Unicorns Part 15

CHAPTER XXVII

MY FIRST MUSICAL ADVENTURE

Music-mad, I arrived in Paris during the last weeks of the World's Fair of 1878, impelled there by a parching desire to see Franz Liszt, if not to hear him. He was then honorary director of the Austro-Hungarian section. But I could not find him, although I heard of him everywhere, of musical fetes and the usual glittering company that had always surrounded this extraordinary son of fortune. One day I fancied I saw him. I was sadly walking the Rue de Rivoli of an October afternoon, when in a pa.s.sing carriage I saw an old chap with bushy white hair, his face full of expressive warts, and in his mouth a long black cigar, which he was furiously puffing. Liszt! I gasped, and started in pursuit. It was not an easy job to keep up with the carriage. At last, because of a blocked procession, I caught up and took a long stare, the object of which composedly smiled at me, but did not truly convince me that he was Franz Liszt.

You see there were so many different pictures of him; even the warts were not always the same in number. When I am in the Cambyses vein I swear I've seen Liszt. Perhaps I did.

Liszt or no Liszt, my ambition was fired, and at the advice of Frederick Boscovitz, a pupil of Liszt and cousin of Rafael Joseffy, I went to the Conservatoire Nationale, with a letter of introduction to the acting secretary, Emile Rety. I was told that I was too old to enter, being a few months past eighteen. I was disappointed and voiced my woes to Lucy Hamilton Hooper, then a clever writer and correspondent of several American newspapers. Her husband was Vice-Consul Robert Hooper and he kindly introduced me to General Fairchild, the consul, and after a cross-examination I was given a letter in which the United States Government testified to my good social standing (I was not a bandit, nor yet an absconder from justice) and extreme youth. Armed with this formidable doc.u.ment, I again besieged the gates of the great French conservatoire--whose tuition, it must be remembered, is free. I was successful, inasmuch as I was permitted to present myself at the yearly examination, which took place November 13 (ominous date). To say that I studied hard and shook in my boots is a literal statement. I lived at the time in an alley-like street off the Boulevard des Batignolles and lived luxuriously on five dollars a week, eating one satisfying meal a day (with a hot bowl of coffee in the morning) and practising on a wretched little cottage piano as long as my neighbours would stand the noise. They chucked boots or any old f.a.ggot they could find at my door, and after twelve hours I was so tired of patrolling the keyboard that I was glad to stop. Then, a pillow on my stomach to keep down the pangs of a youthfully gorgeous appet.i.te, I would lie in bed till dinner-time. O Chopin! O consomme and boiled beef! O sour blue wine at six cents the litre!

At last the fatal day dawned, as the novelists say. It was nasty, chilling, foggy autumnal, but my long locks hung negligently and my velveteen coat was worn defiantly open to the wind. I reached the Conservatoire--then in the old building on the Rue du Faubourg Poissoniere--at precisely nine o'clock of the morn. I was put in a large room with an indiscriminate lot of candidates, some of them so young as to be fit for the care of a nurse. Like lost sheep we huddled and as my eyes feverishly rambled I noticed a lad of about twelve with curling hair worn artist fashion; a naughty haughty boy he was, for he sneered at my lengthy legs and audibly inquired: "Is grandpa to play with us!" I knew enough French to hate that little monster with a nervous hatred. There was a tightened feeling about my throat and heart and I waited in an agitated spirit for my number. A bearded and shy young man came in from examination and was at once mocked by the incipient virtuoso in pantalettes. Another unfortunate, with a roll of music! Then the little devil was summoned. We sat up. In ten minutes he returned with downcast mien, flushed face, tears in his eyes, and tried to sneak out of the room, but too late. After shaking hands all round we solemnly danced in a circle about the now sobbing and no longer sinister child. Who says youth is ever generous?

