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its scope and possibilities with the conserving pride of a citizen from a practically non-oublietted country. Perhaps in the dark my countenance bore the same expression of solemn pleasure and selfcongratulation that I saw on the face of an Alsatian nurse coming out of the Paris morgue with thumb and forefinger pinching her nose.

I do not know what made me slip. A woman tipped back on her heels and fell flat on the cathedral pavement of St. Denis in a manner one would call wholly bourgeoise. The ludicrous which we see first in the clumsiness of others is as quickly felt in calamities of our own. One instant holding to the wall and standing in security, and the next shooting feet foremost into the oubliette, I was conscious of laughing at my plight before I was sick with terror. Yet in peril the physical instinct is quicker than any mental action. The timbers stopped my fall into the well, but the shock loosened them. Trembling and dislodged, they gave way. By one elbow I held to a stone in the floor, and with the other hand grasped whatever was in reach. I think it was a fallen joist, for I do not remember anything except being glad of strength in the arms and well-trained back muscles. By what effort I was out of the pit's mouth and scrambling on all fours up the ascending pavement is altogether unknown to me. I was flying from the top of the ladder across the parapet, when such unseemly haste struck me as liable to bring a cloud of witnesses about, and I leaned against the courtyard wall to recover breath.

The blank of panic is astonishing to look back upon. Mentally I did not exist at all between hanging in the oubliette and reaching the upper air. Then the conventional sense revived, and I brushed my skirts, noticing that ooze and earth had left little stain, and that the gloves with which I had literally been shod had fared worst.

How delicious was the sunshine on that
VOL. LXXVII.
50
NO. 464.

long winding road down Ferté-Milon hill, where I turned shoulder after shoulder of greenness, passing little houses where children played! Had the mothers never anxiety when these children strayed up to the castle? Had they no tales to tell at night of horrors that had leaked through the old walls?

"C'est affreuse!" the guide herself whispered when she leaned with me over the ladder. "Moi, j'ai peur."

Myself, I had no fear at that time, but I accumulated some later.

The

If the oubliette had received one more victim, who could have told her fate? When days went by, inquiry would have followed from a convent in Marne. When weeks went by, demands from America would have become imperative. police could have traced a tourist from Montmirail to Mezy, from Mezy to Château-Thierry, from Château-Thierry to Ferté-Milon; in Ferté-Milon, up to the castle, and, by means of the guide, into the courtyard and out again.

"She took that road down to the village, monsieur," the woman would declare. "Madame was last seen walking in that direction. I myself watched her." And nothing else would be known except that there had been a mysterious disappearance.

The dinner was very good at the Hôtel de la Sauvage, and served privately, undisturbed by parading soldiery. But after all the deliberate courses there was still half an hour before the train was due. One may die or have indelible experiences in such brief time.

A woman with a furtive and crouching look sat in the first-class waiting-room when at last I returned to the railway station. She had two geese tied up, with straw under them, a cat in a high, narrow wicker cage, a netting bag full of string-beans and green nuts of some sort, three little hand-bags, and three gingham umbrellas. This woman was a peasant. Her stock had not known any better for a thousand years than to load themselves

like beasts. I reflected that my stock, also, for a thousand years, had not known any better than to plunge into various quests after knowledge and experience. There was a kind of fellowship - what the guide would have called a correspondence

between us.
I smiled on her, and she
brightened up, reassured at once; know-
ing well that she had no business in the
first-class waiting-room, and that the rail-
way official would turn her out into a
third-class if she should be detected.
Mary Hartwell Catherwood.

THE OPERA BEFORE THE COURT OF REASON.

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THERE must be a large class of respectable persons, so large, indeed, as to be respectable for their numbers, if for nothing else, not gifted with creative powers, but well endowed through their love of beauty with very important appreciative powers, who would gladly welcome an authoritative discussion on the function of reason (I narrowly escaped calling it common sense) in matters of art. To make such a discussion truly authoritative, however, its protagonists should possess not only acknowledged artistic culture and insight, but also strong and honest logical faculty; and this combination is of mournfully rare occurrence. It is a question whether most of those now claiming to possess the best artistic culture and insight would not be ready to dismiss this subject instantly by the positive statement that reason has no function whatever in matters of art, and common sense still less. Such a dictum would of course be intuitively rejected by the respectable class of appreciators just described, but these are seldom sufficiently voluble and self-confident to clothe their intuitive convictions in words convincing to others; while, unfortunately, the claimants of artistic authority nearly always belong to that class so aptly described by Sam Weller as having "the gift o' gab wery gallopin'," and they often get a verdict by mere default, and not on the real merits of the

case.

ceiving the wider general bearings of art the more clearly and completely for living watchfully around it, instead of absorbed and workfully within it, we feel that while the finest foliage, flowers, and fruits of art growth are found on the slender upper stems of finer and more delicate fibre, which, as they wind their way farther and farther into the upper air, bend more freely and flexibly before the wandering and incalculable breath of inspiration ("Thou canst not tell whence it cometh and whither it goeth"), nevertheless these final and glorious gifts of art are possible only because those flower and fruit bearing stems are borne by and draw strength through the sturdy trunk of reason under them, which is itself firmly rooted in and nourished from the solid ground of everlasting truth, the mother earth of the tree of human progress.

