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 will definitely emerge and the new art of the singer be born. What marvellous effects might be achieved by skipping from octave to octave in the human voice! When will the obfusc pundits stop shouting for what Avery Hopwood calls "ascending and descending tetrarchs?"

But, some one will argue, with the passing of bel canto what will become of the operas of Mozart, Bellini, Rossini, and Donizetti? Who will sing them? Fear not, lover of the golden age of song, bel canto is not passing as swiftly as that. Singers will continue to be born into this world who are able to cope with the floridity of this music, for they are born, not made. Amelita Galli-Curci will have her successors, just as Adelina Patti had hers. Singers of this variety begin to sing naturally in their infancy, and they continue to sing, just sing. One touch of drama or emotion and their voices crack. Remember Nellie Melba's sad experience with Siegfried. The great Mario had scarcely studied singing (one authority says that he had taken a few lessons of Meyerbeer) when he made his début in Robert, le Diable, and there is no evidence that he studied very much afterwards. Melba, herself,

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 spent less than a year with Mme. Marchesi in preparation for her opera career. Mme. Galli-Curci asserts that she has had very little to do with professors, and I do not think that Mme. Tetrazzini spent her youth in mastering vocalizzi. As a matter of fact, she studied singing only six months. Adelina Patti told Dr. Hanslick that at the age of seven she had sung Una voce poco fà with the same embellishments which she employed later when she appeared in the opera in which the air occurs. No, these singers are as much freaks of nature as tortoise-shell cats and, like those rare felines, they are usually females of late, although such singers as Battistini and Bonci remind us that men once sang with as much agility as women. But naturally, when this type of singer finally becomes extinct, the operas which depend upon it will disappear likewise; for a cognate reason the works of Monteverde and Handel have dropped out of the repertory and the Greek tragedies and the Elizabethan interludes are no longer current on our stage. None of our actors understands the style of Chinese acting; consequently, it would be impossible to present a Chinese drama in our theatre. As Deirdre wails in Synge's great play: "It's a heartbreak to the wise that it's for a short space we have the same things only." We cannot, indeed, have everything. No one doubts that the

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 plays of Æschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles are great dramas, but to become personally cognizant of that fact today one is obliged to read them; the composers to whom I have just referred can also be admired in the closet. Even now, no more than two works of Rossini, the most popular composer of the early nineteenth century, are to be heard. What has become of Semiramide, La Cenerentola, and the others? There are no singers to sing them and so they have been dropped from the repertory without being missed. Can any of our young misses hum Di tanti palpiti? You know they cannot. I doubt if I could find two girls in New York, and I mean girls with a musical education, who could tell me in what opera the air belongs, and yet in the early nineteenth century this tune was as popular as Un bel di is today.

Coloratura singing has been called heartless, not altogether without reason. Nevertheless, at one time, its interpreters fired composers to their best efforts. That day has passed. That day passed seventy years ago. It may occur to you that something is wrong when singers of a certain type can only find the proper means to exploit their voices in works of the past, operas which are dead. It is to be noted that Nellie Melba and Amelita Galli-Curci are absolutely

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 unfitted to sing in music dramas even so early as those of Richard Wagner; Dukas, Strauss, and Stravinsky are utterly beyond them. Even Adelina Patti and Marcella Sembrich appeared in few, if any, new works of importance. They had no bearing on the march of musical history. Here, then, is an entirely paradoxical situation: a set of interpreters who apparently exist only for the purpose of delivering to us the art of the past. What would we think of a modern actor who could make no effect save in the tragedies of Corneille? Berlioz, one of the first to foresee the coming day, forewarned us in his Mémoires: "We shall always find a fair number of female singers, popular from their brilliant singing of brilliant trifles, and odious to the great masters because utterly incapable of properly interpreting them. They have voices, a certain knowledge of music, and flexible throats; they are lacking in soul, brain, and heart. Such women are regular monsters and all the more formidable to composers because they are often charming monsters. This explains the weakness of certain masters in writing falsely sentimental parts, which attract the public by their brilliancy. It also explains the number of degenerate works, the gradual degradation of style, the destruction of all sense of expression, the neglect of dramatic

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 properties, the contempt for the true, the grand, and the beautiful, and the cynicism and decrepitude of art in certain countries."

So, even if, as the ponderous criticasters are continually pointing out, the age of bel canto is really passing, there is no actual occasion for grief. All fashions in art pass and what is known as bel canto is just as much a fashion as the bombastic style of acting that prevailed in Victor Hugo's time or the "realistic" style of acting we prefer today. All interpretative art is based primarily on the material with which it deals and on contemporary public taste. Florid singing is a direct derivative of a certain school of opera and, as that school of opera is fading, more expressive methods of singing are coming to the fore. The very first principal of bel canto, an equalized scale, is a false one. With an equalized scale a singer can produce a perfectly ordered series of notes, a charming string of matched tonal pearls, but nothing more. It is worthy of attention that it is impossible to sing

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 Spanish or Negro folksongs with an equalized scale. Almost all folk-music, indeed, exacts a vocal method of its interpreter quite distinct from that demanded by the art-song.

We are aware at last that true beauty lies deeper than in the emission of perfect tones. Beauty lurks in truth and expressiveness. The new art of the singer should develop to the highest degree the significance of the text. Calvé once said that she did not become a real artist until she forgot that she had a beautiful voice and thought only of the proper expression the music demanded.

Of the old method of singing we may be sure of the persistence of only one quality in the late twentieth century, and that is style. The performance of any kind of music demands a knowledge of and a feeling for its style, but style is about the last thing that a singer ever studies. When, however, you find a singer who understands style, there you have an artist.

Style is the quality which endures long after the singer has lost the power to produce a pure tone or to contrive accurate phrasing, the quality that makes it possible for an artist to hold his place on the stage long after his voice has become partially defective or, indeed, has actually departed. It is a knowledge of style that ac-

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 counts for the long careers of Marcella Sembrich and Lilli Lehmann, or of Yvette Guilbert and Maggie Cline, for that matter. It is a knowledge of style that makes De Wolf Hopper a fine artist in his interpretation of the music of Sullivan and the words of Gilbert. Some artists, indeed, with barely a shred of voice, have managed to maintain their eminent positions on the stage for many years through a knowledge of style. I might mention in this connection Victor Maurel, Max Heinrich, Antonio Scotti, and Maurice Renaud.

A singer may be born with the ability to produce pure tone (I doubt if Mme. Melba learned much about tone production from her teachers), she may even phrase naturally, although this is more doubtful, but the acquirement of style is an arduous and tedious process and one which generally requires specialization. Style is elusive. A sensitive auditor, a good critic, will recognize it at once, but very few can define it with any exactitude. Nevertheless, it must be fairly obvious to the careful listener that Olive Frem-

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 stad is more at home in the music dramas of Gluck and Wagner than she is in Carmen and Tosca, and that Marcella Sembrich is happier when she is singing Zerlina (as a Mozart interpreter she has had no peer in the past three decades) than when she is singing Lakmé. Mme. Melba sings Lucia in excellent style, but she probably could not convince us that she knows how to sing a Brahms song. So far as I know she has never tried to do so. A recent example comes to mind in Maria Marco, the prima donna of. The Land of Joy company, who sings Spanish music with irresistible effect, but on one occasion when she attempted Vissi d'arte she was transformed immediately into a second-rate Italian singer. Even her gestures, ordinarily full of grace and meaning, had become conventionalized.

If this quality of style which, after all, only means an understanding of both the surface manner and underlying purpose of a composition and an ability to transmit this understanding across the footlights, is of such manifest importance in the field of art-music, it is doubly so in the field of popular music or the folksong. A foreigner

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 had best think twice before attempting to deliver a Swedish song, a Hungarian song, or a Polish song of a popular or folk nature. Strangers, customarily, do not meddle in such matters, although we have before us at the present time the interesting case of Ratan Devi. It is a question, however, whether Ratan Devi would be so much admired if her songs and their traditional manner of performance were more familiar to us.

On our music hall stage there are not more than ten singers who understand how to sing American popular songs, which, as I have said elsewhere, constitute America's best claim to a participation in the art of music. It is very difficult to sing these well. Tone and phrasing have nothing to do with the matter; it is all a question of style. Elsie Janis, a clever mimic, a delightful dancer, and possibly the most deservedly popular artist on our music hall stage, is not

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 a good interpreter of popular songs. In this department she cannot be compared with Bert Williams, Blanche Ring, Stella Mayhew, Al Jolson, May Irwin, Ethel Levey, Nora Bayes, Cecil Cunningham, Fannie Brice, or Marie Cahill. I have named nearly all of the good ones. The spirit, the conscious liberties taken with the scores, for the vaudeville singer must elaborate his own syncopations, as the singer of early opera embroidered on the score of the composer, are not accidents that just happen. To acquire them demands any amount of work and experience with audiences. None of the singers I have named is a novice. Nor will you find novices who are able to sing Schumann and Franz lieder, although they may be blessed with well-nigh perfect vocal organs.

Still the music critics, with a curious persistence, continue to adjudge a singer by the old formulz and standards: Has she an equalized scale? Has she taste in ornament? Does she overdo the use of portamento, messa di voce, and such devices? How is her shake? Etc., Etc. But how false, how ridiculous, this is! Fancy the result if new writers and composers were criticized for failing to conform to the old

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 laws. Creative artists always smash these ancient tablets and it does not seem to me that interpreters need be less progressive. Acting changes. Judged by the standards by which Edwin Booth was assessed, John Drew is no actor. But we have become aware at last that it is a different kind of acting. Acting has been flamboyant, extravagant, and intensely emotional, something quite different from real life. The present craze for counterfeiting the semblance of ordinary existence on the stage will also die out, for the theatre is not life and representing life on the boards, except in a conventionalized or decorative form, is not art. Our new actors, with our new playwrights, will develop a new and fantastic form of expression which will supersede the present fashion. Rubinstein certainly did not play the piano like Chopin. Presently, a virtuoso will appear who will refuse to play the piano at all and a new instrument will be invented without a tempered scale so that he may indulge in all the subtleties between half-tones which are denied to the pianist.

