e of truth. How loudly the
barber-surgeons laughed at Harvey--and how vainly! What clown ever
brought down the house like Galileo? Or Columbus? Or Jenner? Or Lincoln?
Or Darwin?... They are laughing at Nietzsche yet....

XXVI

LITERARY INDECENCIES

The low, graceless humor of names! On my shelf of poetry, arranged by
the alphabet, Coleridge and J. Gordon Cooglar are next-door neighbors!
Mrs. Hemans is beside Laurence Hope! Walt Whitman rubs elbows with Ella
Wheeler Wilcox; Robert Browning with Richard Burton; Rossetti with Cale
Young Rice; Shelly with Clinton Scollard; Wordsworth with George E.
Woodberry; John Keats with Herbert Kaufman!

Ibsen, on the shelf of dramatists, is between Victor Hugo and Jerome K.
Jerome. Sudermann follows Harriet Beecher Stowe. Maeterlinck shoulders
Percy Mackaye. Shakespeare is between Sardou and Shaw. Euripides and
Clyde Fitch! Upton Sinclair and Sophocles! Aeschylus and F. Anstey!
D'Annunzio and Richard Harding Davis! Augustus Thomas and Tolstoi!

More alphabetical humor. Gerhart Hauptmann and Robert Hichens; Voltaire
and Henry Van Dyke; Flaubert and John Fox, Jr.; Balzac and John Kendrick
Bangs; Ostrovsky and E. Phillips Oppenheim; Elinor Glyn and Theophile
Gautier; Joseph Conrad and Robert W. Chambers; Zola and Zangwill!...

Midway on my scant shelf of novels, between George Moore and Frank
Norris, there is just room enough for the two volumes of "Derringforth,"
by Frank A. Munsey.

XXVII

VIRTUOUS VANDALISM

A hearing of Schumann's B flat symphony of late, otherwise a very
caressing experience, was corrupted by the thought that music would be
much the gainer if musicians could get over their superstitious
reverence for the mere text of the musical classics. That reverence,
indeed, is already subject to certain limitations; hands have been laid,
at one time or another, upon most of the immortal oratorios, and even
the awful name of Bach has not dissuaded certain German editors. But it
still swathes the standard symphonies like some vast armor of rubber and
angel food, and so imagination has to come to the aid of the flutes and
fiddles when the band plays Schumann, Mozart, and even parts of
Beethoven. One discerns, often quite clearly, what the reverend Master
was aiming at, but just as often one fails to hear it in precise tones.

This is particularly true of Schumann, whose deficiency in instrumental
cunning has passed into proverb. And in the B flat sympho