Alas, Childe Roland!
Seriously, if our rising young composers—isn't it funny they are always spoken of as rising? I suppose it's because they retire so late—read Hanslick carefully, much good would accrue. It is all well enough to call your work something or other, but do not expect me nor my neighbor to catch your idea. We may be both thinking about something else, according to our temperaments. I may be probably enjoying the form, the instrumentation, the development of your themes; my neighbor, for all we know, will in imagination have buried his rich, irritable old aunt, and so your pæan of gladness, with its brazen clamor of trumpets, means for him the triumphant ride home from the cemetery and the anticipated joys of the post-mortuary hurrah.
XIX
A COLLEGE FOR CRITICS
Yes, it was indeed a hot, sultry afternoon, and as the class settled down to stolid work, even Mr. Quelson shifted impatiently at the blackboard, where he was trying to explain to a young pupil from Missouri that Beethoven did not write his oratorio, The Mount of Olives, for Park and Tilford. It was no use, however, the pupil had been brought up in a delicatessen foundry and saw everything musical from the comestible viewpoint.
The sun blazed through the open oriel windows at the western end of the large hall, and the class inwardly rebelled at its task and thought of cool, green grottoes with heated men frantically falling over the home-plate, while the multitude belched bravos as Teddy McCorkle made three bases. Instead of the national game the class was wrestling with figured bass and the art of descant, and again it groaned aloud.
Mr. Quelson faced his pupils. In his eyes were tears, but he must do his duty.
"Gentlemen," he suavely said, "the weather is certainly trying, but remember this is examination day, and next week you, that is some of you, will go out into the great world to face its cares, to wrestle for its prizes, to put forth your strength against the strength of men; in a word, to become critics of music, and to represent this college, wherein you have imbibed so much generous and valuable learning."