ly characteristic of the Russian salon school. Nor
can one discover in this music a distinctly original sense of either
rhythm of harmony or tone-color. The E-minor Symphony, for all its
competence and smoothness, is full of the color and quality and
atmosphere of Tchaikowsky. It is Tchaikowsky without the hysteria,
perhaps, but also without the energy. In all the music of M.
Rachmaninoff there is something strangely twice-told. From it there
flows the sadness distilled by all things that are a little useless.

There are to be found in every picture gallery canvases attributed, not
to any single painter, but to an atelier, to the school of some great
master. One finds charming pieces among them. Nor are they invariably
the work of pupils who painted under the direction of some famous man.
Quite as often they are the handiwork of artists who appeared
independent enough to their patrons and to themselves. Their names and
their persons were familiar to those who ordered pictures from them. It
is only that in the course of time their names have come to be
forgotten. For there is in their canvases little trace of the substance
that causes people to cherish an individuality, and makes a name to be
remembered. Other personalities have transpired through their
brush-strokes, and have made it evident that behind the man who held the
brush in his hand there was another who directed the strokes--the man
upon whom the artist had modeled himself, the personality he preferred
to his own. It is this reflectiveness that has caused the attribution of
the work to ateliers.

And had M. Rachmaninoff instead of being a musician been a painter,
would not a like destiny await his compositions? For do they not proceed
from the point of departure of the entire brilliant school of
piano-compositions? Are they not a sort of throwback to the salon
school, the school of velocity, of effect, of whatever Rubinstein and
Liszt could desire? Are not the piano-pieces of M. Rachmaninoff the
result of a relationship to the instrument that is fast becoming
outmoded? There was some slight justification for the pompous and empty
work of his models. The concerti, the often flashy and tinselly
pianoforte compositions of Liszt and Rubinstein were the immediate and
surface result of that deeper sense of the instrument which arrived
during the nineteenth century, and intoxicated folk with the piano
timbres, and made them eager to hear its many voices in no matter