As though to reprove all puling pessimism and warn the good American never to despair even of his rude province in the republic of letters, there comes quietly to us, from somewhere in the Middle West, a very modest and attractive little book, aptly entitled the Day before Yesterday. It is not so much a child's book though the right sort of child would revel in it- as a book about children, a family chronicle, humorous and yet reverent, written in sweetest English and with flawless taste. And what a family life it is which these fond recollections reflect! - simple, refined, honorable, and pious; the life of plain but thoroughbred village folk, with brave traditions in this world and stout hope for the next; — infinitely amusing, infinitely affecting! The locality is not very exactly defined. We only know that it was west of Ohio, east of the Mississippi, and within easy reach of the great prairies, that this immaculate race, with ancestors in Virginian churchyards, and cousins in New England colleges, had laid already, in the first half of the last century, the foundations of a home, the very moral of what Sir George Trevelyan dreamed the American home might have been if only it had remained English; the type — thank God! for it is more to the purpose now - of many in that vast midland, which has come, in the course of human events, to hold the balance of our national destinies.

Thus far, our novelists of the vernal season have all been women. The sex is doing its level best to monopolize the great industry of fiction-spinning, and has less to dread this year than usual, it may be, from its male competitors. We find no very distinguished name among these last except that of Lafcadio Hearn, who has collected in Kwaidan: or Stories and Studies of Strange Things, a series of Japanese ghost stories, dainty, wistful, beautiful; all softly permeated by that amiable view of death which we must go to the far East to find in its per

fection; and rendered into English with all the sympathetic insight and airy lightness of diction of which the Lecturer on English Literature in the Imperial University of Tokyo has, many times before, given us admirable examples. After the ghost stories proper come three Insect Studies, from Japanese and Chinese sources: on Butterflies, on Mosquitoes, and on Ants. The first of these contains a few exquisite English versions of Japanese hokku, or seventeen-syllable poems. The last, in gravely calling our attention to that very complete solution of some of the more perplexing of our social and sexual problems, which was long since reached in the formic societies, furnishes one of the most delicate and delightful pieces of satire one has met for many a day. And we may profess and proclaim what we will touching the theoretic obligation of national neutrality, there is no disguising the quickened throb of sympathy which we all feel, just now, with the gallant little David of the farthest Orient, and the good fight he has made, so far, against the Russian Goliath.

:

For the rest, we have the inevitable deluge of dialect, falsely so-called :— the genial crudities of a nautical Yankee commonly called Cap'n Eri; a regrettable attempt to repeat, in the depressing memorials of one Mrs. M'Lerie, the fortuitous triumphs of Wee Macgreegor; a number of dark and bloody studies in socialistic fiction, à la Tolstoi, and à la Gorki; a book for boys, by George Cary Eggleston, entitled Running the River, brisk and, presumably, wholesome, of which the moral is, frankly, that the young American should be up and making money ere he loses the dew of his youth.

Finally, we have two books by men not yet widely known, but from whom we are led, by their present performance, to look for something excellent in the future. These are, Said the Fisherman, by Marmaduke Pickthall, and the Great Adventurer, by Robert Shackleford.

The story of Said, comprising, first the Book of his Luck, and second, the Book of his Fate, is an Arabian tale, and, considered merely as a literary essay, it is already a work of remarkable maturity and finish. Its inspiration is, of course, drawn from the same inexhaustible source as that of Vathek, and Hadji Baba, and the Shaving of Shagpat. The Thousand and One Nights can still supply material for endless wonder-tales; but while those which I have named are all classics, in their way, the story of Said, which is neither an intentional satire like the histories of Shagpat and Hadji, nor a mere opium-fed fantasia, like Beckford's famous novel, is perhaps more intimately and entirely Oriental than either. It is more so even than Kim, because it is more purely objective, and the author effaces his own personality, as Kipling never can. Said is a drama of modern life, introducing recent and well-known historic incidents. spirit, the motive, and the moral of itfor it has a very distinct moral· purely and simply Mohammedan; while the scenery of the ever picturesque East is laid in by the hand of a rare artist. One may open the book at random, and find upon almost any page a tiny vignette, as accurately drawn, as gemlike in the brilliancy of its color, as this:

The

are all

"It was the fourth hour of the day, and not until the flush of evening have men leisure to go forth and drink the sweet air of the garden. A stone bridge of a single lofty arch, which bestrode the wady lower down, looked at fragments of its likeness in the eddies and seemed nodding to sleep. The vast blue cope of the firmament paled everywhere toward the horizon in pearly haze. Abundance of leafage compassed the place on every side, but at one point, through a gap in the branches, the old wall of the city was visible, the white cube of an upper chamber peeping over it, with a bulging lattice and a single minaret cleaving the soft distance."

It would be unreasonable to expect Mr. Marmaduke Pickthall ever to write much better than he has done in Said; but one must earnestly hope that he will soon and yet not too soon! write

more.

