ance, but the town omitted to go mad over him as it did over little Josef Hofmann a year earlier. Now, there are few who have attained the highest places in the world of music who have not discovered precocious talent; but all children do not grow up as they promise; else, as Goethe observes in "Wahrheit und Dichtung," we should have nothing but geniuses in the world. Master Fritz, however, who began playing at the age of four and had appeared in a concert with Patti at six, has kept his youthful promises. When he first came to New York he had already had the training of Hellmesberger in Vienna, which was his home, and of Massart in Paris; there he had taken a Conservatoire prize, and there he had played at one of Pasdeloup's concerts. Fortunately, his experience as an infantile virtuoso was brought to an end with his American tour, and he returned to Paris to study and to grow.

It is characteristic of Mr. Kreisler's intellectual quality that after these boyhood triumphs, and as he was emerging into man's estate, his father, who is a physician, remarked to him once, "Well, after all, you are only a musician; you don't know anything!" The sting hurt, and as a result of it the boy dropped his music entirely for two years, entered the Gymnasium and studied hard, and gained a diploma for the substantial acquire ments he showed there. Perhaps it is needless to say that his art, when he took it up again, was the gainer thereby. He returned to America in 1900 as a mature artist, and again came in 1902 and 1904. He arrived on his present visit last January. At every reappearance he showed a steady advance in his artistic powers, and he now stands among the greatest of musicians. His reputation in Europe has grown enormously, and it

No

is founded on the highest kind of achievement. Depth of feeling, poetic insight, repose, largeness of view, are his; and especially is his playing characterized by a splendid virility; health and strength are in it, the glow of an ardent temperament and a contagious enthusiasm. Few violinists have so unerring a technique as his, and few can traverse with so unfailing certainty the heaped-up difficulties of such works as the concertos of Tschaikowsky and Brahms. But technical mastery with him is but a means to an end. If there ever was any of the dross of virtuosoship in Mr. Kreisler's artistic nature, he has purified himself of it, and he stands now as an exemplar of consummate artistry, intensely human and pulsing with warm blood, but governed by the highest ideals and the noblest and purest taste. period or style is a strange to him; but, with the obviously modern and romantic tendencies of his nature, his predilection for the music of the older masters of the violin is especially notable, and with it the poise and repose that that music demands. The indefinable quality of "style" Mr. Kreisler possesses in an uncommon degree; and it is as evident in his profoundly beautiful playing of Bach's music as it is in his playing of the lesser music of Couperin, Pugnani, Porpora, Leclair, Francœur, Tartini, and others of that period, in which he contrives to gain a point and a special significance that wholly avoid the monotony into which this music can so easily be made to fall for modern ears. He is at home, too, in the facile brilliancy of the modern composers; but for many the climax of his achievements is to be found in his magnificent performance of Brahms's colossal concerto, in which he so triumphantly refutes the old slur that it is "a concerto against the violin.”

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to school him well. The mother, dutiful and true, kept little Fritz close to her tender heart and taught him those household virtues which later he sang in his charming "Lied von der Glocke." To all her children Frau Schiller was a haven in time of storm, and if they were conscious of doing wrong, they confessed to her first, that she might punish them herself and avert their father's wrath. She inspired Fritz also with a feeling of religion, in daily walks storing his receptive mind with Bible lore. 'It was a beautiful Easter Monday," writes Schiller's sister Christophine of one of these outdoor strolls and talks, "and our mother related to us the story of the two disciples, to whom, on their way to Emmaus, Jesus had joined himself. Her speech and narrative grew more and more inspired, and when we got upon the hill we were all so much affected that we knelt down and prayed." Science need not tell us why Schiller inherited the physical features of his mother and her character as well.

A strange and abiding impression was made upon the boy Schiller by the theater at Ludwigsburg, which he saw while at the neighboring Latin school;

tation was a libertine's command, and on January 16, 1773, the fourteen-yearold lad entered the military prison" with a chilblain," as the official record tells us, "an eruption of the scalp, fourteen Latin books, and forty-three kreuzers in money." The flickering candle of hope was suddenly quenched; yet out of the sixty thousand saplings which the veteran forester laid out in the parks and gardens of Würtemberg, none was to give such promise as that to which he and his sorrowing wife, in the following September, signed away all legal right.

Mr. Kuno Fischer, as quoted by Professor Thomas in his excellent new "Life and Works of Schiller," points out that the Academy's atmosphere of outward culture was just the environment needed by the village barber's son; but it is certain that the delicate, studious, and timid boy soon perceived deadly infections about him. Routed out of bed before the dawn of day, he was confronted at every turn by a monitor, who ordered him to put on his blue coat and white breeches, to pray, to eat, to work, and then to undress and pray again; while a more despotic master assigned to him academic tasks which modern pedagogy would brand as barbarous. Frequently, for example, he was compelled to criticise his fellow-students openly, at one time answering even the bald query, "Who is the meanest among you?" And every year he was required to laud his sovereign and the latter's mistress publicly, at the same time imparting to paper an estimate of his own character. Neither modesty nor self-respect failed him, however. "You will find me," he writes, " often over-hasty, often over-frivolous.

but his former schoolmaster, Pastor Moser, in Lorch, had directed his curiosity to the ministry of the Church, and his devout father strove to advance him to that goal. A bitter disappointment, however, was in store for both father and son. Duke Karl established a military school at his castle Solitude, where in 1770 he had appointed Captain Schiller Master Forester, and soon he set his mark of approval on young Friedrich as a likely student whom he wanted for the law class in the Academy. In vain Schiller sought to save his son. The royal invi

You will hear that I am obsti

nate, passionate, and impatient; but you will also hear of my sincerity, my fidelity, and my good heart."

