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It is thus obvious that Grieg is of the nervous, sensitive temperament, the temperament of Keats and Stevenson, quick and ardent in feeling, and in art notable for subjective, intimate work rather than for the wide objective point of view. Grieg's music is of value, indeed, just because it is the artistic expression of delicate personal feeling. We shall find that his whole development tended toward a singularly individual, or at most national, utterance; that his efforts toward a complexer or more universal style, such as in poetry we call epic, were unsuccessful; and that his real and inimitable achievement is all in the domain of the pure lyric.

Edvard Grieg was born in Bergen, Norway, in 1843. At an early age he showed musical talent, starting in to learn the piano and theory at six, under his mother's direction. Gesine Grieg, born Hagerup, descendent from a forceful Norwegian family which had produced some famous men, was a woman of musical and poetic instinct and of strong character. She had studied music in Hamburg and in London, and given some concerts and many soir?es in Bergen. In a word, her son could not have found a better guide in his first studies. At nine Grieg surprised his school-teacher by submitting in place of a literary composition a set of original variations on a German melody, a substitution which was not kindly received. He was told to stop such nonsense. The artistic temperament revealed itself also in great sensitiveness to the beauty of the somber Northern landscape, and at fifteen Grieg wished to become a painter. Fortunately, however, his musical ability was recognized by the famous violinist Ole Bull, at whose suggestion his parents decided to send him to the Leipsic Conservatory, whither he traveled in 1858. Here again the romanticism of the boy showed itself in his fretfulness under the strict r?gime of his masters, Hauptmann, Richter, Rietz, Reinecke, and Moscheles, and in his passionate devotion to the works of Schumann and Chopin, who were then looked upon in academic circles as somewhat dangerous revolutionaries. Except for a vacation of some months at home, necessitated by the pulmonary trouble which has ever since weakened Grieg's health, he spent four years in the Conservatory, being graduated in 1862.

Being at graduation somewhat bewildered and uncertain as to his future course, Grieg turned his steps in 1863 to the Danish capital, the home of a great man whom he idolized. <> he writes in an autobiographical fragment, <

<<'What is it?' I said.

<<'Do you see that little man with the large gray hat?'

<<'I see him.'

<<'Do you know who it is?' said he.

<<'I haven't the least idea.'

<<'That's Gade,' he said. 'Shall I introduce you?'

<

<<'Professor, a Norwegian friend of mine--a good musician.'

<<'Is it Nordraak?' asked Gade.

<<'No, it is Grieg,' answered Matthison-Hansen.

<<'Oh, that's who it is,' said Gade, scanning my insignificant and humble self from head to foot with a searching glance, while I stood, not without awe, face to face with the man whose works I treasured so highly. 'Have you something to show me?'

<<'No,' I answered. For the things I had finished didn't seem good enough.

<<'Then go home and write a symphony,' recommended Gade.>>

It is indicative of the groping stage at which Grieg's genius still paused that he actually tried to write a symphony, two movements of which are preserved in the Symphonic Pieces, opus 14--Grieg, whose talent was symphonic in about the degree that Brahms's was operatic. Contact with the friendly little man in the large gray hat, who has been dubbed the <> was doubtless a stimulus to the young Grieg; but other and more radical influences were needed to awaken his personality and bring him to his own. Such influences, however, he actually found in Copenhagen. The <> for whom Gade had at first taken him, a fervently patriotic Norwegian of magnetic personality, acquainted him with Norwegian folk-songs and fired him with an ambition to found on them a finished art. Meeting in solemn conclave, with all the self-importance of youth, these two enthusiasts took the oath of musical allegiance to their fatherland. <> writes Grieg; <> Nor did their zeal confine itself to composition. In 1864 they founded, with their Danish friends Horneman and Matthison-Hansen, the Euterpe Musical Society, for the performance of Scandinavian works. This institution, which must have reacted stimulatingly on their composition, they supported energetically up to Grieg's departure in 1866 for Christiania. Finally, it was in these years of his freshest vigor, in which he was conscious both of inner power and of outer opportunities, that Grieg met the lady, Miss Nina Hagerup, his cousin, who became in time his wife. It is not to be wondered at that no period in his life was so fruitful as this.

