confused
difficulties and childish melodies. You call it naivete. I call it
puerility. I never saw a man that was less capable of developing a theme
than Tchaikovsky. Compare him to Rubinstein and you insult that great
master. Yet Rubinstein is neglected for the new man simply because, with
your depraved taste, you must have lots of red pepper, high spices,
rum, and an orchestral color that fairly blisters the eye. You call it
color. I call it chromatic madness. Just watch this agile fellow. He
lays hold on a subject, some Russian _volks_ melody. He gums it and
bolts it before it is half chewed. He has not the logical charm of
Beethoven--ah, what Jovian repose; what keen analysis! He has not the
logic, minus the charm, of Brahms; he never smells of the pure, open
air, like Dvorak--a milkman's composer; nor is Tchaikovsky master of the
pictorial counterpoint of Wagner. All is froth and fury, oaths,
grimaces, yelling, hallooing like drunken Kalmucks, and when he writes a
slow movement it is with a pen dipped in molasses. I don't wish to be
unjust to your 'modern music lord,' as some affected idiot calls him,
but really, to make a god of a man who has not mastered his material and
has nothing to offer his hearers but blasphemy, vulgarity, brutality,
evil passions like hatred, concupiscence, horrid pride--indeed, all the
seven deadly sins are mirrored in his scores--is too much for my nerves.
Is this your god of modern music? If so, give me Wagner in preference.
Wagner, thank the fates, is no hypocrite. He says out what he means, and
he usually means something nasty. Tchaikovsky, on the contrary, taking
advantage of the peculiar medium in which he works, tells the most
awful, the most sickening, the most immoral stories; and if he had
printed them in type he would have been knouted and exiled to Siberia.
If----"

"Time to close up," said the waiter. I was alone. The others had fled. I
had been mumbling with closed eyes for hours. Wait until I catch that
Sledge!

XVII

MUSICAL BIOGRAPHY MADE TO ORDER

No longer from Dussek-Villa-on-Wissahickon do I indite my profound
thoughts (it is the fashion nowadays in Germany for a writer to proclaim
himself or herself--there are a great many "hers"--profound; the result,
I suppose, of too much Nietzsche and too little common sense, not to
mention modesty--that quite antiquated virtue). I am now situated in
this lovely, umbrageous spot not far from the Bohemian border in