It is all very well to cry, Halt! and Who goes there? but you can't stop progress any more than you can stop the passing of time. The old technique of the singer breaks down before the new technique of the composer and the musician with

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 daring will go still further if the singer will but have the courage to follow. Would that some singer would have the complete courage to lead! But do not misunderstand me. The road to Parnassus is no shorter because it has been newly paved. Indeed, I believe it to be longer. Caffarelli studied six years before he made his début as "the greatest singer in the world," but Mary Garden is still studying, although she has been before the public for eighteen years. The new music drama, combining, as it does, principles from all the arts, is all-demanding of its interpreters. The new singer must learn how to move gracefully and awkwardly (Thaïs and Santuzza), how to make both fantastic and realistic gestures (Snegourotchka and Louise), always unconventional gestures, because conventions stamp the imitator. She must peer into every period, glance at every nation. Every nerve centre must be prepared to express any adumbration of plasticity. Many of the new operas, Carmen, La Dolores, Salome, Elektra, to name a few, call for interpretative dancing of the first order. Madama Butterfly and Lakmé demand a knowledge of national characteristics. Pelléas et Mélisande and Ariane et Barbe-Bleue exact absolutely distinct enunciation. Monna Vanna and Tristan und Isolde require acting of the highest poetic and imaginative range.

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 It is a question whether certain singers of our day have not solved these problems with greater success than that with which they are credited. Yvette Guilbert has announced publicly that she never had a teacher, that she would not trust her voice to a teacher. The enchanting Yvette practises a sound by herself until she is able to produce it; she repeats a phrase until she can deliver it without an interrupting breath, and is there a singer on our stage more expressive than Yvette Guilbert? She sings a little tenor, a little baritone, and a little bass. She can succeed almost invariably in making the effect she sets out to make. She is, indeed, a living rebuttal to the statement often made that unorthodox methods of singing ruin the voice. Ruin it for performances of Linda di Chamounix and La Sonnambula very possibly, but if young singers sit about saving their voices for these operas they are more than likely to die unheard. It is a fact that good singing in the old-fashioned sense will help nobody out in Elektra, Ariane et Barbe-Bleue, Pelléas et Mélisande, or The Nightingale. Cast Mme. Melba, Mme. Destinn, Mme. Sembrich, or Mme. Galli-Curci to sing in one of these lyric dramas and the result would be deplorable.

We have, I think, but a faint glimmering of what vocal expressiveness may become. Such torch-bearers as Mariette Mazarin and Feodor

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 Chaliapin have been procaciously excoriated by the critics. Until recently, Mary Garden, who of all artists on the lyric stage is the most nearly in touch with the singing of the future, has been regarded by those who sit in high places as a charlatan and a fraud. W. J. Henderson once called her the "Queen of Unsong." Well, perhaps she is, but she is certainly far better fitted to cope with the artistic problems of the modern music drama than such Queens of Song as Marcella Sembrich and Adelina Patti would be. It has occurred to me that Unsong may be the name of the new art.

April 18, 1918.

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The note-books of an artist always make interesting reading. These ideas, incidents, descriptions, these jottings down against the treachery of memory, which some day may fall into their proper places, often exhibit, when published naked, a more spontaneous grace than finished work. The later books of Arthur Symons are little more than note-books, fugitive impressions, shadows of ideas. Therein lies the secret of their charm. Samuel Butler's Note-Book, which has been published since his death, is a treasure house of thought and wisdom. One day it occurred to Havelock Ellis that he had collected more notes than he could ever conveniently find occasion to use, and he filled a book with them, Impressions and Comments, a delightfully stimulating volume, one of this author's best, brimming over with pictures and running commentary. Herein one may find discussions of Sir

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 Richard Burton, Romanesque architecture, vegetarianism and vivisection, the significance of the body, William Blake, Jacobean furniture, obscurity in style, Jules de Gaultier, crowd psychology, Bovarism, the symbolism of the apple, the Bayeux tapestry, flowers, the decline in the birth rate, and Granville Barker. Here is indeed a book which rewards any chance reader who flips open the pages. Picking it up for five minutes or an hour, I have never failed to discover enjoyment in it.

Recently, I came upon the following passage: "I have often noticed . . . that when an artist in design, whether line or colour or clay, takes up a pen and writes, he generally writes well, sometimes even superbly well. Again and again it has happened that a man who spent his life with a brush in his hand has beaten the best penmen at their own weapon. . . . It is hard indeed to think of any artist in design who has been a bad writer. The painter may never write, but when he writes, it would almost seem without an effort, he writes well. . . . And then, for contrast, think of that other art, which yet seems to be so much nearer to words; think of musicians!"

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Why is it that musicians cannot write? I asked myself, for it needed only a half-moment's reflection to convince me that Mr. Ellis was right, although he does not attempt to explain the phenomenon. . . . Wagner is the first musician-writer to come to mind, for whether he could or not, Wagner certainly did write. He wrote not only the texts for his lyric dramas, but also countless papers, manifestoes, explanations, arguments, etc., most of which have been carefully collected and which Mr. William Ashton Ellis has rendered to us in eight volumes of faithful, if not very distinguished, English prose. Several collections of letters and the posthumous Life make a formidable total. Indubitably, priceless facts, brilliant ideas, withal somewhat incoherently and contradictorily expressed, lie buried in this mass of matter. Biographers have found this material useful; music critics occasionally turn to it for information; others generally leave it alone. Wagner, indeed, was always at a disadvantage when he wrote in words. Even the plays rise to no inspired heights without the music. Compare the direct and moving music of the love scene in the second act of Tristan with the metaphysical sentiments which flow from the lips of the guilty pair. Wagner's prose works, with their equivo-

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 cations, their ponderous and opaque phraseology, their individual and very bad German, would seemingly resist translation, but Mr. Ellis wrestled with the task, accomplished it, and even emerged to praise Wagner's style, praise which has found no echo. The Life, of course, should have been a masterpiece; as a matter of fact, it is far from being a failure. Autobiography, even at its worst, is possibly the most enthralling form of literature. But compare the sparkling chapters of Benvenuto Cellini with the halting, obscure, and deliberately untruthful pages in Richard Wagner's account of his life and you will feel, somehow, that you have been cheated. And yet Wagner probably had more to tell than Cellini. The frank account of the Wesendonck affair, the full details of his ménage with the virgin king, a glowing narrative of his capture of Cosima von Bülow, in themselves would have supplied the material for a remarkable triptych in the manner of George Moore's Hail and Farewell, but Wagner could not put it down. He did not know how to write, and there was too much that he desired to conceal or gloss. James Huneker, Catulle Mendes, and a dozen others have done it better.

Gluck's preface to Alceste scarcely gives him claim to serious consideration as a writer. Mozart's letters, which are best perused in the vol-

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 ume of excerpts compiled by Friedrich Kerst, contain many passages of interest to the music student, but they cannot be regarded as literature. Their style, the translator assures us, is "careless, contradictory, and sprawling." Beethoven certainly knew nothing of literary art. Schubert and Weber remained ignorant of it. Poor Chopin knew enough to stick to music. Paul de Musset replied to George Sand's Elle et Lui with another roman à clef defending his brother, but when Lucrezia Floriani appeared, Chopin contented himself by answering it on the piano. Mendelssohn's prose, exposed to us in his numerous published letters, is as sentimental as his music, and not nearly so pretty.

Jean-Philippe Rameau, composer and inventor of the system of the "fundamental bass," wrote several books: Traite de l'harmonie reduite a ses principes naturels (Paris, 1722), Nouveau système de musique théorique (Paris, 1726), Génération harmonique (Paris, 1737), and Code de musique practique (Paris, 1760). I have not attempted to read these books, but J. E. Matthew says of them: "It must be admitted that the style of Rameau is greatly wanting in clearness, so that some resolution is called for in reading his works." Grétry's Mémoires, published

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 in Paris in 1797, make more amusing reading, but scarcely rank as literature.

Offenbach's account of his trip to America is the work of a fifth-rate journalistic hack, certainly not worthy of a man whose music has been compared to champagne. Saint-Saëns is ponderous enough in prose; his books remind me of the bassoon figure in the middle of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Gounod is insufferably sentimental. Anton Rubinstein was a great pianist and an indifferent composer, but his autobiography is even worse than his music. Rimsky-Korsakoff, in his Chronicle of My Musical Life, exhibits himself as utterly unskilled in the practice of writing; his book owes its position to the fact that he had something to write about. We see very little of the artist who created Carmen in the letters of Bizet. Alfred Bruneau, a composer of the second class, is a music critic of the third. Vincent d'Indy's César Franck is a scholarly piece of work which serves its purpose, but it is in no respect a literary masterpiece. It could be read only by a musician. What an opportunity Massenet missed in his Souvenirs! What a career the man had! The book, however, is noteworthy neither for revelations of character nor for inclusion of pertinent incident. It is written in very mediocre French; even the spelling is

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 bad. I recall Geraldine "Farar." Hugo Wolf, in 1884, and for the following three years, acted as music critic for the Vienna Salonblatt. Ernest Newman says, "He wrote singularly well," but the excerpts and summaries that he offers us in evidence of this prowess are not very convincing. If Wolf's skill as a song writer is not as great as Mr. Newman would have us believe (he places him above Schubert) it may be said without fear of contradiction that as a writer of prose he is little read even by musicians.

