eatest composer
of his century, when he was only a clever impostor, a theater-man, a
wearer of borrowed plumage. His influence on music has been deplorably
evil. He has melodramatized the art, introduced in it a species of
false, theatrical, _personal_ feeling, quite foreign to its nature. The
symphony, not the stage, is the objective of musical art.
Wagner--neither composer nor tragedian, but a cunning blend of
both--diverted the art to his own uses. A great force? Yes, a great
force was his, but a dangerous one. He never reached the heights, but
was always posturing behind the foot-lights. And he has left no school,
no descendants. Like all hybrids, he is cursed with sterility. The
twentieth century will find Wagner out. _Nunc Dimittis!_

IV

IN MOZARTLAND WITH OLD FOGY

The greatest musician the world has yet known--Mozart. The greatest?
Yes, the greatest; greater than Bach, because less studied, less
artificial, professional, and _doctrinaire_; greater than Beethoven,
because Mozart's was a blither, a more serene spirit, and a spirit whose
eyes had been anointed by beauty. Beethoven is not beautiful. He is
dramatic, powerful, a maker of storms, a subduer of tempests; but his
speech is the speech of a self-centered egotist. He is the father of all
the modern melomaniacs, who, looking into their own souls, write what
they see therein--misery, corruption, slighting selfishness, and
ugliness. Beethoven, I say, was too near Mozart not to absorb some of
his sanity, his sense of proportion, his glad outlook upon life; but the
dissatisfied peasant in the composer of the _Eroica_, always in revolt,
would not allow him tranquillity. Now is the fashion for soul
hurricanes, these confessions of impotent wrath in music.

Beethoven began this fashion; Mozart did not. Beethoven had himself
eternally in view when he wrote. His music mirrors his wretched, though
profound, soul; it also mirrors many weaknesses. I always remember
Beethoven and Goethe standing side by side as some royal nobody--I
forget the name--went by. Goethe doffed his bonnet and stood uncovered,
head becomingly bowed. Beethoven folded his arms and made no obeisance.
This anecdote, not an apochryphal one, is always hailed as an evidence
of Beethoven's sturdiness of character, his rank republicanism, while
Goethe is slightly sniffed at for his snobbishness. Yet he was only
behaving as a gentleman should. If Mozart had been in Beethoven's place,
how cour