Bloodshot, tearful eyes, blue lips, coarse rags, festering wounds.... Oh, how hideously poverty had eaten into this miserable creature!
He held out to me a red, swollen, filthy hand. He groaned, he mumbled of help.
I began feeling in all my pockets.... No purse, no watch, not even a handkerchief.... I had taken nothing with me. And the beggar was still waiting, ... and his outstretched hand feebly shook and trembled.
Confused, abashed, I warmly clasped the filthy, shaking hand.... “Don’t be angry, brother; I have nothing, brother.”
The beggar stared at me with his bloodshot eyes; his blue lips smiled, and he in his turn gripped my chilly fingers.
“What of it, brother?” he mumbled, “thanks for this too. That is a gift too, brother.”
I knew that I, too, had received a gift from my brother.
Russia, a stripling with stout, straight limbs and white hair, is all fire, caprice, melancholy and revolt. Turgenev, more cosmopolitan, lighter in his touch than Tolstoy or Tschaïkowsky, is able to give us in these two prose poems the sadness and the big heart of the Slav, but in Tschaïkowsky we get the melancholy, the caprice, the fire and the revolt. If he be not the most Russian of composers, he is certainly the greatest composer of Russia!
III
Like Rubinstein, Tschaïkowsky became celebrated as a composer after he had written a little piano piece—a Chanson Sans Paroles, curiously enough in the same key as Rubinstein’s melody in F. A Polish dance, as we all know, lighted Scharwenka’s torch of fame in this country. Tschaïkowsky has never since written so tender, so dainty a piece as this little song without words. An op. 2, it gave him a vogue in the salon that has sent many a shallow admirer to sorrow, for it may be said at the outset that his compositions for piano are not Klaviermässig, do not lie well for the flat keyboard.