Rossini, after he had composed Guillaume Tell, retired. He was thirty-seven, a man in perfect health, and he lived thirty-nine years longer, to the age of seventy-six, yet he never wrote another opera, hardly indeed did he dip his pen in ink at all. These facts have seriously disconcerted his biographers, who are at a loss to assign reasons for his actions. W. F. Apthorp gives us an ingenious explanation in "The Opera Past and Present." He says that after Tell Rossini's pride would not allow him to return to his earlier Italian manner, while the hard work needed to produce more Tells was more than his laziness could stomach.... Perhaps, but it must be remembered that Rossini did not retire to his library or his music room, but to his kitchen. The simple explanation is that he preferred cooking to composing, a fact easy to believe (I myself vastly prefer cooking to writing). He could cook risotto better than any one else he knew. He was dubbed a "hippopotamus in trousers," and for six years before he died he could not see his toes, he was so fat. Sir Arthur Sullivan relates an anecdote which shows that Rossini was conscious of his grossness. Once in Paris Sullivan introduced Chorley to Rossini, when the Italian said, "Je vois, avec plaisir, que monsieur n'a pas de ventre." Chorley indeed was noticeably slender. Rossini could write more easily, so his biographers tell us, when he was under the influence of champagne or some light wine. His provision merchant once begged him for an autographed portrait. The composer gave it to him with the inscription, "To my stomach's best friend." The tradesman used this souvenir as an advertisement and largely increased his business thereby, as such a testimonial from such an acknowledged epicure had a very definite value. J. B. Weckerlin asserts that when Rossini dined at the Rothschild's he first went to the kitchen to pay his respects to the chef, to look over the menu, and even to discuss the various dishes, after which he ascended to the drawing room to greet the family of the rich banker. Mme. Alboni told Weckerlin that Rossini had dedicated a piece of music to the Rothschild's chef.

Anfossi, we are informed, could compose only when he was surrounded by smoking fowls and Bologna sausages; their fumes seemed to inflame his imagination, to feed his muse; his brain was stimulated first through his nose and then through his stomach. When Gluck wrote music he betook himself to the open fields, accompanied by at least two bottles of champagne. Salieri told Michael Kelly that a comic opera of Gluck's being performed at the Elector Palatine's theatre, at Schwetzingen, his Electoral Highness was struck with the music, and inquired who had composed it; on being informed that he was an honest German who loved old wine, his Highness immediately ordered him a tun of Hock. Beethoven, on the contrary, seems to have fed on his thoughts occasionally, although there is evidence that he was not only a good eater but also a good cook (the mothers of both Beethoven and Schubert were cooks in domestic service). There is a story related of him that about the time he was composing the Sixth Symphony he walked into a Viennese restaurant and ordered dinner. While it was being prepared, he became involved in thought, and when the waiter returned to serve him, he said: "Thank you, I have dined!" laid the price of the dinner on the table, and took his departure. Gretry, too, lost his appetite when he was composing. There are numerous references to eating and drinking in Mendelssohn's letters. His particular preferences, according to Sir George Grove, were for rice milk and cherry pie. Dussek was a famous eater, and it is said that his ruling passion eventually killed him. His patron, the Prince of Benevento, paid the composer eight hundred napoleons a year, with a free table for three persons, at which, as a matter of fact, one person usually presided. A musical historian tells us that in the summer of 1797 he was dining with three friends at the Ship Tavern in Greenwich, when the waiter came and laid a cloth for one person at the next table, placing thereon a dish of boiled eels, one of fried flounders, a bowled fowl, a dish of veal cutlets, and a couple of tarts. Then Dussek entered and made away with the lot, leaving but the bones! In W. T. Parke's "Musical Memoirs" justice is done to the appetite of one C. F. Baumgarten, for many years leader of the band and composer at Covent Garden Theatre. Once at supper after the play he and a friend ate a full-grown hare between them. He would never condescend to drink out of anything but a quart pot. On one occasion, at the request of his friends, Baumgarten was weighed before and after dinner. There was eight pounds difference! William Shield, the composer who wrote many operas for Covent Garden Theatre, beginning aptly enough with one called The Flitch of Bacon, was something of an eater. Parke tells how at a dinner one evening there was a brace of partridges. The hostess handed Shield one of these to carve and absent-mindedly he set to and finished it, while the other guests were forced to make shift with the other partridge. Handel was a great eater. He was called the "Saxon Giant," as a tribute to his genius, but the phrase might have had a satirical reference to his enormous bulk. Intending to dine one day at a certain tavern, he ordered beforehand a dinner for three. At the hour appointed he sat down to the table and expressed astonishment that the dinner was not brought up. The waiter explained that he would begin serving when the company arrived. "Den pring up de tinner brestissimo," replied Handel, "I am de gombany." Lulli never forsook the casserole. Paganini was as good a cook as he was a violinist. Parke tells a story of Weichsell, not too celebrated a musician, but the father of Mrs. Billington and Charles Weichsell, the violinist: "He would occasionally supersede the labours of his cook, and pass a whole day in preparing his favourite dish, rump-steaks, for the stewing pan; and after the delicious viand had been placed on the dinner-table, together with early green peas of high price, if it happened that the sauce was not to his liking he has been known to throw rump-steaks, and green peas, and all, out of the window, whilst his wife and children thought themselves fortunate in not being thrown after them."

Is there a cooking theme in Siegfried to describe Mime's brewing? Lavignac and others, who have listed the Ring motive, have neglected to catalogue it, but it is mentioned by Old Fogy. Practically a whole act is taken up in Louise with the preparation for and consumption of a dinner. Scarpia eats in Tosca and the heroine kills him with a table knife. There is much talk of food in Hansel und Gretel and there is a supper in The Merry Wives of Windsor. There are drinking songs in Don Giovanni, Lucrezia Borgia, Hamlet, La Traviata, Girofle-Girofla.... The reference to whiskey and soda in Madama Butterfly is celebrated. J. E. Cox, the author of "Musical Recollections," describes Herr Pischek in the supper scene of Don Giovanni as "out-heroding Herod by swallowing glass after glass of champagne like a sot, and gnawing the drumstick of a fowl, which he held across his mouth with his fingers, just as any of his own middle-class countrymen may be seen any day of the week all the year round at the mit-tag or abend-essen feeding at one of their largely frequented tables-d'hote." Eating or drinking on the stage is always fraught with danger, as Charles Santley once discovered during Papageno's supper scene in The Magic Flute: "The supper which Tamino commands for the hungry Papageno consisted of pasteboard imitations of good things, but the cup contained real wine, a small draught of which I found refreshing on a hot night in July, amid the dust and heat of the stage. On the occasion in question I was putting the cup to lips, when I heard somebody call to me from the wings; I felt very angry at the interruption, and was just about to swallow the wine when I heard an anxious call not to drink. Suspecting something was wrong, I pretended to drink, and deposited the cup on the table. Immediately after the scene I made inquiries about the reason for the caution I received, and was informed that as each night the carpenters, who had no right to it, finished what remained of the wine before the property men, whose perquisite it was, could lay hold of the cup, the latter, to give their despoilers a lesson, had mingled castor-oil with my drink!"

A young husband of my acquaintance once bemoaned to me the fact that his wife seemed destined to become a great singer. "She is such a remarkable cook!" he explained to account for his despondency. I reassured him: "She will cook with renewed energy when she begins to sing Sieglinde and Tosca.... She will practise Vissi d'Arte over the gumbo soup and Du herstes Wunder! while the Frankfurters are sizzling. Her trills, her chromatic scales, and her messa di voce will come right in the kitchen; she will equalize her scale and learn to breathe correctly bending over the oven. It is even likely that she will improve her knowledge of portamento while she is washing dishes. When she can prepare a succulent roast suckling pig she will be able to sing Ocean, thou mighty monster! and she will understand Abscheulicher when she understands the mysteries of old-fashioned strawberry shortcake. If you hear her shrieking Suicidio! invoking Agamemnon, or appealing to the Casta Diva among the kettles and pots be not alarmed.... For the love you bear of good food, man, do not discourage your wife's ambition. The more she loves to sing, the better she will cook!"

July 17, 1917.



An Interrupted Conversation

"We can never depend upon any right adjustment of emotion to circumstance."

Max Beerbohm.



An Interrupted Conversation

Ordinarily one does not learn things about oneself from Edmund Gosse, but my discovery that I am a Pyrrhonist is due to that literary man. A Pyrrhonist, says Mr. Gosse, is "one who doubts whether it is worth while to struggle against the trend of things. The man who continues to cross the road leisurely, although the cyclists' bells are ringing, is a Pyrrhonist—and in a very special sense, for the ancient philosopher who gives his name to the class made himself conspicuous by refusing to get out of the way of careering chariots." Now the most unfamiliar friend I have ever walked with knows my extreme impassivity at the corners of streets, remembers the careless attitude with which I saunter from kerb to kerb, whether it be across the Grand Boulevard, Piccadilly, or Fifth Avenue. Only once has this nonchalant defiance of traffic caused me to come to even temporary grief; that was on the last night of the year 1913, when, in crossing Broadway, I became entangled, God knows how, in the wheels of a swiftly passing vehicle, and found myself, top hat and all, in the most ignominious position before I was well aware of what had really happened. Then a policeman stooped over me, book and pencil in hand, and another held the chauffeur of the victorious taxi-cab at bay some yards further up the street. But I was not hurt and I waved them all away with a magnanimous gesture.... It is owing to this habit of mine that I often make interesting rencontres in the middle of streets. It accounts, in fact, for my running, quite absent-mindedly, plump into Dickinson Sitgreaves, who is more American than his name sounds, one August day in Paris.

