riends were not alone in the practice. There were a dozen or more
artists or _soi-disant_ artists busily engaged with their sketch-books.
The concert-room offered a rich field to them. One could at least be
sure of one thing--that they were not taking off the persons at whom
they looked most intently. There must be quite a gallery hidden away in
some old sketch-books--of portraits or wicked caricatures of the
audience that frequented the concerts of the Instrumental Musik Verein.
I wonder where they all are? Who has them? What has become of the
light-hearted sketchers? I often recall those homely Saturday evening
concerts; the long, shabby saal with its faded out-of-date decorations;
its rows of small tables with the well-known groups around them; the
mixed and motley audience. How easy, after a little while, to pick out
the English, by their look of complacent pleasure at the delightful ease
and unceremoniousness of the whole affair; their gladness at finding a
public entertainment where one's clothes were not obliged to be selected
with a view to outshining those of every one else in the room; the
students shrouded in a mystery, secret and impenetrable, of tobacco
smoke. The spruce-looking school-boys from the Gymnasium and Realschule,
the old captains and generals, the Fraeulein their daughters, the
_gnaedigen Frauen_ their wives; dressed in the disastrous plaids, checks,
and stripes, which somehow none but German women ever got hold of.
Shades of Le Follet! What costumes there were on young and old for an
observing eye! What bonnets, what boots, what stupendously daring
accumulation of colors and styles and periods of dress crammed and piled
on the person of one substantial Frau Generalin, or Doctorin or
Professorin! The low orchestra--the tall, slight, yet commanding figure
of von Francius on the estrade; his dark face with its indescribable
mixture of pride, impenetrability and insouciance; the musicians behind
him--every face of them well known to the audience as those of the
audience to them: it was not a mere "concert," which in England is
another word for so much expense and so much vanity--it was a gathering
of friends. We knew the music in which the Kapelle was most at home; we
knew their strong points and their weak ones; the passage in the
Pastoral Symphony where the second violins were a little weak; that
overture where the blaseninstrumente came out so well--the symphonies
one heard--the divine wealth of u