er minded me of the musical reputations I
have seen rise, fill mid-heaven with splendor, pale, and fade into
ineffectual twilight. Alas! it is one of the bitter things of old age,
one of its keen tortures, to listen to young people, to hear their
superb boastings, and to know how short-lived is all art, music the most
evanescent of them all. When I was a boy the star of Schumann was just
on the rim of the horizon; what glory! what a planet swimming freely
into the glorious constellation! Beethoven was clean obscured by the
romantic mists that went to our heads like strong, new wine, and made us
drunk with joy. How neat, dapper, respectable and antique Mendelssohn!
Being Teutonic in our learnings, Chopin seemed French and dandified--the
Slavic side of him was not yet in evidence to our unanointed vision.
Schubert was a divinely awkward stammerer, and Liszt the brilliant
centipede amongst virtuosi. They were rapturous days and we fed full
upon Jean Paul Richter, Hoffmann, moonshine and mush.

What the lads and lassies of ideal predilections needed was a man like
Schumann, a dreamer of dreams, yet one who pinned illuminative tags to
his visions to give them symbolical meanings, dragged in poetry by the
hair, and called the composite, art. Schumann, born mentally sick, a man
with the germs of insanity, a pathological case, a literary man turned
composer--Schumann, I say, topsy-turvied all the newly born and, without
knowing it, diverted for the time music from its true current. He
preached Brahms and Chopin, but practised Wagner--he was the forerunner
to Wagner, for he was the first composer who fashioned literature into
tone.

Doesn't all this sound revolutionary? An old fellow like me talking this
way, finding old-fashioned what he once saw leave the bank of melody
with the mintage glitteringly fresh! Yet it is so. I have lived to
witness the rise of Schumann and, please Apollo, I shall live to see the
eclipse of Wagner. Can't you read the handwriting on the wall? _Dinna ye
hear the slogan_ of the realists? No music rooted in bookish ideas, in
literary or artistic movements, will survive the mutations of the
_Zeitgeist_. Schumann reared his palace on a mirage. The inside he
called Bachian--but it wasn't. In variety of key-color perhaps; but
structurally no symphony may be built on Bach, for a sufficient reason.
Schumann had the great structure models before him; he heeded them not.
He did not pattern after the three mast