rror; his _B-minor Sonata_ a madman's tale signifying
froth and fury; his legendes, ballades, sonettes, Benedictions in out of
the way places, all, all with choral attachments, are cheap, specious,
artificial and insincere. Theatrical Liszt was to a virtue, and his
continual worship of God in his music is for me monotonously
blasphemous.

The Rhapsodies I reserve for the last. They are the nightmare curse of
the pianist, with their rattle-trap harmonies, their helter-skelter
melodies, their vulgarity and cheap bohemianism. They all begin in the
church and end in the tavern. There is a fad just now for eating
ill-cooked food and drinking sour Hungarian wine to the accompaniment of
a wretched gypsy circus called a Czardas. Liszt's rhapsodies
irresistibly remind me of a cheap, tawdry, dirty _table d'hote_, where
evil-smelling dishes are put before you, to be whisked away and replaced
by evil-tasting messes. If Liszt be your god, why then give me Czerny,
or, better still, a long walk in the woods, humming with nature's
rhythms. I think I'll read _Walden_ over again. Now do you think I am as
amiable as I look?

X

BACH--ONCE, LAST, AND ALL THE TIME

I'm an old, old man. I've seen the world of sights, and I've listened
eagerly, aye, greedily, to the world of sound, to that sweet, maddening
concourse of tones civilized Caucasians agree is the one, the only art.
I, too, have had my mad days, my days of joys uncontrolled--doesn't Walt
Whitman say that somewhere?--I've even rioted in Verdi. Ah, you are
surprised! You fancied I knew my Czerny _et voila tout_? Let me have
your ear. I've run the whole gamut of musical composers. I once swore by
Meyerbeer. I came near worshiping Wagner, the early Wagner, and today I
am willing to acknowledge that _Die Meistersinger_ is the very apex of a
modern polyphonic score. I adored Spohr and found good in Auber. In a
word, I had my little attacks of musical madness, for all the world like
measles, scarlet fever, chicken-pox, and the mumps.

As I grew older my task clarified. Having admired Donizetti, there was
no danger of being seduced by the boisterous, roystering Mascagni.
Knowing Mozart almost by heart, Gounod and his pallid imitations did not
for an instant impose on me. Ah! I knew them all, these vampires who
not only absorb a dead man's ideas, but actually copy his style, hoping
his interment included his works as well as his mortal remains. Being
violently self-conscious,