Cyril Scott is a facile composer of pretty music, the importance of which it would be a mistake to overestimate. Scott has also published five volumes of poetry and a volume of translations from Stefan George and Baudelaire. The titles of his books are: The Shadows of Silence and the Songs of Yesterday, The Grave of Eros and the Book of Mournful Melodies with Dreams from the East, The Voice of the Ancient, The Vales of Unity, and The Celestial Aftermath, A Springtide of the Heart, and Far-Away Songs. A. Eaglefield Hull, in his somewhat emotional book on Cyril Scott, devotes an entire chapter to this poetry, as he explains that Scott at times believes himself to be greater as poet than as composer. We learn via Mr. Hull that in The Garden of Soul-Sympathy the composer rhapsodizes "in soul-knit 'gladness,' and harmoni-

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 ous visions of wondrous colour move majestically over the ear." Um, perhaps. Here is an example of Mr. Scott's "poetry":

It may be noted that Mr. Scott is troubled with a mania for alliteration. Such other instances as "mournful melodies," "shadows of silence," "a far-off flute has faded," "dreamful daffodil," "ambient arms," "future fiends," dribble through his work. It is perhaps a coincidence that Mr. Scott's alphabetical position on the poetry shelf lies half-way between that of Laurence Hope and that of Ella Wheeler Wilcox.

In prose Mr. Scott has written a book called The Philosophy of Modernism. For a chap-

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 ter or two he presents some interesting ideas, though clothed in a style which in no sense could be described as literature. His essay on Percy Grainger is really significant. Then he maunders through an attack on the critics, which is neither clearly thought nor clearly expressed, containing such gems of opinion as this: "All the same, it is a noteworthy fact that the great spiritual geniuses and adepts of the world have never condemned and denounced their fellow-creatures or the works of their fellow-creatures: and to take one sublime instance—Jesus of Nazareth," etc., etc., etc. Cyril Scott is not one of the great composers and I would not have lingered so long over his case were it not for the fact that he offers one of the most typical examples of the musician as writer.

William Wallace, the composer of Villon and other tone-poems for orchestra, has written a book called The Threshold of Music which, I have been assured, is a good book, but, although it has been lying around my garret within easy reach for at least two years, I have never been able to read it. Edward MacDowell's lectures, delivered at Columbia University, collected in a volume entitled Critical and Historical Essays, might best be described by the convenient epithet piffle, pedantic piffle at that. It is only fair to

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 state that MacDowell himself was not responsible for their publication, and probably would have been violently opposed to it.

There are, however, certain notable exceptions to my theorem. Berlioz was a good writer. He might have emerged a famous figure if he had simply given us his Memoires, and his criticism is stylized and expert, sparkling with biting phrases and trenchant words. In A Travers Chants, Les Grotesques de la Musique, Les Soirées de l'Orchestre, his collected journalism in short, he wielded a delightfully nervous pen. His prose, indeed, is better on the whole than his music. Perhaps this is the explanation of his power in this direction. It is really a pity he turned to tone. Schumann, too, was far from being a bad writer, although he by no means stands in a class with Berlioz in this respect. Still his writing is simple and natural, radiating a certain happy enchantment. Occasionally, indeed, the man lights on a sublime phrase. Nevertheless, even his Träumerei is better than all

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 of the two volumes of his collected prose works. The indefatigable Liszt found time for many matters in his long life: love affairs, piano playing, composing, transcribing, pushing Wagner towards success, producing Berlioz's Benvenuto Cellini at Weimar, and even for the writing of a number of books. None of these can be considered a literary masterpiece, but the Life of Chopin contains passages of great charm. To James Huneker the most eloquent page describes "an evening in the Chaussée d'Antin, for it demonstrates the Hungarian's literary gifts and feeling for the right phrase. This description of Chopin's apartment 'invaded by surprise' has a hypnotizing effect on me. The very furnishings of the chamber seem vocal under Liszt's fanciful pen." Personally, I prefer the pages devoted to the polonaise. Liszt's book on the Gipsies, too, is engaging, although one is permitted to disagree with the facts.

And now we come down to a modern musician-writer, Claude-Achille Debussy. Curiously enough, this French composer was rather an adept with the pen. He had a penetrating sense of irony and he was not above epigram. In 1901 he became music critic for the Revue

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 Blanche. Two years later he held the same position on Gil Blas. In 1903 he went to London to write his impressions of Wagner's Tetralogy for this paper. Passages from his reviews have become bywords. Witness the following: "How insufferable these people in helmets and wild-beast skins become by the time the fourth evening comes round. Remember that at each and every appearance they are accompanied by their damned leit-motive. There are some who even sing it themselves. It is as if a harmless lunatic were to present you with his visiting card while he declaimed lyrically what was inscribed thereon." This was one of the earliest pricks in the weaknesses of the Wagner bubble. Here is more Debussy iconoclasm: he calls Gluck a "pedant," Bach "that worthy man," Beethoven "a deaf old man," Berlioz "a monster," César Franck "a Belgian," Massenet "our most notorious master." Of the songs of Schubert he says, "They are inoffensive; they have the odour of bureau drawers of provincial old maids, ends of faded ribbon, flowers for ever faded and dried, out of date photographs! Only they repeat the same effect for interminable stanzas and at the end of the third one wonders if one could not set to music our national Paul Delmet." "One stumbles on Mendelssohn" in Schumann's Faust; Grieg's music gives Debussy "the charming and

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 bizarre sensation of eating a pink bonbon stuffed with snow;" Saint-Saëns's Henry VIII is "a grand historical opera." All this is witty and some of it is sound. However, according to J. G. Prod'homme, Debussy did not write everything he signed. This critic ascribes an article entitled Effin Seuls! which appeared in 1915 in S.I.M. under Debussy's name, to a disciple, and he also informs us that the score for d'Annunzio's Martyre de Saint Sébastien was only finished on the day agreed upon by the collaboration of other disciples, very familiar with the Debussy manner.

On these four men any case for musicians as writers of prose must be rested. Berlioz, it must be admitted, stands the test. Schumann and Liszt as authors would be completely forgotten (are, indeed, more or less forgotten) were it not for their music. Debussy's criticisms have not even been collected in book form, although doubtless they will be.

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And now let us pass on to the painters. Mr. Ellis himself reminds us that "Leonardo, who was indeed great in everything, is among the few great writers of Italian prose. Blake was first and above all an artist in design, but at the best he had so magnificent a mastery of words that beside it all but the rare best of his work in design looks thin and artificial. Rossetti was drawing and painting all his life, and yet, as has now become clear, it is only in language, verse and prose alike, that he is a supreme master. Fromentin was a painter far his contemporaries, yet his paintings are now quite uninteresting, while the few books he wrote belong to great literature, to linger over with perpetual delight. Poetry seemed to play but a small part in the life of Michelangelo, yet his sonnets stand today by the side of his drawings and marbles. Rodin has all his life been passionately immersed in plastic art; he has never written and seldom talks; yet whenever his more intimate disciples, a Judith Cladel or a Paul Gsell, have set down the things he utters, they are found to be among the most vital, fascinating, and profound sayings in the world.

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 "Even a bad artist with the brush may be on the road to become a good artist with the pen. Euripides was not only a soldier, he had tried to be a painter before he became a supreme tragic dramatist, and to come down to modern times, Hazlitt and Thackeray, both fine artists with the pen, had first been poor artists with the brush. . . . The list of good artists and bad artists who have been masters of words, from Vasari and earlier onward, is long. One sets down at random the names of Reynolds, Northcote, Delacroix, Woolner, Carrière, Leighton, Gauguin, Beardsley, Du Maurier, Besnard, to which doubtless it might be easy to add a host of others."

Quite easy; that of Whistler, for example, of whom Max Beerbohm writes in Yet Again: "He was a born writer. He wrote, in his way, perfectly; and his way was his own, and the secret of it died with him. . . . His style never falters. The silhouette of no sentence is ever blurred. Every sentence is ringing with a clear vocal cadence. . . . Read any page of The Gentle Art of Making Enemies and you will hear a voice in it, and see a face in it, and see gestures in it. . . . There are in England, at this moment, a few people to whom prose appeals as an art; but none of them, I think, has yet done justice to Whistler's prose. None has taken it with

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 the seriousness it deserves. I am not surprised. When a man can express himself through two media, people tend to take him lightly in his use of the medium to which he devotes the lesser time and energy, even though he use that medium not less admirably than the other, and even though they themselves care about it more than they care about the other. . . . Had Rossetti not been primarily a poet the expert in painting would have acquired long ago his present penetration into the peculiar value of Rossetti's painting."

There can be no personal plaint in this essay, although Max Beerbohm himself is "a man who can express himself through two media," for no one, I dare say, has attempted to imply dissatisfaction in this case with either form of expression. Max's delicate and fantastic sense of caricature plays as happily through The Happy Hypocrite, A Christmas Garland, and Zuleika Dobson as it does through his drawings of the Rentrée of Mr. George Moore into Chelsea, Mr. Thomas Hardy composing a lyric, and Mr. Joseph Pennell thinking of the old 'un. He turns from one art to the other with equal facility. Like Blake and Rossetti he has made his two careers run parallel. Du Maurier, also, was sib to these. To be sure, he began to write late in life and after he had produced Peter Ibbetson

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 he devoted less attention to the social drawings on which he had founded so brilliant a career in Punch. Nevertheless, he illustrated his own novels, and who can think of Peter, of Trilby, of Svengali, without thinking of Du Maurier's drawings, so close was the intimacy between his two pens? Aubrey Beardsley, too, ran his twin talents side by side, although he gave himself more whole-heartedly to his drawing. Yet the fragment Under the Hill indicates a sure genius for a special kind of fantastic writing, as special in its way as his painting, and wholly analogous to it in spirit. Jacques Blanche since his youth has been both a prolific writer and a prolific painter. His fame as a painter has perhaps outdistanced his fame as a writer because of the celebrity of his models. He has painted very nearly every person of importance who has visited Paris during the past thirty years from George Moore to Nijinsky. Probably the best of his paintings are the self-portrait in the Uffizi at Florence and the picture of the artist Thaulow and his family which hangs in the Luxembourg Gallery at Paris. On the whole Blanche writes better than he draws; his essay on Degas is probably the best yet written. Wyndham Lewis, too, turns from canvas to copy-paper with infinite ease; so does Gordon Craig, while Santiago Rusi-

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 ñol, the Spaniard, divides his time between painting and writing plays.