"Number thirteen!" sang out a voice, and I was pushed through a narrow entry and a minute later was standing on the historic stage of the Paris Conservatoire. The lighting was dim, but I discerned a group of persons somewhere in front of me. A man asked me to sit down at the grand piano--of course, like most pianos, out of tune--and I tremblingly obeyed his polite request. At this juncture a woman's voice inquired: "How old are you, monsieur?" I told her. A feminine laugh rippled through the gloom, for I wore a fluffy little beard, was undeniably gawky, and looked conspicuously older than my years. That laugh settled me. Queer, creepy feelings seized my legs, my eyes were full of solar spectrums, my throat a furnace and my heart beat like a triphammer. I was not the first man, young or old, to be knocked out by a woman's laugh. (Later I met the lady. She was Madame Ma.s.sart, and the wife of the well-known violin master, Ma.s.sart, of the Conservatoire.) Again the demand, "Play something."

It was a foregone conclusion that I couldn't. I began a minuetto from a Beethoven Sonata, hesitated, saw fiery snakes and a kaleidoscope of comets, then pitched into a pres...o...b.. the unfortunate Beethoven, and was soon stopped. A sheet of ma.n.u.script was placed before me. I could have sworn that it was upside down, so as a sight-reading test it was a failure. I was altogether a distinguished failure, and with the audible comment of the examining faculty ringing in my ears, I stumbled across the stage into welcome darkness, and without waiting to thank Secretary Rety for his amiability I got away, crossing in a hurry that celebrated courtyard in which the hideous noises made by many instruments, including the human voice, reminded me of a torture circle in Dante's Inferno.

The United States had no reason to be proud of her musical--or unmusical--son that dull day in November, 1878. When I arrived in my garret I swore I was through and seriously thought of studying the xylophone. But my mood of profound discouragement was succeeded by a more hopeful one. If you can't enter the Paris Conservatoire as an active student you may have influence enough to become an "auditeur," a listener; and a listener I became and in the cla.s.s of Professor Georges Mathias, a genuine pupil of Chopin. My musical readers will understand my good luck. From that spiritual master I learned many things about the Polish composer; heard from his still supple fingers much music as Chopin had interpreted it. Delicate and discriminating in style, M. Mathias had never developed into a brilliant concert pianist; sometimes he produced effects on the keyboard that sounded like emotional porcelain falling from a high shelf and melodiously shattering on velvet mirrors. He also taught me that if a pianist or violinist or singer is too nervous before the public, then he or she has not a musical vocation--the case of Adolf Henselt to the contrary notwithstanding. But better would it be for me to admit that I failed because I didn't will earnestly enough to succeed.

CHAPTER XXVIII

VIOLINISTS NOW AND YESTERYEAR

With the hair of the horse and the entrails of the cat, magicians of the four strings weave their potent spells. What other instrument devised by the hand of man has ever approached the violin? Gladstone compared it with the locomotive; yet complete as is the mechanism of the wheeled monster, its type is transitional; steam is already supplanted by electricity; while the violin is perfection, as perfect as a sonnet, and in its capacity for the expression of emotion next to the human voice; indeed it is even more poignant.

Orchestrally ma.s.sed, it can be as terribly beautiful as an army with banners. In quartet form it represents the very soul of music; it is both sensuous and intellectual. The modern grand pianoforte with its great range, its opulence of tone, its delicacy of mechanism is, nevertheless, a monster of music if placed beside the violin, with its simple curves, its almost primitive method of music-making. The sc.r.a.ping of one substance against another goes back to prehistoric times, nay, may be seen in the gra.s.shopper and its ingenious manner of producing sound. But the violin, as we know it to-day, is not such an old invention; it was the middle of the sixteenth century before it made its appearance, with its varnished and modelled back.

Restricted as is its range of dynamics, the violin has had for its votaries men of such widely differing temperaments as Paganini and Spohr, Wilhelmj and Sarasate, Joachim and Ysaye. Its literature does not compare with that of the piano, for which Bach, Beethoven, Schumann, Chopin, and Brahms have written their choicest music, yet the intimate nature of the violin, its capacity for pa.s.sionate emotion, crowns it--and not the organ, with its mechanical tonal effects--as the king of instruments. Nor does the voice make the peculiar appeal of the violin. Its lowest note is the G below the treble clef, and its top note a mere squeak; but it seems in a few octaves to have imprisoned within its wooden walls a miniature world of feeling; even in the hands of a clumsy amateur it has the formidable power of giving pain; while in the grasp of a master it is capable of arousing the soul.