Precisely as far as the typical West from the traditional East is the scene of the Great Adventurer removed from that of Said the Fisherman. The Adventurer also may be described in the journalistic sense as an inspired "book; inspired in this instance by the fiery example of the late lamented Frank Norris. It was inevitable that the daring author of the Octopus and the Pit should find followers; and Mr. Shackleford seems an earnest, virile, and not altogether unworthy one. His Adventurer - Newbury Linn-is the founder of a stupendous trust, or, rather, a combination of many trusts, aiming at nothing less than the commercial sovereignty of the civilized world. The story is developed with a certain hard strength. The author betrays a curious apparent indifference to what may be called-by comparison at least with the colossal iniquity which he aims to signalize the minor morals. We miss altogether from his dry pages the poetry, the passion, the strong lift of humanistic enthusiasm, which redeemed and dignified the very meanest episodes in Mr. Norris's unfinished tragedy. Yet the inveterate idealism of the American asserts itself at the last, bringing the too trite story of Newbury Linn to a novel and impressive end. The failure of his great scheme, when on the very brink of success, is due, not so much to the counter-combination which was desperately planned for its defeat, as to a species of moral arrest, the sudden, but decisive recoil of a curiously belated conscience in the breast of the Adventurer himself. Then resolutely, deliberately, of his own free act and purpose, he undertakes to dissolve the vast alliance which had been consolidated by his own Satanic ingenuity. He demolishes what he had reared,

undoes the work of his life, and releases, by his own fiat, the myriad spirits confined in the prison of his tyranny. Prosit. H. W. P.

Mr. Huneker's Musi

MUSICAL criticism that is at once suggestive and simple, original cal Essays. and obvious, is rare in these days of democracy in art. The great mass of writing on musical topics is for popular perusal, with little or nothing to commend it to music lovers who have more than a rudimentary knowledge of the subject. But once in a while there appears a writer who addresses himself to the musical thinker, and whose ideas are expressed in such striking literary language as to render the most recondite Such a of them persuasively clear. writer is James Huneker, whose latest volume of essays has just been published. The collection embraces some essays that are not strictly musical. There is one on Nietzsche, one on Flaubert, the "Beethoven of Prose" as he is denominated, and one on Literary Men Who Loved Music. Several of them have appeared in the magazines, and are republished in amplified and otherwise altered form. All are fascinating reading. The volume is inscribed to Richard Strauss, the "Anarch of Art," who is the subject of the first essay.

Mr. Huneker has written a brilliant and comprehensive study of Strauss. Even allowing for the natural lean toward his subject of the moment, it is plain that Mr. Huneker pins his faith. strongly on the new anarch of art. He finds that Strauss has restored to instrumental music its rightful sovereignty, threatened by the Wagnerian cohorts, that he has revolutionized symphonic music by breaking down its formal barriers, and has filled his tone-poems with a new and diverse content. Big words these. But Huneker goes farther. He

1 Overtones: A Book of Temperaments. By

JAMES HUNEKER. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1904.

does not hesitate to pit Strauss against the master minds of music and to award

him the palm. "Berlioz never dared, Liszt never invented, such miracles of polyphony, a polyphony beside which Wagner's is child's play and Bach's is outrivaled." One may protest that all this is extravagant, and that prudence would dictate a little more reserve in eulogizing the work of a man of forty, still in his storm and stress period; but one must admit that Huneker has the courage of his convictions, and very firm convictions they seem to be. The other side of the picture, Strauss's overemphasis of color schemes and mere size, and his apparent neglect of musical values except as tested by programmatic expressiveness Mr. Huneker ignores. He concedes that his musical themes, qua themes, are not to be matched with Beethoven's, but the drift of his argument seems to be that the hypnotic power of Strauss's music prevents the absence of that melodic invention, which calm, critical judgment would demand, from being noticed. Or, putting it in another way, Strauss's music may sound better than it is; and so long as the fact is disguised, and no one the wiser, it is not to be deprecated. However, this is not the place to discuss Strauss, but Huneker; and he has written an interesting, though extreme, "appreciation" of the composer who to-day is unquestionably the greatest figure on the musical horizon.

in

The essay on Parsifal is more or less a protest against the sudden and exaggerated wave of popular enthusiasm started by the recent production of the opera New York. As such, it may be taken with the proverbial grain of salt. There is something fascinating in the very extravagance of Mr. Huneker's critical objurgations. Of the book he says: "It is a farrago of odds and ends, the very dustbin of his philosophies, beliefs, vegetarian, anti-vivisection, and other fads. You see unfold before you a nightmare of characters and events. Without sim

plicity, without lucidity, without naturalness Wagner is the great anti-naturalist among composers - this book, through which has been sieved Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, Schopenhauerism, astounds one by its puerility, its vapidity." He adds that "Wagner spread his music thin over a wide surface," and sums it all up with the remark that Parsifal is the weakest composition its creator ever planned. But if Mr. Huneker's thesis finds few supporters, it is by no means untenable, as his able brief proves.