Often, however, as Mr. Ellis has suggested was the case with Thackeray and Hazlitt, the bad painter takes to writing. Thomas Hardy, for example, began his career as an architect, an allied art, and he has used his knowledge of the technique of this art very concretely in his books. This author even went so far as to illustrate his

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 own Wessex Poems. George Moore was a painter in his youth, and it was while he was studying art in Paris that he imbibed much of the atmosphere that is so essential a part of his books. To this phase of his life we owe such works as The Confessions of a Young Man and Memoirs of My Dead Life, but could such a passage as the description of the trees in A Story-Teller's Holiday have been written by any one but a painter? I hardly think so. Holbrook Jackson tells us that Bernard Shaw as a boy never wanted to write. He wished to draw, and Michelangelo was his boyish ideal. Gautier had the intention of becoming a painter when he

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 first went to Paris. He entered the studio of Rioult for a period. "He had the painter's eye," writes Huneker, "the quick retentive vision, the colour sense, above all the sense of composition." The creator of Une Nuit de Cléopâtre was certainly a painter, and when Fokine arranged this picture-poem as a Russian ballet he had but to follow the suggestion of the painter-poet. Huysmans was a descendant of a long line of Dutch painters, one of whom, Cornelius Huysmans of Mechlin, has a certain fame among the lesser landscape artists of the great period. Huneker writes: "Joris-Karl Huysmans should have been a painter; his indubitable gift for form and colour were by some trick of circumstance transposed to literature." Remy de Gourmont called him an eye. His description of the carcass of a cow hanging outside a butcher shop is certainly the work of a painter: "As in a hot-house, a marvellous vegetation flourished in the carcass. Veins shot out on every side like the trails of bind-weed; dishevelled branch-work extended itself along the body, an efflorescence of entrails unfurled their violet-tinted corollas, and big clusters of fat stood out, a sharp white, against the red medley of quivering flesh." But it seems unnecessary to particularize: A Rebours, La Cathédrale, Là-Bas, all are painted

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 from cover to cover. Octave Mirbeau painted in his moments of leisure, and so great an artist as Claude Monet looked upon his brush-work with favour. He owned a large collection of pictures by Monet, Renoir, Cézanne, Pissarro, Van Gogh, Rodin, and others, which have been sold since his death. Examine again the description of the garden in Le Jardin des Supplices and you will discover how he turned his other talent to account. With some writers, indeed, the analogy between writing and painting becomes perfectly clear. It is so with Gautier and Huysmans. Beerbohm says of Whistler, "Yes, that painting and that writing are marvellously akin; and such differences as you will see in them are superficial merely." It is obvious, too, that Joseph Hergesheimer approaches his task from the point of view of a painter. He selects and describes exactly as an artist in design might select and describe. He turns to his palette for a touch of cobalt blue or yellow ochre exactly as a painter might turn to his palette. This characteristic of Hergesheimer is so marked that several sagacious reviewers have noted that Java Head and The Three Black Pennys are to all intents and purposes painted. The facts in the case are that Hergesheimer began his career as a painter, painted, indeed, for several years before he began to write at all.

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Inspiration, as it affects the artist, is a subject I do not approach without the proper amount of humility. Either it is something mystic, something entirely beyond human ken, something "ecstatic," as Arthur Machen would have it, or else it must be regarded as a ludicrously practical quality. In The Cream of the Jest, Mr. James Branch Cabell shows us with withering irony how a middle-aged, pudgy, greyish-haired, commonplace sort of man, whose conversation seemingly never rises above the most banal level, derives the inspiration for the most fantastic romance from his equally commonplace wife and the broken cover of a cold-cream jar. The mystery of the procedure is emphasized by the fact that The Cream of the Jest is sufficiently scandent, although in style, manner, and matter it is contradictory to a degree with which no satisfactory comparison comes readily to mind. Mr. Cabell, however, in his own way, possibly comes nearer to solving our present problem than any one else. For here, perhaps, we have our first glimmer of understanding. To put it simply, Mr. Cabell's Felix Kennaston depends on his wife, the cover of the cold-cream jar, and straggling, downright stupid conversation about the weather, for his inspiration. In Arthur Machen's. The Hill of

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 Dreams, the author-hero, Lucian Taylor, evolves a complete and mystic comprehension of all the manifestations of sex from the accidental embrace of a farm girl. The novelist, the painter, are thus reduced to models, however far-fetched and ridiculously inappropriate the models may appear to be in the light cast by the finished work. No doubt George Sand loved all her lovers, but somewhere in the back of her head lurked a realization that their ultimate purpose was to supply copy. Some one once asked Maurice Maeterlinck what had been his inspiration for the creation of Pelléas et Mélisande and his reply was, "I was writing a piece that suited my wife." Cecil Forsythe, in his book, Nationalism in Music, educes the interesting theory that a great sea-power never produces great musicians, but that authors and painters flourish under triumphant mercantile, social, and political régimes.

Painters and writers extract their material from the world. They must mingle with men, see and understand life, no matter how far removed from life their finished art may be. Art, it may be stated categorically, is certainly not a reproduction of nature, and yet without nature, or some human aspect of it, the painter and writer are helpless. Perhaps you have never seen a Monet hay-stack in a real field, but unless

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 such an object as a hay-stack existed, unless the sun had lighted that hay-stack, Monet would have chosen another subject. It is not essential or important that Leonardo's Monna Lisa should exactly reproduce the effect of the model, but if no woman had ever breathed in this world the picture never could have been painted. Machen detects his ideal quality of ecstasy raised to the highest degree in Homer, Rabelais, and Cervantes, all men of action and wide experience. He points out, indeed, that one of the principal reasons The Pickwick Papers is not as great as the Odyssey is because Dickens was brought up in Camden Town. It was not carelessly then that Remy de Gourmont called Huysmans an eye, and his dictum that whatever is deeply thought is well written is certainly just. Havelock Ellis adds that whatever is deeply observed is well said. The artist in design, he continues to point out, is by the very nature of his work compelled to observe deeply, precisely, beautifully. He is never able to revolve in a vacuum, or flounder in a morass, or run after a mirage. So, when he takes up his pen, by training, by acquired instinct, he still follows with the new instrument, deeply, precisely, beautifully, the same mystery of nature.

The musician, whose art is the most mystic, the most profound, the most "ecstatic" of any, sim-

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 ply because it deals with clang-tints and not with more definite symbols, is not, as Cecil Forsythe has shown us, inspired by great deeds, by political confusion, by mercantile progress, by social intercourse. War never inspires great music, and England and America have produced less good music than Finland and Scandinavia, not to speak of Bohemia and Italy! The great Beethoven wandered alone, and he wrote some of his finest music after he became stone-deaf. The musical artist, indeed, shut up in a garret, may derive his masterpiece through an orphic process of introspection. There is no need for him even to read; an illiterate composer is a possible figure. "The song, the fugue, the sonata have absolutely no analogues in the world of Nature," writes W. H. Hadow. "Their basis is psychological, not physical, and in them the artist is in direct touch with his idea, and presents it to us, as it were, first hand. Given sound as the plastic medium, Music asks nothing more: it creates its subjects by the spontaneous activity of the mind." And W. F. Apthorp remarks: "The bonds which hold Painting, Sculpture, and Poetry fast to Nature are far tougher and of more inexorable grip than any connection discoverable between Nature and Music. . . . We may safely assert

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 that, though a certain modicum of Realism, or Truth to Nature, is indispensable to the artistic status of Poetry, Painting, or Sculpture, Music can perfectly well do without it; also that such modicum of Realism—when present in Music—cannot be regarded as any true measure of her artistic status."

It may be regarded as a significant fact that the four composers whom I previously selected as types of the fairly successful musician-writer all resorted to this "modicum of realism" in their music. Every one of them was what is known as a literary composer. Every one of them wrote program music. Every one of them leaned on nature, books, and painting for his inspiration. Not only was Schumann's Carnaval and a great deal more of his piano music so inspired; at least two of his symphonies had a definite starting point somewhere outside music itself. Berlioz and Liszt are notorious cases. It is only necessary to recall the titles of Berlioz's symphonies, Fantastique, Romeo and Juliet, Harold in Italy, or of Liszt's tone-poems (a form which he invented), Les Préludes, Tasso, Mazeppa, etc., to realize that although music was the end to these men it was seldom the means. With Debussy

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 it was the same: l'Après midi d'un faune had its foundation in Mallarmé; La Mer, Nocturnes, Ibéria, in nature herself. It may be generally observed, indeed, that musicians who use the pen to write prose or poetry, usually go outside music itself to search for the inspiration for their music. This is as true of Richard Wagner, Cyril Scott, and Edward MacDowell as it is of Liszt and Berlioz.