It was one of those charming days which make August perhaps the most delightful month to spend in Paris, although the facts are not known to tourists. Many a sly French pair, however, bored with Trouville, or the season at Aix, take advantage of the allurements of a Paris August to return surreptitiously to the boulevards. On this particular day almost all the seduction of an October day was in the air, a splendid dull warm-cool crispness, which filtered down through the faded chestnut leaves from the sunlight, and left pale splotches of purple and orange on the trottoirs ... a really marvellous day, which I was spending in that most excellent occupation in Paris of gazing into shops and, passing cafes, staring into the faces of those who sat on the terrasses.... But this is an occupation for one alone; so, when I met Sitgreaves, we joined a terrasse ourselves. We were near the Napolitain and there he and I sat down and began to talk as only we two can talk together after long separation. He explained in the beginning how I had interrupted him.... There was a fille, some little Polish beauty who had captivated his senses a day or so before, brought to him quite by accident in an hotel where the patron furnished his clients with such pleasure as the town and his address book afforded.... I knew the patron myself, a fluent, amusing sort of person, who had been a cuirassier and who resembled Mayol ... a cafe-concert proprietor of an hotel.... It was his boast that he had never disappointed a client and it is certain that he would promise anything. Some have said that his stock in trade was one pretty girl, who assumed costumes, ages, hair, and accents, to please whatever demand was made upon her, but this I do not believe. There must have been at least two of them. The Grand Duchess Anastasia, it was rumoured, had dined with Marcel at one time, in his little hotel, and certainly one king had been seen to go there, and one member of the English royal family, but Marcel remained simple and obliging.

"When will you look up the little Polonaise?" I asked, as we sipped Amer Picon and stared with fresh interest at each new boot and ankle that passed. Paris in August is like another place in May.

"Why don't you come along?" queried Sitgreaves in reply, "and we could go at once.... Oh, I know that you are in no mood for pleasure. You see the point is that I shall have to wait. Marcel will have to send for the fille. It is a bore to wait in a room with red curtains and a picture of Amour et Psyche on the walls.... What have you been doing?" He paid the consommation and started to leave without waiting for a reply, because he knew of my complaisance. I rose with him and we walked down the boulevard.

"What is there to do in Paris in August but to enjoy oneself?" I asked. "I have made friends with an apache and his gigolette. We eat bread and cheese and drink bad wine on the fortifications.... In the afternoon I walk. Sometimes I go to the Luxembourg gardens to hear the band bray sad music, or to watch the little boys play diavolo, or sail their tiny boats about the fountain pond; sometimes I walk quite silently up the Avenue Gabriel, with its triste line of trees, and dream that I am a Grand Duke; in the evening there are again the terrasses of the cafes, dinner in Montmartre at the Clou, or the Cou-Cou, a revue at La Cigale, but it is all governed, my day and my night, by what happens and by whom I meet.... Have you seen Jacques Blanche's portrait of Nijinsky?"

"I think it is Picasso that interests me now," Sitgreaves was saying. "He puts wood and pieces of paper into his composition; architecture, that's what it is.... I don't go to Blanche's any more. It's too delightfully perfect, the atmosphere there.... The books are by all the famous writers, and they are all dedicated to Blanche; the pictures are all of the great men of today, and they are all painted by Blanche; the music is played by the best musicians.... Do you know, I think Blanche is the one man who has made a successful profession of being an amateur—unless one excepts Robert de la Condamine.... You can scarcely call a man who does so much a dilettante. Yes, I think he is an amateur in the best sense."

"I met the Countess of Jena there the other day," I responded. "She had scarcely left the room before three people volunteered, sans rancune, to tell her story. She is a devout Catholic, and her husband contrived in some way to substitute a spy for the priest in the confessional. He acquired an infinite amount of information, but it didn't do him any good. She is so witty that every one invites her everywhere in spite of her reputation, and he is left to dine alone at the Meurice. Dull men simply are not tolerated in Paris.

"It was at Blanche's last year that I met George Moore," I continued. "You know I have just seen him in London. He is at work on The Apostle, making a novel of it, to be called 'The Brook Kerith.'... For a time he thought of finishing it up as a play because a novel meant a visit to Palestine and that was distasteful to him, but it finally became a novel. He went to Palestine and stayed six weeks, just long enough to find a monastery and to study the lay of the country. For he says, truly enough, that one cannot imagine landscapes; one does not know whether there is a high or low horizon. There may be a brook which all the characters must cross. It is necessary to see these things. Besides he had to find a monastery.... He told me of his thrill when he discovered an order of monks living on a narrow ledge of cliff, with 500 feet sheer rise and descent above and below it ... and when he had found this his work was done and he returned to England to write the book, a reaction, for he told me that he was getting tired of being personal in literature. The book will exhibit a conflict between two types: Christ, the disappointed mystic, and Paul; Christ, who sees that there is no good to be served in saving the world by his death, and Paul, full of hope, idealism, and illusions. It is the drama of the conflict between the nature which is affected by externals and that which is not, he told me."

"It's a subject for Anatole France," said Sitgreaves. "Moore, in my opinion, is not a novelist. His great achievements are his memoirs. I was interested in 'Evelyn Innes' and 'Esther Waters,' but something was lacking. There is nothing lacking in the three volumes of 'Hail and Farewell.' They grow in interest. Moore has found his metier."

"But he insists," I explained, before the door of the little hotel, "that 'Hail and Farewell' is a novel. He is infuriated when some one suggests that it is a book after the manner of, say, 'The Reminiscences of Lady Randolph Churchill.'..."

We entered and walked up the little staircase.

"Do you mean that the incidents are untrue?"

We were at the door of the concierge and there stood Marcel, his apron spread neatly over his ample paunch. It was early in the afternoon and the room beyond him, sometimes filled with possibilities for customers, was empty.

"Ah, monsieur est revenu!" he exclaimed in his piping voice. "C'est pour la petite Polonaise sans doute que monsieur revient?"

"Oui," answered Sitgreaves, "faut-il attendre longtemps?"

"Mais non, monsieur, un petit moment. Elle habite en face. Je vais envoyer le garcon la chercher tout de suite. Et pour monsieur, votre ami?"

"Je ne desire rien," I replied.

Marcel bowed humbly.... "Comme monsieur voudra." Then a doubt assailed him. "Peut-etre que la petite Polonaise vous suffira a tous les deux?"

"Jamais de la vie!" I shouted, "Flute, Mercure, allez! Je suis puceau!"

Marcel was equal to this. "Et ta soeur?" he demanded as he disappeared down the staircase.

He had put us meanwhile in the very chamber with the red curtains and the picture of Cupid and Psyche that Sitgreaves had described. Perhaps all the rooms were similarly decorated. I lounged on the bed while Sitgreaves sat on a chair and smoked....

I answered his last question, "No, they are true, but there is selection and form."

"While other memoirs have neither selection nor form and usually are not altogether accurate in the bargain...."

"Especially Madame Melba's...."

"Especially," agreed Sitgreaves delightedly, "Madame Melba's."

"Moore is really right," I went on. "He says that some people insist that Balzac was greater than Turgeniev, because the Frenchman took his characters from imagination, the Russian his from life. You will remember, however, that Edgar Saltus says, 'The manufacture of fiction from facts was begun by Balzac.' Moore's point is that all great writers write from observation. There is no other way. A character may have more or less resemblance to the original; it may be derived and bear a different name; still there must have been something.... In a letter which Moore once wrote me stands the phrase, 'Memory is the mother of the Muses.' 'Hail and Farewell' is just as much a work of imagination, according to Moore, as 'A Nest of Noblemen' or 'Les Illusions Perdues.'"

"Of course," admitted Sitgreaves. "No writer but what has suffered from the recognition of his characters. Dickens got into trouble. Oscar Wilde is said to have done himself in 'Dorian Gray,' and Meredith's models for 'The Tragic Comedians' and 'Diana of the Crossways' are well known."

"All Moore has done is to call his characters by their real names and he has reported their conversations as he remembered them, but, mind you, he has not put into the book all their conversations, or even all the people he knew at that period. Arthur Symons, for instance, a great friend of Moore's at that time, is scarcely mentioned, and with reason: he has no part in the form of the book; its plot is not concerned with him.

"All artists create only in the image of the things they have seen, reduced to terms of art through their imagination. The paintings of Mina Loy seem to the beholder the strange creations of a vagrant fancy. I remember one picture of hers in which an Indian girl stands poised before an oriental palace, the most fantastic of palaces, it would seem. But the artist explained to me that it was simply the facade of Hagenbeck's menagerie in Hamburg, seen with an imaginative eye. The girl was a model.... One day on the beach at the Lido she saw a young man in a bathing suit lying stretched on the sand with his head in the lap of a beautiful woman. Other women surrounded the two. The group immediately suggested a composition to her. She went home and painted. She took the young man's bathing suit off and gave him wings; the women she dressed in lovely floating robes, and she called the picture, l'Amour Dorlote par les Belles Dames.

"And once I asked Frank Harris to explain to me the origin of his vivid story, 'Montes the Matador.' 'It's too simple,' he said, 'the model for Montes was a little Mexican greaser whom I met in Kansas. He was one of many in charge of cattle shipped up from Mexico and down from the States. All the white cattle men, the gringos, held him in great contempt. But,' continued Harris, speaking deliberately with his beautifully modulated voice, and his eyes twinkling with the memory of the thing, 'I soon found that the greaser's contempt for the gringos was immeasureably greater than their's for him. "Bah," he would say, "they know nothing." And it was so. He could go into a cattle car on a pitch dark night and make the bulls stand up, a feat that none of the white men would have attempted. I asked him how he did this and he told me the answer in three words, "I know them." He could go into a herd of cattle just let loose together and pick out their leader immediately, pick him out before the cattle themselves had! There was the origin of "Montes the Matador." He was named, of course, after the famous torero described by Gautier in his "Voyage en Espagne." When I was in Madrid sometime later I went to a number of bull-fights before I put the story together.' 'But,' I asked Harris, 'Is it possible for an espada to stand in the bull ring with his back to the bull, during a charge, as you have made him do frequently in the story?' 'Of course not,' he answered me at once, smiling his frankly malevolent smile, 'Of course not. That part was put in to show how much the public will stand for in a work of fiction. I believe one of the espadas tried it some time after the book appeared and was immediately killed.'