No other instrument has the ecstatic quality; neither the shallow-toned pianoforte, nor the more mellow and sonorous violoncello. The angelic, demoniacal, lovely, intense tones of the violin are without parallel in music or nature. It is as if this box with four strings across its varnished belly had a rarer nervous system than all other instruments. It is a cry, a shriek, a hymn to heaven, a call to arms, an exquisite evocation, a brilliant series of multi-coloured visions, a broad song of pa.s.sion, or mocking laughter--what cannot the violin express if the soul that guides it be that of an artist? Otherwise, it is only a fiddle. It is the hero, the heroine, the vanguard of every composition. As a solo instrument in a concerto, its still small voice is heard above the din and thunder of the accompaniment. In a word, this tiny music-box is the ruler among instruments.

Times have changed since 1658 in England, when the following delightful ordinance was made for the benefit of musical genius, or otherwise:

"And be it enacted that if any person or persons, commonly called Fiddlers, or minstrels, shall at any time after the said first of July be taken playing, fiddling, or making music in any inn, alehouse or tavern, or shall be proffering themselves, or desiring, or entreating any person or persons to hear them play ... shall be adjudged rogues, vagabonds, and st.u.r.dy beggars."

Decidedly, England was not then the abode of the muses, for the poor actor suffered in company with the musician. You wonder whether this same penalty would be imposed upon musical managers ... they certainly do "entreat" the public to listen to their "fiddlers." Yet in 1690 when Corelli, the father of violin playing, led the band at Cardinal Ottoboni's house in Rome, he stopped the music because his churchly patron was talking, and he made an epigram that has since served for other artists: "Monsignore," remarked this intrepid musician, when asked why the band had ceased, "I feared the music might interrupt the conversation." How well Liszt knew this anecdote may be recalled by his retort to a czar of Russia under similar circ.u.mstances.

Until a few months ago I had not heard Eugene Ysaye play for years.

In the old days he had enchanted my ears, and in company with Gerardy, the violoncellist and Pugno the pianist had made music fit for the G.o.ds. Considering the flight of the years, I found the art of the Belgian comparatively untouched. Like Liszt, like Paderewski, Ysaye has his good moments and his indifferent. He is the Paderewski of the strings in his magical interpretations. And unlike his younger contemporaries, he still carves out the whole block of the great cla.s.sics, sonatas, and concertos. He plays little things tenderly, exquisitely, and the man is first the musician, then the virtuoso.

I heard neither Paganini nor Spohr. Joachim, Wilhelmj, Wieniawski, and Ysaye I have heard and seen. My memory a.s.sures me of keener satisfactions than any book about these giants of the four strings could give me. The first violinist I ever listened to was in the early seventies. I was hardly at the age of musical discrimination.

Yet I remember much. It was at the opera, a matinee in the Philadelphia Academy of Music. Nilsson was singing. I can't recall her on that occasion, though it seems only the other day when Carlotta Patti sang the Queen of the Night in The Magic Flute, and limped over the stage--possibly the lameness fixed the event in my mind more than the music.

A "front" set was dropped between the acts at this particular matinee--I do not recollect the name of the opera--and through a "practicable" door came an old gentleman with a violin in his hands.

He was white-haired, he wore white side-whiskers, and he looked to my young eyes like a prosperous banker. He played. It was as the sound of falling waters on a moonlight night. I asked the name of the old gentleman. My father said, "Henri Vieuxtemps," which told me nothing then, though it means much to me now. What did he play? I do not know. Yet whenever I hear the younger men attack his Fantaisie Caprice, his Ballade and Polonaise, his Concertos, I think proudly: "I have heard Vieuxtemps!" He was a Belgian, born 1820, died 1881.

His style was finished, elegant, charming. He was a pupil of De Beriot and represented, with his master, perfection in the Belgian school.

