yries_ and
wondered if it was music or just a stable full of crazy colts neighing
for oats. Dean Swift's Gulliver would have said the latter. I thought
so. The howling of the circus girls up on the rocks paralyzed my
faculties.

It was a hideous saturnalia, and deafened by the brass and percussion
instruments I tried to get away, but my neighbors protested and I was
forced to sit and suffer. What followed was incomprehensible. The crazy
amazons, the Walk-your-horses, and the disagreeable _Wotan_ kept things
in a perfect uproar for half an hour. Then the stage cleared and the
father, after lecturing his daughter, put her to sleep under a tree. He
must have been a mesmerist. Red fire ran over the stage, steam hissed,
the orchestra rattled, and the bass roared. Finally, to tinkling bells
and fourth of July fireworks, the curtain fell on the silliest pantomime
I ever saw.

The music? Ah, don't ask me now! Wait until my nerves get settled. It
never stopped, and fast as it reeled off I recognized Bach, Mozart,
Beethoven, Schumann, Weber--lots of Weber--Marschner, and Chopin. Yes,
Chopin! The orchestration seemed overwrought and coarse and the
form--well, formlessness is the only word to describe it. There was an
infernal sort of skill in the instrumentation at times, a short-breathed
juggling with other men's ideas, but no development, no final cadence.
Everything in suspension until my ears fairly longed for one perfect
resolution. Even in the _Spring Song_ it does not occur. That tune is
suspiciously Italian, for all Wagner's dislike of Italy.

And this is your operatic hero today! This is your maker of music
dramas! Pooh! it is neither fish nor flesh nor good red herring. Give me
one page from the _Marriage of Figaro_ or the finale to _Don Giovanni_
and I will show you divine melody and great dramatic writing! But I'm
old-fashioned, I suppose. I have since been told the real story of _Die
Walkuere_ and am dumfounded. It is all worse than I expected. Give me my
Dussek, give me Mozart, let me breathe pure, sweet air after this
hot-house music with its debauch of color, sound, action, and morals. I
must have the grip, because even now as I write my mind seems tainted
with the awful music of Richard Wagner, the arch fiend of music. I shall
send for the doctor in the morning.

XIV

A VISIT TO THE PARIS CONSERVATOIRE

I feel very much like the tutor of Prince Karl Heinrich in the pretty
play _Old Heidelberg_. Aft