"Fiction, history, poetry, criticism, at their best, are all the same thing. When they inflame the imagination and stir the pulse they are identical: all creative work. It does not matter what a man writes about. It matters how he writes it. Subject is nothing. Should we regard Velasquez as less important than Murillo because the former painted portraits of contemporaries, whom in his fashion he criticized, while the Spanish Bouguereau disguised his models as the Virgin? Walter Pater's description of the Monna Lisa would live if the picture disappeared. Indeed it has created a factitious interest in da Vinci's masterwork. Even more might be said for Huysmans's description of Moreau's Salome, which actually puts the figures in the picture in motion! The critic, the historian at their best are creative artists as the writers of fiction are creative artists. Should we regard, for example, 'Imperial Purple' less a work of creative art than 'The Rise of Silas Lapham'?"

"I am getting your meaning more and more," said Sitgreaves. "And it occurs to me that perhaps I have been unjust in rating Moore low as a novelist. Perhaps I should have said that he is more successful in those books which depend more on his memory and less on his imaginative instinct. He cannot, after all, have known Jesus and Paul...."

"You are quite wrong," I said. "At least from his point of view. He says that he knows Paul better than he has ever known any one else. He even finds hair on Paul's chest. He can describe Paul, I believe, to the last mole. He knows his favourite colours, and whether he prefers artichokes to alligator pears. As for Christ, everybody professes to know Christ these days. Since the world has become distinctly un-Christian it has become comparatively easy to discuss Christ. He is regarded as an historical character, and a much more simple one than Napoleon. I have heard anarchists in bar-rooms talk about him by the hour, sometimes very graphically and always with a certain amount of wit. No, it is all the same.... Moore, now that he has been to Palestine and read the gospels, feels as well acquainted with Christ and Paul as he does with Edward Martyn and Yeats and Lady Gregory."

"I must fall back on the personal then," said Sitgreaves, now really at bay, "and say that I am less moved and interested when Moore is describing Evelyn Innes, than when he tells of his affair with Doris at Orelay."

"I am glad that you mentioned 'Evelyn Innes' again," I said, "because it is in this very book that he is said to have painted so many of his friends. Ulick Dean is undoubtedly Yeats. It has been suggested that Arnold Dolmetsch posed for the portrait of Evelyn's father. Dolmetsch's testimony on this point goes farther. He says that he dictated certain passages in the book...."

"What is it, then? What is the difference? There is some difference, of that I am sure...."

"The difference is—" I began when the door opened and Marcel entered, the most amazingly comprehensive smile on his countenance. "Mademoiselle vous attend," he said, and he looked the question. "Shall I bring her in here?"

Sitgreaves answered it immediately, "Je viens." And then to me, "Wait," as he vanished through the doorway.... I walked to the window, drew aside the red curtains, and looked out into the fountain-splashed court below....

* * * * *

"What is the difference?"

"I suppose it is that you prefer the new Moore to the old Moore, the author of the later and better written books to the author of the earlier ones. 'Evelyn Innes' was many times rewritten. Moore has said that he could never get it to suit him, but he has also said, recently, that he would never rewrite another book (a resolution he has not kept). 'Memoirs of My Dead Life' and 'Hail and Farewell' do not need rewriting. They are written to stand. 'The Brook Kerith,' perhaps, you will find equally to your taste. It will be the newest Moore...."

"You have explained to me," said Sitgreaves, "the difference: it is one of development. Now that I think of it I don't believe that Anatole France could write 'The Brook Kerith.'... It would be too symbolical, too cynical, in his hands. Moore will perhaps make it more human, by knowing the characters. I wonder," he continued musingly, as we left the room, and descended the stairs, "if he told you whether that hair on Paul's chest was red or black...."

February 1, 1915.



The Authoritative Work on American Music



The Authoritative Work on American Music

H. L. Mencken pointed out to me recently, in his most earnest and persuasive manner, that it was my duty to write a book about the American composers, exposing their futile pretensions and describing their flaccid opera, stave by stave. It was in vain that I urged that this would be but a sleeveless errand, arguing that I could not fight men of straw, that these our composers had no real standing in the concert halls, and that pushing them over would be an easy exercise for a child of ten. On the contrary, he retorted, they belonged to the academies; certain people believed that they were important; it was necessary to dislodge this belief. I suggested, with a not too heavily assumed humility, that I had already done something of the sort in an essay entitled "The Great American Composer." "A good beginning," asserted Col. Mencken, "but not long enough. I won't be satisfied with anything less than a book." "But if I wrote a book about Professors Parker, Chadwick, Hadley, and the others I could find nothing different to say about them; they are all alike. Neither their lives nor their music offer opportunities for variations." "An excellent idea!" cried Major Mencken, enthusiastically, "Write one chapter and then repeat it verbatim throughout the book, changing only the name of the principal character. Then clap on a preface, explaining your reason for this procedure." My last protest was the feeblest of all: "I can't spend a year or a month or a week poring over the scores of these fellows; I can't go to concerts to hear their music. I might as well go to work in a coal mine." "I'll do it for you!" triumphantly checkmated General Mencken. "I'll read the scores and you shall write the book!" And so he left me, as on a similar occasion the fiend, having exhibited his prospectus, vanished from the eyes of our Lord. And I returned to my home sorely troubled, finding that the words of the man were running about in my head like so many little Japanese waltzing mice.

And, after much cogitation, I went to such and such a book case and took down a certain volume written by Louis Charles Elson (a very large red tome) and another by Rupert Hughes, to see if their words of praise for our weak musical brothers would stir me to action. I found that they did not. My heart action remained normal; no film covered my eyes; foam did not issue from my mouth. Indeed I read, quite calmly, in Mr. Hughes's "American Composers" that A. J. Goodrich is "recognized among scholars abroad as one of the leading spirits of our time"; that "(Henry Holden) Huss has ransacked the piano and pillaged almost every imaginable fabric of high colour.... The result is gorgeous and purple"; that "The thing we are all waiting for is that American grand opera, The Woman of Marblehead (by Louis Adolphe Coerne). It is predicted that it will not receive the marble heart"; that "I know of no modern composer who has come nearer to relighting the fires that burn in the old gavottes and fugues and preludes (than Arthur Foote). His two gavottes are to me away the best since Bach"; that "the song (Israfel by Edgar Stillman-Kelley) is in my fervent belief, a masterwork of absolute genius, one of the very greatest lyrics in the world's music"; and in "The History of American Music" by Louis C. Elson that "Music has made even more rapid strides than literature among us," and that "he (George W. Chadwick) has reconciled the symmetrical (sonata) form with modern passion." But it was in the fourth volume of "The Art of Music," published by the National Society of Music, that I found the supreme examples of this kind of writing. The volume was edited by Arthur Farwell and W. Dermot Darby. Therein I read with a sort of awed astonishment that one of the songs of Frederick Ayres "reveals a poignancy of imagination and a perception and apprehension of beauty seldom attained by any composer." I learned that T. Carl Whitmer has a "spiritual kinship" with Arthur Shepherd, Hans Pfitzner, and Vincent d'Indy. His music is "psychologically subtle and spiritually rarefied: in colour it corresponds to the violet end of the spectrum." I turned the pages until I came to the name of Miss Gena Branscombe: "Inexhaustible buoyancy, a superlative emotional wealth, and wholly singular gift of musical intuition are the qualities which have shaped the composer's musical personality (without much effort of the imagination we might say that they are the qualities that shaped Beethoven's musical personality).... Her impatient melodies leap and dash with youthful life, while her accompaniments abound in harmonic hairbreadth escapes." Before he became acquainted with the later French idiom Harvey W. Loomis "spontaneously breathed forth the quality of spirit which we now recognize in a Debussy or a Ravel."

Curiously enough, however, these statements did not annoy me. I found no desire arising in me to deny them and doubtless, though mayhap with a guilty conscience, I should have ditched the undertaking, consigned it to that heap of undone duties, where already lie notes on a comparison of Andalusian mules with the mules of Liane de Pougy, a few scribbled memoranda for a treatise on the love habits of the mole, and a half-finished biography of the talented gentleman who signed his works, "Nick Carter," if my by this time quite roving eye had not alighted, entirely fortuitously, on one of the forgotten glories of my library, a slender volume entitled "Popular American Composers."

I recalled how I had bought this book. Happening into a modest second-hand bookshop on lower Third Avenue, maintained chiefly for the laudable purpose of redistributing paper novels of the Seaside and kindred libraries, of which, alas, we hear very little nowadays, I asked the proprietor if by chance he possessed any literature relating to the art of music. By way of answer, he retired to the very back of his little room, searched for a space in a litter on the floor, and then returned with a pile of nine volumes or so in his arms. The titles, such as "Great Violinists," "Harmony in Thirteen Lessons," and "How to Sing," did not intrigue me, but in idly turning the pages of this "Popular American Composers" I came across a half-tone reproduction of a photograph of Paul Dresser, the only less celebrated brother of Theodore Dreiser, with a short biography of the composer of On the Banks of the Wabash. As Sir George Grove in his excellent dictionary neglected to mention this portentous name in American Art and Letters (although he devoted sixty-seven pages, printed in double columns, to Mendelssohn) I saw the advantage of adding the little book to my collection. The bookseller, when questioned, offered to relinquish the volume for a total of fifteen cents, and I carried it away with me. Once I had become more thoroughly acquainted with its pages I realized that I would willingly have paid fifteen dollars for it.

This book, indeed, cannot fail to delight General Mencken. There is no reference in its pages to Edgar Stillman-Kelley, Miss Gena Branscombe, Louis Adolphe Coerne, Henry Holden Huss, T. Carl Whitmer, Arthur Farwell, Arthur Foote, or A. J. Goodrich. In fact, if we overlook brief notices of John Philip Sousa, Harry von Tilzer, Paul Dresser, Charles K. Harris, and Hattie Starr (whom you will immediately recall as the composer of Little Alabama Coon), the author, Frank L. Boyden, has not hesitated to go to the roots of his subject, pushing aside the college professors and their dictums, and has turned his attention to figures in the art life of America, from whom, Mencken himself, I feel sure, would not take a single paragraph of praise, so richly is it deserved. I am unfamiliar with the causes contributing to this book's comparative obscurity; perhaps, indeed, they are similar to those responsible for the early failure of "Sister Carrie." May not we even suspect that the odium cast by the Doubledays on the author of that romance might have been actively transferred in some degree to a work which contained a biographical notice and a picture of his brother? At any rate, "Popular American Composers," published in 1902, fell into undeserved oblivion and so I make no apology for inviting my readers to peruse its pages with me.