After an interval of some years, I heard the only pupil of Paganini, as he called himself, Camillo Sivori. It was in Paris, 1879. The precise day I can't say but my letter from Paris which appeared in the Philadelphia _Evening Bulletin_ was dated January 31, 1879. I still preserve it in a venerable sc.r.a.p-book. I was in my 'teens but I wrote with the courage of youthful ignorance as follows: (It almost sounds like a musical criticism.) "Although it was generally supposed that Sivori, the great violinist, would not play this season in Paris, he, nevertheless delighted a large audience, last Sunday, at the Concert Populaire, with his lovely music. He is no longer a young man, but the vigour and fire of his playing are immense. He gave, with the orchestral accompaniment, a Berceuse, his own composition, with unapproachable delicacy. It was played throughout with the mute. In contrast came a Mouvement Perpetuel. Sivori's tone is not like that of Joachim or Wilhelmj, but it is sweeter than either. It reminds one of gold drawn to cobweb fineness. As an encore he played the too well known Carnival of Venice. That it was given in the style of his ill.u.s.trious master, Paganini, who may say? But it was amazing, painful, finally tiresome." That same season I heard Anna Bock, Boscovitz, Diemer, Plante, Theodore Ritter, the two Jaells, fat Alfred and his thin wife.

Sivori (1815-1894), dapper, modest, stood up in the vast s.p.a.ces of the Cirque d'Hiver, which was engaged every Sunday by Jacques Pasdeloup and his orchestra. (Jacob Wolfgang was the real name of this conductor who braved the wrath of his audiences by putting Wagner on his programmes; and one afternoon we had a pitched battle over Rimsky-Korsakoff's Symphonic Poem, Sadko.) Sivori played a tarantella; every tone was clearly heard in the great, crowded auditorium. Pupils of De Beriot and Paganini I have heard, though I hardly recall the style of the former and nothing of the latter. But there was little of Paganini's fiery attack in Sivori; possibly he was too old. Fire and fury I later found in Wieniawski.

I must not omit the name of Ole Bull (1810-1880), for, though I heard him as a boy, I best remember him in 1880, when he gave his last concerts in America. In the fifties, while on a visit to my father's house, he went on his two thumbs around a dining-table, lifting his body clear from the ground. His muscular power was remarkable. It showed in the dynamics of his robust and sentimental playing. Spohr discouraged him as a boy, but later spoke of his "wonderful playing and sureness of his left hand; unfortunately, like Paganini, he sacrifices what is artistic to something that is not quite suitable to the n.o.ble instrument. His tone, too, is bad...." For Spohr any one's tone was, naturally enough, bad, as he possessed the most monumental tone that ever came from a violin.

The truth is that Ole Bull was not a cla.s.sical player; as I remember him, he could not play in strict tempo; like Chopin, he indulged in the rubato and abused the portamento. But he knew his public.

America a half-century ago, particularly in the regions he visited, was not in the mood for sonatas or concertos. Old Dan Tucker and the Arkansaw Traveller were the mode. Bull played them both, played jigs and old tunes, roused the echoes with the Star Spangled Banner and Irish melodies. He played such things beautifully, and it would have been musical sn.o.bbery to say that you didn't like them. You couldn't help yourself. The grand old fellow bewitched you. He was a handsome Merlin, with a touch of the charlatan and a touch of Liszt in his tall, willowy figure, small waist, and heavy head of hair. Such white hair! It tumbled in ma.s.ses about his kindly face like one of his native Norwegian cataracts. He was the most picturesque old man I ever saw except Walt Whitman, at that time a steady attendant of the Carl Gaertner String Quartet concerts in Philadelphia. (And what Walt didn't know about music he made up in his love for stray dogs; he was seldom without canine company.)

