the point where he will hear, see, and read—and himself createonly what he can admire. His chief divinity is Mozart. He conceives all artistic development as the alternating rise and fall of a wave. We are at present touching bottom.

First we behold Busoni the pianist. The parallel between him and Liszt is overdrawn in heavy lines, though we are carefully made to understand that Busoni is "the greater thinker of the two." That sounds plausible. Only let us admit that Liszt was the greater feeler, and that his richer sensibility made up for Busoni's power of abstraction. The assertion that Busoni is the first, since Liszt, to widen the limits of piano playing is open to challenge. What of Debussy, Albeniz and Scriabin? The novel pedal tricks, the silently pressed-down keys that lend color to notes that are struck, were known at least to one composer, Arnold Schönberg; Mr. Harold Bauer, among other pianists, has experimented with them and uses them effectively. But here comes the most monstrous piece of glorification: "In the knowledge that a true legato goes counter to the nature of the keyboard and is foreign to its organism, he [Busoni] starts by giving up all attempts at producing it, and chisels out each tone separately, relying for the cantilena solely upon a constant and minutely poised use of the pedal." What of the cushioned finger-tips; the clinging, almost organ, touch; the caressing rotation of the forearm that would accomplish the impossible and impart to the piano a vibrato? We all have heard it, and some of us prefer it to the chiseled notes and the idea of the Hammerklavier. The surprise is small indeed when, seven pages further, we are let into the secret that Busoni has more and more withdrawn from Beethoven, whose op. 106 is the only one he now cares for. Yet his playing of the Emperor concerto had something truly imperial and remains unforgettable. The pianist Busoni's favorites are few and marvellous. For a time Alkan's Concert-études were his speciality. (Mme. Vita Witek still delights in dauntlessly bringing them to the fore.) Debussy never appealed to him. For Schönberg he has great admiration, though he will not accept the latest products of the disconcerting sage of Mödling. He never was drawn to Schubert and Schumann. With the exception of the Études and Preludes, he does not play Chopin. He considers Franck one in a small number of nineteenth-century composers who were genuinely touched with the Poetry of Counterpoint! His dislike for Brahms is strong and thorough. Bach, plain and Busonified, is his long suit. He will play a whole program by him, regardless what state the audience is in at the end.

His "orgiastically soaring feast of Six Liszt Days" [orgiastisch aufrauschendes Fest von sechs Liszt-Tagen] is probably without counterpart in the world, save possibly for the bicycle race in Madison Square Garden. He has been known to employ his art on the virtuoso pieces of Hummel, Weber, Mendelssohn. His own compositions he plays but seldom in public. His retentiveness is prodigious; he has undertaken concert tours from Moscow to Boston, from Helsingfors to Rome, with never so much as one sheet of printed music in his trunk. That Busoni's piano style has influenced his composition is nothing exceptional. Bach's use of the thumbs, Weber's left hand, Chopin's manner of making, even for Moscheles' ears, his "rough and inartistic" modulations bearable they are in line with Liszt, with Debussy and Scriabin.

Then begin the author's laudations and hosannahs, in praise of Busoni the composer. The atmosphere thickens with incense. But through the clouds of myrrh and frankincense, we retain sight of a remarkable musician, a stubborn seeker whose technical mastery is surpassed only by his uncompromising intellectuality. Both, Mahler and Busoni, while worlds apart in certain things, are closely kin in others; and one hates to think that not the least resemblance may lie in the melancholic futility of all that stupendous effort, which both have spent upon making a dent in their century.

If this century, as it well might, has little to commend itself to you, I advise your reading "La musique dans la comédie de Molière" (La Renaissance du Livre, Paris), by that excellent musicologist, Mr. Julien Tiersot. Other men have studied the origins and formative stages of French opera, notably Messrs. Rolland, de la Laurencie and Prunières. But it was left to Mr. Tiersot, and most fittingly, to weld together in his book the detached pieces of research furnished by others, and to embody his own copious and illuminating finds, The glory of Molière, author of comedies, has hitherto obscured the important part he played in creating the prototype of French opera. We watch the gradual transformations of ballet, masque, intermède, comedy with interpolated airs, into the score of the Bourgeois Gentilhomme, which already is "a sort of anthology, or encyclopedia of French music at the eve of grand opera's birth." Its dawn breaks with Psyché, to which Molière's collaborator Lulli writes the music, while Corneille himself, and young Quinault,

help the too busy poet with carrying out the scenes of his plot, and with furnishing verses for the composer.

