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and very handsome. She might have been marble herself like the mantel, she was so cold, and I, suddenly aroused by the shock, was on fire with resolve and fierce hunger for sympathy. She did not hesitate a moment; and I walked out. She had given me a deep wound. I saw the sun rise in the streets.

Within two weeks I had made all my arrangements; had closed up my affairs; given up everything in the world I had; executed my notes to my creditors and told them they were not worth a cent unless I lived, in which case they would be worth principal and interest; sold my law books to Peck for a price which made his eyes glisten, had given him my office for the unexpired term and was gone to the West.

The night before I left I called to see the young lady again-a piece of weakness. But I hated to give up.

She looked unusually handsome.

"Where?" That was every word-in just
such a tone as if she had met me on the
corner, and I had said I was going to walk.
She was standing by the mantel with her
shapely arm resting lightly on the marble.
I said, "God only knows, but somewhere
far enough away."

"When are you coming back?"
"Never."

Oh, yes you will," she said coolly, arranging a bracelet, so coolly that it stung me like a serpent and brought me on my feet.

"I'll be ! No, I will not," I said. "Good-by."

Good-by." She gave me her hand and it was as cool as her voice.

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'Good-by." And mine was as cold as if I were dead. I swear, I believe sometimes I did die right there before her and that a new man took my place within me.

As I walked out of her gate, I met Peck going in, and I did not care. I did not even hate him. I remember that his collar was up to his ears. I heard afterward that she accepted him that same week. I started West that night. (To be continued.)

I believe if she had said a word or had looked sweet at me I might have stayed, and I know I should have remained in love with her. But she did neither. When I told her I was going away, she said,

THE USE OF ENGLISH IN SINGING
By Francis Rogers

HE announcement that the management of the Metropolitan Opera House will soon begin the production of operas in English is welcome news to those who believe that the present practice of giving operas in languages unintelligible to ninetenths of the public is highly detrimental to the cause of vocal music in this country. Until we shall cease to treat music as an exotic art, holding it at arm's length, we, as a nation, shall continue to be unmusical (even though we may merit the name of music lovers), and creatively of no account at all in the eyes of the great musical world. The case of England illustrates strikingly this point. No other nation has supported sc loyally for more than two centuries music in all its branches, but she has al

VOL. XLV-5

ways sent to the continent of Europe for her inspiration, her masters, and her composers. As a result, in the field of musical creation, England is practically non-existent. Her first, last, and only great composer, Henry Purcell, died in 1695! She has produced no singers, instrumentalists, or conductors of international reputation. Let us hope that America is to have a less barren record.

The statement that all great art must spring from an original creative impulse seems hardly to need proof. Imitative or borrowed art may be wonderfully clever and great in its kind, but it is inconceivable that it ever could find a resting-place in the hearts of men-and that is where all great art has its ultimate home. Borrowed art, if it survive at all the fashion of the day which produces it, does so only in the musty

pages of histories and encyclopædias. With this thought in mind, it would be interesting to take up the question of musical development in America in its various branches, but just now I wish to deal with one point only. This point I deem of cardinal importance the use of the English language in singing and its bearing upon our future growth as a really musical people. The field of vocal music divides itself into two styles-the dramatic, or operatic (including the oratorio), and the lyric, which includes the smaller forms of expression of sentiment and emotion and the ballad, or narrative, form. These forms often encroach upon one another, but for our present purpose we may safely group them together and treat the subject as a whole. In all forms the text is the foundation upon which the musical structure is built; the composer is inspired by the poem and strives to interpret and illuminate it through the medium of his own musical thoughts. The music of many a song and of many an opera is so far superior to the text as to make us wonder in what the composer really found his inspiration (as, for instance, in many of the Schubert songs and the early Italian and French operas); but, all the same, the text is always the basis of the musical thought. Even in the days of the Italian bel canto, when the words were frankly a mere framework upon which to hang the musical fabric, and when the beauty of the melody was the prime purpose of the song, the text did mean something and did bear a certain, if not an over-intimate, relation to the music. As musical taste and culture have increased, the text has come to play a part of evergrowing importance in the mind of the composer, who nowadays endeavors to merge into each other absolutely the verbal and the musical form. Possibly the highest development of this modern tendency is to be found in Debussy's "Pelléas et Méli

sande."