His most characteristic works, accordingly, were composed between his graduation from the conservatory and the early seventies--between his twentieth and his thirtieth years. There are the two inimitable Sonatas for Violin and Piano, opus 8 and 13; the Piano Sonata, opus 7; the incidental music to Ibsen's Peer Gynt; some of the most charming of the Lyric Pieces for piano and of the Songs, and the Piano Concerto, opus 16; the best part, certainly, of his entire musical product. It were a hopeless as well as useless task to describe in words the qualities of these compositions. What shall one say in words of the flavor of an orange? It is sweet? Yes. And acid? Yes, a little. And it has a delicate aroma, and is juicy and cool. But how much idea of an orange has one conveyed then? And similarly with this indescribably delicate music of Grieg; there is little that can be pertinently or serviceably said of it. One may point out, however, its persistently lyrical character. It is like the poetry of Mr. Henley in its exclusive concern with moods, with personal emotions of the subtlest, most elusive sort. It is intimate, suggestive, intangible. It voices the gentlest feelings of the heart, or summons up the airiest visions of the imagination. It is whimsical, too, changes its hues like the chameleon, and often surprises us with a sudden flight to some unexpected shade of expression. Again, its finesse is striking. The phrases are polished like gems, the melodies charm us with their perfect proportions, the cadences are as consummate as they are novel. Then, again, the rhythm is most delightfully frank and straightforward; there is no maundering or uncertainty, but always a vigorous dancing progress, as candid as childhood. It is hard to keep one's feet still through some of the Norwegian Dances. And though in the Lyric Pieces rhythm is idealized, it is always definite and clear, so that they are at the opposite pole from all that formless sentimentality which abandons accent in order to wail. Again, we must notice the curious exotic flavor of this music, a flavor not Oriental but northern, a half-wild, half-tender pathos, outlandish a little, but not turgid--on the contrary, perfectly pellucid. An example is a little waltz that figures as number two of the Lyric Pieces, opus 12. Grieg's music, then, is lyrical, intimate, shapely, and exotic, if such words mean anything--yes, just as the orange is sweet, acid, and aromatic. One who would feel the quality of these works must hear them.

On the other hand, Grieg is never large or heroic; he never wears the buskin. He has neither the depth of passion nor the intellectual grasp needed to make music in the grand style. Probably of all his peculiarities the most significant is the shortness of his phrases and his manner of repeating them almost literally, displaced a little in pitch, but not otherwise altered. Almost all his music can be cut up into segments two or four measures long, each segment complete in itself, an entire musical thought. If the reader will examine the little Waltz just mentioned, for example, he will see that it is constructed as follows: after two introductory measures a phrase of melody is announced, four measures in length; this is immediately repeated, at the same pitch but slightly varied in rhythm; then enters another phrase, two measures long, which is repeated literally a third lower; its latter half is twice echoed, and there is a two-measure cadence. All is then repeated. The middle part of the piece, in A major, is built in much the same way; after it the first part is given once more, and there is a short coda. The construction of this charming piece, in a word, is very like that of the passages from primers that are familiar to us all: <> And Grieg's coda adds meditatively, <> His thoughts complete themselves quickly; they have little span, and they are combined, not by interfusion, but by juxtaposition. He never weaves a tapestry; he assembles a mosaic. We have only to compare his music with that of some great master, of wide scope and large synthetic power, like Brahms or Beethoven, to feel precisely in what sense he is lyrical rather than heroic, charming rather than elevated, suggestive rather than informative. Compare, for instance, with his waltz, the waltz of Brahms, number eight in opus 39. Here there is a sustained flight of twelve measures, the tune poising and soaring as it were on a rising or falling breeze, or like a kite that now dips and now is up again, but never touches the earth. It is interesting to play the two waltzes one after the other, noting the difference in effect between the precise, dainty, clipped phrases of the one and the broad-spanned arch of melody of the other. Such contrasts are at the basis of all significant discriminations of musical form.