It would be very comforting to have this feeling put into forceful words by some strong one whose very name would compel respectful attention from the claimants of artistic authority, and keep them from calling us fools and Philistines. For surely, unless men have sunk into egoistic hedonists, all fine and earnest art must now seek truth first of all,

philosophy's truth by which to justify its existence and its pursuit, and nature's truth by which to express itself. The first of these was once felicitously indicated by Mr. Howells in the Easy Chair

Now we of class first, perhaps per- of Harper's Magazine (I quote from

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Bernhardt because she fulfills this requirement more closely and sincerely.

It would not be difficult to cover some pages with proofs and instances of the widening reign of reason over the drama; but with music this is not so apparent, and I fear that the claimants of artistic authority, and perhaps others, would be quick to call that man rash, if not stupid, who should try to bring common sense into a discussion on taste in music, an art generally admitted to be the most emotional, and therefore the least logical of all. Yet Mr. Krehbiel, in a recent lecture on Listening to Music, opened his subject by stating that among the writers and talkers about music there are two sorts who should be equally shunned, both being objectionable and misleading, because both are equally unreasonable, though in opposite directions,

the ped

ants and the rhapsodists. Now this is only a rather picturesque variant of the old maxim "In medio tutissimus ibis," which is just as true of the other arts, of all art in the largest sense, as it is of music; and it admits reason as a governing principle of judgment. This done,

it will be difficult, at least for those belonging to the species homo sapiens, to fix upon the where and the why for refusing to follow reason's lead farther.

But even the least logical of the arts must use a deal of common sense in the management of their means of expression, - the tools of their trades, to speak irreverently. The poets, genus irritabile vatum, who might perhaps be ranked as next to the least logical of artists, even the dear poets are compelled to parse, and to punctuate, and to scan; or rather, they used to be. Nowadays, I believe, the claimants no longer think it necessary that poetry should either parse or scan, though it still is punctuated to

some extent.

Rash though it may be, my present aim is a common-sense consideration, reckless of the claimants' scorn, of some aspects of that old and great quæstio vexata between classic and dramatic music: and this is attempted because I find so many who, like myself, have been keen lovers and learners of music all their lives without ever feeling sure that some of its chief apostles and loudest professors are preaching the real truth about it.

Here let me say that since most persons who speak of dramatic music mean opera or music-drama, that meaning will be taken here, though I do not indorse it as a strict definition. When, however, the effort is made to express the classic side of this question in a similarly condensed way, some very serious difficulties are met. If we try to boil it down into a phrase, we find that some of its most characteristic contents are so volatile and expansive that they are driven off. I myself should be quite willing to come down at once to describing the question as the case of Truth versus Opera; but I should not expect many to come with me, for choice of sides on this question seems to be controlled usually by idiosyncrasy rather than by thought, and to be the result of processes not so much mental as temperamental. In fact, the

temptation to accept as belief on proof that which one wants to believe is just as irresistible here as in morals and religion and all other things; and so the discussions of this question have been more in the nature of pleas for previously adopted views than of earnest searches after fundamental truth. Naturally enough, also, these views have been almost as many and as various as the viewers and their points of view. Some talk learnedly of absolute music as the antithesis of dramatic music, and some still more learnedly about subjective and objective music; and always, the more of such learning there is in the talk, the greater seems the loss by evaporation when you come to boil it down.

One of the brightest and pleasantest of the later essays on this question denies dramatic power to polyphonic music, and grants it to monodic music, and for illustrative examples cites Three Blind Mice as polyphonic harmony, and Home, Sweet Home, as monodic melody. But from my point of view not only is this proposed principle quite wrong, but the examples given do not illustrate it. Three Blind Mice was one of the earliest of my musical experiences, and I can still remember distinctly the childish pity for the wretched little rodents inspired by those pathetic descending thirds when the second voice enters, and the hurrying horror when the quicker - moving third voice tells out the tragedy of the tails and the carving-knife: and all this without the slightest action on the part of the singers. I was not a very impressionable child; I am sure there must have been many others who felt that music just as I did and this seems to me to be evidence of dramatic quality inherent in the very music that was cited as devoid of it.