Those were the days when Prume's La Melancolie and Wieniawski's Legende were the two favourite, yet remote, peaks of the student's repertoire. How we loved them! Then came Wieniawski with Rubinstein in 1872-1873, and such violin playing America had never before heard--nor has it since, let me hasten to add. This Pole (1835-1880) was a brilliant master. His dash and fire and pathos carried you off your feet. His tone at times was like molten metal. He had a caressing and martial bow. His technique was infallible, his temperament truly Slavic, languorous, subtle, fierce. Wieniawski always reminded me of a red-hot coal. How chivalric is his Polonaise--that old war-horse! How elegiac his Legende! His favourite pupil was Leopold Lichtenberg, the greatest violin talent that has been thus far unearthed in America. Lichtenberg had everything when a youth--temperament, brains, musical feeling, and great technical ability.

After Wieniawski followed Wilhelmj, who did not efface his memory, but plunged one into another atmosphere; that of the calm, profound, untroubled, and cla.s.sic. No doubt Spohr's tone was larger, yet this is difficult to believe. Wilhelmj drew from his instrument the n.o.blest sounds I ever heard; not Joachim, not Ysaye excelled him in cantabile. He was the first to play Wagner transcriptions--no wonder Wagner made him leader of the strings at Bayreuth in 1876. How he read the Beethoven Concerto, the Bach Chaconne. Or the D flat Nocturne of Chopin--in D. Or the much abused Mendelssohn E Minor Concerto--with Max Vogrich accompanying him at the piano. A giant in physique, when he faced his audience there was something of the majestic, fair-haired G.o.d Wotan in his immobile posture. He never appealed to his public as did Wieniawski; there was always something of chilly grandeur and remoteness in Wilhelmj's play. The last time I saw him was at Marienbad, shortly before his death, where, a stooped-shouldered, grey-haired old man, he was taking a Kur. He walked slowly, his hands clasped behind him, in his eyes the vacant look of one busy with memories. He reminded me of Beethoven's pictures.

Joseph Joachim, that mighty Hungarian, was past his prime when I heard him in London. He played out of tune--some of his pupils have imitated his failing--but whether in a Beethoven quartet, concerto, sonata with piano, he always stamped on your consciousness that Joseph Joachim was the greatest violinist that had ever lived. This is, of course, absurd, this unfair comparison of one artist with another. Yet it is human to compare, and if a violinist can evoke such a vision of perfection, then he must be of uncommon powers.

Maud Powell, a distinguished pupil of Joachim, has a.s.serted that it took her three years before she could recover herself in the presence of Joachim's overwhelming personality. Yet he struck me as not at all a.s.sertive. He seemed an "objective" player, _i. e._, you thought only of Beethoven, of Brahms, as he calmly delivered himself of their Olympian measures. The grand manner is now out of fashion.

We care more for exotic rhetoric than for simple and lofty measures.

Sarasate and Dengremont charmed me more; Wieniawski set my blood coursing faster; but in Joachim's presence I felt as if near some old Grecian temple hallowed by the presence of oft-worshipped G.o.ds.

Remenyi was a puzzle. He could play divinely, and scratch diabolically. He belonged to that old romantic school in which pose and gesture, contortion and grimace occupied a prominent place. I had an opportunity to study Remenyi (whose Austrian name was Hoffman) (1830-1898), at close quarters. He brought to my father's house in the early eighties his favourite instruments, and such a wild night of music I never heard. He played hour after hour, everything from Bach to Brahms--and incidentally scolded Brahms for "stealing" some of his, Remenyi's, Hungarian dances! (Which is a joke, as Brahms only followed the examples of Liszt and Joachim in avowedly employing Hungarian folk melodies). He did such tricks as dashing off in impeccable tune his arrangement of the D Flat Valse of Chopin in double notes at a terrific tempo. Violinists will understand the feat when I tell them that the key was the original one--D flat. He made the walls shiver when he struck his bow clangorously in the opening chords of the Rackoczy March. What a hero then seemed this stout, little, prancing, baldheaded man with the face of an unfrocked priest. How he could talk in a half-dozen different languages; he had travelled enough and encountered enough celebrated people to fill a dozen volumes with his recollections. He was a violinist of unquestionable power; that he deteriorated in his later years was to have been expected. Liszt understood and appreciated Remenyi from the first; he nicknamed him "the Kossuth of the Fiddle."

