ng a trap for the vanity of these egregious persons. The
newspapers, the managers and the artists before the public are to blame
for this callow, shallow attempt at culture. We read that Rosenthal is a
second Heine in conversation. That he spills epigrams at his meals and
dribbles proverbs at the piano. He has committed all of Heine to memory
and in the greenroom reads Sanscrit. Paderewski, too, is profoundly
something or other. Like Wagner, he writes his own program--I mean plots
for his operas. He is much given to reading Swinburne because some one
once compared him to the bad, mad, sad, glad, fad poet of England,
begad! As for Sauer, we hardly know where to begin. He writes blank
verse tragedies and discusses Ibsen with his landlady. Pianists are now
so intellectual that they sometimes forget to play the piano well.

Of course, Daddy Liszt began it all. He had read everything before he
was twenty, and had embraced and renegaded from twenty religions. This
volatile, versatile, vibratile, vivacious, vicious temperament of his
has been copied by most modern pianists who haven't brains enough to
parse a sentence or play a Bach _Invention_. The Weimar crew all
imitated Liszt's style in octaves and hair dressing. I was there once, a
sunny day in May, the hedges white with flowers and the air full of
bock-bier. Ah, thronging memories of youth! I was slowly walking through
a sun-smitten lane when a man on horse dashed by me, his face red with
excitement, his beast covered with lather. He kept shouting "Make room
for the master! make way for the master!" and presently a venerable man
with a purple nose--a Cyrano de Cognac nose--came towards me. He wore a
monkish habit and on his head was a huge shovel-shaped hat, the sort
affected by Don Basilio in _The Barber of Seville_.

"It must be Liszt or the devil!" I cried aloud, and Liszt laughed, his
warts growing purple, his whole expression being one of good-humor. He
invited me to refreshment at the Czerny House, but I refused. During the
time he stood talking to me a throng of young Liszts gathered about us.
I call them "young Liszts" because they mimicked the old gentleman in an
outrageous manner. They wore their hair on their shoulders, they
sprinkled it with flour; they even went to such lengths as to paint
purplish excrescences on their chins and brows. They wore
semi-sacerdotal robes, they held their hands in the peculiar and
affected style of Liszt, and they one and all wo