was
approached for assistance, and Illowski vanished from Italy.

In the British Isles, the same wicked tales were told of him. He was
denounced by priest and publican as a subverter of morals. No poet, no
demagogue, had ever so interested the masses. Musicians of academic
training held aloof. What had they in common with this charlatan who
treated the abominable teachings of Walt Whitman symphonically? He could
not be a respectable man, even if he were a sane. And then the
unlettered tiller of the soil, drunken mechanic and gutter drab all
loved his music. What kind of music was it thus to be understood by the
ignorant?

The police thought otherwise. Illowski gathered crowds--that was
sufficient to ban him, not as the church does, with bell, book and
candle, but with stout oaken clubs. Forth he fared, and things came to
such a pass that not a steamer dared convey him or his band to America.
By this time the scientific reviews had taken him up as a sort of public
Illusionist. Disciples of Charcot explained his scores--though not one
had been published--while the neo-moralists gladly denounced him as a
follower of the Master Immoralist, a sublimated emotional expression of
the ethical nihilism of Friedrich Nietzsche. Others, more fanciful, saw
in his advent and in his art an attempt to overturn nations, life
itself, through the agency of corrupting beauty and by the arousing of
illimitable desires. Color and music, sweetness and soft luxuries,
declared these modern followers of Ambrose and Chrysostom, were the
agencies of Satan in the undermining of morals. Pulpits thundered. The
press sneered at the new Pied Piper of Hamelin, and poets sang of him.
One Celtic bard named him "Master of the Still Stars and of the Flaming
Door."

For women his music was as the moth's desire. Wherever he went were
women--women and children. Old legends were revived about the ancient
gods. The great Pan was said to be abroad; rustling in the night air set
young folk blushing. An emotional renascence swept like a torrid simoon
over Europe. Those who had not heard, had not seen him, felt,
nevertheless, Illowski's subtle influences in their bosoms. The
fountains of democracy's great deeps were breaking up. Too long had smug
comfort and utilitarianism ruled a world grown weary of debasing
commerce. All things must have an end, even wealth; and to the wretched,
to those in damp mines, to the downcast in exile and in prisons and to
the muck o