as imminent. Liszt, quickly divining that
Chopin was about to break forth in an hysterical fury, forstalled him by
jocosely crying: "Freddy, my old son, the trouble with you is that you
have no Sand in you!" And before the enraged Pole could answer this
cruel, mocking raillery, the tall Magyar leaned over, pressed the button
three times, and the lemonade came in time to avert blood-shed.

There, Mr. Editor, you have a pleasing comminglement of romance and
colloquialism. Now that I have shown how to play the trick, let all who
will go ahead and be their own musical Boswell.

But a truce to such foolery. I am wayward and gray of thought today. My
soul is filled with the clash and dust of life. I hate the eternal
blazoning of fierce woes and acid joys upon the orchestral canvas. Why
must the music of a composer be played? Why must our tone-weary world
be sorely grieved by the subjective shrieks and imprudent publications
of some musical fellow wrestling in mortal agony with his first love,
his first tailor's bill, his first acquaintance with the life about him?
Why, I ask, should music leave the page on which it is indited? Why need
it be played? How many beauties in a score are lost by translation into
rude tones! How disenchanting sound those climbing, arbutus-like
arpeggios and subtle half-tints of Chopin when played on that brutal,
jangling instrument of wood, wire and iron, the pianoforte! I shudder at
the profanation. I feel an oriental jealousy concerning all those
beautiful thoughts nestling in the scores of Chopin and Schubert which
are laid bare and dissected by the pompous pen of the music-critic. The
man who knows it all. The man who seeks to transmute the unutterable and
ineffable delicacies of tone into terms of commercial prose. And
newspaper prose. Hideous jargon, I abominate you!

I am suffering from too many harmonic harangues. [Isn't this one?] I
long for the valley of silence, Edgar Poe's valley, wherein not even a
sigh stirred the amber-colored air [or wasn't it saffron-hued? I forget,
and Poe is not to be had in this corner of the universe]. Why can't
music be read in the seclusion of one's study, in the company of one's
heart-beats? Why must we go to the housetop and shout our woes to the
universe? The "barbaric yawp" of Walt Whitman, over the roofs of the
world, has become fashionable, and from tooting motor-cars to noisy
symphonies all is a conspiracy against silence. At night dream-fugues
shatte