But what about rhythm? What about the so-called musical quality in good literature? In The Critic as Artist, Oscar Wilde says: "Since the introduction of printing and the fatal development of the habit of reading amongst the middle and lower classes there has been a tendency to appeal more and more to the eye and less and less to the ear, which is really the sense which, from the standpoint of pure art, it should seek to please, and by whose canons of pleasure it should abide always. Even the work of Mr. Pater . . . is often far more like a piece of mosaic than a passage in music. We, in fact, have made writing a definite mode of composition and have located it as a form of design. The Greeks, upon the other hand, regarded writing simply as a means of chronicling. Their test was always the spoken word in its musical and rhetorical relation. The voice was the medium and the ear the critic. . . . When Milton could

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 no longer write he began to sing. Who could match the measures of Comus with the measures of Samson Agonistes or of Paradise Lost or Regained? When he became blind he composed as everybody should compose, with the voice purely. . . ."

This is all very well; perhaps the voice was once the medium of composition; perhaps the Greek musicians could compose in words as well as tone. We know very little about them. Nowadays, in Wilde's own phrase, "we have made writing a definite mode of composition and have located it as a form of design." There are certainly writers of today who make an especial effort to write prose which will read aloud well. I believe that Henry James dictated certain of his novels with this idea in mind. George Moore, too, has taken to dictating. But the rhythmical quality we note in writing is perhaps nearer to the rhythmical quality we note in painting than to that we note in music. Balance and a sense of proportion, light and shade, all these qualities are as instinctive to a writer as they are to a painter. He places a word, as the painter places an object or a point on his canvas, where it may catch the light and offer contrast to another word or phrase. Balance, light and shade, sense of proportion, are all part of the musician's jargon, too. Nevertheless, even if the rhythmi-

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 cal quality we note in music is identical with the rhythmical quality of prose or poetry, it must be remembered that the musician creates rhythm with pure tone, sound, whereas in any good prose or poetry sense and definite meaning must play their part. Most of us are unlike Mme. de Staël who delighted in the melody of verse, demanding nothing more. She would read a favourite specimen and declare, "That is what I call poetry! It is delicious, and so much the more so because it does not convey a single idea to me!"

Probably the best and truest reason, however, why musicians cannot juggle words is definitely a puritanic reason. Of all artists the musician is the only one who can express himself freely. In a casual paper, James Huneker once observed, "Because of its opportunities for the expansion of the soul music has ever attracted the strong free sons of earth. It is, par excellence, the art masculine. The profoundest truths, the most blasphemous ideas, may be incorporated within the walls of a symphony, and the police none the wiser." The painter even less than the writer can reproduce all that he really sees. Nor can the sculptor do more than the painter. These artists, then, find themselves free, unrestricted in the medium of words, because hitherto they have observed and felt deeply so much more than they could express on canvas or in marble. The mu-

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 sician, on the other hand, feels bound and tied when he is forced to express himself in words. He cannot say as much (nor can he say it as vaguely) as he can in his own music. If a law be passed as a pendent to the now celebrated Eighteenth Amendment (and very probably it will be), making it a criminal offence to mention vodka or absinthe or even beer in a book, or to paint a picture in which people may be seen to be drinking, the musician may still compose bacchanals and brindisi; he may be as abandonedly Dionysiac, as intoxicated and as intoxicating as he desires. Nobody is going to prohibit performances of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony. Nobody will arrest Vincent d'Indy for disrobing a tune in Istar. The cream of the jest is that our national anthem, The Star Spangled Banner, was originally a drinking song!

February 21, 1919.

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Beginning with the eighteenth century and extending down through our own time, heaven and hell have exerted a powerful sway over the imagination of the musician. It would appear, at first glance, that the most abstract of the arts could express to us more satisfactorily than poetry, painting, or sculpture the symbolism inherent in the names of these post-death kingdoms. Heaven suggests goodness, nobility, sublimity, glory, simple faith, aspiration, charity, brotherly love, and, in the minds of composers, perhaps because of the mistranslation of the names of obscure Hebrew instruments of which we have no pictorial conception, these qualities are best expressed concretely by means of harps and trumpets. Hell, on the other hand, which suggests vice, ugliness, deceit, and defeat, is generally associated with snarling bassoons and rattling drums. Curiously enough, for there can be nothing inherently wicked about music, it is with hell rather than heaven that composers gen-

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 erally have achieved better results; and the noblest music is not specifically concerned with paradise. The Symphony in C minor, of which it is unnecessary to name the composer, Schubert's Symphony in C major, which has only been associated with heaven through Schumann's adjectival comment, Or sai chi l'onore, and the final scene of Die Walküre were all no doubt inspired by God in the deepest religious sense, but the composers were making no attempt to picture to us the streets of pearl, the mighty chryselephantine throne, or the winged supernaturals who are said to play harps in the air. A real heaven in opera or tone-poem is quite likely to remind a musician of the key of C major, the tonic and the dominant, and the diatonic scale, whereas hell and the devil seem to insist on five or six sharps or flats, esoteric scales, and a daedal disregard for exoteric rhythms. The conclusion of the second act of Hänsel und Gretel furnishes an excellent typical example of what usually happens in music when the composer is concerned with heaven. Humperdinck here is satisfied, with the aid of transparencies, coloured lights, and statelily tripping angels bearing gilded palm leaves,

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 to transfigure and glorify a tune which would form an appropriate part of the service at a Protestant Sunday School and which dramatically is probably quite in keeping with the Protestant Sunday School ideas of the two babes in the forest. It may be said, however, with its unimaginative succession of tonic and dominant chords and plentiful arpeggios, to represent one of the weakest moments in the score. Arpeggios, by the way, are seemingly an essential accompaniment to anything heavenly. It is not alone Little Eva who expires to them; even Richard Strauss invokes their aid for his balefully banal heaven music in his tone-poem, Death and Transfiguration, an episode which sends some of us away from the concert hall fully determined never to do any good in this world for fear we may be consigned to listen to such vapid music all our immortal lives. Heaven, indeed, must be a dull place to inspire such saccharine chords in the composer of the acescent and biting Elektra. Again, in The Legend of Joseph, an angel steps our way to a tune which suggests that Strauss is not at his best when thinking of heaven. Nor is Mascagni who, in Iris, introduces us to a Japanese paradise, via a lotus-flower route, much more

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 successful. With the naïve simplicity of The Creation and for the thundering, God-fearing music of The Messiah I have more sympathy, and of all heavenly music I do not believe better exists than the Dance of the Angels in Wolf-Ferrari's Vita Nuova. There is a test for great art, and you may apply it equally to Paul Verlaine or to Shakespeare, in that it treats of the sublime with simplicity and of the simple with sublimity. This minuet, scored for harps, piano, and kettledrums, bringing to mind a divine fresco of pre-Raphaelite angels, of daisy-speckled green fields, of deep blue skies reflected in lakes of still deeper blue, circled by ilexes and cypresses, is indeed celestial in its simplicity, as poignant a simplicity as that of one of the poems of Sagesse. It suggests the simple faith of its composer and it begets faith in its listeners. There is gnosis in this music. Gluck, too, knew the secret; Gluck, above all others, knew the secret, but Gluck was inspired by the pagan heaven of the Greeks, a more æsthetic idealization than the heaven of the Christians. In all opera I cannot recall a more simple, a more touchingly serene page, than the music of the scene of the Elysian Fields in Orfeo. The first and unbelievably lovely dance

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 of the happy spirits in F major, "which," Vernon Lee assures us in one of the most mood-compelling of her essays, "seems, in its even flow, to carry the soul, upon some reedy, willowy stream, into the heart of the land of the happy dead," is immediately pursued by an exquisite flute melody to which, if we are not disturbed by the action on the stage (and it is often well to cover one's eyes) we may fancy the filmiest of sylphs floating lazily through the ether. The song of the Happy Shade enhances this mood of enchantment and even the entrance of Orpheus does not break the spell, which continues to hold us in its power until the descending curtain shuts from our ears the divine chorus which closes the scene. The singing of Christian angels can never rival that of this marvellous pagan choir. The preceding scene of Furies exhibits Gluck's talent for demoniacism. How persistently they scamper and riot! How tremendous is their marmorean and terrible No! This naïve, but substantial, tonal tapestry suggests Orcagna's fresco, The Triumph of Death, in the Campo Santo at Pisa much more definitely than Liszt's Todtentanz, which is intended as a musical transmutation of the painting.

In the music of Gluck we are assuredly near the heart of true beauty which, after all, may be

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 the real God, the actual heavenly kingdom. Ideas differ, however. In 1665, Fr. Arnoulx, Canon of the Cathedral of Riez in Provence, published at Rouen a book, now very rare, entitled Du paradis et de ses merveilles, où est amplement traicté de la félicité éternelle et de ses joyes. After describing the sights of heaven, he turns to the pleasures of the ear: "If the glory of the picture is all that one can desire, also the ear is charmed by melodious music, pleasant harmony, gentle murmurings, soft and beautiful voices. There is a director; there are singers and musicians in abundance; there are thousands of millions of beautiful voices which sing in harmony, observing very perfectly all the rules of music. The director is Jesus Christ; the singers are the angels, the blessed, happy angels. Of these there are three bands, and each of these bands, in turn, is divided into three choirs: the Cherubim, the Seraphim, and the Thrones sing soprano; the Dominations and the Principalities sing alto; the Powers and the Virtues sing tenor; the archangels and the angels in the lowest choirs sing bass; even the saints come to sing with these. Jesus Christ gives the key to all, and intones the motet, which is new. With this celestial music and so many melodious voices of different kinds there is yet, for the entire perfection of the scale, the sound of the harp, of the flute, of viols, of

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 the spinet, of the lute, and all other kinds of instruments which marvellously tickle the delicacy of our ears."