Opening the book, then, at random, I discover on page 96 a biography of Lottie A. Kellow (her photograph graces the reverse of this page). In a few well-chosen words (almost indeed in "gipsy phrases") Mr. Boyden gives us the salient details of her career. Mrs. Kellow is a resident of Cresco, Iowa, a church singer of note, and the possessor of a contralto voice of great volume. As a composer she has to her credit "marches, cakewalks, schottisches, and other styles of instrumental music." We are given a picture of Mrs. Kellow at work: "Mrs. Kellow's best efforts are made in the evening, and in darkness, save the light of the moonbeams on the keys of her piano." We are also told that "she is happy in her inspirations and a sincere lover of music. All of her compositions show a decided talent and possess musical elements which are only to be found in the works of an artist. Mrs. Kellow's musical friends are confident of her success as a composer and predict for her a brilliant future."

Let us turn to the somewhat more extensive biography of W. T. Mullin on Page 4 (his photograph faces this page). Almost in the first line the author rewards our attention: "To him may be applied the simplest and grandest eulogy Shakespeare ever pronounced: 'He was a man.'" We are also informed that he was born of a cultured family, that his inherited nobility of character has been carefully fostered by a thorough education, and told that one finds in him the unusual combination of genius wedded to sound common sense and practical business capacity. His family moved to Colorado, Texas, while he was still a lad and here his musical talent began to display itself. "The inventive faculties of the small boy, and the innate harmony of the musician, combined to improvise a crude instrument which emitted the notes of the scale. Successful at drawing forth a concord of sweet sounds, he continued to experiment upon everything which would emit musical vibrations. (Even the pigs, I take it, did not escape.) He consequently discovered the laws of vibrating chords before he had mastered the intricacies of the multiplication table. Yet strange as it may seem, his musical education was neglected. A four months' course in piano instruction was interrupted and then resumed for two months more. Upon this meagre foundation rested his subsequent phenomenal progress." I pause to point out to the astonished and breathless reader that even Mozart and Schubert, infant prodigies that they were, received more training than this.

I continue to quote: "At the age of thirteen he joined The Colorado (Texas) Cornet Band as a charter member. The youngest member of the band, he soon outstripped his comrades by virtue of his superior natural ability. His position was that of second tenor. Wearying of the monotony of playing, he determined to venture on solo work. The boy felt the impetus of restless power and the following incident illustrates his remarkable originality. Taking the piano score of a favourite melody he transposed it within the compass of the second tenor. This feat evoked admiring applause because of his extreme youth and untrained abilities. The band-master remarked that elderly and experienced heads could hardly have accomplished this.

"From boyhood to manhood he has remained with the Colorado (Texas) band as one of its most efficient members, composing in his leisure moments, marches, ragtimes, waltzes, song and dance schottisches, etc. Of his many meritorious compositions only one has so far been given to the public:—The West Texas Fair March, composed for and dedicated to the management of the West Texas Fair and Round-up. This institution holds its annual meetings at Abilene, Texas. There the march was played for the first time at their October, 1899, meet with great success, and again at their September, 1900, meet by the Stockman band of Colorado, Texas, which has furnished music for the West Texas Fair during their 1899 and 1900 meetings. Mr. Mullin's position in the Stockman band is that of euphonium soloist. He is a proficient performer upon all band instruments from cornet to tuba, including slide trombone, his favourites being the baritone and the trombone.

"He plays many stringed instruments, as well as the piano and organ. He is the proud possessor of a genuine Stradivarius violin—a family heirloom—which he naturally prizes beyond the intrinsic value. The feat of playing on several instruments at once presents no difficulty to him.

"This briefly sketches Mr. Mullin's life, character and ability as a musician. His accompanying photograph reveals his superb physique. Personally he possesses charming, agreeable manners and Chesterfieldan courteousness, which vastly contributes to his popularity. Sincere devotion to his art has been rewarded by that elevating nobility of soul, which alone can penetrate the blue expanse of space and revel in the music of the spheres."

What more is there to say? I can only assure the reader that Mullin stands unique among all musicians, creative and interpretative, in being able to play the organ, many stringed instruments, and all the instruments in a brass band (several of them simultaneously; it would be interesting to know which and how) after studying the piano for six months. I sincerely hope that the mistake he made in withholding all his compositions, save one, from the public, has been rectified.

Helen Kelsey Fox, like so many of our talented men and women, has a European strain in her blood. She is a lineal descendant on her mother's side of a French nobleman and a German princess. Nevertheless she continues to reside in Vermilion, Ohio. She is of a "decided poetic nature and lives in an atmosphere of her own. She dwells in a world of thought peopled by the creations of an active and lyric mentality." She is so imbued with the poetic spark that, as she expresses it, she "speaks in rhyme half the time."

John Z. Macdonald, strictly speaking, is not an American composer. He was born in Scotland and came to America in 1881 at the age of 21, but as he is one of the very few composers since Nero to enter public political life he well deserves a place in this collection. In 1890 he was elected city clerk of Brazil, Indiana, a position which he held for seven years. In 1898 he was elected treasurer of Clay County, Indiana. This county is democratic "by between five and six hundred" but Mr. Macdonald was elected on the republican ticket by a majority of 133. He was the only republican elected. Among the best known of Mr. Macdonald's compositions is his famous "expansion" song, in which he predicted the fate of Aguinaldo. He has autograph letters, praising this song, from the late President McKinley, Col. Roosevelt, General Harrison, Admiral Schley, John Philip Sousa and other "eminent gentlemen."

Edward Dyer, born in Washington, was the son of a marble cutter who "helped to erect the U. S. Treasury, Patent Office, and Capitol.... In the majority of his compositions there is a tinge of sadness which appeals to his auditors.... Mr. Dyer never descends to coarseness or vulgarity in his productions; he writes pure, clean words, something that can be sung in the home, school and on the stage to refined respectable people."

We learn much of the study years of Mrs. Lucy L. Taggart: "From earliest childhood she received valuable musical instruction from her father (Mr. Longsdon) who, coming from England in 1835, purchased the first piano that came to Chicago, an elegant hand-carved instrument that is still treasured in the old home." Later "she studied under Prof. C. E. Brown, of Owego, N. Y., Prof. Heimburger, of San Francisco and Herr Chas. Goffrie. Mrs. Taggart was also for five years a pupil of Senor Arevalo, the famous guitar soloist of Los Angeles.... Mrs. Taggart has in preparation (1902) Methought He Touched the Strings, an idyl for piano in memory of the late Senor M. S. Arevalo."

David Weidley, born in Philadelphia, is the composer of the following songs, Old Spooney Spooppalay, Jennie Ree, Autumn Leaves, Hannah Glue, and Uncle Reuben and Aunt Lucinda. "He has done much to create and elevate a taste for music in the community where he resides and where he is known as 'Dave.' Even the little children call him 'Dave' as freely and innocently as those who have known him for years, and there can be no greater compliment for any man than that he is known and loved by the children. Mr. Weidley is by profession a sheet metal worker. He is a P. G. of the I. O. O. F., and a P. C. in the Knights of Pythias. He is not identified with any church, but loves and serves his fellow-men."

In the biography of Delmer G. Palmer we are assured that "Versatility is a trait with which musical composers are not excessively burdened. There are few performers who can include The Moonlight Sonata and Schubert's Serenade with selections from The Merry-go-round, and do justice to the expression of each, much less would such adaptability be looked for among composers. As most rules have exceptions, in this there is one who stands in a class occupied by no one else, Mr. Delmer G. Palmer, the 'Green Mountain Composer,' who at present resides in Kansas City.

"As recently as 1899 Mr. Palmer wrote a song in the popular 'ragtime,' My Sweetheart is a Midnight Coon and almost in the same breath also wrote the heavy sacred solo, Christ in Gethsemane. The first is of the usual light order characteristic of this class of music. The latter is as far removed to the contrary as is comedy from tragedy. The 'coon' song entered the bubbling effervescing cauldron of what is termed 'ragtime' music among the multitudinous others, and soon was seen peeping through at the surface among the lightest and most catchy.... The sacred solo found its level among the heavier in its class, and if the term may be here applied, it was also a hit."

S. Duncan Baker, born August 25, 1855, still lives (1902) in the old family residence at Natchez, Miss. "In this house is located the den where he has spent many hours with his collection of banjos and pictures and in writing for and playing on the instrument which he adopted as a favourite during its dark days (about 1871)." We are told that he composed an "artistic banjo solo," entitled, Memories of Farland. "Had this production or its companion piece, Thoughts of the Cadenza, been written by an old master for some other instrument and later have been adapted by a modern composer to the banjo, either or both of them would have been pronounced classic, barring some slight defects in form."

I cannot stop to quote from the delightful accounts offered us of the lives and works of Albert Matson, George D. Tufts, D. O. Loy, Lavinia Pascoe Oblad, and forty or fifty other American singers, but it seems to me that I have done enough, Mencken, to prove to you that the great book on American music has been written. Without one single mention of the names of Horatio Parker, George W. Chadwick, Frederick Converse, or Henry Hadley, by a transference of the emphasis to the place where it belongs, the author of this undying book has answered your prayer.

December 11, 1917.



Old Days and New



Old Days and New

Some toothless old sentimentalist or other periodically sets up a melancholy howl for "the good old days of comic opera," whatever or whenever they were. Perhaps none of us, once past forty, is guiltless in this respect. Nothing, not even the smell of an apple-blossom from the old homestead, the sight of a daguerreotype of a miss one kissed at the age of ten, or a taste of a piece of the kind of pie that "mother used to make" so arouses the sensibility of a man of middle age as the memory of some musical show which he saw in his budding manhood. That is why revivals of these venerable institutions are frequently projected and, some of them, very successfully accomplished. When a manager revives an old drama he must appeal to the interest of his audience; it may not be the identical interest which held the original spectators of the piece spell-bound, but, none the less, it must be an interest. When a manager revives an old musical comedy he appeals directly to sentiment.

