old
chap again with his car-load of musty reminiscences! Even if Old Fogy
did study with Hummel, is that any reason why we should be bored by the
fact? How can a skeleton in the closet tell us anything valuable about
contemporary music?"

To this youthful wail--and it is a real one--I can raise no real
objection. I am an Old Fogy; but I know it. That marks the difference
between other old fogies and myself. Some English wit recently remarked
that the sadness of old age in a woman is because her face changes; but
the sad part of old age in a man is that his mind does not change. Well,
I admit we septuagenarians are set in our ways. We have lived our lives,
felt, suffered, rejoiced, and perhaps grown a little tolerant, a little
apathetic. The young people call it cynical; yet it is not
cynicism--only a large charity for the failings, the shortcomings of
others. So what I am about to say in this letter must not be set down as
either garrulity or senile cynicism. It is the result of a half-century
of close observation, and, young folks, let me tell you that in fifty
years much music has gone through the orifices of my ears; many artistic
reputations made and lost!

I repeat, I have witnessed the rise and fall of so many musical
dynasties; have seen men like Wagner emerge from northern mists and die
in the full glory of a reverberating sunset. And I have also remarked
that this same Richard the Actor touched his apogee fifteen years ago
and more. Already signs are not wanting which show that Wagner and
Wagnerism is on the decline. As Swinburne said of Walt Whitman: "A
reformer--but not founder." This holds good of Wagner, who closed a
period and did not begin a new one. In a word, Wagner was a theater
musician, one cursed by a craze for public applause--and shekels--and
knowing his public, gave them more operatic music than any Italian who
ever wrote for barrel-organ fame. Wagner became popular, the rage; and
today his music, grown stale in Germany, is being fervently imitated,
nay, burlesqued, by the neo-Italian school. Come, is it not a comical
situation, this swapping of themes among the nations, this picking and
stealing of styles? And let me tell you that of all the Robber Barons of
music, Wagner was the worst. He laid hands on every score, classical or
modern, that he got hold of.

But I anticipate; I put the _coda_ before the dog. When _Rienzi_
appeared none of us were deceived. We recognized our Meyerbeer
disfigu