erto for seven drums and wood-wind orchestra. The
critics laughed me to distraction. Instead of listening to the
innumerable rhythms and marvellous variety of nuances I offered them,
they mocked my agile behavior and my curiously colored hair. Even my
confreres envied and reviled me. I have genius, so am hated and
despised. Oh, the pity of it all! They couldn't hear the tenderness, the
fairy-like sobbing made by my wrists, but listened with admiration to
the tinkling of a piano, with its hard, unchangeable tone. Oh, the
stupidity of it all!...

But time will have its revenge. I will not stir a finger either. When I
die the world of tone will realize that a great man has passed away,
after a wretched, neglected life. I have composed a symphony, and for
nothing but _Tympani_! Don't smile, because I have explored the most
fantastic regions of rhythm, hitherto undreamed. Tone, timbre,
intensity, rhythm, variety in color, all, all will be in it; and how
much more subtly expressed than by your modern orchestra, with its
blare, blow, bang and scratch. And what great thoughts I have expressed!
I have gone beyond Berlioz, Wagner and Richard Strauss. I have
discovered rhythms, Asiatic in origin, that will plunge you into
midnight woe; rhythms rescued from the Greeks of old, that will drive
you into panting dance; rhythms that will make drunkards of sober men,
warriors of cowards, harlots of angels. I can intoxicate, dazzle, burn,
madden you. Why? Because all music is rhythm. It is the skeleton, the
structure of life, love, the cosmos. God! how I will exult, even if my
skin crackles in hell-fire, when the children of the earth listen to my
Tympani Symphony, and go crazy with its tappings!...

I have led a shiftless, uneventful life, yet I envy no one, for I am the
genius of a new art--but stay a moment! An uneventful life, did I say?
Alas! my life has been one long, desperate effort to forget her, to
forget my love, my wife. My God! I can see her face now, when she
flashed across my sight at a provincial circus. It was in France. I was
a young man drum-mad, and went to the circus to beguile my time, for I
couldn't practise all day. Then I saw her--"Mlle. Leontine, the Aerial
Virtuoso of the Century," the playbills called her. She was fair and
slim, and Heaven had smiled into her eyes.

I am a poet, you see. Her hair was the color of tender wheat and her
feet twinkled star-wise when she walked. She was my first, my only love,
my