Now, so many little tricks and idiosyncrasies, however piquant in the work of a beginner, could hardly escape becoming, as time went on, an incubus to even the most vigorous imagination. Nothing menaces thought more than affectations and whimsicalities of style. And even in the meridian of Grieg's activity, when he was charming a staid world with the fresh beauties of the Piano Sonata and the two early Violin Sonatas, there were not wanting critics who discerned his danger and foresaw that he must either broaden his methods or deteriorate. Over twenty years ago the following words were written in an English magazine by Frederick Niecks: <> Subsequent events have proved that this fear was but too well founded. Although, during the years at Copenhagen, and the eight years, from 1866 to 1874, that Grieg lived in Christiania teaching and conducting, he continued to do excellent work, he seems to have even then reached the acme of his powers, and thenceforward to have imperceptibly declined. It is rather a melancholy fact that when, in 1874, receiving a pension of sixteen hundred crowns from the Government, which enabled him to resign the conductorship of the Musical Union of Christiania, he began to devote himself almost entirely to composition, his mental vivacity was waning and his lovely lyrical utterance was beginning to be smothered under mannerisms. From this time on he advanced more by familiarizing the world with his earlier compositions than by adding to them anything particularly novel or precious. He traveled in Germany, Holland and Denmark, gave concerts in England in 1888, and visited France a year later, playing and conducting his works at Paris. For the rest, he retired to his picturesque villa, Troldhangen, ten miles from Bergen, where he lives a peaceful and secluded country life.

When all is said, however, Grieg has in these early works made a contribution to music which our sense of his later shortcomings must not make us forget. His Piano Sonata and his Violin Sonatas supply chamber-music with a note of pure lyric enthusiasm, of fresh unthinking animation, not elsewhere to be found. His Peer Gynt Suite fills a similar place among orchestral works. His best piano pieces, and, above all, his lovely and too little known songs, are unique in their delicate voicing of the tenderest, most elusive personal feeling, as well as in their consummate finesse of workmanship. It is a Lilliputian world, if you will, but a fair one. That art of the future which Grieg predicts in his essay on Mozart, which <> will acknowledge in Grieg himself the source of one indispensable element--the element of na?ve and spontaneous romance.

FOOTNOTES:

Thus <<4/4 time>> is a compound of twos, <<6/8 time>> is a compound of threes, and the interesting 5/4 measure, so effective in the second movement of Tscha?kowsky's Pathetic Symphony, is a compound of twos and threes regularly alternating.

<> translated in <> by Rosa Newmarch.

<> Ernest Closson. Paris, Librairie Fischbacher, 1892.

On an October evening in 1892 there was given in New York City a <> in exploitation of the <> Dr. Antonin Dvo??k. There was an orchestra of eighty, a chorus of three hundred, and an audience of several thousand; the ceremonies, partly hospitable and partly patriotic, included an oration, the presentation of a silver wreath, and the singing of <> by the assembled multitude. Outwardly picturesque as the occasion doubtless was, it must have been even more striking in its suggestion of the extreme contrasts in life which accompany the turning of fortune's wheel. Here was a man, originally a Bohemian peasant, a village butcher's son, who for years had endured the most grinding poverty, the most monotonous obscurity, the most interminable labor for power and recognition, coming at last, a famous musician, to hear his works performed and his genius extolled in a great, enthusiastic country that wanted, and was <> a school of music. Even statistics are eloquent when character is behind them; at a salary of fifteen thousand dollars a year the National Conservatory of America had engaged as principal the composer who, less than twenty years before, had been pensioned by the Austrian Ministry of Education just one hundredth of that sum. Dvo??k's reception in New York was an appropriate outward sign of a victory achieved over peculiarly indifferent destiny by peculiarly indomitable pluck.

