Just lately I've heard a lot of music including Tschaikovsky's Pathétique and Fifth Symphonies, some Debussy, and odd pieces by Dukas, Glinka, Smetana, Mozart. I am chock-full of impressions of all this precious stuff and scarcely know what to write. As usual, the third movement of the Pathétique produced a frenzy of exhilaration; I seemed to put on several inches around my chest and wished to shout in a voice of thunder. The conventions of a public concert hall are dreadfully oppressive at such times. I could have eaten "all the elephants of Hindustan and picked my teeth with the spire of Strassburg Cathedral."
In the last movement of the Fifth Symphony of that splendid fellow Tschaikovsky, the orchestra seemed to gallop away leaving poor Landon Ronald to wave his whip in a ridiculously ineffective way. They went on crashing down chords, and just before the end I had the awful presentiment that the orchestra simply could not stop. I sat still straining every nerve in the expectancy that this chord or the next or the next was the end. But it went on pounding down—each one seemed the last but every time another followed as passionate and emphatic as the one before, until finally, whatever this inhuman orchestra was attempting to crush and destroy must have been reduced to shapeless pulp. I wanted to board the platform and plead with them, elderly gentlemen turned their heads nervously, everyone was breathless, we all wanted to call "For God's sake, stop"—to do anything to still this awful lust for annihilation.... The end came quickly in four drum beats in quick succession. I have never seen such hate, such passionate intensity of the will to destroy.... And Tschaikovsky was a Russian!
Debussy was a welcome change. "L'Après-midi d'un Faun" is a musical setting to an oscitatory exercise. It is an orchestral yawn. Oh! so tired!
Came away thoroughly delighted. Wanted to say to every one "Bally good, ain't it?" and then we would all shake hands and go home whistling.
December 14.
My rooms are littered with old concert programmes and the Doctor's prescriptions (in the yellow envelopes of the dispenser) for my various ailments and diseases, and books, books, books.
Among the latter those lying on my table at this moment are—
Joseph Vance.
The Sequel to Pragmatism: The Meaning of Truth, by Wiliam James.