Of Nietzsche, Mr. Huneker has many acceptable things to say, and he gossips entertainingly of Turgenieff, Balzac, Daudet, and George Moore, and their attitude toward music. He has a fine and contagious enthusiasm for the later Verdi, the turning-point in whose career he attributes to his acquaintance with Boïto.

The essay entitled After Wagner What? promises more than it gives. Mr. Huneker answers the interrogation with another : 66 Why cannot we have the Athenian gladness and simplicity of Mozart, with the added richness of Richard Strauss ? And again another: "Why cannot we accept music without striving to extort from it metaphysical meanings?" To neither question vouchsafes he an answer. And so, as Strauss ends his tone-poem Zarathustra with the world-riddle unsolved, does Mr. Huneker close his latest volume with a question unanswered and unanswer

able.

Mr. Huneker as a critic of music has the faculty of giving one his impressions with unequivocal directness: and his impressions are always worth having. He is a suggestive writer, and in his point of view often original. His command of a facile pen and his feeling for vigorous and picturesque words make his criticism forceful and convincing. Even while one is quite sure that he does not agree with a certain extravagant statement, he

American

Two rather bitter and pessimistic A History of letters from the composer Music. MacDowell, recently given to the public, have directed attention to the quality and status of the music produced in this country. In one Mr. MacDowell resigned the professorship of music which he had held at Columbia, declaring that the limitations of the curriculum precluded any adequate or dignified development of the study of music, but adding that all the arts were treated equally ill, and that the graduates of the university were little other than barbarians in their knowledge or appreciation of æsthetics. In the other he asked withdrawal of a composition of his from a concert devoted to American music, on the ground that to put forward by themselves musical works written by Americans was an indignity and an injustice, inasmuch as it implied that they were unworthy to be presented on an equality with the writings of other composers as integral portions of an impartial programme. Without pausing to discuss whether this last point be well taken, or whether it might not be as forcibly pressed against a concert of Flemish, Russian, or English music, it is depressing to find a man of Mr. MacDowell's talent and authority maintaining urgently such extreme views; and yet one doubts whether America be, after all, a musical Nazareth from which no real good is to come.

But one feels relieved and cheered after examining Mr. Louis C. Elson's

volume, many of whose statements of fact, incident, and personality reassure, and whose deductions and prognostications encourage. It should, however, be called rather an essay toward a history than a history; for the materials, which have been gathered carefully, and no doubt laboriously, are not so well coördinated as to afford due proportion and perspective. So far as there is any complete conspectus of musical progress in this country, it is quite closely confined to New England, although the early existence of transplanted English music in the southern colonies, the life of opera in the French dependencies, the establishment of the Philharmonic Society in New York, and the desire for conservatories and orchestras throughout the country are recognized fully and fairly. Mr. Elson rightly places religious music first in the order of influence and development of the science and art in America, admitting that the real point of departure was from New England. Prayer and praise were associated in the minds of the early settlers, in spite of their many grim beliefs and the severe rigidity of their psalmody, so that the first efforts toward formal expression of native musical feeling naturally took the shape of religious songs and tunes, some of which have maintained themselves to the present time as exemplary and still available for public services.

The expansion of private gatherings for practice of such vocal music-as later for the social study of instrumental compositions, beginning in Boston near the end of the eighteenth century-into strong and permanent societies is considered justly as leading to that diffusion of musical understanding and interest which caused the formation of educational institutions, orchestras, choruses, and chamber-music companies.

The large and ever mooted questions of 1 The History of American Music. By LOUIS C. ELSON. New York: The Macmillan Co.

1904.

folk-songs and a distinctively American musical style or school receive chapters to themselves; but the discussion ends nearly where it began, that the abori ginal Indian music is difficult of preservation and virtually impossible of assimilation into modern composition because of its fluctuating tonality and abnormal progression; and that a national fashion of song is to be sought, if anywhere, in the plantation melodies and "spirituals,” which rudely and yet tenderly try to press the emotional fervor and pathos of the negro nature into forms borrowed or adapted from general vocalism. Extreme value seems here to be set upon the work of Stephen C. Foster, who, after all, merely created a species of song better and more faithful in giving a graceful, lovable form to the sentiments of slave life than did others belonging to the same genus and epoch.

Some divisions of the book are devoted to composers and directors of orchestral and vocal music, to the spread of the opera, to the participation of women in composition, to the present conditions of musical education and criticism, and to the right and wrong tendencies of the American musical disposition, the latter deriving chiefly from the national disinclination to be serious, to move slowly, and to consider intrinsic worth before superficial brilliancy and material profit. But that America has made music that Europe has welcomed and esteemed is proclaimed plainly and stoutly as a cheering fact.

As has been implied, the only symmetrically developed portions of the book relate to Boston and its derivatives. Yet this is probably not due to partiality, for the author has evidently striven to be equitable, but rather to the difficulty of finding and collating material elsewhere. A kindly temper prevails, comparisons are avoided, and gentle judgments are the rule. The style is alert, fluent, and interesting, but qualified sometimes by a lenity that would suit better with an