Fine settings of English texts are deplorably hard to find, and their scarcity is often attributed to alleged lacks in our language. We are told that it is unmelodious, illadapted to musical uses, and unsingable. Against this too generally accepted explanation I wish to protest most emphatically. We have a poetic literature of marvellous richness. Only the Germans can lay

claim to a lyric wealth as great as ours. The language we inherit is an extraordinarily rich one. A German authority credits it with a vocabulary three times as large as that of its nearest competitor, German, and ten times as large as that of French, the poorest, in number of words, of all the great languages. With such an enormous fund of words to choose from it seems as if we not only should be able to express our thoughts with unparalleled exactness and subtlety, but also with unequalled variety of sound. Further, it is probable that English surpasses the other three great languages of song, German, Italian and French, in number of distinguishable vowel sounds, but in questions of ear authorities usually differ, and it is hazardous to claim in this an indubitable supremacy. It seems certain, however, that English has rather more than twice as many vowel sounds as Italian (the poorest language in this respect), which has only seven or eight.

Again, it is asserted that the sound of English is unmelodious because of its many consonants, but we are no richer in consonants than the Germans, and German is accepted as a suitable vehicle for song. Furthermore, a richness and variety in consonant sounds adds to the vocal expressiveness of a language, as the best German singers have amply proved. Italian is the easiest language in which to sing because it contains the fewest vowels and consonants, and, for the same reason, is, despite certain obvious beauties, the most limited in its range. It is easy to illustrate the beauty of our mother-tongue, considered merely as sound. I quote a few lines from four standard poets, chosen almost at random. Their indisputable loveliness is owing in very large part to the richness, beauty, and grouping of the consonant sounds.

"When to the Sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past." "Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow, For precious friends hid in death's dateless night." -SHAKESPEARE.

"That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees, In some melodious plot

Of beechen green, and shadows numberless, Singest of summer in full-throated ease." "Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways." -KEATS.

"There is sweet music here that softer falls

Than petals from blown roses on the grass, Or night-dews on still waters between walls Of shadowy granite, in a gleaming pass." -TENNYSON.

"In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbow'd."

-HENLEY.

These lines are, I grant, hard to read well and still harder to sing, but the difficult is not the impossible, and the singer who can deliver skilfully such verbal beauties as these has at his command a choice of exquisite effects of sound such as he could obtain from no French or Italian sources. There is no dearth of fine English poetry, both dramatic and lyric, suitable for musical setting. We lack only the composers equal to their opportunities, and are awaiting with some signs of impatience the arrival on the scene of our Schubert, our Verdi, and our Fauré. Composers, as well as poets, are born and not made, but there is no reason why we should not manufacture plenty of singers capable of doing justice to the tonal beauty of our language. Demosthenes proved more than two thousand years ago that the question of good diction is merely one of persistence in wisely directed effort. Even if we grant that of all languages English is the hardest to sing, this only means that we have to work proportionately harder in order to achieve a similar degree of perfection in its use, and if our singers would devote to the study of their own language one-half of the time which they give to the study of foreign tongues, their hearers would all be justifiably proud of the mere sound of English. American singers feel that because they have always spoken English, they need not study its theoretic side at all, and may safely take for granted their own ability to use it sufficiently well. The French, who are justly famed for the perfection of their diction in singing, take nothing for granted, except that their language is a beautiful one to listen to; and, consequently, they submit themselves to a long, rigorous, and intelligent study of the whole subject, and then send out such splendid exponents of clear and mellifluous diction as Plançon and Gilibert. So, also, to a less extent, with the Germans and Italians. English-speaking singers bring up the rear of the procession

and sing their own language in so nearly unanimously wretched a fashion that the public is convinced that the fault lies with the language and not with the singers themselves. Dear and long suffering public! Don't be imposed upon any longer. If you can't understand what a singer is singing about, it is his fault-not yours, and not that of your common language. Remember that the old saying: "He who says well, sings well," has a converse-"The singer who cannot say his words intelligibly and beautifully doesn't know how to sing!"

The patience of the American public is proverbial, and nowhere is this patience more strikingly exemplified than in our fashionable opera houses. Only a patient and bewildered public would, year after year, listen to opera sung in languages which, for the most part, they do not understand, when, by the assertion of their plain rights, they could hear them sung in the vernacular. The book of an opera means a great deal to its composer, and it ought to mean at least something to the public. It is not enough to have a vague knowledge of the plot; one should be able to follow the dialogue. Mr. Mahler has proved in his conducting of some of the great Wagner operas that a properly controlled orchestra does not drown the singers' voices. Of last season's cast of "Tristan and Isolde," at the Metropolitan, three of the principal singers, Fremstad, Homer, and Blass, are Americans; if the opera had been sung in a good English translation, how much more thoroughly the great mass of the public would have enjoyed the beauties of this masterpiece of composition! In all the great opera houses of continental Europe one hears only the language of the country, and foreign singers are not engaged until they have mastered it. We certainly have the right to exact a similar capacity from our high-priced foreign songsters. It is only laziness on their part, and unadmirable patience on ours, which delays this desideratum.