Of course, the exact date of the good old days is a variable quantity. I have known a vain regretter to turn no further back than to the nights of The Merry Widow, The Waltz Dream, The Chocolate Soldier, The Girl in the Train, and The Dollar Princess, in other words to the Viennese renaissance; another, in using the phrase, is subconsciously conjuring up pictures of La Belle Helene, Orphee aux Enfers, or La Fille de Madame Angot, good fodder for memory to feed on here; a third will instinctively revert to the Johann Strauss operetta period, the era of The Queen's Lace Handkerchief and Die Fledermaus; a fourth cries, "Give us Gilbert and Sullivan!" A fifth, when his ideas are chased to their lair, will rhapsodize endlessly over the charms of the London Gaiety when The Geisha, The Country Girl, and The Circus Girl were in favour; a sixth, it seems, finds his pleasure in Americana, Robin Hood, Wang, The Babes in Toyland, and El Capitan; a seventh becomes maudlin to the most utter degree when you mention Les Cloches de Corneville, or La Mascotte, products of a decadent stage in the history of French opera-bouffe. Not long ago I heard a man speak of the cadet operas in Boston (did a man named Barnet write them?) as the last of the great musical pieces; and every one of you who reads this essay will have a brother, or a son, or a friend who went to see Sybil forty-three times and The Girl from Utah seventy-six. Twenty years from now, as he sits before the open fire, the mere mention of They Wouldn't Believe Me will cause the tears to course down his cheeks as he pats the pate of his infant son or daughter and weepingly describes the never-to-be-forgotten fascination of Julia Sanderson, the (in the then days) unattainable agility of Donald Brian.

In no other form of theatrical entertainment is the appeal to softness so direct. The man who attends a performance of a musical farce goes in a good mood, usually with a couple of friends, or possibly with the girl. If he has dined well and his digestion is in working order and he is young enough, the spell of the lights and the music is irresistible to his receptive and impressionable nature. There are those young men, of course, who are constant attendants because of the altogether too wonderful hair of the third girl from the right in the front row. Others succumb to the dental perfection of the prima donna or to the shapely legs of the soubrette. All of us, I am almost proud to admit, at some time or other, are subject to the contagion. I well remember the year in which I considered myself as a possible suitor for the hand of Della Fox. Photographs and posters of this deity adorned my walls. I was an assiduous collector of newspaper clippings referring to her profoundly interesting activities, although my sophistication had not reached the stage where I might appeal to Romeike for assistance. The mere mention of Miss Fox's name was sufficient cause to make me blush profusely. Eventually my father was forced to take steps in the matter when I began, in a valiant effort to summon up the spirit of the lady's presence, to disturb the early morning air with vocal assaults on She Was a Daisy, which, you will surely remember, was the musical gem of The Little Trooper. Here are the words of the refrain:

"She was a daisy, daisy, daisy! Driving me crazy, crazy, crazy! Helen of Troy and Venus were to her cross-eyed crones! She was dimpled and rosy, rosy, rosy! Sweet as a posy, posy, posy! How I doted upon her, my Ann Jane Jones!"

You will admit, I think, at first glance, the superior literary quality of these lines; you will perceive at once to what immeasurably higher class of art they belong than the lyrics that librettists forge for us today.

Wall Street broker, poet, green grocer, soldier, banker, lawyer, whatever you are, confess the facts to yourself: you were once as I. You have suffered the same feelings that I suffered. Perhaps with you it was not Della Fox.... Who then? Did saucy Marie Jansen awaken your admiration? Was pert Lulu Glaser the object of your secret but persistent attention? How many times did you go to see Marie Tempest in The Fencing Master, or Alice Nielsen in The Serenade? Was Virginia Earle in The Circus Girl the idol of your youth or was it Mabel Barrison in The Babes in Toyland? Theresa Vaughn in 1492, May Yohe in The Lady Slavey, Hilda Hollins in The Magic Kiss, or Nancy McIntosh in His Excellency? Madge Lessing in Jack and the Beanstalk, Edna May in The Belle of New York, Phyllis Rankin in The Rounders, or Gertrude Quinlan in King Dodo?

What do you whistle in your bathtub when you are in a reminiscent mood? Is it The Typical Tune of Zanzibar, or Baby, Baby, Dance My Darling Baby, or Starlight, Starbright, or Tell Me, Pretty Maiden, or A Simple Little String, or J'aime les Militaires (if you whistle this, ten to one your next door neighbour thinks you have been to an orchestra concert and heard Beethoven's Seventh Symphony), or Sister Mary Jane's Top Note, or A Wandering Minstrel I, or See How It Sparkles, or the Lullaby from Erminie, which Pauline Hall used to sing as if she herself were asleep, and which Emma Abbott interpolated in The Mikado, or A Pretty Girl, A Summer Night, or the Policeman's Chorus from The Pirates of Penzance, or The Soldiers in the Park, or My Angeline, or the Letter Song from The Chocolate Soldier, or I'm Little Buttercup, or the Gobble Song from The Mascot, or the Anna Song from Nanon, or the march from Fatinitza, or I'm All the Way from Gay Paree, or Love Comes Like a Summer Sigh, or In the North Sea Lived a Whale, or Jusqu'la, or The Harmless Little Girlie With the Downcast Eyes, or They All Follow Me, or The Amorous Goldfish, or Don't Be Cross, or Slumber On, My Little Gypsy Sweetheart, or Good-bye Flo, or La Legende de la Mere Angot, or My Alamo Love?

There is a very subtle and fragrant charm about these old recollections which the sight or sound of a score, a view of an old photograph of Lillian Russell or Judic, or a dip in the Theatre Complet of Meilhac and Halevy will reawaken. But it is only at a revival of one of our old favourites that we can really bathe in sentimentality, drink in draughts of joy from the past, allow memory full away. You whose hair is turning white will be in Row A, Seat No. 1 for the first performance of a revival of Robin Hood. You will not hear Edwin Hoff in his original role; Jessie Bartlett Davis is dead and, alas, Henry Clay Barnabee is no longer on the boards, but the newcomers, possibly, are respectable substitutes and the airs and lines remain. You can walk about in the lobby and say proudly that you attended the first performance of the opera ever so long ago when operettas had tune and reason. "Yes sir, there were plots in those days, and composers, and the singers could act. Times have certainly changed, sir. Come to the corner and have a Manhattan.... There were no cocktails in those days.... There is no singer like Mrs. Davis today!"

Well the poor souls who cannot feel tenderly about a past they have not yet experienced have their recompenses. For one thing I am certain that the revivals of the Gilbert and Sullivan operettas to which De Wolf Hopper devoted his best talents were better, in many respects, than the original London productions; just as I am equally certain that the representations of Aida at the Metropolitan Opera House are way ahead of the original performance of that work given at Cairo before the Khedive of Egypt.

Then there is the musical revue, a form which we have borrowed from the French, but which we have vastly improved upon and into which we have poured some of our most national feeling and expression. The interpretation of these frivolities is a new art. Gaby Deslys may be only half a loaf compared to Marie Jansen, but I am sure that Elsie Janis is more than three-quarters. Frank Tinney and Al Jolson can, in their humble way, efface memories of Digby Bell and Dan Daly. Adele Rowland and Marie Dressler have their points (and curves). Irving Berlin, Louis A. Hirsch, and Jerome Kern are not to be sniffed at. Neither is P. G. Wodehouse. Harry B. Smith we have always with us: he is the Sarah Bernhardt of librettists.

Joseph Urban has wrought a revolution in stage settings for this form of entertainment. Louis Sherwin has offered us convincing evidence to support his theory that the new staging in America is coming to us by way of the revue and not through the serious drama. Melville Ellis, Lady Duff-Gordon, and Paul Poiret have done their bit for the dresses. In fact, my dear young man—who are reading this article—you will feel just as tenderly in twenty years about the Follies of 1917 as your father does now about Wang. Only, and this is a very big ONLY, the Follies of 1917, depending as it does entirely on topical subjects and dimpled knees, cannot be revived. Fervid and enlivening as its immediate impression may be it cannot be lasting. You can never recapture the thrills of this summer by sitting in Row A, Seat No. 1 at any 1937 reprise. There can never be anything of the sort. The revue, like the firefly, is for a night only. We take it in with the daily papers ... and the next season, already old-fashioned, it goes forth to show Grinnell and Davenport how Mlle. Manhattan deported herself the year before.

So if the youth of these days chooses to be sentimental in the years to come over the good old days of Urban scenery and Olive Thomas, the Balloon Girls of the Midnight Frolic and the chorus of the Winter Garden, he will be obliged to give way to the mood at home in front of the fire, see the pictures in the smoke, and hear the tunes in the dropping of the coals. Which is perhaps as it should be. For in 1937 the youth of that epoch can sit in Row A, Seat No. 1 himself and not be ousted from his place by a sentimental gentleman of middle age who longs to hear Poor Butterfly again.

April 25, 1917.



Two Young American Playwrights

"Gautier had a theory to the effect that to be a member of the Academy was simply and solely a matter of predestination. 'There is no need to do anything,' he would say, 'and so far as the writing of books is concerned that is entirely useless. A man is born an Academician as he is born a bishop or a cook. He can abuse the Academy in a dozen pamphlets if it amuses him, and be elected all the same; but if he is not predestined, three hundred volumes and ten masterpieces, recognized as such by the genuflections of an adoring universe, will not aid him to open its doors.' Evidently Balzac was not predestined but then neither was Moliere, and there must have been some consolation for him in that."

Edgar Saltus.



