unfair not to make some allowance for temper in her case.
Allowances must also be made for music teachers, who, from the very
nature of their profession, rarely hear music as it ought to be, and
therefore naturally become impatient and irritable. They illustrate,
not the normal, but the abnormal effects of music. Moreover, owing to
the lamentable ignorance of so many parents and pupils, the
profession of music teachers is invaded with impunity by hundreds of
tramps who know so little of music that, if they tried to become
cobblers or tailors with a corresponding amount of knowledge, they
would be ignominiously kicked out of doors. Surely it is unfair to lay
the sins of these vagabonds on the shoulders of music.

Finally, as regards the moral character and temper of composers, it
should be remembered that, if some of them occasionally gave way to
their angry passion, they were generally provoked to it by the
obtuseness and insulting arrogance of their contemporaries. Had these
contemporaries honored and commended them for enlarging the boundaries
of art and the sphere of human pleasures, instead of tormenting them
with cruel and ignorant criticisms, the great composers would, no
doubt, have been amiable in their public relations, as they appear to
have been almost invariably toward their friends. Wagner's pugnacity
and frequent ill-temper, for instance, arose simply from the fact
that, while he was toiling night and day to compose immortal
master-works, his contemporaries not only refused to contribute enough
for his daily bread, but assailed him on all sides with malicious
lying, stupid criticisms, with as much obvious enjoyment of this
flaying alive of a genius as if they were a band of Indians torturing
a prisoner of war. Among his friends, Wagner was one of the most
gentle, tender, and kind-hearted of men, and it made him frantic to
see even a dumb animal suffer. He wrote a violent pamphlet against
vivisection, and one day missed an important train because he stopped
to scold a peasant woman who was taking to the market a basket of live
fish in the agony of suffocation. I hardly know of a great composer
who, in his heart of hearts, was not gentle and generous. Bach,
Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Gluck, Schubert, Beethoven, Schumann,
Mendelssohn, Weber, Liszt, and a dozen others who might be named,
though not without their faults, were kind and honest men, living
arguments for the ennobling effects of music.

In no other