The most colorful part of Mr. Tiersot's narrative is the description of the early court ballet. But then, what a subject! The fifteen-year-old king, an apparition of beauty and grace, seconded by the most lovely women of his realm, dances before a parterre of princes and nobles, and finally permits the common throng of his people to gaze on him with awe and pride. Wearing a golden wig in the "Ballet de la Nuit," as the rising sun, he shall go down in history as "Le Roi-Soleil." The stage is set in the parks fashioned by Le Nôtre, or amid scenes painted by Le Brun and Mignard. Lulli presides over the orchestra, and Vatel prepares the supper. The ingenuity of the machinists is put to ever harder tests, inventing trees from which emerge dryads represented by members of the House of France; fountains, the spray of which condenses into comely nymphs; clouds, from which descend the various members of the Olympian stirps, to discuss in florid Alexandrines their family affairs, or to enact in perspicuous allegory the virtues of Louis. All this is retold by Mr. Tiersot without the heavy artillery of cumbersome footnotes, shooting off volleys of "documentation." At times it seems that not a musical historian speaks, but Henri de Régnier, poet of Versailles, romancer of the Grand Monarch's "bon plaisir.'

W

By MARION BAUER

NO. 2

E have a vast, immeasurable past at our backs-a past crowding us on to an enigmatic future; a past glorious in great attainment and rampant with fearful defeats and failures. We are but the unfolding of seeds of this past, which have lain dormant for centuries, or have developed gradually step by step. Civilizations have risen and have been swept aside, each like the deposits of the soil adding strata on strata until we stand to-day "an acme of things accomplished, an encloser of things to be." (Walt Whitman-"Song of Myself.")

Our art is a great structure, as colossal as our mechanical development, our scientific attainments, or our political institutions, and it has followed practically the same line as these in having passed from unsophistication to sophistication, from spontaneity to artificiality, from ignorance to intellectuality, from the mystical to the scientific; yet we are building machinery that might fall by its own weight, and upon which the future alone can pronounce final judgment. The present civilization may eventually disintegrate to give way to a new one that must again complete a cycle starting from the primitive state, but with the cumulative consciousness of the past to drive it forward.

We speak lightly of the decline of civilization, without considering that decay and renewal are constantly with us. There has never been a period when civilization has been on one level, because, in every age, all stages from the primitive to the decadent are represented. The difference between culture and savagery is often geographical, not necessarily chronological; thus it is possible for the Bushman of Australia to exist in the same world that has produced the most learned Oxford professor. Perhaps the tribe of Bushmen will become extinct before it has the chance to

attain a high degree of culture, or perhaps culture will be forced upon it through propinquity; however, the Oxford professor comes from stock that was once as primitive as the Bushman. Is it just chance and circumstance that developed the Briton, or is it an evolutionary process so vast that our imaginations are unable to follow the grinding of the Mills of the Gods?

This curious overlapping of eras has enabled us to study the primitive at first hand, to fill in the archæological gaps, and to recognize traits and characteristics common to early man of all periods. Certain tendencies are so universal that they have been accepted as instincts. Thus there has always been a stream of art consciousness-an awareness, sometimes conscious, but more often unconscious, of an attempt at, or a desire for, art-expression. To analyze the art-instinct or impulse, one must go back farther than civilization has been recorded, to an age when there were no systems of thought, no written language, no science, no history, when sensation was the only guide, and all phenomena were miracles. Even in the man of that stage there is visible the need for self-expression -a natural instinct for reproduction. This instinct reveals itself not only in the reproduction of species, but in the apparent desire of the human to reproduce his thoughts and feelings, to satisfy an inner necessity. It is Bergson's "élan vital" (creative urge) of the physical plane, and of the mental, emotional, and æsthetic, as well.

The cave-dweller has an encounter with a wild animal; he returns to his mates and, in trying to give them a graphic description of his experience, picks up a piece of charred wood and draws a picture of his deed; this was self-expression-crude, primitive, unconscious Art. Warriors return victorious from battle, and enact the scene repeatedly for the women, children, and old men of the tribe. This same type gave vent to savage joys and griefs in bodily motions—the forerunner of the dance—and accompanied these dances with rhythmic noises-the forerunner of music. The savage shouts and grunts by which they expressed emotions antedated speech, and were the forerunners of song, which has been the natural means of musical expression for the masses, and the true source of musical development from the primitive through the folkperiod to the democratic community singing of the present day.

There was little more than mere physical reaction in these demonstrations, nothing that could be called Art as we have known it for centuries; still, the germ was there, and every simple germ as it develops and propagates, becomes a complicated product. The crude drawings and pantomimes became the means