high tea, very
bourgeois, very long and very indigestible. One of the pair of
distinguished foreigners was Mr. Sauer; the other, Dvorak, was the
hero of the evening. Now, whatever one may think of Dvorak the
musician, it is impossible to feel anything but sympathy and
admiration for Dvorak the man. His early struggles to overcome the
attendant disadvantages of his peasant birth; his unheard-of labours
to acquire a mastery of the technique of his art when body and brain
were exhausted by the work of earning his daily bread in a very humble
capacity; his sickening years of waiting, not for popular recognition
merely, but for an opportunity of showing that he had any gifts worthy
of being recognised,--these command the sympathy of all but those
happy few who have found life a most delicate feather-bed. Dvorak has
honestly worked for all that has come to him, and the only people who
will carp or sneer at him are those who have gained or wish to gain
their positions without honest work. There could be no conjecture
wider of the mark than that of his success being due to any charlatan
tricks in his music or in his conduct of life. No composer's
music--not Bach's, nor Haydn's, nor even Mozart's--could be a more
veracious expression of his inner nature; and if Dvorak's music is at
times odd and whimsical, and persistently wrong-headed and _outre_
through long passages, it does not mean that Dvorak is trying to
impress or startle his hearers by doing unusual things, but merely
that he himself is odd and whimsical and has his periods of persistent
wrong-headedness. He is Slav in every fibre--not a pseudo-Slav whose
ancestors were or deserved to be whipped out of the temple in
Jerusalem. He has all the Slav's impetuosity and hot blood, his love
of glaring and noisy colour, his love of sheer beauty of a certain
limited kind, and--alas!--his unfailing brainlessness. His impetuosity
and hot blood are manifested in his frequent furious rhythms and the
abrupt changes in those rhythms; his love of colour in the quality of
his instrumentation, with its incessant contrasts and use of the
drums, cymbals, and triangle; his sense of beauty in the terribly
weird splendour of his pictures, and its limitations in his rare
achievement of anything fine when once he passes out of the region of
the weird and terrible; his brainlessness in his inability to
appreciate the value of a strong sinewy theme, in the lack of
proportion between the differen