To recall all the celebrities of the violin I have heard since 1870 would be hardly possible. I've forgotten most of them, though I do remember that wonderful boy, Maurice Dengremont, who ended his life, so rich in possibilities, it is said as a billiard marker. He was spoiled by women, for he was a comely lad. Another wonder-child kept his head, and to-day fascinating Fritz Kreisler is a master of masters and a favourite in America without peer. He first appeared at Boston and in 1888. In Paris I recall Marsick and his polished style; the gallant Sauret, Johannes Wolf, and the brilliant and elegant Timothee Adamowski. And in 1880, Marie Tayau and her woman quartet, a member of which was Jeanne Franko, the sister of the conductors and violinists, Sam Franko and Nahan Franko; Caesar Thomson, the miraculous; C. M. Loeffler--subtle player, subtle composer; Sarasate with his sweet tone; Brodsky and his masculine manner; w.i.l.l.y Burmester and his pallid pyrotechnics; the learned Schradieck, the Bohemian Ondricek, the dashing Ovide Musin, Bernhard Listemann, Carl Halir; Gregorowitsch, the languid; brilliant Marteau; Alexander Petschinikoff, the Russian; the musicianly Max Bendix; the astonishing John Rhodes, the wonder-worker Kubelik and his icy perfections; Kocian, w.i.l.l.y Hess, Efrem Zimbalist, Albert Spalding, Arthur Hartman, and a myriad of spoiled youths, Von Veczsey, Horszowski--all have crossed the map of my memory. And Franz Kneisel and the Kneisel Quartet, dispensers of musical joys for decades, but alas! no more. Alas! I would not barter memories of their music-making for a wilderness of virtuosi. I must not forget Joseph White, the Cuban violinist, who was with Theodore Thomas one season. His style was finished and Parisian. He was a mulatto and a handsome man. The night I heard him he played the Mendelssohn concerto, and at the beginning of the slow movement his chanterelle broke. Calmly he took concert master Richard Arnold's proffered instrument and triumphantly finished the composition.

Three violinists abide clear in my recollection: Wieniawski, Wilhelmj, and Ysaye. The last named is dearer because nearer, contrary to the supposed rule that the older the thing the worse it is. Ysaye is the magician of the violin. He holds us in a spell with that elastic, curving bow of his, with those many coloured tones, tender, silky, sardonic, amorous, rich, and ductile. He interprets the cla.s.sics as well as the romantics; Bach, Beethoven, Brahms; Vieuxtemps as well as Sibelius. Above all else, his mastery of the violin's technical mysteries, looms his musical temperament. He has imagination.

I have reserved the women for the last. A goodly, artistic company.

It is not necessary to go back to the Milanolla sisters. We still cherish remembrances of Camilla Urso and her broad musicianly manner; the finished style of Normann-Neruda, Maris Soldat, the gifted and unhappy Arma Senkrah, Nettie Carpenter, Teresina Tua--who did not become a "Fiddle Fairy" when she visited us in 1887--Leonora Jackson, Dora Becker, Olive Mead, and Maud Powell. In Europe many years ago, I heard Marcella Sembrich, who, after playing the E Flat Polonaise of Chopin on the piano, picked up a violin and dashed off the Wieniawski Polonaise; these feats were followed by songs, one being Viardot-Garcia's arrangement of Chopin's D Major Mazourka.

Sembrich is the blue rose among great singers. Gericke, Paur, Nikisch were at first violinists; so was Fritz Scheel, late conductor of the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra. Franz Kneisel is a conductor of great skill; so is Frederick Stock, who followed Theodore Thomas as conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Theodore Spiering formerly concert-master of the Philharmonic orchestra proved himself an excellent conductor. But that a little Polish woman could handle with ease two instruments and sing like an angel besides, borders on the fantastic. Geraldine Morgan is an admirable violin artiste who plays solo as well as quartet with equal authority.

Maud Powell has fulfilled her early promise. She is a mature artiste, one who will never be finished because she will always study, always improve. A Joachim pupil, she is, nevertheless, a pupil of Maud Powell, and her playing reveals breadth, musicianship, beauty of tone and phrasing. She is our greatest American violin virtuosa.

