it of
its charities, at the Carnegie Music Hall, New York. Mr. Walter
Damrosch was to have conducted, but was detained in Washington by
the funeral of Mr. Blaine, and Mr. Hinrichs took his place.

O Doctor _admirabilis, acutus et illuminatissimus_! Needless to say the
universities have not overlooked this geyser of buttermilk: he is an
honourary A.M. of Yale. His most respectable volume, that on negro
folksong, impresses one principally by its incompleteness. It may be
praised as a sketch, but surely not as a book. The trouble with
Krehbiel, of course, is that he mistakes a newspaper morgue for
Parnassus. He has all of the third-rate German's capacity for
unearthing facts, but he doesn't know how either to think or to write,
and so his criticism is mere pretence and pishposh. W. J. Henderson, of
the _Sun_, doesn't carry that handicap. He is as full of learning as
Krehbiel, as his books on singing and on the early Italian opera show,
but he also wields a slippery and intriguing pen, and he could be hugely
entertaining if he would. Instead, he devotes himself to manufacturing
primers for the newly intellectual. I can find little of the charm of
his _Sun_ articles in his books. Lawrence Gilman? A sound musician but
one who of late years has often neglected music for the other arts.
Philip H. Goepp? His three volumes on the symphonic repertoire leave
twice as much to be said as they say. Carl Van Vechten? A very promising
novice, but not yet at full growth. Philip Hale? His gigantic
annotations scarcely belong to criticism at all; they are musical
talmudism. Beside, they are buried in the program books of the Boston
Symphony Orchestra, and might as well be inscribed on the temple walls
of Baalbec. As for Upton and other such fellows, they are merely musical
chautauquans, and their tedious commentaries have little more value than
the literary criticisms in the religious weeklies. One of them, a
Harvard _maestro_, has published a book on the orchestra in which, on
separate pages, the reader is solemnly presented with pictures of first
and second violins!

It seems to me that Huneker stands on a higher level than any of these
industrious gentlemen, and that his writings on music are of much more
value, despite his divided allegiance among the _beaux arts_. Whatever
may be said against him, it must at least be admitted that he knows
Chopin, and that he has written the best volumes upon the tuberculous
Pole in