Music of hell is usually associated with his kaisership the devil. Once even, it is related, on the authority of a composer, the devil himself wrote a tune; this is Tartini's Devil's Trill Sonata which violinists often play to this day. M. Lalande, in his Voyage d'un François en Italie, tells the story, which he avers he had directly from Tartini, and Dr. Burney repeats it. Michael Kelly informs us, in an autobiography not entirely to be relied upon in other respects, that Nardini, a pupil of Tartini, assured him that the tale was correct in every detail. One night in the year 1713, it appears, Tartini dreamed that he had made a contract with the devil, who promised to be at his service on all occasions; indeed, in the dream, the musician's new servant anticipated all his wishes and fully satisfied his desires. Ultimately, the two became so familiar that Tartini presented the fiend with his violin in order to ascertain what kind of musician he was; when, to Tartini's astonishment, he heard the evil one play an air, so beautiful in itself and performed with such taste and skill that it surpassed all the music he had ever heard before in his life. Tartini awoke in a state of feverish excitement and delight, and seized his fiddle in the hope of

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 reproducing the music he had just heard, but the arch fiend had departed and his music with him! Nevertheless, Tartini sought pen and music-paper and immediately composed the sonata which bears the devil's name. It is the best of Tartini's works, but so far inferior has its composer declared it to be to the music which he heard in his dream that he said he would have smashed his instrument and abandoned the art for the remainder of his life could he have subsisted by any other means.

It was thoughtful of the devil to improvise his sonata in the style of the eighteenth century. What if it had occurred to him to dash off Leo Ornstein's Opus 31? Could Tartini have remembered the notes and set them down? I doubt it. As it is, we have Tartini's word for the fact that the music as performed was infinitely more extraordinary than his transcription of it. Memory is treacherous at best, and to remember a whole sonata, taking in at the same time the virtuosity of the devil and the glamour of his presence, which must have shared interest with his playing, must be adjudged a remarkable feat. Broad, sweeping, sensuous melodies, and rapid, dashing cascades of notes, to be played with devilish abandon, alternate in this music. If Tolstoy had been more familiar with musical literature he might have found this composition more to

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 his purpose than the harmless Kreutzer Sonata. In one section the leading notes are trilled and in the cadenza the violinist is offered an opportunity to trill to his heart's content: hence probably the title. The work is difficult and we are forced to the conclusion that the devil must have been an exceptionally fine fiddler.

Philip Hale assures us, as a matter of fact, that when the devil played the fiddle his bowing was so vigorous that the dancers kept on dancing until they died. Miss Jeannette d'Abadie saw Mrs. Martibalsarena dance with four frogs at the same time at a Sabbat personally conducted by Satan, who played in an amazingly wild fashion. His favourite instrument was the fiddle, but he occasionally performed on the bagpipe. The good monk Abraham à Sancta-Clara, according to Mr. Hale, once meditated on the devil's taste in musical instruments: "Does he prefer the harp? Surely not, for it was by the harp that he was driven from the body of Saul. A trumpet? No, for the brilliant tones of the trumpet have many times dispersed the enemies of the Lord. A tambourine? Ah, no, for Miriam, the sister of Aaron, after Pharaoh and his host were drowned in the Red Sea, took a tambourine in her hand and with all the women about her praised and thanked God. A fiddle? No, indeed, for with a fiddle an angel rejoiced

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 the heart of St. Francis. I do not wish to abuse the patience of the reader, and so I say that nothing is more agreeable to Satan for accompaniment to the dance than the ancient pagan lyre."

In 1858–59, Liszt composed two orchestral paraphrases of episodes from the Faust of Nicolaus Lenau, and in the second of these, The Dance in the Village Tavern, more commonly known as the Mephisto Waltz, the devil plays the violin, while Faust, in sensual excitement, prances away with a black-eyed peasant girl. John Sullivan Dwight, once a prominent Boston critic, held that this music was "positively devilish, simply diabolical . . . it shuts out every ray of light and heaven, from whence music sprang." Perhaps the spirit of ataraxy is in the air; at any rate, today we can listen to this piece without trembling.

Rubinstein's orchestral poem, Faust, seems to lack any reference to the devil, but in his opera. The Demon, which until recently, at least, has remained popular in Russia, he drew a full length portrait of the tempter. There are minor

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 glimpses of hell in Der Freischütz and Robert, le Diable; in Grisélidis, Massenet turned his attention to a bourgeois, boisterous, Gothic, gargoyle kind of devil, which he has limned with no little humour. The most important air of this amusing apparition is called Loin de sa femme! Another comedy devil is to be encountered in Tchaikovsky's charming opera, Vakoola, The Smith. Charles Martin Loeffler, the Alsatian composer who resides in Boston or thereabouts, has written The Devil's Villanelle, a tone-poem after Maurice Rollinat's Villanelle du Diable. The music follows the verse line by line, word by word, while the two refrains, Hell's a burning,

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 burning, burning, and The Devil, prowling, runs about, both have their themes. The word crapule suggests Aristide Bruant's celebrated ditty A la Villette (often sung inimitably by Yvette Guilbert) to Mr. Loeffler, and he quotes from it. To decorate the word magister he involves the Ça Ira and La Carmagnole in a contrapuntal fracas. Death plays the fiddle in Saint-Saëns's tone-poem, La Danse Macabre, while skeletons click bones and bound about. There is surely some devilry in this business. At least one American composer, Henry Hadley, has done his bit for the devil. His work is a tone-poem, Lucifer, after Vondel's five-act tragedy. The music purports to describe the war between darkness and the powers of light, until the defeated Lucifer is cast down into chaos. The Lucifer theme has been described as "sinister, foreboding." The work has been performed in New York and Boston, but I have not heard it.

It is the Faust legend, however, which has principally encouraged composers for considerably over a century to go to hell. Many of these operas, symphonies, and overtures have disappeared and only musical dictionaries and white-haired gatherers of statistics remind us that they once existed. Even much of the incidental music composed to be performed with Goethe's tragedy has fallen into oblivion. The very names of

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 Radziwell, Lindpaintner, Béaucourt, de Peelaert, Porphire-Désiré Hennebert, F. de Roda, Rietz, Henry Rowley Bishop, Louise Angélique Bertin, Heinrich Zoellner, Lickl, Karl Eberwein, Louis Schloesser, Eduard Lassen, and L. Gordigiani have faded away. We do remember Schumann, but who knows his Faust music, maugre Mr. Newman's earnest praise? Spohr's Faust, too, is forgotten, Spohr of whom W. H. Hadow once wrote, "His whole conception of the art is soft and voluptuous, his Heaven is a Garden of Atlantis, and even his Judgment Day is iridescent." Weber might have composed a Faust. When he was engaged to write an opera for London he was offered a choice between this subject and Oberon. He chose the latter. Beethoven, too, once contemplated the possibilities of the theme. Wagner's Eine Faustouvertüre is not performed as frequently as the prelude to Die Meistersinger, but there are probably few concert-goers who have not heard it. Felix Weingartner's incidental music for Goethe's play was performed at Weimar in 1908. More recently, a young Frenchwoman, Lili Boulanger, who died before she had achieved a style, set to music a scene from the second part of Goethe's Faust and called the result a cantata, but her devil is be-

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 decked with Wagnerian melodies and harmonies. Liszt's Faust Symphony is certainly with us both in spirit and flesh. The third movement is devoted to Mephistopheles. Ernest Newman observes that this "section is particularly ingenious. It consists, for the most part, of a kind of burlesque upon the subjects of Faust, which are here passed, as it were, through a continuous fire of irony and ridicule. This is a far more effective way of depicting 'the spirit of denial' than making him mouth a farrago of pantomime bombast, in the manner of Boito. The being who exists, for the purposes of drama, only in antagonism to Faust, whose main activity consists only in endeavouring to frustrate every good impulse in Faust's soul, is really best dealt with, in music, not as a positive individuality, but as the embodiment of a negation—a malicious, saturnine parody of all the good that has gone to the making of Faust. The Mephistopheles is not only a piece of diabolically clever music, but the best picture we have of a character that in the hands of the average musician becomes either stupid, or vulgar, or both. As we listen to Liszt's music, we feel that we really have the Mephistopheles of Goethe's drama." Mr. Apthorp remarks, "One may suspect the composer of taking 'Ich bin der Geist der stehts verneint' for the motto of this movement," and James Huneker tells us

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 that "in the Mephistopheles Liszt appears in his most characteristic pose—Abbé's robe tucked up, Pan's hoofs showing, and the air charged with cynical mockeries and travesties of sacred love and ideals (themes are topsy-turvied à la Berlioz)."

At the present day we often hear two Faust operas; occasionally, three. Boito, after his prologue in which Mefistofele challenges the heavenly hosts, ventures no nearer paradise than the classical Sabbath scene in which Faust meets Helena in a sort of Italianate duet. To me this is the unendurable episode of this lyric drama. The scene in which Mefistofele twirls the globe in his palm while his craven cohorts circle and chortle around him is extremely effective, but when Chaliapin appears as the spirit that denies it is a matter for doubt whether it is the Russian bass or Boito who makes the effect. Certainly. Marguerite's death in prison remains the best scene, musically speaking, in the drama. Berlioz, in his "dramatic legend," is nearest hell in the Song of the Flea, an excellent piece of sardonic ribaldry, although the ride, with its ghastly accentuated horse-hoofs beating up from the orchestra, is very wonderful. Ernest Newman thinks indeed, that Berlioz's devil is the only operatic Mephistopheles that carries conviction: "He never, even for a moment, suggests the in-

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 anely grotesque figure of the pantomime. Of malicious, saturnine devilry there is plenty in him; no one, except Liszt, could compete with Berlioz on this ground. But there is much more than this in the character. In such scenes as that on the banks of the Elbe, where he lulls Faust to sleep, there is a real suggestion of power, of dominion over ordinary things, that takes Mephistopheles out of the category of the merely theatrical and-puts him in that of the philosophical." Marguerite's glorification is a forgettable passage, just as Gounod's attempt at the translation of Marguerite is the weakest point in the score, but, as no one nowadays ever ventures to sit out an opera, it was perhaps clever of Gounod to place his heaven scene last so that only the ushers and stage-hands may hear it before they extinguish the lights in the theatre. Nevertheless, you will no doubt recall the episode, with its white-winged supernumeraries rising above the housetops to the accompaniment of arpeggios and a silly chant, not even the perfumed sanctity we have the right to demand of a modern French composer.

