ssuring him that he
had unusual ability. But the lad also had a well-developed
discriminative faculty. He had chosen his ideal and could not he
persuaded to forsake it, preferring tone-pictures to those made with
brushes and palette.

Besides the Quaker strain, with its tendency toward dignity,
simplicity and openness to the leadings of spirit, he owes to his
Celtic lineage the mystic, poetic, dashing, unsophisticated vein that
might be easily mistaken for caprice, and to his American birth is
due, no doubt, many of the more solid, practical characteristics that
combined to produce the proper balance.

Naturally, he was deeply influenced by his foreign teachers and also
by his favorites among the great masters whose works he studied. He is
said to have adored Wagner, with Tschaikowsky and Grieg for lesser
musical loves. To what extent he drew upon Wagner no one can say, but
that he did so, either unconsciously or with that imitation that is
sincerest flattery is very evident. Many passages suggest Wagner, and
one can easily imagine the ardent young American worshiping the great
German master, as he in turn had adored Beethoven.

Liszt used to say: "I only value people by what they are to Wagner."
There is no estimating the value of Wagner to those who came after
him. He was not satisfied, we are told, with either the melody of the
Italians or the rhetorical excesses of the French. The music of
Beethoven was his ideal, and the dramas of Shakespeare, whose work, to
his mind, compared with the early Greek plays, was like a scene in
nature in comparison with a piece of architecture. Mme. de Stael
called beautiful architecture "frozen music." It was just this
architectural, frozen, congealed condition that Wagner wished to
overcome, without running into any frivolities. He was in every sense
a living, breathing _man_, and his work is pervaded by this virile,
life-like quality. In his first youthful attempt at drama, forty-two
persons perished in the development of the plot and most of them had
to be brought back as ghosts to enable him to complete the piece. Now,
however, one is haunted by the faithfulness to life of his creations,
not by the ghosts of his slaughtered victims, and an aspiring young
composer who adored him could not help imbibing some of his power.

Wagner thought that the musician should write his own lines in opera
or song, and conceived and mastered a new form, taking poetry into
music just as Sidney