As one looks back from this imposing event over the course of Dvo??k's laborious, persistent youth, one's attention, no matter how much it is at first engaged with the changes of his outer life, with his progress from obscure poverty to comfort and fame, soon dwells even more on the underlying identity of the man through all changes, on his unswerving simplicity of nature and steadfastness of aim. More remarkable than the diversity of his career is the unity of his character. From first to last, whether in M?hlhausen, Prague, London, or New York, he is essentially a peasant. His deepest moral trait is the dumb persistence, the unthinking doggedness, of the peasant. His mental atmosphere is the peasant's innocence of self-consciousness, his unintrospective candor. Not like the sophisticated man, who weighs motives and foresees obstacles, does he pursue his troublous way. He is, on the contrary, like an engine placed on the track and started; through darkness and day, through failure and success, through weakness and strength, he steams ahead, ever propelled by irresistible inner force, insensible and unamenable to circumstance. And his musical impulse is of the same sort. His aims in music have always been simple, definite, unsophisticated by intellectualism. Taking keen delight in the sensuous beauty of sound, gifted with the musical sense in its most fundamental form of physical susceptibility, from his earliest days he set about learning to produce pleasant effects of rhythm and consonance, with utter sincerity, with no reference to derivative and secondary musical values. When, as a boy, he heard the villagers playing their native dances, his blood stirred in sympathy, and as soon as he was able he took a hand. When he was older he invented similar pieces, gradually refining them, but always cherishing the brightness of tone, the vigor of rhythmic life, that had first won his devotion. And when, in New York, an experienced and honored musician, he was expected to advise our composers, it was highly characteristic of him that he recommended them to pour their ideas into the negro molds. Here was a music simple, sensuous, highly rhythmic; he looked no further, he was disconcerted by no ethnological problems, nor even by the incongruity that any man of the world would have seen between negro song and our subtly mingled, highly complex American character. Bohemian folk-melodies had expressed him; why should not plantation tunes express us? But perhaps his curious simplicity reveals itself most of all in his perfectly uncritical fecundity as a composer. He writes with extreme rapidity, and indefatigably. The great Stabat Mater is said to have been completed in six weeks, and his opus numbers extend beyond a hundred. He writes as if nothing existed in the world but himself and an orchestra waiting to play his scores. He is never embarrassed by a sense of limitation, by the perception in others of powers he lacks. Though he has studied the masters, he is not abashed by them. The standards of scholarship, those academic bugbears, have for him no terrors. Indeed, of all great composers he is perhaps least the scholar, most the sublimated troubadour, enriching the world with an apotheosized tavern-music. In reading his life we must never forget these things: his simple nature, his sensuous rather than emotional or intellectual devotion to music, and his immunity from the checks and palsies of wide learning and fastidious taste.

There is in a rural district of Bohemia, on the Moldau River, a quiet little village called Nelahozeves, or, in German, M?hlhausen, where, in 1841, was born Antonin, eldest son of Frantisek Dvo??k, the village innkeeper and butcher. The Dvo??ks were people not without consideration among their fellow-townsmen; not only was mine host of the tavern a widely acquainted man, but his wife's father was bailiff to a prince. One may imagine the potency, in a small hamlet, of such a conjunction of prominence and prestige. Nevertheless, as social distinction has no direct effect on a man's income, and as the butcher's family grew in the course of years inconveniently numerous, it happened that Antonin, the eldest of eight children, was looked to in early youth to learn his father's trade and contribute toward the family support. Unfortunately, he wished to be a musician. Such a desire, indeed, chimerical as it may have appeared at the time, was natural enough in a boy of musical sensibility who had been surrounded from his earliest years by a people passionately devoted to music. Not only is music a part of the instruction in the Bohemian public schools, but it is the adjunct of all the occasions of life. As many as forty dances are said to be practiced by the peasants, and we have it on Dvo??k's own authority that laborers in Bohemia sing at their work, and after church on Sunday begin dancing, which they <> Taking advantage of his opportunities, the boy had learned at fourteen to play the violin, the organ, and the piano, and to sing. It was a year later that, summoned by his father to surrender his dreams of musicianship, he performed an exploit well worth mentioning, as an early example of his indefatigable persistence and his blundering methods. Hoping to enlist his father's sympathy, he wrote, scored, and had played by the village band, an original polka. Mr. Hadow tells the story at length; its point is that Dvo??k, whose ambition was more robust than his learning, failed to write the trumpets as transposing instruments, and, of course, made a distressing fiasco. <> comments Mr. Hadow, <> He did, indeed, give up music for a year, but in October, 1857, was allowed by his father to enter the Organ School at Prague.

