit, and as the guest-chamber of the cottage was occupied they took up temporary quarters at an inn, "The Raven" (Wotan's ravens!) Cosima, young, impressionable, turned her face to the wall and wept when Wagner played and sang for his friends the first and second acts of Siegfried. Even then she felt the "pull" of his magnetism, of his genius, and doubtless regretted having married the fussy, irritable Von Bülow—who had gone down in the social scale in wedding a girl of dubious descent. (In Paris Liszt for many years was only a strolling gipsy piano-player to whom the Countess d'Agoult had "condescended.")

Mathilde Wesendonk entertained the Von Bülows, who went away pleased with their reception, above all deeply impressed by the exiled Wagner. They so reported to Liszt, and Von Bülow did more; as the scion of an old aristocratic family, he made many attemptsto secure an amnesty for Wagner, as well as making propaganda for his music. Which favours Wagner, who was the very genius of ingratitude, repaid later.

In one point Herr Ludwig is absolutely correct: the composer was supported by his friends from 1849 to the year when King Ludwig intervened. The starvation talk was a part of the Wagner legend, even the Paris days were greatly exaggerated as to their black poverty. Wagner was always a spendthrift.

From November, 1857, to May, 1858, Wagner set to music the five poems of Mathilde, veritable sketches for Tristan. Early in September, 1857, the relations between Minna and Mathilde had become strained. Wagner accused his wife of abusing Mathilde in a vulgar manner; worse remained; he had sent a letter by the gardener to Frau Wesendonk and the jealous wife intercepted it, broke the seal, read the contents. To Wagner, this was the blackest of crimes; yet can you blame her? To be sure, she had no conception of her husband's genius. For her Rienzi was his only work. Had it not succeeded? So had Tannhäuser and Lohengrin, also The Flying Dutchman, but Rienzi was her darling. How often she begged him to write another opera of the same Wagnerian calibre he has not failed to tell us. Otto Wesendonk's wife she firmly believed was leading him into a quagmire. What theatre could ever produce The Ring?One thing, however, Minna did not do, as most writers on the subject say she did: she did not show the fatal letter to Wesendonk at the time, but only to Wagner. Later she made its meanings clear to the injured husband, which no doubt provoked the explosive phrase quoted above.

The youthful Karl Tausig, bearing credentials from Liszt, appeared on the scene in May, 1858, and the entire household was soon in an uproar. Luckily, Wagner had persuaded Minna to take a cold-water cure at a sanatorium some distance from Zurich, so he could handle the wild-eyed Tausig, whose volcanic piano performances at the age of sixteen made the mature composer both wonder and admire. Tausig smoked black cigars, a trait he imitated from Liszt, and almost lived on coffee. Here is a curious criticism of him made by Cosima Von Bülow, who, it must be remembered, was both the daughter and wife of famous pianists. She said: "Tausig has no touch, no individuality; he is a caricature of Liszt." This, in the light of Tausig's subsequent artistic career, sounds almost comical; it also shows the intensely one-sided temperament of a remarkable woman, who banished from her life both von Bülow and her father, Franz Liszt, when Wagner entered into her dreams. The fortitude she displayed after her Richard's death in 1883 was not tempered by any human feelingtoward her father. His telegrams were unanswered. She denied herself to him. She became a Brünnhilde frozen into a symbol of intolerable grief.

Of her personal fascination the sister of Nietzsche, Elizabeth Foerster-Nietzsche, told me, when I last saw her at Weimar. Von Bülow succumbed to this charm; Rubinstein also (query: perhaps that is the reason he so savagely abused Wagner in his Conversations on Music?), and, if gossip doesn't lie, Nietzsche was another victim.

On September 17, 1858, after a general row, Wagner left his home on the green hill, his "Asyl," for ever. Why? Plenty of conjectures, no definite statements. He makes a great show of frankness in his diaries, in his autobiography; but they were obviously "edited" by Baireuth. Tristan and Isolde remains as evidence that a mighty emotion had transfigured the nature of a genius, and instead of an erotic anecdote the world of art is richer in the possession of a moving drama of desire and woe and tragedy. At the Berlin premiere of Tristan the old Kaiser Wilhelm remarked: "How Wagner must have loved when he wrote the work;" which is sound psychology.

The two books discussed are constructive in nature; not so the book by Emil Ludwig, Wagner, or the Disenchanted, which is frankly destructive. Since The Wagner Case by Nietzsche—and not Nietzsche at his best—there has not been written a book so overflowing with hatred for Wagner, the man as well as the musician. Ludwig is the author of poems, plays, and a study of Bismarck, the latter a noteworthy achievement. He is thorough in his attacks, though he does not measure up to Ernest Newman in his analysis of Wagner's poetry, libretti, and philosophy. The English critic's studies remain the best of its kind, because it is written without parti-pris.

Ludwig slashes à la Nietzsche, though he cannot boast that poet's diamantine style. He accuses Wagner of being paroxysmal, erotic—a painter of moods; he couldn't build a Greek temple like Beethoven—weak as a poet, inconclusive as a musician. For Tristan and Die Meistersinger he has words of hearty praise. The Ludwig book stirred up a nest of hornets, and one lawsuit resulted. A newspaper critic presumed to criticise, and the sensitive poet, who calls Wagner every bad name in the Schimpf Lexicon, invoked the aid of the law. We know only too well, thanks to that ill-tasting but engrossing autobiography, that Wagner was amonster of ingratitude. Hasn't Nietzsche, against his own natural feeling, proclaimed the futility of gratitude? Perhaps he learned this lesson from his hard experience with Wagner. We also know that Wagner wanted to run the universe, but after a brief note from Ludwig II he left Munich rather than face the angry burghers.

He attempted to coerce Bismarck, but there he ran up against a wall of granite. Bismarck was a Beethoven lover, and he abhorred, as did Von Beust, revolutionists. Thereat Wagner wrote sarcastic things about the uselessness and vanity of statesmen. He didn't treat Ludwig II right when he announced from Venice that he wasn't in sufficient health and spirits to grant the King's request for a performance of the prelude to Lohengrin in a darkened theatre with one listener, Ludwig II. (By the way, Ludwig II never sat through a performance alone of Parsifal. Once and once only, years before the completion of the work, he heard a performance of the prelude in Munich given for his sole benefit.) Wagner's gruff letter wounded the sensitive idealist. In 1866, a few weeks after the death of Minna Wagner-Planer, Cosima von Bülow-Liszt followed Wagner to Switzerland. Probably the hostile attitude of Liszt in the affair was largely inspired by the fact that when Richard and Cosima married, the latter abjured Catholicism and became a Protestant. Liszt, a religious man(despite his pyrotechnical virtuosity in the luxurious region of sentiment), never could reconcile himself to this defection on the part of a beloved child.

It angered Nietzsche to discover in Wagner a leaning toward mysticism, toward religion: witness the mock-duck mysticism and burlesque of religious ritual in Parsifal. After Feuerbach came Arthur Schopenhauer in the intellectual life of Wagner. This was in 1854. His friend Wille lent him the book. Immediately he started to "Schopenhauerise" the Ring, thereby making a hopeless muddle of situation and character. The enormous vitality of Wagner's temperament expressed itself in essentially optimistic terms. He was not a pessimist, and he hopelessly misunderstood his new master. Wotan must needs become a Schopenhauerian; and Siegfried, a pessimist at the close.

