he air--then comes one of
those terrible pauses, and now down into the abyss. A crash, an
ineffectual beating, a spasmodic rush. I seem to hear the pumps again,
distant, remote, ineffectual. But that is not so; the struggle is
over. Chopin's Study has been battered to pieces; only disarticulated
fragments toss amidst the froth. High up the confusion of the stormy
sky she drives in a sieve dropping notes--the witch of the storm. La
Belle Dame Sans Merci.

"But the third piece in her repertory has begun--Rubinstein. This, at
any rate, is familiar. She plays with the confidence born of long
unpunished misdoing. That Rubinstein must indeed be sorry, and unless
their elysium is like the library of the Linnaean Society, and fitted
with double windows, all the great departed musicians must be sorry
too, that he ever wrote a Melody in F. Daily from the altars of a
thousand, of ten thousand, school pianos that melody cries to heaven.
From the empire of the music master, upon which the sun never sets, day
and night, week in week out, from year to year, Rubinstein's Melody in
F streams up for ever. These school pieces are like the Latin ritual
before the Reformation, they link all Christendom by a common use. As
the earth spins, and the sunlight sweeps ever westward, that melody
passes with the day. Now it is tinkling in a grey Moravian school, now
it dawns upon the Adige and begins in Alsace, now it has reached
Madrid, Paris, London. Then a devotee in some Connemara Establishment
for Young Ladies sets to. Presently tall ships upon the silent main
resound with it, and they are at it in the Azores and in Iceland, and
then--one solitary tinkling, doubling, reduplicating, manifolding into
an innumerable multitude--New York takes up the wondrous tale. On then
with the dawn to desolate cattle ranches, the tablelands of Mexico, the
level plains of Illinois and Michigan. So the great tide that started
in Rubinstein's cranium proceeds upon its destiny. Always somewhere
between the hours of eleven and two it comes back to me here, poor
hunted composition, running its eternal world gauntlet, pursuing its
Wandering Jew pilgrimage, and I curse and pity it as it goes by.... It
has gone. The 'Maiden's Prayer' is next usually. Then one of the
'Lieder ohne Worte,' then the 'Dead March'--all of them but the meagre
and mutilated skeletons of themselves; things of gaps and tatters, like
gibbet trophies. They are as knocked abou