Had Dvo??k been of an introspective turn of mind, he might now have wondered rather dismally, as the months went by in Prague, the paternal allowance ceased, and the tuition at the Organ School proved narrow and technical, whether he had really benefited himself. Fortunately, he was not given to metaphysical speculation; he got what training he could from the school and joined a band. In M?hlhausen he had often taken a viola part in the village band that played for weddings and on holidays; now he turned his skill to account in the restaurants of Prague. In this way, and by playing also in a church orchestra on Sundays, he managed to amass about nine dollars a month, and to acquire an instinct for the way instrumental parts should be written. The only obvious advantage of this trying period was the intimate knowledge of instruments it gave him. He lived, so to speak, cheek by jowl with them, watching them, handling them, seeing what was written for them, and hearing how it sounded. His is no book-knowledge of orchestration. On the other hand, his extreme poverty, the limitations of the school, and his lack of friends to lend him scores or the use of a piano, cut him off cruelly from that equally essential part of education, familiarity with classic masterpieces and the traditions of academic learning. His band played only popular overtures and the usual pot-pourris. Sometimes he coaxed a kettle-drummer to let him crouch behind the drums and hear a concert. He once had an opportunity to hear <> for the modest sum of four cents, but the four cents was not forthcoming, and <> went unheard. He could afford to buy no scores, and there was no library where he could read them. Such were the meager advantages of which he made good use; such the heavy obstacles he gradually surmounted.

It was early in the seventies that he finally emerged from his studious reserve and appeared before the world with an opera, <> which he was commissioned to write for the National Theater. So clear was the patriotic intent of this commission, so entirely was the popular interest enlisted in Smetana's effort to build up a Bohemian school of music, that it is hard to conceive how Dvo??k could have fallen into the error he now made. He prepared for his fellow-countrymen a Wagnerian music-drama. The situation is comic. The good Bohemians, come to hear folk-tunes, were given leit-motifs and <> If they failed to sympathize with his adoration for the Bayreuth master , if <> was a flat failure, Dvo??k had no one but himself to blame. At this point, however, as at so many others in his career, his unfailing energy saved the day so nearly lost by what one critic has called his <> He set to and rewrote his work entire, leaving not a single number of the unhappy music-drama. But now the libretto, which had at first been spared a disapproval all concentrated upon the music, proved worthless and flat, and the opera was damned afresh. Still Dvo??k persisted. Getting a poet to set an entirely new <> to his entirely new music, he made at last a success with an opera of which Mr. Hadow well says that <> No one but Dvo??k would have so bungled his undertaking; no one but he would so have forced it to a successful issue.

As regards structure, Dvo??k is felicitous but eccentric. He does not lay out his plans with the careful prevision of one to whom balance and symmetry are vital. His scheme is not foreordered, it is sketched currently. Thus, for example, his modulation is singularly radical, impulsive and haphazard. He loves to descend unexpectedly upon the most remote keys, never knows where he will turn next, and when he gets too far from home returns over fences and through no-thoroughfares. Often, with him, a change of key seems dictated merely by a desire for a particular patch of color; he wishes to brighten the tonal background with sharps or mollify it with flats, and plump he comes to his key, little caring how he gets there or where he is going next. His use of contrasts of tonality is thus characteristic of his love of color-effects for themselves and his willingness to subordinate to them purity of line. Again, it is probably not forcing the point to see in his use of uneven rhythms, such as five and seven bar periods, another instance of the same tendency to license. Undoubtedly in part a legacy from Bohemian folk-song, which is particularly rich in them, his uneven rhythms seem to be also in part due to a certain fortuitousness of mind. It is as if he closed his phrase, without regard to strict symmetry, wherever a good chance offered. The theme of the Symphonic Variations, opus 78, is an example. It is interesting to contrast this rhythmic trait of Dvo??k's with Grieg's accurate and sometimes almost wearisome precision of outline. Both men derive from folk-music a love of incisive meter--their music has a strong pulse; but Grieg, who is precise, lyrical, sensitive to perfection of detail, is really finical in his unfaltering devotion to square-cut sections, while Dvo??k, more wayward, less perfect and exquisite, strays into all sorts of odd periods. His somewhat arbitrary treatment of tonality relations and of rhythm is thus illustrative of a general laxity of method highly characteristic of the man. In contrast with a jealously accurate artist like Grieg, he is felicitous more by force of genius than by wisdom of intent.