Nietzsche was right; Schopenhauer proved a powerful poison for Wagner. And Schopenhauer himself laughed at Wagner's music; he remained true to Rossini and Mozart and advised Wagner, through a friend, to stick to the theatre and hang his music on a nail in the wall; but when his library was overhauled several marginalia were discovered, one which he contemptuously wrote on a verse of Wagner's: "Ear! Ear! Where are your ears, musician?"

Wagner, when Liszt adjured him to turn to religion as a consolation, replied: "I believe only in mankind." Ludwig compares thisdeclaration with some of the latter opinions concerning Christianity, of which Wagner has said many evil things. Wagner's life was a series of concessions to the inevitable. He modified his art theories as he grew older, and with fame and riches his character deteriorated.

He couldn't stand success—he, the bravest man of his day; the undaunted fighter for an idea crooked the knee to caste, became an amateur mystic and announced his intention of returning to absolute music, of writing a symphony strict in form—which, for his reputation, he luckily did not attempt. He was a colossal actor and the best self-advertiser the world has yet known since Nero. But I can't understand Herr Ludwig when he asserts that from 1866 to 1883 the composer did nothing but compose two marches, finish Siegfried and Götterdämmerung. Rather a large order, considering the labours of the man as practical opera conductor, prose writer, poet-dramatist, and composer. And then, too, the gigantic scheme of Baireuth was realised in 1876.

Comparatively barren would be a fairer phrase. After Tristan and Isolde, what could any man compose? A work which its creator rightfully said was a miracle he couldn't understand. After the anecdotage of Wagner's career is forgotten, after Baireuth has become owl-haunted, Tristan and Isolde will be listened to by men and women who love or have loved.

It isn't pleasant to read a book like Ludwig's,truthful as it may be in parts. Nor should he call our attention to the posthumous venom of the composer as expressed in his hateful remarks concerning Otto Wesendonk. There Wagner was his own Mime, his own Alberich, not the knightly hero who would not woo the fair Irish maid till magic did melt his will. Richard Wagner was once Tristan.

Music-mad, I arrived in Paris during the last weeks of the World's Fair of 1878, impelled there by a parching desire to see Franz Liszt, if not to hear him. He was then honorary director of the Austro-Hungarian section. But I could not find him, although I heard of him everywhere, of musical fêtes and the usual glittering company that had always surrounded this extraordinary son of fortune. One day I fancied I saw him. I was sadly walking the Rue de Rivoli of an October afternoon, when in a passing carriage I saw an old chap with bushy white hair, his face full of expressive warts, and in his mouth a long black cigar, which he was furiously puffing. Liszt! I gasped, and started in pursuit. It was not an easy job to keep up with the carriage. At last, because of a blocked procession, I caught up and took a long stare, the object of which composedly smiled at me, but did not truly convince me that he was Franz Liszt. You see there were so many different pictures of him; even the warts were not always the same in number. When I am in the Cambyses vein I swear I've seen Liszt. Perhaps I did.

Liszt or no Liszt, my ambition was fired, and at the advice of Frederick Boscovitz, a pupil of Liszt and cousin of Rafael Joseffy, I went to the Conservatoire Nationale, with a letter of introduction to the acting secretary, Emile Rety. I was told that I was too old to enter, being a few months past eighteen. I was disappointed and voiced my woes to Lucy Hamilton Hooper, then a clever writer and correspondent of several American newspapers. Her husband was Vice-Consul Robert Hooper and he kindly introduced me to General Fairchild, the consul, and after a cross-examination I was given a letter in which the United States Government testified to my good social standing (I was not a bandit, nor yet an absconder from justice) and extreme youth. Armed with this formidable document, I again besieged the gates of the great French conservatoire—whose tuition, it must be remembered, is free. I was successful, inasmuch as I was permitted to present myself at the yearly examination, which took place November 13 (ominous date). To say that I studied hard and shook in my boots is a literal statement. I lived at the time in an alley-like street off the Boulevard des Batignolles and lived luxuriously on five dollars a week, eating one satisfying meal a day (with a hot bowl of coffee in the morning) and practising on a wretched little cottage piano as long as my neighbours would stand the noise. They chucked boots or any old faggot they couldfind at my door, and after twelve hours I was so tired of patrolling the keyboard that I was glad to stop. Then, a pillow on my stomach to keep down the pangs of a youthfully gorgeous appetite, I would lie in bed till dinner-time. O Chopin! O consommé and boiled beef! O sour blue wine at six cents the litre!

At last the fatal day dawned, as the novelists say. It was nasty, chilling, foggy autumnal, but my long locks hung negligently and my velveteen coat was worn defiantly open to the wind. I reached the Conservatoire—then in the old building on the Rue du Faubourg Poissonière—at precisely nine o'clock of the morn. I was put in a large room with an indiscriminate lot of candidates, some of them so young as to be fit for the care of a nurse. Like lost sheep we huddled and as my eyes feverishly rambled I noticed a lad of about twelve with curling hair worn artist fashion; a naughty haughty boy he was, for he sneered at my lengthy legs and audibly inquired: "Is grandpa to play with us!" I knew enough French to hate that little monster with a nervous hatred. There was a tightened feeling about my throat and heart and I waited in an agitated spirit for my number. A bearded and shy young man came in from examination and was at once mocked by the incipient virtuoso in pantalettes. Another unfortunate, with a roll of music! Then the little devil was summoned. We sat up. In tenminutes he returned with downcast mien, flushed face, tears in his eyes, and tried to sneak out of the room, but too late. After shaking hands all round we solemnly danced in a circle about the now sobbing and no longer sinister child. Who says youth is ever generous?

"Number thirteen!" sang out a voice, and I was pushed through a narrow entry and a minute later was standing on the historic stage of the Paris Conservatoire. The lighting was dim, but I discerned a group of persons somewhere in front of me. A man asked me to sit down at the grand piano—of course, like most pianos, out of tune—and I tremblingly obeyed his polite request. At this juncture a woman's voice inquired: "How old are you, monsieur?" I told her. A feminine laugh rippled through the gloom, for I wore a fluffy little beard, was undeniably gawky, and looked conspicuously older than my years. That laugh settled me. Queer, creepy feelings seized my legs, my eyes were full of solar spectrums, my throat a furnace and my heart beat like a triphammer. I was not the first man, young or old, to be knocked out by a woman's laugh. (Later I met the lady. She was Madame Massart, and the wife of the well-known violin master, Massart, of the Conservatoire.) Again the demand, "Play something." It was a foregone conclusion that I couldn't. I began a minuetto from a Beethoven Sonata, hesitated, saw fiery snakes and a kaleidoscope of comets, then pitched into a presto by the unfortunate Beethoven, and wassoon stopped. A sheet of manuscript was placed before me. I could have sworn that it was upside down, so as a sight-reading test it was a failure. I was altogether a distinguished failure, and with the audible comment of the examining faculty ringing in my ears, I stumbled across the stage into welcome darkness, and without waiting to thank Secretary Rety for his amiability I got away, crossing in a hurry that celebrated courtyard in which the hideous noises made by many instruments, including the human voice, reminded me of a torture circle in Dante's Inferno.

