rating millions
of delicate, ethereal sounds, the timbre of which to my ears has color,
form, substance, nuance, and thrills me even to my old marrow. Is it not
delicious--that warm, velvety, dull percussion? Is it not delicious, I
say? How it shimmers and senses about me! You have heard of drummed
tears? I can make you weep, if I will, with a few melancholy, muffled
strokes. The drum is the epitome of life. Sound is life. The cave-men
bruised stones together and heard the first music.

I know your Herbert Spencer thinks differently, but bah! what does he
know about tympani? Chopin would have been a great tympanist if he had
not wasted his life foolishly at the piano. When he merely drummed with
his fingers on the table, Balzac said, he made music, so exquisitely
sensitive was his touch. Ah me! what a tympanist was lost to the world.
What shading, what delicacy, what sunlight and shadow he would have made
flit across my little darlings on their tripods! No wonder I hate the
piano; and yet, hideous mockery of fate! I play upon an old grand to
earn my bread and wine. I can't play with an orchestra--it is torture
for me. They do not understand me; the big noisy boors do not understand
rhythm or nuance. They play so loud that I cannot be heard, and I will
never stoop to noisy banging. How I hate these orchestral players! How
they scratch and blow like pigs and boasters! When I did play with them
they made fun of my red hair and delicate touch. The leader could not
understand me, and kept on yelling "Forte, Forte." It was in the Fifth
of Beethoven, and I became angry and called out in my poor German (ah! I
hate German, it hurts my teeth): "_Nein, so klopft das Schicksal nicht
an die Pforte._" You remember Beethoven's words!

Well, everybody laughed at me, and I got mad and covered up my
instruments and went home. Jackass! he wanted me to bang out that
wonderful intimation of fate as though it were the milkman knocking at
the door. I am a poet, and play upon the tympani; the conductor and the
orchestra are boors. But I do injustice to one of them. He was an
Alsatian, and spoke bad French. But he was an excellent bassoon player.
He often called on me and we played duets for bassoon and tympani, and
then read Amiel's journal aloud and wept. Oh! he had a sensitive soul,
that bassoon player. He died of the cholera, and now I am alone....

After my failure as an orchestral player I gave a concert in this city,
and played my conc