As to Home, Sweet Home, for an example of monody, can any one who knows that song listen to it sung unaccompanied without being conscious of hearing in his mind's ear, along with the melody, the

main chords of the usual harmony in the remembered instrumental accompaniment? I myself cannot, and I have yet to find any musical person (others are out of this question) who, after fair trial and thought, will claim such ability. Is that song, so heard, true monody to such hearers? Truly not; and I believe this holds good of every theme, vocal or instrumental, whose harmonic foundation is known to the hearer; and it is preeminently true of those many masterpieces of modern song-writing whose accompaniments are essential and integral parts of the works, and are sometimes splendid specimens of polyphonic writing in themselves without the vocal parts they were written to sustain.

Is there, then, no such thing as true monody to modern musical ears? When such a determined effort after it as the piping of the peasant in Wagner's Tristan is found to carry with it suggestions of various minor and major chords, as it is found to do on close and honest scrutiny, it almost seems as if real monody must be relegated to those distant days B. C. when Theocritus reveled in the songs of the Sicilian shepherds as "the fairest meed of the gods," and told with pride how Menalcas skillfully made and played a herdsman's pipe, but lost it to Daphnis in an open-air song competition. It may be safely assumed that no accompanying chords and harmonies suggested themselves to the ears that listened to their music.

But I think the real roots of the question lie much below all this, and lower than most music lovers are willing to dig for them. Perhaps my purpose will be best served by at once taking hold of what seems to me a sort of tap-root, and working upwards.

Some years ago I happened to hear, in the English West Indian island Trinidad, a party of negro working men and women at one of their customary moonlight-night outdoor dances. The music, or, more correctly, motive power, was

furnished solely by an empty keg with a piece of hide stretched over one end, assisted by a gourd containing dried peas and small pebbles; the first was thumped and the second rattled, in strictest time and with exasperating continuity, until

moonset.

These two instruments were generally accompanied by hand-clapping from some of those not dancing. Now there was rhythm, pure and simple and alone, utterly independent and neglectful of the musical qualities and attributes of the sound produced, and used only as a means of conveying the ictus to the ears of all the party, in order that individual overflow of emotion might be worked off in associated physical motion; and to this pure rhythm the negroes danced almost all night. Occasionally a dancer would give a staccato shout, and the sitters around would answer with a longer crooning on two or three notes, wordless, rising and falling in apparently aimless but musical intervals. When the dancers all gave out and stopped to rest, which was very seldom, the thump and the rattle kept right on, and somebody began to sing one of the many songs in the West Indian French patois; marked rhythm being also a conspicuous feature in these somewhat monotonous melodies. sently the song would stop and dancing would be resumed for a while, and so on till the moon was gone.

Pre

The next Sunday I attended morning service at the English Church in Port of Spain, and saw a large chancel choir of negroes only, young men and girls and boys, all dressed in the cleanest of white clothes, and seated in rows with becoming seriousness. They might very well have been children of some of those I had heard dancing and singing almost like savages, to the drum and rattle in the moonlight; and yet this choir, led by the admirable playing of an English or ganist, sang in unison the music of the English Church service, including an elaborate Te Deum by Berthold Tours and several chants and modern hymn

tunes, and all with really delightful perfection of time, tone, and expression. I had always known that negroes are a tuneful race, but this performance was a surprising one.

Do not these incidents point to the natural order and succession of steps in the evolution of music? Rhythm first, suggested and shown to individuals in the motion of their own limbs; then rhythm becoming stronger, and marked by uttered sound, as the walking of one man grows into the marching of many men; then rhythm still more marked, as the joyous excitement of friendly association seeks outlet in the excited and exciting motions of the dance, led by rhythmical sounds of percussion; then rhythmic shouting; and then song; and all the rest follows naturally. But always present, and controlling, and inspiring, is rhythm. When the evolutionary process arrives at recording the music, then the rhythm of notes and bars is discovered to be the only means by which music can be written and read. When the further stage of several persons playing or singing together is reached, then still more must rhythm rule them all alike, all reading the same record. And when the final stage of the great orchestras and choruses is reached, then, above and beyond the same written record placed before all, there must also be visible to all the imperative controlling rhythm of the conductor's beat, in order to secure perfect ensemble performance.

Let us now consider what part rhythm plays in volitional human action, which is the main constituent of that visible human life to which we have already seen that artistic dramatic action must in these days be true. The walking of a grown person is about as automatic as breathing, and may be justly set aside with it as scarcely volitional action. But rhythm evidently governs marching, and dancing, and in fact any conditions of life wherein the object is to produce continuous consentient and coincident action

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