Two Young American Playwrights

In the newspaper reports relating to the death of Auguste Rodin I read with some astonishment that if the venerable sculptor, who lacked three years of being eighty when he died, had lived two weeks longer he would have been admitted to the French Academy! In other words, the greatest stone-poet since Michael Angelo, internationally famous and powerful, the most striking artist figure, indeed, of the last half century, was to be permitted, in the extremity of old age, to inscribe his name on a scroll, which bore the signatures of many inoffensive nobodies. I could not have been more amused if the newspapers, in publishing the obituary notices of John Jacob Astor, had announced that if the millionaire had not perished in the sinking of the Titanic, his chances of being invited to join the Elks were good; or if "Variety" or some other tradespaper of the music halls, had proclaimed, just before Sarah Bernhardt's debut at the Palace Theatre, that if her appearances there were successful she might expect an invitation to membership in the White Rats.... These hypothetical instances would seem ridiculous ... but they are not. The Rodin case puts a by no means seldom-recurring phenomenon in the centre of the stage under a calcium light. The ironclad dreadnaughts of the academic world, the reactionary artists, the dry-as-dust lecturers are constantly ignoring the most vital, the most real, the most important artists while they sing polyphonic, antiphonal, Palestrinian motets in praise of men who have learned to imitate comfortably and efficiently the work of their predecessors.

* * * * *

If there are other contemporary French sculptors than Rodin their names elude me at the moment; yet I have no doubt that some ten or fifteen of these hackmen have their names emblazoned in the books of all the so-called "honour" societies in Paris. It is a comfort, on the whole, to realize that America is not the only country in which such things happen. As a matter of fact, they happen nowhere more often than in France.

If some one should ask you suddenly for a list of the important playwrights of France today, what names would you let roll off your tongue, primed by the best punditic and docile French critics? Henry Bataille, Paul Hervieu, and Henry Bernstein. Possibly Rostand. Don't deny this; you know it is true, unless it happens you have been doing some thinking for yourself. For even in the works of Remy de Gourmont (to be sure this very clairvoyant mind did not often occupy itself with dramatic literature) you will find little or nothing relating to Octave Mirbeau and Georges Feydeau. True, Mirbeau did not do his best work in the theatre. That stinging, cynical attack on the courts of Justice (?) of France (nay, the world!), "Le Jardin de Supplice" is not a play and it is probably Mirbeau's masterpiece and the best piece of critical fiction written in France (or anywhere else) in the last fifty years. However Mirbeau shook the pillars of society even in the playhouse. Le Foyer was hissed repeatedly at the Theatre Francais. Night after night the proceedings ended in the ejection and arrest of forty or fifty spectators. Even to a mere outsider, an idle bystander of the boulevards, this complete exposure of the social, moral, and political hypocricies of a nation seemed exceptionally brutal. Le Foyer and "Le Jardin" could only have been written by a man passionately devoted to the human ideal ("each as she may," as Gertrude Stein so beautifully puts it). Les Affaires sont les Affaires is pure theatre, perhaps, but it might be considered the best play produced in France between Becque's La Parisienne and Brieux's Les Hannetons.

It is not surprising, on the whole, to find the critical tribe turning for relief from this somewhat unpleasant display of Gallic closet skeletons to the discreet exhibition of a few carefully chosen bones in the plays of Bernstein and Bataille, direct descendants of Scribe, Sardou, et Cie, but I may be permitted to indulge in a slight snicker of polite amazement when I discover these gentlemen applying their fingers to their noses in no very pretty-meaning gesture, directed at a grandson of Moliere. For such is Georges Feydeau. His method is not that of the Seventeenth Century master, nor yet that of Mirbeau; nevertheless, aside from these two figures, Beaumarchais, Marivaux, Becque, Brieux at his best, and Maurice Donnay occasionally, there has not been a single writer in the history of the French theatre so inevitably au courant with human nature. His form is frankly farcical and his plays are so funny, so enjoyable merely as good shows that it seems a pity to raise an obelisk in the playwright's honour, and yet the fact remains that he understands the political, social, domestic, amorous, even cloacal conditions of the French better than any of his contemporaries, always excepting the aforementioned Mirbeau. In On Purge Bebe he has written saucy variations on a theme which Rabelais, Boccaccio, George Moore, and Moliere in collaboration would have found difficult to handle. It is as successful an experiment in bravado and bravura as Mr. Henry James's "The Turn of the Screw." And he has accomplished this feat with nimbleness, variety, authority, even (granting the subject) delicacy. Seeing it for the first time you will be so submerged in gales of uncontrollable laughter that you will perhaps not recognize at once how every line reveals character, how every situation springs from the foibles of human nature. Indeed in this one-act farce Feydeau, with about as much trouble as Zeus took in transforming his godship into the semblance of a swan, has given you a well-rounded picture of middle-class life in France with its external and internal implications.... And how he understands the buoyant French grue, unselfconscious and undismayed in any situation. I sometimes think that Occupe-toi d'Amelie is the most satisfactory play I have ever seen; it is certainly the most delightful. I do not think you can see it in Paris again. The Nouveautes, where it was presented for over a year, has been torn down; an English translation would be an insult to Feydeau; nor will you find essays about it in the yellow volumes in which the French critics tenderly embalm their feuilletons; nor do I think Arthur Symons or George Moore, those indefatigable diggers in Parisian graveyards, have discovered it for their English readers. Reading the play is to miss half its pleasure; so you must take my word in the matter unless you have been lucky enough to see it yourself, in which case ten to one you will agree with me that one such play is worth a kettleful of boiled-over drama like Le Voleur, Le Secret, Samson, La Vierge Folle, et cetera, et cetera. In the pieces I have mentioned Feydeau, in representation, had the priceless assistance of a great comic artist, Armande Cassive. If we are to take Mr. Symons's assurance in regard to de Pachmann that he is the world's greatest pianist because he does one thing more perfectly than any one else, by a train of similar reasoning we might confidently assert that Mlle. Cassive is the world's greatest actress.

When you ask a Frenchman to explain why he does not like Mirbeau (and you will find that Frenchmen invariably do not like him) he will shrug his shoulders and begin to tell you that Mirbeau was not good to his mother, or that he drank to excess, or that he did not wear a red, white, and blue coat on the Fourteenth of July, or that he did not stand for the French spirit as exemplified in the eating of snails on Christmas. In other words, he will immediately place himself in a position in which you may be excused for regarding him as a person whose opinion is worth nothing, whereas his ratiocinatory powers on subjects with which he is more in sympathy may be excellent. I know why he does not like Mirbeau. Mirbeau is the reason. In his life he was not accustomed to making compromises nor was he accustomed to making friends (which comes after all to the same thing). He did what he pleased, said what he pleased, wrote what he pleased. His armorial bearings might have been a cat upsetting a cream jug with the motto, "Je m'en fous." The author of "Le Jardin de Supplice" would not be in high favour anywhere; nevertheless I would willingly relinquish any claims I might have to future popularity for the privilege of having been permitted to sign this book.

Feydeau is distinctly another story; his plays are more successful than any others given in Paris. They are so amusing that even while he is pointing the finger at your own particular method of living you are laughing so hard that you haven't time to see the application.... So the French critics have set him down as another popular figure, only a nobody born to entertain the boulevards, just as the American critics regard the performances of Irving Berlin with a steely supercilious impervious eye. The Viennese scorned Mozart because he entertained them. "A gay population," wrote the late John F. Runciman, "always a heartless master, holds none in such contempt as the servants who provide it with amusement."

The same condition has prevailed in England until recently. A few seasons ago you might have found the critics pouring out their glad songs about Arthur Wing Pinero and Henry Arthur Jones. Bernard Shaw has, in a measure, restored the balance to the British theatre. He is not only a brilliant playwright; he is a brilliant critic as well. Foreseeing the fate of the under man in such a struggle he became his own literary huckster and by outcriticizing the other critics he easily established himself as the first English (or Irish) playwright. When he thus rose to the top, by dint of his own exertions, he had strength enough to carry along with him a number of other important authors. As a consequence we may regard the Pinero incident closed and in ten years his theatre will be considered as old-fashioned and as inadept as that of Robertson or Bulwer-Lytton.

Having no Shaw in America, no man who can write brilliant prefaces and essays about his own plays until the man in the street is obliged perforce to regard them as literature, we find ourselves in the condition of benighted France. Dulness is mistaken for literary flavour; the injection of a little learning, of a little poetry (so-called) into a theatrical hackpiece, is the signal for a good deal of enthusiasm on the part of the journalists (there are two brilliant exceptions). Which of our playwrights are taken seriously by the pundits? Augustus Thomas and Percy MacKaye: Thomas the dean, and MacKaye the poet laureate. I have no intention of wrenching the laurel wreathes from these august brows. Let them remain. Each of these gentlemen has a long and honourable career in the theatre behind him, from which he should be allowed to reap what financial and honourary rewards he may be able. But I would not add one leaf to these wreathes, nor one crotchet to the songs of praise which vibrate around them. I turn aside from their plays in the theatre and in the library as I turn aside from the fictions of Pierre de Coulevain and Arnold Bennett.

I love to fashion wreathes of my own and if two young men will now step forward to the lecturer's bench I will take delight in crowning them with my own hands. Will the young man at the back of the hall please page Avery Hopwood and Philip Moeller?... No response! They seem to have retreated modestly into the night. Nevertheless they shall not escape me!

I speak of Mr. Hopwood first because he has been writing for our theatre for a longer period than has Mr. Moeller, and because his position, such as it is, is assured. Like Feydeau in France he has a large popular following; he has probably made more money in a few years than Mr. Thomas has made during his whole lifetime and the managers are always after him to furnish them with more plays with which to fill their theatres. For his plays do fill the theatres. Fair and Warmer, Nobody's Widow, Clothes, and Seven Days, would be included in any list of the successful pieces produced in New York within the past ten years. Two of these pieces would be near the very top of such a list. An utterly absurd allotment of actors is sufficient to explain the failures of Sadie Love and Our Little Wife and it might be well if some one should attempt a revival of one of his three serious plays, This Woman and This Man, in which Carlotta Nillson appeared for a brief space.