Dvo??k's childlike spontaneity is in no way better exemplified than by his attitude toward folk-music, and here again he may profitably be contrasted with Grieg. Both devotees of local color have enriched art with unfamiliar lineaments and unused resources, yet their modes of procedure have been quite different. Grieg, traversing the usual mill of German musical education, turned consciously to Norwegian folk-song to find a note of individuality. Struck with the freshness of the native dances, he transplanted them bodily into his academic flower-pots. His courtship of the national Muse was conscious, sophisticated, and his style is in a sense the result of excogitation. Dvo??k, on the contrary, growing up in his small Bohemian village, unable to get classic scores, assiduously fiddling throughout his youth at village f?tes where the peasants must have a scrap of tune to dance by, became thoroughly saturated with the rude music. It moved in his veins like blood; it was his other language. Thus the two men were at quite polar standpoints in relation to nationalism. With Dvo??k it was a point of departure, with Grieg it was a goal of pilgrimage. And so, while the Norwegian has tended to immure himself in idiosyncrasy, the Bohemian has rubbed off provincialisms without losing his inheritance. His music, while retaining the sensuous plenitude, the individual flavor, the florid coloring, with which his youth endowed it, has acquired, with years and experience, a scope of expression, a maturity of style, and a universality of appeal that make it as justly admired as it is instinctively enjoyed.

Imperceptibly we have passed from technical analysis into personal inventory. And indeed, all Dvo??k's peculiarities of style may be viewed as the inevitable manifestations of a nature at once rich and na?ve. His music makes a delightfully frank appeal. It is never somber, never crabbed, never even profound. It breathes not passion, but sentiment. It is too happily sensuous to be tragic, too busy with an immediate charm to trouble about a remote meaning. Even when he is moving, as in the Largo of the New World Symphony, is it not with a gentle, half-sensuous pathos, a wistfulness more than half assuaged by the wooing sweetness of the sounds that fill our ears? To him music is primarily sweet sound, and we shall misconceive his aim and service if in looking for something deep in him we miss what is, after all, very accessible and delightful for itself--the simple charm of his combinations of tone.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE.--Dvo??k's fecundity is surprising. He has written cantatas, oratorios, a mass, a requiem, and hymns for chorus and orchestra; five symphonies, five overtures, four symphonic poems, the well-known Slavonic Dances and Rhapsodies, concertos for piano, violin, and violoncello, the inimitable Suite, op. 39, the Symphonic Variations, op. 78, and other orchestral works of smaller proportions; seven string quartets, a sextet, three trios, a terzetto for two violins and a viola, two string quintets, a piano quintet, a piano quartet, a sonata for violin and piano, and a serenade for wind instruments; and, finally, many piano works and songs. He is at his best in his orchestral and chamber works, of which the following are typical: the Slavonic Dances, op. 46 and 72, the Slavonic Rhapsodies, op. 45, the Suite, op. 59, the Symphony, <> op. 95, and the Scherzo Capriccioso, op. 66; the Sextet, op. 48, the Quartet and Quintet on negro themes, op. 96 and 97, the Piano Quintet, op. 81, and the Piano Quintet, op. 87. Though these compositions lose much in transcription, they are all obtainable in four-hand piano arrangements. The piano music is somewhat unidiomatic except the later things, but the Mazurkas, op. 56, the Poetische Stimmungsbilder, op. 85, and the Humoreskes, op. 101, are worth knowing. Of the songs, nine of the best are published separately by the house of Simrock, and the two most popular ones, <> and <> are to be had in Schirmer's series entitled <> A study of these will probably arouse a desire for more, and the student may buy the Gipsy Songs, op. 55, and the Love Songs, op. 83. The duets, <> not very well known, are characteristic.