The United States had no reason to be proud of her musical—or unmusical—son that dull day in November, 1878. When I arrived in my garret I swore I was through and seriously thought of studying the xylophone. But my mood of profound discouragement was succeeded by a more hopeful one. If you can't enter the Paris Conservatoire as an active student you may have influence enough to become an "auditeur," a listener; and a listener I became and in the class of Professor Georges Mathias, a genuine pupil of Chopin. My musical readers will understand my good luck. From that spiritual master I learned many things about the Polish composer; heard from his still supple fingers much music as Chopin had interpreted it. Delicate and discriminating in style, M. Mathias had never developed into a brilliant concert pianist; sometimes he producedeffects on the keyboard that sounded like emotional porcelain falling from a high shelf and melodiously shattering on velvet mirrors. He also taught me that if a pianist or violinist or singer is too nervous before the public, then he or she has not a musical vocation—the case of Adolf Henselt to the contrary notwithstanding. But better would it be for me to admit that I failed because I didn't will earnestly enough to succeed.

With the hair of the horse and the entrails of the cat, magicians of the four strings weave their potent spells. What other instrument devised by the hand of man has ever approached the violin? Gladstone compared it with the locomotive; yet complete as is the mechanism of the wheeled monster, its type is transitional; steam is already supplanted by electricity; while the violin is perfection, as perfect as a sonnet, and in its capacity for the expression of emotion next to the human voice; indeed it is even more poignant. Orchestrally massed, it can be as terribly beautiful as an army with banners. In quartet form it represents the very soul of music; it is both sensuous and intellectual. The modern grand pianoforte with its great range, its opulence of tone, its delicacy of mechanism is, nevertheless, a monster of music if placed beside the violin, with its simple curves, its almost primitive method of music-making. The scraping of one substance against another goes back to prehistoric times, nay, may be seen in the grasshopper and its ingenious manner of producing sound. Butthe violin, as we know it to-day, is not such an old invention; it was the middle of the sixteenth century before it made its appearance, with its varnished and modelled back.

Restricted as is its range of dynamics, the violin has had for its votaries men of such widely differing temperaments as Paganini and Spohr, Wilhelmj and Sarasate, Joachim and Ysaye. Its literature does not compare with that of the piano, for which Bach, Beethoven, Schumann, Chopin, and Brahms have written their choicest music, yet the intimate nature of the violin, its capacity for passionate emotion, crowns it—and not the organ, with its mechanical tonal effects—as the king of instruments. Nor does the voice make the peculiar appeal of the violin. Its lowest note is the G below the treble clef, and its top note a mere squeak; but it seems in a few octaves to have imprisoned within its wooden walls a miniature world of feeling; even in the hands of a clumsy amateur it has the formidable power of giving pain; while in the grasp of a master it is capable of arousing the soul.

No other instrument has the ecstatic quality; neither the shallow-toned pianoforte, nor the more mellow and sonorous violoncello. The angelic, demoniacal, lovely, intense tones of the violin are without parallel in music or nature. It is as if this box with four strings across its varnished belly had a rarer nervous system than all other instruments. It is acry, a shriek, a hymn to heaven, a call to arms, an exquisite evocation, a brilliant series of multi-coloured visions, a broad song of passion, or mocking laughter—what cannot the violin express if the soul that guides it be that of an artist? Otherwise, it is only a fiddle. It is the hero, the heroine, the vanguard of every composition. As a solo instrument in a concerto, its still small voice is heard above the din and thunder of the accompaniment. In a word, this tiny music-box is the ruler among instruments.

Times have changed since 1658 in England, when the following delightful ordinance was made for the benefit of musical genius, or otherwise:

"And be it enacted that if any person or persons, commonly called Fiddlers, or minstrels, shall at any time after the said first of July be taken playing, fiddling, or making music in any inn, alehouse or tavern, or shall be proffering themselves, or desiring, or entreating any person or persons to hear them play ... shall be adjudged rogues, vagabonds, and sturdy beggars."

Decidedly, England was not then the abode of the muses, for the poor actor suffered in company with the musician. You wonder whether this same penalty would be imposed upon musical managers ... they certainly do "entreat" the public to listen to their "fiddlers." Yet in 1690 when Corelli, the father of violinplaying, led the band at Cardinal Ottoboni's house in Rome, he stopped the music because his churchly patron was talking, and he made an epigram that has since served for other artists: "Monsignore," remarked this intrepid musician, when asked why the band had ceased, "I feared the music might interrupt the conversation." How well Liszt knew this anecdote may be recalled by his retort to a czar of Russia under similar circumstances.

Until a few months ago I had not heard Eugene Ysaye play for years. In the old days he had enchanted my ears, and in company with Gerardy, the violoncellist and Pugno the pianist had made music fit for the gods. Considering the flight of the years, I found the art of the Belgian comparatively untouched. Like Liszt, like Paderewski, Ysaye has his good moments and his indifferent. He is the Paderewski of the strings in his magical interpretations. And unlike his younger contemporaries, he still carves out the whole block of the great classics, sonatas, and concertos. He plays little things tenderly, exquisitely, and the man is first the musician, then the virtuoso.

I heard neither Paganini nor Spohr. Joachim, Wilhelmj, Wieniawski, and Ysaye I have heard and seen. My memory assures me of keener satisfactions than any book about these giants of the four strings could give me. The first violinist I ever listened to was in the early seventies.I was hardly at the age of musical discrimination. Yet I remember much. It was at the opera, a matinee in the Philadelphia Academy of Music. Nilsson was singing. I can't recall her on that occasion, though it seems only the other day when Carlotta Patti sang the Queen of the Night in The Magic Flute, and limped over the stage—possibly the lameness fixed the event in my mind more than the music.

A "front" set was dropped between the acts at this particular matinee—I do not recollect the name of the opera—and through a "practicable" door came an old gentleman with a violin in his hands. He was white-haired, he wore white side-whiskers, and he looked to my young eyes like a prosperous banker. He played. It was as the sound of falling waters on a moonlight night. I asked the name of the old gentleman. My father said, "Henri Vieuxtemps," which told me nothing then, though it means much to me now. What did he play? I do not know. Yet whenever I hear the younger men attack his Fantaisie Caprice, his Ballade and Polonaise, his Concertos, I think proudly: "I have heard Vieuxtemps!" He was a Belgian, born 1820, died 1881. His style was finished, elegant, charming. He was a pupil ofDe Bériotand represented, with his master, perfection in the Belgian school.

After an interval of some years, I heard theonly pupil of Paganini, as he called himself, Camillo Sivori. It was in Paris, 1879. The precise day I can't say but my letter from Paris which appeared in the PhiladelphiaEvening Bulletinwas dated January 31, 1879. I still preserve it in a venerable scrap-book. I was in my 'teens but I wrote with the courage of youthful ignorance as follows: (It almost sounds like a musical criticism.) "Although it was generally supposed that Sivori, the great violinist, would not play this season in Paris, he, nevertheless delighted a large audience, last Sunday, at the Concert Populaire, with his lovely music. He is no longer a young man, but the vigour and fire of his playing are immense. He gave, with the orchestral accompaniment, a Berceuse, his own composition, with unapproachable delicacy. It was played throughout with the mute. In contrast came a Mouvement Perpetuel. Sivori's tone is not like that of Joachim or Wilhelmj, but it is sweeter than either. It reminds one of gold drawn to cobweb fineness. As an encore he played the too well known Carnival of Venice. That it was given in the style of his illustrious master, Paganini, who may say? But it was amazing, painful, finally tiresome." That same season I heard Anna Bock, Boscovitz, Diémer, Planté, Theodore Ritter, the two Jaells, fat Alfred and his thin wife.