Faust, it seems to me, of all conceivable operatic subjects, cries out for collaborators. It is unfortunate that César Franck is dead because I think that the Belgian composer and Igor Stravinsky working together might have evolved

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 something extraordinary. For César Franck came nearer to expressing aspiration and vague longing in his mystic music than any other composer. It is not alone the Rédemption and the Béatitudes that shine in blessed light. The D minor Symphony is to me one of the finest examples of simple sublimity to be found in all music. This haunting reticulation of tones aspires and even reaches beyond aspiration. The terrible first movement warns us of the Judgment Day and then in melting human tones forgives us our sins. The allegretto is like a graceful dance of angels, the angels of Benozzo Gozzoli, clad in robes of mulberry and lilac sewn with threads of gold and silver, their halos effulgent in a blue light, itself impregnated with golden dust, while the hautboys and harps ravish our ears and the soaring violins give ample promise of the glory of the heavenly choirs. Santa Teresa would have loved this music, music mystic and beneficent at the same time, not the mysticism tinged with chypre and verveine and essence of bergamot which makes Debussy's music a powerful stimulant to jaded nerves. César Franck could have realized the simple purity of Marguerite and he would have carried her triumphantly, gloriously, magnificently, through vague Gothic arches of tone which would have burst the bound-

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 aries of any singing theatre and transported us to Amiens or Chartres.

But Papa Franck never could have managed the hell scenes of Faust. He would have made of Abaddon a truly epicene kingdom, frequented by bardashes and catamites. No, for hell we should turn to Stravinsky, and what a dashing, erratic, spontaneous, discordant devil we might expect from him! A devil in quintuple and sextuple rhythms, a devil decked cap-à-pie with triplets in sixteenths, and figurations after the worst manner of sheol, a delightful, insinuating, firefly, marvellous fellow of a fiend, with piccolos, flutes, clarinets, hautboys, bassoons, French horns, and celestas at his beck and call, a Zamiel with nerve-wracking glissandos on the violins and deep, passionate, long-bowed, mocking viola notes at his command, a Beelzebub with a shower of shuddering octaves and a flood of discordant tenths, an Apollyon who could sing bass and tenor and a little falsetto, in fact, a regular bing-bang-boom hell of a devil in the best Russian Ballet manner!

Now a Stravinsky devil played against a César Franck heaven would create a Faust warranted to keep the oldest subscriber to the Opera awake.

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 Even old Nietzsche, could he hear it, would be delighted with this nexus of mysticism and nervous energy, this combat of the life-force with the spirit of God!

November 18, 1918.

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In a recent periodical George Moore, indulging in an imaginary conversation with Edmund Gosse, discussed the advisability of rewriting Robinson Crusoe: "The first part of the story could not be improved, but the end is a sad spectacle for us men of letters—the uninspired trying to continue the work of the inspired." And Mr. Moore makes a statement which is all too true, that few read on in the book after Crusoe leaves the island. So it is on the island that he would have him write his memoirs, dying before Friday, "and some admirable pages might be written on the grief of the man Friday, intermingled with fears lest his kindred should return and eat him—Friday, not Crusoe; and Friday true to his evangelization, would bury Crusoe

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 with all the prayers he could remember. . . . Crusoe must not meet with sudden death, rather an accident among the cliffs that would allow him to continue his memoirs from time to time. I would have the last page of the manuscript relate Crusoe's anxiety for Friday, who he foresees will die of grief, and Friday's last act, the placing the manuscript hard by the grave, which would be necessary for the completion of the story, for it is the manuscript that explains to the captain of the next ship that visits the island the presence of the skeleton by the grave. The captain's reading the manuscript would have given Defoe an opportunity to evoke a new soul, the captain's. How the poor savage must have grieved for his saviour and master! 'Like a dog,' he mutters as he turns the last page."

While reading these lines my mind reverted to a conversation I once held with the sage of Forty-second Street, Oscar Hammerstein, relative to his next production of opera. Oscar's idea was that when he again presented opera he should lay as violent hands as seemed expedient on the published texts of composers, transposing, rearranging, adding, subtracting, in order that the entertainment might be made more brisk, more appetizing to the customers. He spoke with particular emphasis concerning Aida, in which the principal tenor air occurs a few moments after

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 the rise of the first curtain, an absurd situation for a tenor air in opera, as it is a convention for opera-goers not to put in an appearance until the second act is well begun. Celeste Aida, therefore, in Oscarian opera was to be sung some time during the second or third act. He also had under consideration a rearrangement of La Forza del Destino, which he acknowledged was full of pretty tunes but which was handicapped by a preposterous fable, and he reminded me that when he had produced Les Huguenots he had imported from his own Victoria Theatre of Varieties a wire walker who simply transported the public as he threaded his way back and forth on the taut steel during the scene laid in a meadow on the bank of the Seine, thereby diverting attention from the "dull music," how Mary Garden, inserted in the tenor rôle of Le Jongleur de Notre-Dame, had made that opera a desirable form of entertainment, and again, how Odette Valery, plus live vipers and boa constrictors, had almost succeeded in making Samson et Dalila endurable.

The idea allured me, and seemed, at first thought, novel. As opera is seldom regarded seriously by musicians, there is no reason why it should be so solemnly conducted. There are times at the Metropolitan Opera House when one expects to hear the gong of high mass sound or Professor William Lyon Phelps begin to lec-

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 ture on Browning. Reflecting in this manner, my enthusiasm mounted: surely no need to stop with Aida and La Forza del Destino.

The mere announcement, however, that operatic works of art were to be so tampered with would arouse the New York Times to such a condemnatory editorial that else only a threatened encroachment on Central Park could provoke, and yet, on second thought, I realized that this idea of Oscar Hammerstein's was not entirely new. He crystallized it into an advertisable slogan, gave it the power to create discussion, but he did not create it. Scarcely any work of art which requires interpretation, play, symphony, or violin concerto, is ever performed exactly as it was written, and I think it may be safely stated categorically that an opera never is.

Most conductors have found it expedient to modify orchestral masterpieces. I am inclined to believe that all of them have. Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven did not write for the modern orchestra, and when their music is performed under modern conditions doubtless some liberties should be taken with the text. As a matter of fact, it usually is. The weak orchestration of Chopin's piano concertos has been reinforced by many pens. If some one with courage does not inaugurate a similar mode of pro-

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 cedure with the Schumann Symphonies it may be predicted with certainty that they will drop out of the repertory. Schumann was an amateur at instrumentation; he heard these works on the piano. To those who rise in horror at this point to suggest that such meddling with the work of genius is sacrilegious I may be permitted to reply that any one who prefers to do so may always return to the original score. In case improvements are noted in the rearrangements probably fewer conductors will avail themselves of this privilege.

H. E. Krehbiel, an honest man with violent prejudices, wrote bitterly about one of the finest conductors we have had in New York for no other reason than that Mahler added a flute here or suppressed a kettledrum there. This one-sided battle, conducted with considerable din,

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 would have been ridiculous, even farcical, but for the sudden death of the besieged musician, which gave to the matter a tragic aspect, somewhat accentuated by an article which appeared in the New York Tribune on May 21, 1911. Reread in calmer days, this paper seems rather droll, but at the time of its appearance it almost broke up homes. Amusing, indeed, is Mr. Krehbiel's pompous description of the eupeptic auditors of the Philharmonic Society: "He (Mr. Mahler) never discovered that there were Philharmonic subscribers who had inherited not only their seats from their parents and grandparents, but also their appreciation of good music. He never knew, or if he knew he was never willing to acknowledge, that the Philharmonic audience would be as quick to resent an outrage on the musical classics as a corruption of the Bible or Shakespeare." This was an unfortunate comparison. Probably even Mr. Krehbiel himself has swallowed without loss of appetite Mr. Daly's corruptions (monstrous, they were, too), Mr. Booth's corruptions, Mme. Modjeska's corruptions, and Sir Henry Irving's corruptions. I would be willing, indeed, to lay an even bet that

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 no member of the Philharmonic Society has ever seen a Shakespeare play performed as written by Shakespeare. The dean gave Mr. Mahler credit for too little intelligence. The Bohemian Jew conductor probably was well aware of the fact that many of the grandparents of Philharmonic subscribers had assisted at the burning of witches and yet he would have been the last to advise the survival of this jolly custom. Striving to reawaken interest in music which had been heard so often, so badly performed, that it was received with apathy, he introduced careful alterations, perhaps not invariably well-advised, but never thoughtlessly, never for economic reasons, and never, I should be willing to swear, did he obscure a composer's intention. Rather he illuminated it. Permit me to continue to quote Mr. Krehbiel to show how far dull pedantry may exercise an ancillary function to blind obstinacy of opinion: "He did not know that he was doing it, or if he did he was willing wantonly to insult their intelligence and taste by such things as multiplying the voices in a Beethoven symphony (an additional kettledrum in the Pastoral, for instance), by cutting down the strings and doubling the flutes in Mozart's G minor, by fortifying the brass in Schubert's major until the sweet Vienna singer of nearly a century ago seemed a modern Malay running amuck, and

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text: The Works of Charles Dickens/Volume 1/Chapter 6


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 most monstrous of all his doings—starting the most poetical and introspective of Schumann's overtures—that to Manfred—with a cymbal clash like that which sets Mazeppa's horse on his wild gallop in Liszt's symphonic poem. And who can ever forget the treatment of the kettledrums which he demanded of his players?"