A translation is never so good as the original, it is true, but it is much better than unintelligible poems or librettos. That the translations of operas and songs with which we are unfamiliar have not satisfied us, is only due to our not having insisted that the translations be well done. Last winter, in London, Hans Richter conducted

a season of Wagner's operas which were sung in English, and the reports seem to agree that the translation was adequate and that the experiment of giving the English public a chance to follow the text at first hand was a great success. Wagner himself believed thoroughly in this matter of translation.

Musical America has worn its swaddlingclothes too long and should free itself from the bands which retard its growth into maturity. We owe a large debt of gratitude to Europe, which has, of necessity, been our nurse, and must for years to come be an indispensable tutor, but we are now old enough to begin to think our own musical thoughts and to express them in our mother-tongue. Three great German composers, Handel, Haydn and Mendelssohn, have shown us that English can lend itself to the happy expression of great musical ideas, and the Gilbert and Sullivan operas prove to us that, in lighter vein, good English and good music can dwell together in blissful wedlock.

The American public should rouse itself from its lethargy and insist that its operas and songs be sung in its own familiar tongue. Where this exaction necessitates a translation from another language, we should demand that the translating be done by competent men. The translations into Italian of the librettos for Verdi's "Otello" and "Falstaff" were made by Boito, to-day the first poet in Italy. Let us make our singers sing to us in good intelligible English. Singers whose diction is not intelligible have not mastered their art. It is both our right and our duty to demand all this for the cause of the domestication and growth of song in this country.

The American composer should gird up his loins and interpret for us some of the noble dramatic and lyric poems which are ours by right of heritage. There they lie in splendid profusion right at his hand, and here in America is a great hungry public yearning, even if unconsciously, to hear its inmost ideals embodied in musical form. Let the American composer do for us what Wagner and Schubert did for the Germans, and Verdi for the Italians. He should express himself as an American who is familiar with the great music of all nations,

but who is, at the same time, self-dependent in his musical thinking. Even if he speak a bit indistinctly at first and fall far short of his ideal, let him hold his head high and be proud to carry the torch of progress in his hand, if only for a moment. As Professor Woodberry points out, the history of the growth of the Race-mind is to be read in the aspiration of the race rather than in its actual achievements.

Let the American singer educate himself. President Eliot says truly that a liberal education is a state of mind, and that to.be alert and responsive to the signal of every honest new thought and sympathetic with all striving after worthy ideals is better than to be the most highly developed specialist. Therefore he should familiarize himself with all the foreign schools of singing and composition, accepting and rejecting as his experience guides him; but he should remember that he can develop himself to his highest efficiency only as an American. When he is called upon to sing foreign music, which is not, so to speak, in his blood, he must inevitably interpret it in the light of the experience of his race. Therefore, he should make the most of his race inheritance, modifying and strengthening it wherever he sees the need. He should make himself at home in the rich treasure-house of English literature, and make of our language an obedient and expressive medium for musical thought. He should render himself so skilful in the singing of English that his hearers cannot fail to recognize its beauty and strength; if he cannot do this, it is not the fault of the language, but is due to his own indifference and laziness.

So long as our operas and songs are sung to us in foreign tongues, so long will the art of song play only a small part in our inner life. But when the American composer shall arouse himself and express himself as an American to Americans, even as the great German composers to the Germans, and shall find for his interpreters American singers who are conscious and proud of their race inheritance, then, and not till then, shall we fully comprehend the solace and inspiration, to both heart and mind, which a whole nation may derive from song.

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LTHOUGH occasional glimpses have been given of Mr. Alexander's three years' work on his mural paintings in the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburg, its approaching completion makes it possible for the first time to consider comprehensively this very extensive scheme of interior decoration. Not only the large amount of actual wall space placed at his disposal but also the number, and variety in size, shape, and location, of the sets of panels in the three stories of the building, permitted him, called upon him, to embroider his theme, to elucidate the various heads to his discourse. Opportunities like this are not very numerous in modern art-for the painters, even less than the sculptors. The latter, in their personifications of various abstract conceptions-virtues, epochs, as

VOL. XLV.-6

pirations, even in their portrait statuesare required to think, more or less assiduously, before they begin to model. In portraiture, it is more difficult for them to find adequate rendering of the ordinary frockcoated citizen than it is for the painter. Even among the great mural commissions for our public buildings no such theme as Raphael's Disputa is now possible. And, in the United States, it is practically only the painters who work on walls who are called upon for great synthetical creations. This commission, given in June, 1905, by the President and Trustees of the Institute, to furnish the eastern wing or pavilion of the great new façade of their building with mural decorations, was not arrived at without due deliberation. The artist's qualifications were carefully weighed, his record at home and abroad examined, the long list of his honors (membership in the important

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