Sivori (1815-1894), dapper, modest, stood up in the vast spaces of the Cirque d'Hiver,which was engaged every Sunday by Jacques Pasdeloup and his orchestra. (Jacob Wolfgang was the real name of this conductor who braved the wrath of his audiences by putting Wagner on his programmes; and one afternoon we had a pitched battle over Rimsky-Korsakoff's Symphonic Poem, Sadko.) Sivori played a tarantella; every tone was clearly heard in the great, crowded auditorium. Pupils of De Bériot and Paganini I have heard, though I hardly recall the style of the former and nothing of the latter. But there was little of Paganini's fiery attack in Sivori; possibly he was too old. Fire and fury I later found in Wieniawski.

I must not omit the name of Ole Bull (1810-1880), for, though I heard him as a boy, I best remember him in 1880, when he gave his last concerts in America. In the fifties, while on a visit to my father's house, he went on his two thumbs around a dining-table, lifting his body clear from the ground. His muscular power was remarkable. It showed in the dynamics of his robust and sentimental playing. Spohr discouraged him as a boy, but later spoke of his "wonderful playing and sureness of his left hand; unfortunately, like Paganini, he sacrifices what is artistic to something that is not quite suitable to the noble instrument. His tone, too, is bad...." For Spohr any one's tone was, naturally enough, bad, as he possessed the most monumental tone that ever came from a violin.

The truth is that Ole Bull was not a classical player; as I remember him, he could not play in strict tempo; like Chopin, he indulged in the rubato and abused the portamento. But he knew his public. America a half-century ago, particularly in the regions he visited, was not in the mood for sonatas or concertos. Old Dan Tucker and the Arkansaw Traveller were the mode. Bull played them both, played jigs and old tunes, roused the echoes with the Star Spangled Banner and Irish melodies. He played such things beautifully, and it would have been musical snobbery to say that you didn't like them. You couldn't help yourself. The grand old fellow bewitched you. He was a handsome Merlin, with a touch of the charlatan and a touch of Liszt in his tall, willowy figure, small waist, and heavy head of hair. Such white hair! It tumbled in masses about his kindly face like one of his native Norwegian cataracts. He was the most picturesque old man I ever saw except Walt Whitman, at that time a steady attendant of the Carl Gaertner String Quartet concerts in Philadelphia. (And what Walt didn't know about music he made up in his love for stray dogs; he was seldom without canine company.)

Those were the days when Prume's La Mélancolie and Wieniawski's Légende were the two favourite, yet remote, peaks of the student's répertoire. How we loved them! Then came Wieniawski with Rubinstein in 1872-1873,and such violin playing America had never before heard—nor has it since, let me hasten to add. This Pole (1835-1880) was a brilliant master. His dash and fire and pathos carried you off your feet. His tone at times was like molten metal. He had a caressing and martial bow. His technique was infallible, his temperament truly Slavic, languorous, subtle, fierce. Wieniawski always reminded me of a red-hot coal. How chivalric is his Polonaise—that old war-horse! How elegiac his Légende! His favourite pupil was Leopold Lichtenberg, the greatest violin talent that has been thus far unearthed in America. Lichtenberg had everything when a youth—temperament, brains, musical feeling, and great technical ability.

After Wieniawski followed Wilhelmj, who did not efface his memory, but plunged one into another atmosphere; that of the calm, profound, untroubled, and classic. No doubt Spohr's tone was larger, yet this is difficult to believe. Wilhelmj drew from his instrument the noblest sounds I ever heard; not Joachim, not Ysaye excelled him in cantabile. He was the first to play Wagner transcriptions—no wonder Wagner made him leader of the strings at Bayreuth in 1876. How he read the Beethoven Concerto, the Bach Chaconne. Or the D flat Nocturne of Chopin—in D. Or the much abused Mendelssohn E Minor Concerto—with Max Vogrich accompanying him atthe piano. A giant in physique, when he faced his audience there was something of the majestic, fair-haired god Wotan in his immobile posture. He never appealed to his public as did Wieniawski; there was always something of chilly grandeur and remoteness in Wilhelmj's play. The last time I saw him was at Marienbad, shortly before his death, where, a stooped-shouldered, grey-haired old man, he was taking a Kur. He walked slowly, his hands clasped behind him, in his eyes the vacant look of one busy with memories. He reminded me of Beethoven's pictures.

Joseph Joachim, that mighty Hungarian, was past his prime when I heard him in London. He played out of tune—some of his pupils have imitated his failing—but whether in a Beethoven quartet, concerto, sonata with piano, he always stamped on your consciousness that Joseph Joachim was the greatest violinist that had ever lived. This is, of course, absurd, this unfair comparison of one artist with another. Yet it is human to compare, and if a violinist can evoke such a vision of perfection, then he must be of uncommon powers. Maud Powell, a distinguished pupil of Joachim, has asserted that it took her three years before she could recover herself in the presence of Joachim's overwhelming personality. Yet he struck me as not at all assertive. He seemed an "objective" player,i. e., you thought only of Beethoven, of Brahms, as he calmly delivered himself of theirOlympian measures. The grand manner is now out of fashion. We care more for exotic rhetoric than for simple and lofty measures. Sarasate and Dengremont charmed me more; Wieniawski set my blood coursing faster; but in Joachim's presence I felt as if near some old Grecian temple hallowed by the presence of oft-worshipped gods.

Remenyi was a puzzle. He could play divinely, and scratch diabolically. He belonged to that old romantic school in which pose and gesture, contortion and grimace occupied a prominent place. I had an opportunity to study Remenyi (whose Austrian name was Hoffman) (1830-1898), at close quarters. He brought to my father's house in the early eighties his favourite instruments, and such a wild night of music I never heard. He played hour after hour, everything from Bach to Brahms—and incidentally scolded Brahms for "stealing" some of his, Remenyi's, Hungarian dances! (Which is a joke, as Brahms only followed the examples of Liszt and Joachim in avowedly employing Hungarian folk melodies). He did such tricks as dashing off in impeccable tune his arrangement of the D Flat Valse of Chopin in double notes at a terrific tempo. Violinists will understand the feat when I tell them that the key was the original one—D flat. He made the walls shiver when he struck his bow clangorously in the opening chords of the Rackoczy March. What a hero then seemedthis stout, little, prancing, baldheaded man with the face of an unfrocked priest. How he could talk in a half-dozen different languages; he had travelled enough and encountered enough celebrated people to fill a dozen volumes with his recollections. He was a violinist of unquestionable power; that he deteriorated in his later years was to have been expected. Liszt understood and appreciated Remenyi from the first; he nicknamed him "the Kossuth of the Fiddle."

To recall all the celebrities of the violin I have heard since 1870 would be hardly possible. I've forgotten most of them, though I do remember that wonderful boy, Maurice Dengremont, who ended his life, so rich in possibilities, it is said as a billiard marker. He was spoiled by women, for he was a comely lad. Another wonder-child kept his head, and to-day fascinating Fritz Kreisler is a master of masters and a favourite in America without peer. He first appeared at Boston and in 1888. In Paris I recall Marsick and his polished style; the gallant Sauret, Johannes Wolf, and the brilliant and elegant Timothée Adamowski. And in 1880, Marie Tayau and her woman quartet, a member of which was Jeanne Franko, the sister of the conductors and violinists, Sam Franko and Nahan Franko; Cæsar Thomson, the miraculous; C. M. Loeffler—subtle player, subtle composer; Sarasate with his sweet tone; Brodsky and his masculine manner;Willy Burmester and his pallid pyrotechnics; the learned Schradieck, the Bohemian Ondricek, the dashing Ovide Musin, Bernhard Listemann, Carl Halir; Gregorowitsch, the languid; brilliant Marteau; Alexander Petschinikoff, the Russian; the musicianly Max Bendix; the astonishing John Rhodes, the wonder-worker Kubelik and his icy perfections; Kocian, Willy Hess, Efrem Zimbalist, Albert Spalding, Arthur Hartman, and a myriad of spoiled youths, Von Veczsey, Horszowski—all have crossed the map of my memory. And Franz Kneisel and the Kneisel Quartet, dispensers of musical joys for decades, but alas! no more. Alas! I would not barter memories of their music-making for a wilderness of virtuosi. I must not forget Joseph White, the Cuban violinist, who was with Theodore Thomas one season. His style was finished and Parisian. He was a mulatto and a handsome man. The night I heard him he played the Mendelssohn concerto, and at the beginning of the slow movement his chanterelle broke. Calmly he took concert master Richard Arnold's proffered instrument and triumphantly finished the composition.