Tiring of law, and seeing no chance for entering the ministry, Schiller in 1775 took up the study of medicine by permission of the Duke, and reached eagerly after the coveted parchment. But again he felt the despot's power; his ambitious thesis was rejected and he was commanded to try again. Then it was in God's providence that his hidden, uneventful life touched that of one who, years later, was to stand forth with him proudly before the world as his most faithful and illustrious friend. On a state occasion in Stuttgart graced by Karl August and the famous young Goethe, the enslaved lad Schiller, after obsequiously kissing the garment of Karl's mistress, was given three prizes for skill in medicine, though denied a prize for proficiency in literature ! In December, 1780, Schiller graduated from the Academy and was appointed Regimental Doctor for Stuttgart, at the paltry salary of seven dollars a month. He was forbidden to engage in private practice or to dress as civilian, and his personal appearance, as described by a school

a

Find.

For eight long years the unscrupulous Karl Eugene had tried to mold the barber's kidnapped son, denying him communication with parents or sisters except through censored letters, and now he thought to find in the struggling student but a crushed lackey subservient to his basest designs. It was the Duke's turn, however, to drink deep of the bitters he had so often proffered others, for before graduating Schiller had begun to cut his own swathe, justifying, no doubt, the witticism of a Stuttgart lady who said

mate, suggested anything but the coming poet or even the dramatist of "Wallenstein:"

Crushed into the stiff, tasteless old Prussian uniform, each of his temples was adorned with three stiff rolls, as if done with gypsum; a tiny three-cornered hat scarcely covered his crown; a thick, long pigtail was crammed with his slender neck into a very narrow horsehair stock; while a strip of felt, put under the white spatterdashes enriched by traces of shoeblacking, gave to the legs a bigger diameter than the thighs could boast of, squeezed as they were into their tightfitting breeches. Hardly able even to bend his knees, the whole man moved like a stork.

"Regimental Doctor Schiller steps out as if the Duke were one of his inferior servants!" Stirred to the depths of his soul by the stinging injustice done him, and gradually awakening to his literary strength, Schiller now protested against the political and social forces of the age in a wild, immature play called "Die Räuber," written by stealth, in which these words reveal his sense of orphanage:

The whole world one family, with its Father above me, and that Father not mine! I alone the castaway, I alone struck out from the company of the just! Not for me is the sweet name of child, never for me the look of one I love!

For

By smuggling out the manuscript, Schiller managed to get the play produced on the stage at Mannheim, and, by letting himself down with bedclothes from an upper window, he twice contrived to be present at the performances. the first clandestine excursion he was reprimanded by the Duke; for the second he was imprisoned; and on the night of September 22, 1782, after a tearful parting with his mother and sisters, Schiller took French leave of his too paternal sovereign and made off again for Mannheim, where the theater seemed to promise him a certain future.

Among the few friends to whom Schiller confided his plan of deserting the Duke of Würtemberg was Frau Henriette von Wolzogen, who offered him a cottage at Bauerbach; and thither he repaired on finding that his hopes for Mannheim did not materialize. As Dr. Ritter he preserved his incognito fairly well, sedulously reporting that Schiller had gone to America. It was here, while writing" "Kabale und Liebe," that he made the acquaintance of Reinwald, the Ducal Librarian at Meiningen, afterwards his unworthy brother-in-law, who

adrift again in the world. During the year, however, the Mannheim Theater produced the weak "Fiesco " and " Kabale und Liebe," the royalist Stage Director von Dalberg cutting out the lines describing realistically the exportation of hireling soldiers to America.

About the same time that Schiller was satirized in a Mannheim farce, making him loathe the town of his new adoption, he received from Leipsic an embroidered letter-case containing several letters of warm congratulation and four miniature portraits-two of young ladies-all sent

young exile:

To-day Schiller opened his heart to me-a youth who has already been through the school of life-and I found him worthy to be called my friend. He has an extraordinary mind, and I believe that Germany will some day name his name with pride.

Through Frau von Wolzogen Schiller finally engaged for a year as theater poet at Mannheim; but eight months of intermittent fever, bringing a caustic reproof from his father for lack of medical attention to himself, so interfered with his stage services that he was set

mark of esteem for the Swabian poet. Körner was a well-to-do young lawyer, for a while a privat-docent at the University of Leipsic, and later a practicing advocate in Dresden; and this generous act, followed by several gifts of money disguised as loans, drew Schiller, poor, but now of some fame, first to Leipsic and its summer suburb, Gohlis, and later to the inspiring Saxon capital. With expanded ideas of life he frequented Richter's coffee-house in Leipsic to study the people, and at Gohlis occupied an unpretentious little cottage, still shown as the