I wrote this of Mischa Elman (the first of the many Mischas and Jaschas who mew on the fiddle strings) after I heard him play in London: "United to an amazing technical precision there is a still more amazing emotional temperament, all dominated by a powerful musical and mental intellect, uncanny in one not yet out of his teens. What need to add that his conception of Beethoven is neither as lovely as Kreisler's nor as fascinating as Ysaye's? Elman will mature. In the romantic or the virtuoso realm he is past master. His tone is lava-like in its warmth. He paints with many colours. He displays numberless nuances of feeling. The musical in him dominates the virtuoso. Naturally, the pride of hot youth asserts itself, and often, self-intoxicated, he intoxicates his audiences with his sensuous, compelling tone. Hebraic, tragic, melancholy, the boisterousness of the Russian, the swift modulation from mad caprice to Slavic despair—Elman is a magician of many moods. When I listen to him I almost forget Ysaye." Yet when I heard Ysaye play last season it was Elman that I forgot for the moment. After all, a critic, too, may have his moods. And now comes another conqueror, the lad Jasha Heifetz from Russia, a pupil of Leopold Auer and an artist of such extraordinary attainments that the greatest among contemporary violinists—is it necessary to mention names?—have said of him that his art begins where theirs ends, and that they will shut up shop when he plays here. All of which is a flattering tribute, but it has been made before. Heifetz, however, may be the dark horse in the modern fiddle sweepstakes.
CHAPTER XXIX
RIDING THE WHIRLWIND
Once Swinburne, in a Baudelaire mood, sang: "Shall no new sin be born for men's troubles?" And it was an Asiatic potentate who offered a prize for the discovery of a new pleasure. Or was it a sauce?
Mankind soon wearies. The miracles of yesteryear are the commonplaces of to-day. Steam, telegraphy, electric motors, wireless, and now wireless telephony are accepted as a matter of course by the man in the street. How stale will seem woman suffrage and prohibition after they have conquered. In the world of art conditions are analogous. The cubist nail drove out the impressionist, and the cubist will vanish if the futurist hammer is sufficiently heavy.
Nevertheless, there is a novel sensation in store for those who make a first flight through the air. I don't mean in a balloon, whether captive or free; in the case of the former, a trip to the top of the Washington Monument or the Eiffel Tower will suffice; and while I rode in a Zeppelin at Berlin in 1912 (100 marks, or about $25, was the tariff) and saw Potsdam at my feet, yet I was unsatisfied. The passengers sat in a comfortable salon, ate, drank, even smoked. The travelling was so smooth as to suggest an inland lake on a summer day. No danger was to be apprehended. The monster air-ship left its hangar and returned to it on schedule time. The entire trip lacked the flavour of adventure. And that leads me to a personal confession.
I am not a sport. In my veins flows sporting blood, but only in the Darwinian sense am I a "sport," a deviation from the normal history of my family, which has always been devoted to athletic pleasures. A baseball match in which carnage ensues is a mild diversion for me. I can't understand the fury of the contest. I yawn, though the frenzied enthusiasm of the spectators interests me. I have fallen asleep over a cricket match at Lord's in London, and the biggest bore of all was a Sunday afternoon bull-fight in Madrid. It was such a waste of potential beefsteaks. Prize-fights disgust, shell races are puerile, football matches smack of obituaries. As for golf—that is a prelude to senility, or the antechamber to an undertaker's establishment.
The swiftness of film pictures has set a new metronomic standard for modern sports. I suppose playing Bach fugues on the keyboard is as exciting a game as any; that is, for those who like it. A four-voiced polyphony at a good gait is positively hair-raising. It beats poker. All this is a preliminary to my little tale.