Three violinists abide clear in my recollection: Wieniawski, Wilhelmj, and Ysaye. The last named is dearer because nearer, contrary to the supposed rule that the older the thing the worse it is. Ysaye is the magician of the violin. He holds us in a spell with thatelastic, curving bow of his, with those many coloured tones, tender, silky, sardonic, amorous, rich, and ductile. He interprets the classics as well as the romantics; Bach, Beethoven, Brahms; Vieuxtemps as well as Sibelius. Above all else, his mastery of the violin's technical mysteries, looms his musical temperament. He has imagination.

I have reserved the women for the last. A goodly, artistic company. It is not necessary to go back to the Milanolla sisters. We still cherish remembrances of Camilla Urso and her broad musicianly manner; the finished style of Normann-Neruda, Maris Soldat, the gifted and unhappy Arma Senkrah, Nettie Carpenter, Teresina Tua—who did not become a "Fiddle Fairy" when she visited us in 1887—Leonora Jackson, Dora Becker, Olive Mead, and Maud Powell. In Europe many years ago, I heard Marcella Sembrich, who, after playing the E Flat Polonaise of Chopin on the piano, picked up a violin and dashed off the Wieniawski Polonaise; these feats were followed by songs, one being Viardot-Garcia's arrangement of Chopin's D Major Mazourka. Sembrich is the blue rose among great singers. Gericke, Paur, Nikisch were at first violinists; so was Fritz Scheel, late conductor of the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra. Franz Kneisel is a conductor of great skill; so is Frederick Stock, who followed Theodore Thomas as conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Theodore Spiering formerlyconcert-master of the Philharmonic orchestra proved himself an excellent conductor. But that a little Polish woman could handle with ease two instruments and sing like an angel besides, borders on the fantastic. Geraldine Morgan is an admirable violin artiste who plays solo as well as quartet with equal authority.

Maud Powell has fulfilled her early promise. She is a mature artiste, one who will never be finished because she will always study, always improve. A Joachim pupil, she is, nevertheless, a pupil of Maud Powell, and her playing reveals breadth, musicianship, beauty of tone and phrasing. She is our greatest American violin virtuosa.

I wrote this of Mischa Elman (the first of the many Mischas and Jaschas who mew on the fiddle strings) after I heard him play in London: "United to an amazing technical precision there is a still more amazing emotional temperament, all dominated by a powerful musical and mental intellect, uncanny in one not yet out of his teens. What need to add that his conception of Beethoven is neither as lovely as Kreisler's nor as fascinating as Ysaye's? Elman will mature. In the romantic or the virtuoso realm he is past master. His tone is lava-like in its warmth. He paints with many colours. He displays numberless nuances of feeling. The musical in him dominates the virtuoso. Naturally, the pride of hot youth asserts itself, and often, self-intoxicated, heintoxicates his audiences with his sensuous, compelling tone. Hebraic, tragic, melancholy, the boisterousness of the Russian, the swift modulation from mad caprice to Slavic despair—Elman is a magician of many moods. When I listen to him I almost forget Ysaye." Yet when I heard Ysaye play last season it was Elman that I forgot for the moment. After all, a critic, too, may have his moods. And now comes another conqueror, the lad Jasha Heifetz from Russia, a pupil of Leopold Auer and an artist of such extraordinary attainments that the greatest among contemporary violinists—is it necessary to mention names?—have said of him that his art begins where theirs ends, and that they will shut up shop when he plays here. All of which is a flattering tribute, but it has been made before. Heifetz, however, may be the dark horse in the modern fiddle sweepstakes.

Once Swinburne, in a Baudelaire mood, sang: "Shall no new sin be born for men's troubles?" And it was an Asiatic potentate who offered a prize for the discovery of a new pleasure. Or was it a sauce?

Mankind soon wearies. The miracles of yesteryear are the commonplaces of to-day. Steam, telegraphy, electric motors, wireless, and now wireless telephony are accepted as a matter of course by the man in the street. How stale will seem woman suffrage and prohibition after they have conquered. In the world of art conditions are analogous. The cubist nail drove out the impressionist, and the cubist will vanish if the futurist hammer is sufficiently heavy.

Nevertheless, there is a novel sensation in store for those who make a first flight through the air. I don't mean in a balloon, whether captive or free; in the case of the former, a trip to the top of the Washington Monument or the Eiffel Tower will suffice; and while I rode in a Zeppelin at Berlin in 1912 (100 marks, or about $25, was the tariff) and saw Potsdam at my feet, yet I was unsatisfied. The passengers sat in a comfortable salon, ate,drank, even smoked. The travelling was so smooth as to suggest an inland lake on a summer day. No danger was to be apprehended. The monster air-ship left its hangar and returned to it on schedule time. The entire trip lacked the flavour of adventure. And that leads me to a personal confession.

I am not a sport. In my veins flows sporting blood, but only in the Darwinian sense am I a "sport," a deviation from the normal history of my family, which has always been devoted to athletic pleasures. A baseball match in which carnage ensues is a mild diversion for me. I can't understand the fury of the contest. I yawn, though the frenzied enthusiasm of the spectators interests me. I have fallen asleep over a cricket match at Lord's in London, and the biggest bore of all was a Sunday afternoon bull-fight in Madrid. It was such a waste of potential beefsteaks. Prize-fights disgust, shell races are puerile, football matches smack of obituaries. As for golf—that is a prelude to senility, or the antechamber to an undertaker's establishment.

The swiftness of film pictures has set a new metronomic standard for modern sports. I suppose playing Bach fugues on the keyboard is as exciting a game as any; that is, for those who like it. A four-voiced polyphony at a good gait is positively hair-raising. It beats poker. All this is a preliminary to my little tale.

Conceive me as an elderly person of generouswaist measurement, slightly reckless like most near-sighted humans; this recklessness is psychical. Safety first, and I always watch my step; painful experience taught me years ago the perils that lurk in ambush for a Johnny-look-in-the-air.

Flying in heavier-than-air machines fascinated me. The fantastic stories of H. G. Wells were ever a joy. When the Argonauts of the Air appeared, flying was practically assured, although a Paris mathematician had demonstrated with ineluctable logic that it was impossible; as proved a member of the Institute a century earlier that birds couldn't fly. It was an illusion. Well, the Wrights flew, even if Langley did not—Langley, the genuine father of the aeroplane.