This author, mainly through the beneficent offices of a gift of supernal charm, contrives to do in English very much what Feydeau does in French. It is his contention that you can smite the Puritans, even in the American theatre, squarely on the cheek, provided you are sagacious in your choice of weapon. In Fair and Warmer he provokes the most boisterous and at the same time the most innocent laughter with a scene which might have been made insupportably vulgar. A perfectly respectable young married woman gets very drunk with the equally respectable husband of one of her friends. The scene is the mainstay, the raison d'etre, of the play, and it furnishes the material for the better part of one act; yet young and old, rich and poor, philistine and superman alike, delight in it. To make such a situation irresistible and universal in its appeal is, it seems to me, undoubtedly the work of genius. What might, indeed should, have been disgusting, was not only in intention but in performance very funny. Let those who do not appreciate the virtuosity of this undertaking attempt to write as successful a scene in a similar vein. Even if they are able to do so, and I do not for a moment believe that there is another dramatic author in America who can, they will be the first to grant the difficulty of the achievement. With an apparently inexhaustible fund of fantasy and wit Mr. Hopwood passes his wand over certain phases of so-called smart life, almost always with the happiest results. With a complete realization of the independence of his medium he often ignores the realistic conventions and the traditional technique of the stage, but his touch is so light and joyous, his wit so free from pose, that he rarely fails to establish his effect. His pen has seldom faltered. Occasionally, however, the heavy hand of an uncomprehending stage director or of an aggressive actor has played havoc with the delicate texture of his fabric. There is no need here for the use of hammer or trowel; if an actress must seek aid in implements, let her rather rely on a soft brush, a lacy handkerchief, or a sparkling spangled fan.

Philip Moeller has achieved distinction in another field, that of elegant burlesque, of sublimated caricature. His stage men and women are as adroitly distorted (the better to expose their comic possibilities) as the drawings of Max Beerbohm. Beginning with the Bible and the Odyssey (Helena's Husband and Sisters of Susannah for the Washington Square Players) he has at length, by way of Shakespeare and Bacon (The Roadhouse in Arden) arrived at the Romantic Period in French literature and in Madame Sand, his first three-act play, he has established himself at once as a dangerous rival of the authors of Caesar and Cleopatra and The Importance of Being Earnest, both plays in the same genre as Mr. Moeller's latest contribution to the stage. The author has thrown a very high light on the sentimental adventures of the writing lady of the early Nineteenth Century, has indeed advised us and convinced us that they were somewhat ridiculous. So they must have appeared even to her contemporaries, however seriously George took herself, her romances, her passions, her petty tragedies. A less adult, a less seriously trained mind might have fallen into the error of making a sentimental play out of George's affairs with Alfred de Musset, Dr. Pagello, and Chopin (Mr. Moeller contents himself with these three passions, selected from the somewhat more extensive list offered to us by history). Such an author would doubtless have written Great Catherine in the style of Disraeli and Androcles and the Lion after the manner of Ben Hur! Whether love itself is always a comic subject, as Bernard Shaw would have us believe, is a matter for dispute, but there can be no alternative opinion about the loves of George Sand. A rehearsal of them offers only laughter to any one but a sentimental school girl.

The piece is conceived on a true literary level; it abounds in wit, in fantasy, in delightful situations, but there is nothing precious about its progress. Mr. Moeller has carefully avoided the traps expressly laid for writers of such plays. For example, the enjoyment of Madame Sand is in no way dependent upon a knowledge of the books of that authoress, De Musset, and Heine, nor yet upon an acquaintance with the music of Liszt and Chopin. Such matters are pleasantly and lightly referred to when they seem pertinent, but no insistence is laid upon them. Occasionally our author has appropriated some phrase originally spoken or written by one of the real characters, but for that he can scarcely be blamed. Indeed, when one takes into consideration the wealth of such material which lay in books waiting for him, it is surprising that he did not take more advantage of it. In the main he has relied on his own cleverness to delight our ears for two hours with brilliant conversation.

There is, it should be noted, in conclusion, nothing essentially American about either of these young authors. Both Mr. Hopwood and Mr. Moeller might have written for the foreign stage. Several of Mr. Hopwood's pieces, indeed, have already been transported to foreign climes and there seems every reason for belief that Mr. Moeller's comedy will meet a similarly happy fate.

November 29, 1917.



De Senectute Cantorum

"All'eta di settanta Non si ama, ne si canta."

Italian proverb.



De Senectute Cantorum

"I am not sure," writes Arthur Symons in his admirable essay on Sarah Bernhardt, "that the best moment to study an artist is not the moment of what is called decadence. The first energy of inspiration is gone; what remains is the method, the mechanism, and it is that which alone one can study, as one can study the mechanism of the body, not the principle of life itself. What is done mechanically, after the heat of the blood has cooled, and the divine accidents have ceased to happen, is precisely all that was consciously skilful in the performance of an art. To see all this mechanism left bare, as the form of a skeleton is left bare when age thins the flesh upon it is to learn more easily all that is to be learnt of structure, the art which not art but nature has hitherto concealed with its merciful covering."

Mr. Symons, of course, had an actress in mind, but his argument can be applied to singers as well, although it is safest to remember that much of the true beauty of the human voice inevitably departs with the youth of its owner. Still style in singing is not noticeably affected by age and an artist who possesses or who has acquired this quality very often can afford to make lewd gestures at Father Time. If good singing depended upon a full and sensuous tone, such artists as Ronconi, Victor Maurel, Max Heinrich, Ludwig Wullner, and Maurice Renaud would never have had any careers at all. It is obvious that any true estimate of their contribution to the lyric stage would put the chief emphasis on style, and this is usually the explanation for extended success on the opera or concert stage, although occasionally an extraordinary and exceptional singer may continue to give pleasure to her auditors, despite the fact that she has left middle age behind her, by the mere lovely quality of the tone she produces.

In the history of opera there may be found the names of many singers who have maintained their popularity and, indeed, a good deal of their art, long past fifty, and there is recorded at least one instance in which a singer, after a long absence from the theatre, returned to the scene of her earlier triumphs with her powers unimpaired, even augmented. I refer, of course, to Henrietta Sontag, born in 1805, who retired from the stage of the King's Theatre in London in 1830 in her twenty-fifth year and who returned twenty years later in 1849. She had, in the meantime, become the Countess Rossi, but although she had abandoned the stage her reappearance proved that she had not remained idle during her period of retirement. For she was one of those artists in whom early "inspiration" counted for little and "method" for much. She was, indeed, a mistress of style. She came back to the public in Linda di Chaminoux and H. F. Chorley ("Thirty Years' Musical Recollections") tells us that "all went wondrously well. No magic could restore to her voice an upper note or two which Time had taken; but the skill, grace, and precision with which she turned to account every atom of power she still possessed,—the incomparable steadiness with which she wrought out her composer's intentions—she carried through the part, from first to last, without the slightest failure, or sign of weariness—seemed a triumph. She was greeted—as she deserved to be—as a beloved old friend come home again in the late sunnier days.

"But it was not at the moment of Madame Sontag's reappearance that we could advert to all the difficulty which added to the honour of its success.—She came back under musical conditions entirely changed since she left the stage—to an orchestra far stronger than that which had supported her voice when it was younger; and to a new world of operas.—Into this she ventured with an intrepid industry not to be overpraised—with every new part enhancing the respect of every real lover of music.—During the short period of these new performances at Her Majesty's Theatre, which was not equivalent to two complete Opera seasons, not merely did Madame Sontag go through the range of her old characters—Susanna, Rosina, Desdemona, Donna Anna, and the like—but she presented herself in seven or eight operas which had not existed when she left the stage—Bellini's Sonnambula, Donizetti's Linda, La Figlia del Reggimento, Don Pasquale; Le Tre Nozze, of Signor Alary, La Tempesta, by M. Halevy—the last two works involving what the French call 'creation,' otherwise the production of a part never before represented.—In one of the favourite characters of her predecessor, the elder artist beat the younger one hollow.—This was as Maria, in Donizetti's La Figlia, which Mdlle. Lind may be said to have brought to England, and considered as her special property.... With myself, the real value of Madame Sontag grew, night after night—as her variety, her conscientious steadiness, and her adroit use of diminished powers were thus mercilessly tested. In one respect, compared with every one who had been in my time, she was alone, in right, perhaps of the studies of her early days—as a singer of Mozart's music."

It was after these last London seasons that Mme. Sontag undertook an American tour. She died in Mexico.

The great Mme. Pasta's ill-advised return to the stage in 1850 (when she made two belated appearances in London) is matter for sadder comment. Chorley, indeed, is at his best when he writes of it, his pen dipped in tears, for none had admired this artist in her prime more passionately than he. Here was a particularly good opportunity to study the bare skeleton of interpretative art; the result is one of the most striking passages in all literature:

"Her voice, which at its best, had required ceaseless watching and practice, had been long ago given up by her. Its state of utter ruin on the night in question passes description.—She had been neglected by those who, at least, should have presented her person to the best advantage admitted by Time.—Her queenly robes (she was to sing some scenes from Anna Bolena) in nowise suited or disguised her figure. Her hair-dresser had done some tremendous thing or other with her head—or rather had left everything undone. A more painful and disastrous spectacle could hardly be looked on.—There were artists present, who had then, for the first time, to derive some impression of a renowned artist—perhaps, with the natural feeling that her reputation had been exaggerated.—Among these was Rachel—whose bitter ridicule of the entire sad show made itself heard throughout the whole theatre, and drew attention to the place where she sat—one might even say, sarcastically enjoying the scene. Among the audience, however, was another gifted woman, who might far more legitimately have been shocked at the utter wreck of every musical means of expression in the singer—who might have been more naturally forgiven, if some humour of self-glorification had made her severely just—not worse—to an old prima donna;—I mean Madame Viardot.—Then, and not till then, she was hearing Madame Pasta.—But Truth will always answer to the appeal of Truth. Dismal as was the spectacle—broken, hoarse, and destroyed as was the voice—the great style of the singer spoke to the great singer. The first scene was Ann Boleyn's duet with Jane Seymour. The old spirit was heard and seen in Madame Pasta's Sorgi! and the gesture with which she signed to her penitent rival to rise. Later, she attempted the final mad scene of the opera—that most complicated and brilliant among the mad scenes on the modern musical stage—with its two cantabile movements, its snatches of recitative, and its bravura of despair, which may be appealed to as an example of vocal display, till then unparagoned, when turned to the account of frenzy, not frivolity—perhaps as such commissioned by the superb creative artist.—By that time, tired, unprepared, in ruin as she was, she had rallied a little. When—on Ann Boleyn's hearing the coronation music of her rival, the heroine searches for her own crown on her brow—Madame Pasta turned in the direction of the festive sounds, the old irresistible charm broke out;—nay, even in the final song, with its roulades, and its scales of shakes, ascending by a semi-tone, the consummate vocalist and tragedian, able to combine form with meaning—the moment of the situation, with such personal and musical display as form an integral part of operatic art—was indicated: at least to the apprehension of a younger artist.—'You are right!' was Madame Viardot's quick and heartfelt response (her eyes were full of tears) to a friend beside her—'You are right! It is like the Cenacolo of Da Vinci at Milan—a wreck of a picture, but the picture is the greatest picture in the world!'"