FOOTNOTES:

A graphic picture of the sleepy little place is given in the essay on Dvo??k in <> W. H. Hadow, Second Series. Macmillan, New York, 1894.

It is a principle of musical expression that of the two great types of temperament, the active and the contemplative, the first tends to express itself in strongly rhythmic figures, the second in phrases of vaguer outline, full of sentiment not easily to be confined in molds. The man of action is incisive, vigorous, compact in utterance; the mystic is by contrast indefinite and discursive. It has been well established, indeed, that primeval music was the product of two modes of instinctive emotional expression, the gesticulatory and the vocal, dance and song; and throughout its growth these two strands, however closely they may intertwine, can still be traced. Thus it happens that even to-day we find the complex work of modern musicians getting a special impress of personality and style according as the rhythmic or the melodic-harmonic faculty predominates in the individual. One man's music will be notable for its strong impulse, its variety and vivacity of rhythm; another's will appeal to the more dreamy and sentimental part of our natures, will speak to our hearts so movingly that we shall recognize its descent from the song rather than from the dance. And in all such cases the first man will be of the active temperament, a man of the world, of many interests and great nervous force; the second will be contemplative, inclined to the monastic life, and of great heart rather than keen intelligence.

Such an antithesis of artistic product and of personal character exists in a peculiar degree between Camille Saint-Sa?ns and C?sar Franck, the two greatest composers France has produced since Bizet. Each of these men is great by virtue of qualities somewhat wanting in the other. The one is clever, worldly, learned--and a little superficial; the other, profound, religious, of singularly pure and exalted spirit, is yet emotional to the verge of abnormality. And so with their music; that of Saint-Sa?ns is energetic, lucid, consummately wrought, while Franck's, more moving and more subtle, is so surcharged with feeling as to become vague and inarticulate. A review of their lives and a brief analysis of their work will bring out more clearly this divergence of nature, which, in spite of the many traits they have in common, has determined them to very different careers and exacted of them very dissimilar artistic services.

But this adept metropolitan is also an inveterate nomad. Not content with traveling all over Europe in his virtuoso tours, he has long had the habit of wintering in outlandish places like the Canary Islands. Often he leaves home without announcing to any one his departure, or even giving friends his addresses; sometimes without knowing himself where he will go. The spectacle of distant lands and alien races has for him an inexhaustible fascination. In writing of his experiences in England, where he went in 1893 to receive the doctor's degree from Cambridge, he dwells with gusto on the procession of dignitaries, at the head of which, he says, <> <> he adds, <> And in his charming little essay, <> the same enthusiasm throws about his oboe-playing ship-captain the glamour of romance. On his first trip to the Canaries, made incognito, he is said to have offered himself as a substitute to sing a tenor part in <> and to have come near appearing in this incongruous r?le. When his grand opera, <> was produced at Paris, he scandalized his friends and the public by being absent from the first performance. Diligent inquiry, and even the efforts of the diplomatic agents of the Government, failed to discover his whereabouts, and it was actually rumored that he had died in Ceylon, on his way to Japan. But all the while he was happily basking in the sun at Palma, scribbling verses. Finally his fondness for astronomy is well known, and he is said to have a private observatory in some <> There is much about this picturesque Frenchman that reminds one of the heroes of Jules Verne's romances.

When he is at home, Saint-Sa?ns carries on a many-sided activity of which composition is hardly more than half. For one thing, he is indefatigable in his efforts to improve public taste. In 1864 he gave in a series of concerts all the concertos of Mozart; in 1878, such is the catholicity of his taste, he organized concerts to produce Liszt's Symphonic Poems. He has done much for musical bibliography by his careful editions of Gluck, Rameau, and others. In 1871 he took active measures to better the opportunities of young native composers. At that time, as he puts it, <> The great improvement that has taken place since then is due largely to him and his brother-workers of the National Society of Music.