Living so long in France and Belgium, I had grown accustomed to the whirring of aerial motors, a sound not unlike that of a motor-boat or the buzzing of a sawmill. I became accustomed to this drone above the housetops, and since my return to America I have often wondered why in the land where the aeroplane first flew, so little public interest was manifested. To be sure, there are aero clubs, but they never fly where the interest of the greater public can be intrigued. Either there is a hectic excitement over some record broken or else the aviator sulks in his tent. Is the money devil at the bottom of the trouble? Sport for sport's sake, like art for art's sake,is rarely encountered. The government has taken up flying, but that is for pragmatic purposes. The aeroplane as a weapon of defence, not the aeroplane as a new and agreeable pleasure. We are not a disinterested nation; even symphony concerts and opera and the salvation of souls are commercial propositions. Else would our skies be darkened by flying machines instead of smoke, and our churches thronged with aviators.

Walking on the famous and fatiguing Boardwalk of Atlantic City I suddenly heard a familiar buzzing in the air and looked up. There it was, a big flying boat like a prehistoric dragon-fly, speeding from the Inlet down to the million-dollar pier. Presently there were two of them flying, and I felt as if I were in a civilised land. On the trolleys were signs: "See the Flying Boats at the Inlet!" I did, the very next morning. I had no notion of being a passenger. I was not tempted by the thought. But as Satan finds work for idle hands, I lounged down the beach to the Kendrick biplane, and stared my full at its slender proportions. A young man in a bathing-suit explained to me the technique of flying, and insinuated that hundreds and hundreds had flown during the season without accident. Afternoon saw me again on the sands, an excited witness of a flight; excited because I stood behind the motor when it was started for a preliminary tryout—"tuning up" is the slang phrase ofthe profession—and the cyclonic gale blew my hat away, loosened my collar, and made my teeth chatter.

Such a tornadic roar! I firmly resolved that never would I trust myself in such a devil's contrivance. Why, it was actually riding the whirlwind—and, perhaps, reaping a watery grave. What else but that? On a blast of air you sail aloft and along. When the air ceases you drop (less than forty-five miles an hour). And this in a flimsy box kite. Never for me! Not to-day, baker, call to-morrow with a crusty cottage! as we used to say in dear old "Lunnon" years ago. Nevertheless, the poison was in my veins; cunningly it began to work. I saw a passenger, a fat man, weighing two hundred and four pounds—I asked for the figures—trussed up like a calf in the arms of a slight, muscular youth, who carried him a limp burden and deposited him on a seat in the prow of the boat. I turned my head away. I am not easily stirred—having reported musical and theatrical happenings for a quarter of a century—but the sight of that stout male, a man and a brother (I didn't know him from Adam), evoked a chord of pity in my breast. I felt that I would never set eyes again on this prospective food for fishes. I quickly left the spot and returned to my hotel, determined to say, "Retro me, Sathanas!" if that personage should happen to show me his hoofs, horns, and hide.

But he did not. The devil is a subtle beast. He had simply set jangling the wires of suggestion, and my nerves accomplished the rest. One morning, a few days later, I awoke parched with desire. I drank much strong tea to steady me and smoked unremittingly. Again, during the early afternoon, I found myself up the beach. "My feet take hold on hell," I said to myself, but it was only hot sand. I teased myself with speculations as to whether the game was worth the candle—yes, I had got that far, traversing a vast mental territory between the No-Sayer and the Yes-Sayer. I was doomed, and I knew it when I began to circle about the machine.

Courteously the bonny youth explained matters. It was a Glenn H. Curtiss hydro-aeroplane, furnished with one of the new Curtiss engines of ninety horse-power, capable of flying seventy to ninety miles an hour, of lifting four hundred pounds, and weighing in all about a ton. Was it safe? Were the taut, skinny piano wires that manipulated the steering-gear and the plane durable? Didn't they ever snap? Of course they were durable, and, of course, they occasionally snapped. What then? Why, you drop, in spiral fashion—volplane—charming vocable! But if the engine?—same thing. You would come to earth, rather water, as naturally as a child takes the breast. Nothing to fear.

Young Beryl Kendrick is an Atlantic Cityproduct—he was a professional swimmer and life-guard—and will look after you. The price is fifteen dollars; formerly twenty-five dollars, but competition, which is said to be the life of trade, had operated in favour of the public. Rather emotionally I bade my man good day, promising to return for a flight the next morning, a promise I certainly did not mean to keep. This stupendous announcement he received coolly. Flying to him was a quotidian banality.

And then I noticed that the blazing sun had become darkened. Was it an eclipse, or were some horrid, monstrous shapes like the supposititious spindles spoken of by Langley devouring the light of our parent planet? No, it was the chamber of my skull that was full of shadows. The obsession was complete. I would go up, but I must suffer terribly in the interim.

Why should I fly and pay fifteen good shekels for the unwelcome privilege? I computed the cost of various beverages, and as a consoling thought recalled Mark Twain's story of the Western editor who, missing from his accustomed haunts, was later found serenely drunk, passionately reading to a group of miners from a table his lantern-illuminated speech, in which he denounced the cruel raw waste of grain in the making of bread when so many honest men were starving for whisky. Yet did I feel that I would not begrudge my hard-earned royalties (I'm not a best-seller), and thus tormentedbetween the devil of cowardice and the deep sea of curiosity I retired and dreamed all night of fighting strange birds that attacked me in an aeroplane.

I shan't weary you with the further analysis of my soul-states during this tempestuous period. I ate a light breakfast, swallowed much tea. Then I resolutely went in company with a friend, and we boarded an Inlet car. I had the day previous resorted to a major expedient of cowards. I had said, so as to bolster up my fluttering resolution, that I was going to fly; an expedient that seldom misses, for I should never have been able to face the chief clerk, the head waiter, or the proprietor at the hotel if I failed to keep my promise.

"Boaster! Swaggerer!" I muttered to myself en route. "Now are you satisfied? Thou tremblest, carcass! Thou wouldst tremble much more if thou knewest whither I shall soon lead thee!" I quoted Turenne, and I was beginning to babble something about Icarus—or was it Phæton, or Simon Magus?—brought to earth in the Colosseum by a prayer from the lips of Saint Peter—when we arrived. How I hated the corner where we alighted. It seemed mean and dingy and sinister in the dazzling sunlight—a red-hot Saturday, September 11, 1915, and the hour was 10.30A. M.A condemned criminal could not have noted more clearly every detail of the life he was about to quit. We ploughed through thesand. We reached the scaffold—at least it looked like one to me. "Hello, here's a church. Let's go in," I felt like exclaiming in sheer desperation, remembering Dickens and Mr. Wemmick. I would have, such was my blue funk, quoted Holy Scripture to the sandlopers, but I hadn't the chance.

I asked my friend, and my voice sounded steady enough, whether the wind and weather seemed propitious for flying. Never better was the reply, and my heart went down to my boots. I really think I should have escaped if a stout man with a piratical moustache hadn't approached me and asked: "Going up to-day?" I marvelled at his calmness, and wished for his instant dissolution, but I gave an affirmative shake of the head. Cornered at last! Handing my watch, hat, and wallet to my friend, I coldly awaited the final preparations. I had forgotten my ear protector, but cotton-wool would answer the purpose of making me partially deaf to the clangorous vibration of the propeller blades—which resemble in a magnified shape the innocent air-fans of offices and cafés. I essayed one more joke—true gallows humour—before I was led like a lamb (a tough one) to the slaughter. I asked an attendant to whom I had paid the official fee if my widows would be refunded the money in case of accident; but this antique and tasteless witticism was indifferently received, as it deserved. Finally the young man gave me a raincoat,grabbed me around the waist, and bidding me clasp his neck he carried me out into shallow water and sat me beside the air-pilot, who looked like a mere lad in his bathing-clothes. My hand must have been trembling (ah, that old piano hand), for he inquiringly eyed me. The motor was screaming as we flew through the water toward the Inlet. I hadn't courage of mind to make a farewell signal to my companion. Too late, we're off! I thought, and at once my trepidation vanished.

