." A lady who heard the two pianists at a
concert for the Italian poor, given in the salons of the Princess
Belgiojoso, exclaimed: "Thalberg est le premier pianiste du monde."--"Et
Liszt?" asked the person to whom the words were addressed--"Liszt!
Liszt--c'est le seul!" was the reply. This is the spirit in which great
artists should be judged. It is oftener narrowness of sympathy than
acuteness of discrimination which makes people exalt one artist and
disparage another who differs from him. In the wide realm of art there
are to be found many kinds of excellence; one man cannot possess them
all and in the highest degree. Some of these excellences are indeed
irreconcilable and exclude each other; most of them can only be combined
by a compromise. Hence, of two artists who differ from each other, one
is not necessarily superior to the other; and he who is the greater on
the whole may in some respects be inferior to the lesser. Perhaps the
reader will say that these are truisms. To be sure they are. And yet if
he considers only the judgments which are every day pronounced, he may
easily be led to believe that these truisms are most recondite truths
now for the first time revealed. When Liszt after his first return
from Switzerland did not find Thalberg himself, he tried to satisfy his
curiosity by a careful examination of that pianist's compositions. The
conclusions he came to be set forth in a criticism of Thalberg's Grande
Fantaisie, Op. 22, and the Caprices, Op. 15 and 19, which in 1837 made
its appearance in the Gazette musicale, accompanied by an editorial
foot-note expressing dissent. I called Liszt's article a criticism, but
"lampoon" or "libel" would have been a more appropriate designation. In
the introductory part Liszt sneers at Thalberg's title of "Pianist to
His Majesty the Emperor of Austria," and alludes to his rival's distant
(i.e., illegitimate) relationship to a noble family, ascribing his
success to a great extent to these two circumstances. The personalities
and abusiveness of the criticism remind one somewhat of the manner
in which the scholars of earlier centuries, more especially of the
sixteenth and seventeenth, dealt critically with each other. Liszt
declares that love of truth, not jealousy, urged him to write; but he
deceived himself. Nor did his special knowledge and experience as a
musician and virtuoso qualify him, as he pretended, above others for the
task he had undertaken; he forgot that no ma