I was indeed disheartened. Then a lady spoke to me, a musical lady, and said:
"It was grand, perfectly grand, but why did you introduce a funeral march in the middle—I fancied that Childe Roland was not killed until the end?"
The funeral march she alluded to was not a march at all, but the "quagmire theme," from which queer faces threateningly mock at the knight.
"Hopeless," thought I; "these people have no imagination."
The next day the critics treated me roughly. I was accused of cribbing my first theme from The Flying Dutchman, and fixing it up rhythmically for my own use, as if I hadn't made it on the spur of an inspired moment! They also told me that I couldn't write a fugue; that my orchestration was overloaded, and my work deficient in symmetry, repose, development and, above all, in coherence.
This last was too much. Why, Browning's poem was contained in my tone-poem; blame Browning for the incoherence, for I but followed his verse. One day many months afterward I happened to pick up Hanslick, and chanced on the following:
"Let them play the theme of a symphony by Mozart or Haydn, an adagio by Beethoven, a scherzo by Mendelssohn, one of Schumann's or Chopin's compositions for the piano, or again, the most popular themes from the overtures of Auber, Donizetti or Flotow, who would be bold enough to point out a definite feeling on the subject of any of these themes? One will say 'love.' Perhaps so. Another thinks it is longing. He may be right. A third feels it to be religion. Who may contradict him? Now, how can we talk of a definite feeling represented when nobody really knows what is represented? Probably all will agree about the beauty or beauties of the composition, whereas all will differ regarding its subject. To represent something is to exhibit it clearly, to set it before us distinctly. But how can we call that the subject represented by an art which is really its vaguest and most indefinite element, and which must, therefore, forever remain highly debatable ground."
I saw instantly that I had been on a false track. Charles Lamb and Eduard Hanslick had both reached the same conclusion by diverse roads. I was disgusted with myself. So then the whispering of love and the clamor of ardent combatants were only whispering, storming, roaring, but not the whispering of love and the clamor; musical clamor, certainly, but not that of "ardent combatants."
I saw then that my symphonic poem, Childe Roland, told nothing to anyone of Browning's poem, that my own subjective and overstocked imaginings were not worth a rush, that the music had an objective existence as music and not as a poetical picture, and by the former and not the latter it must be judged. Then I discovered what poor stuff I had produced—how my fancy had tricked me into believing that those three or four bold and heavily orchestrated themes, with their restless migration into different tonalities, were "soul and tales marvelously mirrored."
In reality my ignorance and lack of contrapuntal knowledge, and, above all, the want of clear ideas of form, made me label the work a symphonic poem—an elastic, high-sounding, pompous and empty title. In a spirit of revenge I took the score, rearranged it for small orchestra, and it is being played at the big circus under the euphonious title of The Patrol of the Night Stick, and the musical press praises particularly the graphic power of the night stick motive and the verisimilitude of the escape of the burglar in the coda.