I had for some unknown reason, possibly because of absolute despair, suffered a rich sea-change. We churned the waves. I saw tiny sails studding the deep blue. Men fished from the shore. As we neared the Inlet, where a shambling wooden hotel stands on the sandy point, the sound of the motor grew intenser. We began to lift, not all at once, but gradually. Suddenly her nose poked skyward, and the boat climbed the air with an ease that was astonishing. No shock. No jerkiness. We simply glided aloft as if the sky were our native heath—you will pardon the Hibernicism—and as if determined to pay a visit to the round blazing sun bathing naked in the brilliant blue. And with the mounting ascent I became unconscious of my corporeal vesture. I had become pure spirit. I feared nothing. The legend of angels became a certainty. I was on the way to the Fourth Dimensional vista. I recalled Poincaré's suggestion thatthere is no such thing as matter; only holes in the ether. Nature embracing a vacuum instead of abhorring it. A Swiss cheese universe. Joseph Conrad has said "Man on earth is an unforeseen accident which does not stand close investigation." But man in the air? Man is destined to wings. Was I not proving it? Flying is the sport of gods, and should be of humans now that the motor-car is become slightly "promiscuous."

The Inlet and thoroughfare at my feet were a network of silvery ribbons. The heat was terrific, the glare almost unbearable. But I no longer sneezed. Aviation solves the hay-fever problem. The wind forced me to clench my teeth. We were hurled along at seventy miles an hour, and up several thousand feet, yet below the land seemed near enough to touch. As we swung across the masts of yachts I wondered that we didn't graze them—so elusive was the crystal clearness of the atmosphere, a magic mirror that made the remote contiguous. The mast of the sunken schooner hard by the sand-bar looked like a lead-pencil one could grasp and write a message to Mars.

Hello! I was become lyrical. It is inescapable up in the air. The blood seethes. Ecstasy sets in; the kinetic ecstasy of a spinning-top. I gazed at the pilot. He twisted his wheel nonchalantly as if in an earthly automobile. I looked over the sides of the cedar boat and was not giddy, for I had lived years at the top of an apartment-house,ten stories high, from which I daily viewed policemen killing time on the sidewalks; besides, I have strong eyes and the stomach of a drover. Therefore, no giddiness, no nausea. Only exaltation as we swooped down to lower levels. Atlantic City, bizarre, yet meaningless, outrageously planned and executed, stretched its ugly shape beneath us; the most striking objects were the exotic hyphenated hotel, with its Asiatic monoliths and dome, and its vast, grandiose neighbour, a mound of concrete, the biggest hotel in the world. The piers were salient silhouettes. A checker-board seemed the city, which modulated into a tremendous arabesque of ocean and sky. I preferred to stare seaward. The absorbent cotton in my ears was transformed into gun-cotton, so explosive the insistent drumming of the motor-engine. Otherwise, we flew on even keel, only an occasional dip and a sidewise swing reminding me that I wasn't footing the ordinary highway. The initial intoxication began to wear off, but not the sense of freedom, a glorious freedom; truly, mankind will not be free till all fly.

Alas! though we become winged we remain mortal. We may shed our cumbersome pedestrian habits, but we take up in the air with us our petty souls. I found myself indulging in very trite thoughts. What a pity that war should be the first to degrade this delightful and stimulating sport! Worse followed. Whycouldn't I own a machine? Base envy, you see. The socialistic leaven had begun to work. No use; we shall remain human even in heaven or hell.

I have been asked to describe the sensation of flying. I can't. It seems so easy, so natural. If you have ever dreamed of flying, I can only say that your dream will be realised in an aeroplane. Dreams do come true sometimes. (Curiously enough, I've not dreamed of flying since.) But as there is an end even to the most tedious story, so mine must finish.

Suddenly the sound of the engine ceased. The silence was thrilling, almost painful. And then in huge circles, as if we were descending the curves of an invisible corkscrew, we came down, the bow of the flying boat pointing at an angle of forty-five degrees. Still no dizziness, only a sense of regret that the trip was so soon over. It had endured an eternity, but occupied precisely twenty-one minutes.

We reached the water and settled on the foam like a feather. Then we churned toward the beach; again I was carried, this time on to solid land, where I had ridiculous trouble in getting the cotton from my harassed eardrums. Perhaps my hands were unsteady, but if they were, my feet were not.

I reached the Inlet via the Boardwalk, making record time, and drew the first happy sigh in a week as I sat down, lighted a cigar, and twiddled my fingers at a waiter. Even if Ihad enjoyed a new pleasure I didn't propose to give up the old ones. Then my nerves! And when I meet Gabriele d'Annunzio I can look him in the eye. He flew over Trieste, but I flew over my fears—a moral as well as a physical victory for a timid conservative.

(From the editorial page of the New YorkSun, December 31, 1916)

It is a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead that they may be loosed from their sins; and it is as holy a prayer that begs from the god of chance his pity for the living. Aye! it is those who are about to live, not to die, that we should salute. Life is the eternal slayer; death is but the final punctuation of the vital paragraph. Life is also the betrayer. A cosmical conspiracy of deception encircles us. We call it Maya, and flatter our finite sense of humour that we are no longer entrapped by the shining appearance of things when we say aloud: Stay, thou art so subtle that we know you for what you are—the profoundest instinct of life: its cruel delight in pretending to be what it is not. We are now, all of us who think that we think, newly born Fausts with eyes unbandaged of the supreme blinders, Time and Space. Nature clothes the skeleton in a motley suit of flesh, but our supersharpened ears overhear the rattling of the bones. We are become so wise that love itself is no longer a sentiment, only a sensation; religionis first cousin to voluptuousness; and if we are so minded we may jig to the tune of the stars up the dazzling staircase, and sneer at the cloud-gates of the infinite inane. Naught succeeds like negation, and we swear that in the house of the undertaker it is impolite to speak of shrouds. We are nothing if not determinists. And we believe that the devil deserves the hindmost.

We live in order to forget life. For our delicate machinery of apperception there is no longer right or wrong; vice and virtue are the acid and alkali of existence. And as too much acid deranges the stomach, so vice corrodes the soul, and thus we are virtuous by compulsion. Yet we know that evil serves its purpose in the vast chemistry of being, and if banished the consequences might not be for universal good; other evils would follow in the train of a too comprehensive mitigation, and our end a stale swamp of vain virtues. Resist not evil! Which may mean the reverse of what it seems to preach. The master modern immoralist has said: Embrace evil! that we may be over and done with it. Toys are our ideals; glory, goodness, wealth, health, happiness; all toys except health; health of the body, of the soul. And the first shall be last.