The great Mme. Viardot herself, whose intractable voice and noble stage presence inevitably remind one of Mme. Pasta, took no chances with fate. The friend of Alfred de Musset, the model for George Sand's "Consuelo," the "creator" of Fides in Le Prophete, and the singer who, in the revival of Orphee at the Theatre Lyrique in 1859, resuscitated Gluck's popularity in Paris, retired from the opera stage in 1863 at the age of 43, shortly after she had appeared in Alceste! (She sang in concert occasionally until 1870 or later.) Thereafter she divided her time principally between Baden and Paris and became the great friend of Turgeniev. His very delightful letters to her have been published. Idleness was abhorrent to this fine woman and in her middle and old age she gave lessons, while singers, composers, and conductors alike came to her for help and advice. She died in 1910 at the age of 89. Her less celebrated brother, Manuel Garcia (less celebrated as a singer; as a teacher he is given the credit for having restored Jenny Lind's voice. Among his other pupils Mathilde Marchesi and Marie Tempest may be mentioned), had died in 1906 at the age of 101. Her sister, Mme. Malibran, died very young, in the early Nineteenth Century, before, in fact, Mme. Viardot had made her debut.

Few singers have had the wisdom to follow Mme. Viardot's excellent example. The great Jenny Lind, long after her voice had lost its quality, continued to sing in oratorio and concert. So did Adelina Patti. Muriel Starr once told me of a parrot she encountered in Australia. The poor bird had arrived at the noble age of 117 and was entirely bereft of feathers. Flapping his stumpy wings he cried incessantly, "I'll fly, by God, I'll fly!" So, many singers, having lost their voices, continue to croak, "I'll sing, by God, I'll sing!" The Earl of Mount Edgcumbe, himself a man of considerable years when he published his highly diverting "Musical Reminiscences," gives us some extraordinary pictures of senility on the stage at the close of the Eighteenth Century. There was, for example, the case of Cecilia Davis, the first Englishwoman to sustain the part of prima donna and in that situation was second only to Gabrielli, whom she even rivalled in neatness of execution. Mount Edgcumbe found Miss Davies in Florence, unengaged and poor. A concert was arranged at which she appeared with her sister. Later she returned to England ... too old to secure an engagement. "This unfortunate woman is now (in 1834) living in London, in the extreme of old age, disease, and poverty," writes the Earl. He also speaks of a Signora Galli, of large and masculine figure and contralto voice, who frequently filled the part of second man at the Opera. She had been a principal singer in Handel's oratorios when conducted by himself. She afterwards fell into extreme poverty, and at the age of about seventy (!!!!), was induced to come forward to sing again at the oratorios. "I had the curiosity to go, and heard her sing He was despised and rejected of men in The Messiah. Of course her voice was cracked and trembling, but it was easy to see her school was good; and it was a pleasure to observe the kindness with which she was received and listened to; and to mark the animation and delight with which she seemed to hear again the music in which she had formerly been a distinguished performer. The poor old woman had been in the habit of coming to me annually for a trifling present; and she told me on that occasion that nothing but the severest distress should have compelled her so to expose herself, which after all, did not answer to its end, as she was not paid according to her agreement. She died shortly after." In 1783 the Earl heard a singer named Allegranti in Dresden, then at the height of her powers. Later she returned to England and reappeared in Cimarosa's Matrimonio Segreto. "Never was there a more pitiable attempt: she had scarcely a thread of voice remaining, nor the power to sing a note in tune: her figure and acting were equally altered for the worse, and after a few nights she was obliged to retire and quit the stage altogether." The celebrated Madame Mara, after a long sojourn in Russia, suddenly returned to England and was announced for a benefit performance at the King's Theatre after everybody had forgotten her existence. "She must have been at least seventy; but it was said that her voice had miraculously returned, and was as good as ever. But when she displayed those wonderfully revived powers, they proved, as might have been expected, lamentably deficient, and the tones she produced were compared to those of a penny trumpet. Curiosity was so little excited that the concert was ill attended ... and Madame Mara was heard no more. I was not so lucky (or so unlucky) as to hear these her last notes, as it was early in the winter, and I was not in town. She returned to Russia, and was a great sufferer by the burning of Moscow. After that she lived at Mitlau, or some other town near the Baltic, where she died at a great age, not many years ago."

Here is Michael Kelly's account of the same event: "With all her great skill and knowledge of the world, Madame Mara was induced, by the advice of some of her mistaken friends, to give a public concert at the King's Theatre, in her seventy-second year, when, in the course of nature her powers had failed her. It was truly grievous to see such transcendent talents as she once possessed, so sunk—so fallen. I used every effort in my power to prevent her committing herself, but in vain. Among other arguments to draw her from her purpose, I told her what happened to Monbelli, one of the first tenors of his day, who lost all his well-earned reputation and fame, by rashly performing the part of a lover, at the Pergola Theatre, at Florence, in his seventieth year, having totally lost his voice. On the stage, he was hissed; and the following lines, lampooning his attempt, were chalked on his house-door, as well as upon the walls of the city:—

'All' eta di settanta Non si ama, ne si canta.'"

W. T. Parke, forty years principal oboe player at Covent Garden Theatre, is kinder to Madame Mara in his "Musical Memoirs," but it must be taken into account that he is kinder to every one else, too. There is little of the acrimonious or the fault-finding note in his pages. This is his version of the affair: "That extraordinary singer of former days, Madame Mara, who had passed the last eighteen years in Russia, and who had lately arrived in England, gave a concert at the King's Theatre on the 6th of March (1820), which highly excited the curiosity of the musical public. On that occasion she sang some of her best airs; and though her powers were greatly inferior to what they were in her zenith, yet the same pure taste pervaded her performance. Whether vanity or interest stimulated Mara at her time of life to that undertaking, it would be difficult to determine; but whichsoever had the ascendency, her reign was short; for by singing one night afterwards at the vocal concert, the veil which had obscured her judgment was removed, and she retired to enjoy in private life those comforts which her rare talent had procured for her."

Parke also speaks of a Mrs. Pinto, "the once celebrated Miss Brent, the original Mandane in Arne's Artaxerxes," who appeared in 1785 at the age of nearly seventy in Milton's Mask of Comus at a benefit for a Mr. Hull, "the respectable stage-manager of Covent Garden Theatre." She was to sing the song of Sweet Echo and as Parke was to play the responses to her voice on the oboe he repaired to her house for rehearsal. "Although nearly seventy years old, her voice possessed the remains of those qualities for which it had been so much celebrated,—power, flexibility, and sweetness. On the night Comus was performed she sung with an unexpected degree of excellence, and was loudly applauded. This old lady, as a singer, gave me the idea of a fine piece of ruins, which though considerably dilapidated, still displayed some of its original beauties."

The celebrated Faustina, whose quarrel with Cuzzoni is as famous in the history of music as the war between Gluck and Piccinni, was less daring. Dr. Burney visited her when she was seventy-two years old and asked her to sing. "Alas, I cannot," she replied, "I have lost all my faculties."

La Camargo, the favourite dancer of Paris in the early Eighteenth Century, the inventor, indeed of the short ballet skirt, and the possessor of many lovers, retired from the stage in 1751 with a large fortune, besides a pension of fifteen hundred francs. Thenceforth she led a secluded life. She was an assiduous visitor to the poor of her parish and she kept a dozen dogs and an angora cat which she overwhelmed with affection. In that quaint book, "The Powder Puff," by Franz Blei, you may find a most charming description of a call paid to the lady in 1768 in her little old house in the Rue St. Thomas du Louvre, by Duclos, Grimm, and Helvetius, who had come in bantering mood to ask her whom, in her past life, she had loved best. Her reply touched these men, who took their leave. "Helvetius told Camargo's story to his wife; Grimm made a note of it for his Court Journal; and as for Duclos, it suggested some moral reflections to him, for when, two years later, Mlle. Marianne Camargo was carried to her grave, he remarked: 'It is quite fitting to give her a white pall like a virgin.'"

Sophie Arnould, one of the most celebrated actresses and singers of the Eighteenth Century, died in poverty at the age of 63 and there is no record of her burial place. She had been the friend of Voltaire, Rousseau, d'Alembert, Diderot, Helvetius, and the Baron d'Holbach. She had "created" Gluck's Iphigenie en Aulide and the composer had said of her, "If it had not been for the voice and elocution of Mlle. Arnould, my Iphigenie would never have been performed in France." In her youth she had interested not only Marie Antoinette but also the King, and she had been the object of Mme. de Pompadour's suspicion and Mme. du Barry's rage. Garrick declared her a better actress than Clairon. She was as famous for her wit as for her singing and acting. When Mme. Laguerre appeared drunk in Iphigenie en Tauride she exclaimed, "Why this is Iphigenie en Champagne!" Indeed, she made so many remarks worthy of preservation that shortly after her death in 1802, a book called "Arnoldiana," devoted to her epigrams, was issued.... Nevertheless, this lady was hissed at the age of 36, when, after a short absence from the stage she reappeared as Iphigenie in 1776. She was neither old nor ugly and if her voice may have lost something her nineteen years of stage life in Paris might have weighed against that. On one occasion, according to La Harpe, when she had the line to sing, "You long for me to be gone," the audience applauded vociferously. To protect Sophie, Marie Antoinette sat in a box on several nights and stemmed the storm of disapproval, but in the end even the presence of the queen herself was insufficient to quell the hissing. One sad story completes the picture. In 1785, when her financial troubles were beginning, her two sons, who bore her no love, called for money. She had none to give them. "There are two horses left in the stable," she said. "Take those." They rode away on the horses.