I wrote this of Mischa Elman (the first of the many Mischas and Jaschas who mew on the fiddle strings) after I heard him play in London: "United to an amazing technical precision there is a still more amazing emotional temperament, all dominated by a powerful musical and mental intellect, uncanny in one not yet out of his teens. What need to add that his conception of Beethoven is neither as lovely as Kreisler's nor as fascinating as Ysaye's? Elman will mature. In the romantic or the virtuoso realm he is past master. His tone is lava-like in its warmth. He paints with many colours. He displays numberless nuances of feeling. The musical in him dominates the virtuoso. Naturally, the pride of hot youth a.s.serts itself, and often, self-intoxicated, he intoxicates his audiences with his sensuous, compelling tone. Hebraic, tragic, melancholy, the boisterousness of the Russian, the swift modulation from mad caprice to Slavic despair--Elman is a magician of many moods. When I listen to him I almost forget Ysaye." Yet when I heard Ysaye play last season it was Elman that I forgot for the moment. After all, a critic, too, may have his moods. And now comes another conqueror, the lad Jasha Heifetz from Russia, a pupil of Leopold Auer and an artist of such extraordinary attainments that the greatest among contemporary violinists--is it necessary to mention names?--have said of him that his art begins where theirs ends, and that they will shut up shop when he plays here. All of which is a flattering tribute, but it has been made before. Heifetz, however, may be the dark horse in the modern fiddle sweepstakes.

CHAPTER XXIX

RIDING THE WHIRLWIND

Once Swinburne, in a Baudelaire mood, sang: "Shall no new sin be born for men's troubles?" And it was an Asiatic potentate who offered a prize for the discovery of a new pleasure. Or was it a sauce?

Mankind soon wearies. The miracles of yesteryear are the commonplaces of to-day. Steam, telegraphy, electric motors, wireless, and now wireless telephony are accepted as a matter of course by the man in the street. How stale will seem woman suffrage and prohibition after they have conquered. In the world of art conditions are a.n.a.logous. The cubist nail drove out the impressionist, and the cubist will vanish if the futurist hammer is sufficiently heavy.

Nevertheless, there is a novel sensation in store for those who make a first flight through the air. I don't mean in a balloon, whether captive or free; in the case of the former, a trip to the top of the Washington Monument or the Eiffel Tower will suffice; and while I rode in a Zeppelin at Berlin in 1912 (100 marks, or about $25, was the tariff) and saw Potsdam at my feet, yet I was unsatisfied. The pa.s.sengers sat in a comfortable salon, ate, drank, even smoked. The travelling was so smooth as to suggest an inland lake on a summer day. No danger was to be apprehended. The monster air-ship left its hangar and returned to it on schedule time. The entire trip lacked the flavour of adventure. And that leads me to a personal confession.

I am not a sport. In my veins flows sporting blood, but only in the Darwinian sense am I a "sport," a deviation from the normal history of my family, which has always been devoted to athletic pleasures. A baseball match in which carnage ensues is a mild diversion for me. I can't understand the fury of the contest. I yawn, though the frenzied enthusiasm of the spectators interests me. I have fallen asleep over a cricket match at Lord's in London, and the biggest bore of all was a Sunday afternoon bull-fight in Madrid. It was such a waste of potential beefsteaks. Prize-fights disgust, sh.e.l.l races are puerile, football matches smack of obituaries. As for golf--that is a prelude to senility, or the antechamber to an undertaker's establishment.

The swiftness of film pictures has set a new metronomic standard for modern sports. I suppose playing Bach fugues on the keyboard is as exciting a game as any; that is, for those who like it. A four-voiced polyphony at a good gait is positively hair-raising. It beats poker. All this is a preliminary to my little tale.

Conceive me as an elderly person of generous waist measurement, slightly reckless like most near-sighted humans; this recklessness is psychical. Safety first, and I always watch my step; painful experience taught me years ago the perils that lurk in ambush for a Johnny-look-in-the-air.