The human soul in health? But there is no spiritual health. The mystic, Doctor Tauler, has said: "God does not reside in a vigorous body"; sinister; nevertheless, equitable. Thedolorous certitude that the most radiant of existences ends in the defeat of disease and death; that happiness is relative, a word empty of meaning in the light of experience, and non-existent as an absolute; that the only divine oasis in our feverish activities is sleep; sleep the prelude to the profound and eternal silence—why then this gabble about soul-states and the peace that passeth all understanding? Simply because the red corpuscles that rule our destinies are, when dynamic, mighty breeders of hope; if the powers and principalities of darkness prevail, our guardian angels, the phagocytes, are dominated by the leucocytes. Gods and devils, Ormuzd and Ahriman, and other phantasms of the sky, may all be put on a microscopic slide and their struggles noted. And the evil ones are ever victors in the diabolical game. No need to insist on it. In the heart of mankind there is a tiny shrine with its burning taper; the idol is Self; the propitiatory light is for subliminal foes. Alas! in vain. We succumb, and in our weakness we sink into the grave. If only we were sure of the River Styx afterward we should pay the ferry-tax with joy. Better Hades than the poppy of oblivion. "Ready to be anything in the ecstasy of being ever," as Sir Thomas Browne sagely remarks.

The pious and worthy Doctor Jeremy Taylor, who built cathedral-like structures of English prose to the greater glory of God and for theedification of ambitious rhetoricians, has dwelt upon the efficacy of prayer in a singularly luminous passage: "Holy prayer procures the ministry and services of angels. It rescinds the decrees of God. It cures sickness and obtains pardon. It arrests the sun in its course and stays the wheels of the chariot of the moon. It rules over all God's creatures and opens and shuts the storehouses of rain. It unlocks the cabinet of the womb and quenches the violence of fire. It stops the mouths of lions and reconciles our sufferance and weak faculties with the violence of torment and sharpness of persecution. It pleases God and supplies all our needs. But prayer that can do this much for us can do nothing at all without holiness, for God heareth not sinners, but if any man be a worshipper of God and doth His will, him He heareth."

It should not be forgotten that Taylor, perhaps the greatest English prose-master save John Milton, was a stickler for good works as well as faith. He was considered almost heterodox because of his violence of speech when the subject of death-bed repentance became a topic of discussion; indeed, his bishop remonstrated with him because of his stiff-necked opinions. To joust through life as at a pleasure tournament and when the dews of death dampen the forehead to call on God in your extremity seemed to this eloquent divine an act of slinking cowardice. Far better face the evil one in a defiant spirit than knock foradmittance at the back door of paradise and try to sneak by the winged policeman into a vulgar bliss: unwon, unhoped for, undeserved. Therefore the rather startling statement, "God heareth not sinners," read in the light of Bishop Taylor's fervent conception of man's duty, hath its justification.

But this atmosphere of proverbial commonplaces and "inspissated gloom" should not be long maintained when the coursers of the sun are plunging southward in the new year; when the Huntsman is up at Oyster Bay and "they are already past their first sleep in Persia." What a bold and adventurous piece of nature is man; yet how he stares at life as a frowning entertainment. Why must we "act our antipodes" when "all Africa and her prodigies are in us"? Ergo, let us be cheerful. God is with the world. Let us pray that during the ensuing year no rust shall colour our soul into a dingy red. Let us pray for the living that they may be loosed from their politics and see life steadily and whole.

Let us pray that we may not take it on ourselves to feel holier than our neighbours. Let us pray that we be not cursed with the itching desire to reform our fellows, for the way of the reformer is hard, and he always gets what he deserves: the contempt of his fellow men. He is usually a hypocrite. Let us pray that we are not struck by religious zeal; religious people are not always good people; good people arenot envious, jealous, penurious, censorious, or busybodies, or too much bound up in the prospect of the mote in their brother's eye and unmindful of the beam in their own. Furthermore, good people do not unveil with uncharitable joy the faults of women. Have faith. Have hope, and remember that charity is as great as chastity.

Let us pray for the misguided folk who, forgetful of Mother Church, her wisdom, her consolations, flock to the tents of lewd, itinerant, mumbo-jumbo howlers, that blaspheme the sacred name as they epileptically leap, shouting glory-kingdom-come and please settle at the captain's office.

Though they run on all fours and bark as hyenas, they shall not enter the city of the saints, being money-changers in the Temple, and tripe-sellers of souls. Better Tophet and its burning pitch than a wilderness of such apes of God. Some men and women of culture and social position indorse these sorry buffoons, the apology for their paradoxical conduct being any port in a storm; any degrading circus, so it be followed by a mock salvation. But salvation for whom? What deity cares for such foaming at the mouth, such fustian? Conversion is silent and comes from within, and not to the din of brass-bands and screaming hallelujahs. It takes all sorts of gods to make the cosmos, but why return to the antics and fetishes of our primate ancestors, the cave-dwellers?This squirming and panting and brief reform "true religion"? On the contrary it is a throwback to bestiality, to the vilest instincts. A "soul" that has to be saved by such means is a soul not worth the saving. To the discard with it, where, flaming in purgatorial fires, it may be refashioned for future reincarnation on some other planet.

Abuse of drink is to be deplored, but Prohibition is more enslaving than alcohol. Paganism in its most exotic forms is preferable to this prize-ring Christianity. One may be zealous without wallowing in debasing superstition. Again, let us pray for these imbeciles and for the charlatans who are blinding them. Neither arts and sciences nor politics and philosophies will save the soul. The azure route lies beyond the gates of ivory and the gates of horn.

Let us pray for our sisters, the suffragettes, who are still suffering from the injustice of Man, now some million of years. Let us pray that they be given the ballot to prove to them its utter futility as a cure-all. With it they shall be neither happier nor different. Once a woman, always a martyr. Let them not be deceived by illusive phrases. If they had not been oppressed they would to-day be "free"! Alas! free from their sex? Free from the burden of family? Free like men to carry on the rude labours of this ruder earth? To what purpose? To become second-rate men, whennature has endowed them with qualities that men vainly emulate, vainly seek to evoke their spirit in the arts and literature! Ages past woman should have attained that impossible goal, oppression or no; in fact, adversity has made man what he is—and woman, too. Pray, that she may not be tempted by the mirage into the desert, there to perish of thirst for the promised land. Nearly a century ago George Sand was preaching the equality of the sexes, and rightly enough. What has come of it? The vote? Political office? Professions, business opportunities? Yes, all these things, but not universal happiness. Woman's sphere—stale phrase!—is any one she hankers after; but let her not deceive herself. Her future will strangely resemble her past.

William Dean Howells was not wrong when he wrote: Woman has only her choice in self-sacrifice. And sometimes not even the choosing. Why? Why are eclipses? Why are some men prohibitionists? Why do hens cluck after laying eggs? Let us pray for warring women that their politically ambitious leaders may no longer dupe them with fallacious promises—surely a "pathetic fallacy." But, then, females rush in where fools fear to tread.

And lastly, beloved sisters and brothers, let us heartily pray that our imperial democracy (or is it a democratic empire?), our plutocratic republic (or should we say republican plutocracy?) may be kept from war; avoid"the drums and tramplings of three conquests." But by the Eternal Jehovah, God of battles, if we are forced to fight, then let us fight like patriotic Americans, and not gently coo, like pacifists and other sultry south winds. A billion for "preparedness," but not a penny for "pork," say we.

And by the same token let us pray that those thundering humbugs and parasites who call themselves labour leaders—the blind leading the blind—for ever vanish. Because of their contumacious acts and egregious bamboozling of their victims, because of their false promises of an earthly paradise and a golden age, they deserve the harshest condemnation.

Like certain Oriental discourses, our little Morality which began in the mosque has rambled not far from the tavern. Nevertheless, let us pray for the living as well as the dead. Oremus!

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