Mr. Krehbiel presents a highly flattering portrait of the lay members of the Philharmonic Society. I doubt if meddling with the classics, even when it is radical, causes these ladies and gentlemen as keen suffering as he imagines. At any rate, this procedure did not begin with Mahler, nor did it end with him, and I would like to wager that I could introduce salient modifications in such frequently performed and popular works as the overture to Oberon, Beethoven's Eighth Symphony, and Mozart's Jupiter without their being detected by more than seven or eight persons in an average Philharmonic audience (and this is putting the percentage considerably higher than seems justifiable), an audience which might include the lynx-eared dean himself who once, even with a program before him, levelled a half-column of abuse at a man named Prokofieff for having composed a piece which the aforesaid program plainly attributed to Vasilenko.

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 In one of the "golden periods" of opera no respect whatever was paid to the composer. When, for example, John Ebers was manager of the King's Theatre in London, the air, Voi che sapete, in The Marriage of Figaro, was sung variously, on different evenings, by the Countess, by Susanna, occasionally even by Cherubino, for whom it was written. It was the custom at this epoch for singers to do as they pleased by operas. When the great Mme. Pasta appeared in Coccia's Maria Stuarda "scarcely a single part in the piece escaped unchanged," writes Ebers, "so bent were the performers on introducing additions for the gratification of their amour propre." De Begnis chose Il Turco in Italia as the vehicle for his London début, but all the best parts of La Cenerentola were forced into it.

You may read, also, in historical tables and essays, which old gentlemen delight in preparing for us, of the character of the numerous operatic performances that took place in New York in the early nineteenth century, admittedly hodgepodges, airs from this and from that, with scenes transposed or omitted. We need only to recall Manuel Garcia's celebrated season at the Park Theatre in 1825, during which Il Barbiere was performed twenty-three times. Does any one imagine for a moment that Rossini's musical comedy was given as he wrote it? If any one

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 does, let him examine the records, where he also may discover astonishing details concerning the presentation of the other operas offered during this season, which derives its magnificence from the presence of the elder Garcia and the young Malibran in the company. Thereafter, as before, on through the Mapleson seasons at the Academy of Music, operas were produced with due regard for the caprices of prime donne, and the pocket-books of impresarii. The ignorance of the public was taken for granted. Emma Abbott interpolated the Lullaby from Erminie in The Mikado and Adelina Patti interpolated Home Sweet Home in any opera she happened to be singing. To this day you may hear Frieda Hempel sing Keep the home fires burning somewhere in The Daughter of the Regiment.

This reference to Mme. Hempel has reminded me that I cannot recall a single opera in the repertory of the Metropolitan Opera House which has not undergone some change or other, many of them very considerable, and almost all of them advantageous. However, I prefer to hear and see the church scene in Faust given, as it appears in the score, after the death of Valentin, rather than before, as it is sung in our theatre and almost everywhere else. Valentin's air, Dio possente, was written for an Italian performance of the opera in London; it is never sung in Paris,

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 but we hear it in New York, and, as the opera is performed here in French, Dio possente becomes Avant de quitter ces lieux. It was formerly the American custom, and a very good one too, to omit the ballet; that has been restored at our theatre, but one of Siebel's airs and Marguerite's spinning song are never heard. Gluck originally wrote Orfeo for a castrato and later arranged the part for a tenor. In the newer version prepared for the Paris Academie Royale de Musique, the principal singer, with the consent of Gluck, interpolated an air at the close of the first act, an air which, until recently, has been attributed to a contemporary composer named Bertoni, and has been held in disfavour. It is certainly not in keeping with the rest of the music of this lyric drama, but Tiersot has established the fact that Gluck transplanted it from one of his own early operas. However that may be, it still remains in disfavour. When Marie Delna sang Orfeo at the Metropolitan she substituted an air from Echo et Narcisse; Mrs. Homer's custom is to sing the grand air from Alceste, which has the disadvantage of releasing the trombones before their outburst in the furious scene of the second act. Fate played a considerable part in relation to modern perform-

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 ances of The Barber of Seville. The manuscript parts of the overture and a trio were lost before the work was published; for the first, an earlier overture of the composer serves; for the second, sopranos substitute, during the lesson scene, whatever air or airs suit their voices and appeal to their tastes. Patti and Sembrich, indeed, often gave little concerts at this point in the opera, always singing three or four songs, frequently, seven or eight. Lucia was originally regarded as a tenor opera; now we only think of it as an excuse for a coloratura soprano to debate with a flute. As a result, the last act, which belongs to Edgardo, is omitted, and the work is terminated with the mad scene. As our opera-goers object to arriving at the theatre at six-thirty or seven, it has become necessary to cut huge chunks out of the Wagner dramas. Sometimes we are introduced to the Norns in Götterdämmerung, sometimes to Waltraute, but seldom to both together. Mr. Bodanzky, always original in such matters, dropped Alberich. I attended his next performance of Parsifal, hoping to find that the rôle of Gurnemanz had disappeared. No such luck. When Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride was produced at the Metropolitan Opera House it was in a German version, prepared by Richard Strauss, who had even composed the trio with which the opera ended.

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 But the most striking cases of rewriting at present on view at the Metropolitan Opera House are Boris Godunoff, Oberon, and Le Coq d'Or.

Besides writing fifteen operas of his own, Rimsky-Korsakoff orchestrated The Stone Guest, left unfinished by the death of Dargomijski, and with the assistance of Glazunoff he completed Prince Igor. Another friend of Rimsky

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 Korsakoff, Musorgsky, left La Khovantchina incomplete at his death. Rimsky orchestrated this opera, composing the last pages himself. He made several excisions, which later were restored in a version prepared by Stravinsky and Ravel. In relation to this episode Mr. Calvocoressi writes, "We can see, thanks to the work of Ravel and Stravinsky, that the score (published by Rimsky-Korsakoff in 1883) was little better than a libel. Rimsky-Korsakoff

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 erred in all good faith. . . . Musorgsky believed anything resembling formalism to be fatal to art; he was as convinced that Rimsky-Korsakoff's idioms and methods were superfluously stiff and conventional as Rimsky-Korsakoff was convinced that Boris Godunoff and La Khovantchina were uncouth and crude."

Rimsky-Korsakoff called this doing his duty; his intentions were honourable. He also considered it his duty to rewrite Boris Godunoff, and since that work has been performed extensively in the singing theatres of Europe and America a constant hum of excited discussion regarding this version of the opera has simmered in the critical kettle. In a conversation with V. Yastrebtsieff, as reported in the Moscow weekly, Musica, June 22, 1903, Rimsky-Korsakoff said: "I originally intended writing a purely critical article on the merits and demerits of Boris Godunoff, but a new revised pianoforte score and a new orchestral score will be a more eloquent testimony to future generations of my views of this work, not only as a whole, but as regards the details of every bar; the more so, because in this transcription of the opera for orchestra, personality is not concerned, and I am only doing what Musorgsky himself ought to have done, but which he did not understand how to carry out, simply because of his lack of technique as a com-

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 poser. I maintain that in my intention to reharmonize and reorchestrate this great opera of Musorgsky there is certainly nothing for which I can be blamed; in any case I impute no sins to myself. . . . Only when I have revised the whole of Musorgsky's works shall I begin to be at peace and feel that my conscience is clear; for then I shall have done all that can and ought to be done for his compositions and his memory."

Boris was apparently successfully produced at. The Mariinski Theatre at St. Petersburg on January 24 (O. S.) 1874, but the opera did not retain its place in the repertory, although it was sporadically revived, and it was not produced outside of Russia. In 1896, Rimsky-Korsakoff's version was published, and has held the stage ever since.

Of this version, Montagu-Nathan admits that Rimsky seems to have "toned down a good many musical features which would have won acceptance today as having been extraordinarily prophetic." V. V. Stasoff, the Russian music critic, was opposed to the alterations. "While admitting Musorgsky's technical limitations," writes Rosa Newmarch, "and his tendency to be slovenly in workmanship, he (Stasoff) thought it might be better for the world to see this original and inspired composer with all his faults ruthlessly exposed to view than clothed in his right

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 mind with the assistance of Rimsky-Korsakoff. . . . We who loved Musorgsky's music in spite of its apparent dishevelment may not unnaturally resent Rimsky-Korsakoff's conscientious grooming of it. But when it actually came to the question of producing the operas, even Stasoff, I am sure, realized the need for practical revisions, without which Musorgsky's original scores, with all their potential greatness, ran considerable risk of becoming mere archeological curiosities." Arthur Pougin falls in with this theory, "In reality, the music of Musorgsky only became possible when a friendly, experienced hand had taken the trouble to look over and carefully correct it." James Huneker writes: "Musorgsky would not study the elements of orchestration and one of the penalties he paid was that his friend, Rimsky-Korsakoff, 'edited' Boris Godunoff (in 1896 a new edition appeared with changes, purely practical, as Calvocoressi notes, but the orchestration, clumsy as it is, largely remains the work of the composer) and La Khovantchina was scored by Rimsky-Korsakoff, and no doubt 'edited,' that is revised, what picture experts call 'restored. Calvocoressi contents himself with this laconic statement: "In 1896 a new edition of Boris Godunoff appeared, revised by M. Rimsky-Korsakoff. Certain of the changes that one remarks in this have a purely

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