flügelhorns), two trombones, two horns, and three players operating the whole family of saxophones, a family of oboes, and another of clarinets. The great range and variety of sonorities within the powers of such an orchestra must be apparent to any one possessing even a layman's knowledge of orchestral effects.

This jazz orchestra is American. It has impressed itself upon the artistic European mind just as the ragtime and jazz music has captured the popular fancy of Europe. Can any such thing be said of any other American musical creation? In the admirable compositions of the learned Athenians who walk in the groves of the Boston Common one finds all the urbanity and all the lofty contemplation that characterize the works of the fathers. But has Europe hearkened to them? Has a European musician stretched out the arms of his flagging inspiration toward them and clasped to his throbbing breast their needed support? Alas, no! But ragtime and jazz rule the feet of France and Britain. And only last winter there came into the presence of local musiclovers a composition by Igor Stravinsky called "Symphonies for Wind-Instruments," which betrayed that famous experimentalist as an attentive listener to the seductive breathings of the saxophones, clarinets, and stopped trumpets of the jazz band.

Our jazz music is unquestionably our own. It expresses our ebulliency, our care-free optimism, our nervous energy, and our extravagant humor-characteristics which our foreign critics tell us demark us from the rest of the world. Our composers have in recent years disclosed a desire to embody in music national thought, aspiration, and emotion. Goldmark's "Gettysburg" symphony, Hadley's "North, East, South, and West," Schelling's "Victory Ball," and the negro rhapsodizings of Henry F. Gilbert and John Powell are the fruit of earnest efforts to be truly American, while John Alden Carpenter's "Adventures in a Perambulator" and Deems Taylor's "Through a Looking-Glass" publish the finer qualities of American humor.

But almost no American composer of the highly cultivated class has put forth anything that translates into the language of art the musical ideals of the people.

Those who have endeavored to follow the kindly advice of Doctor Dvořák and make the folk-music of the negro the basis of their compositions have failed to conquer the public because that public declined to embrace the slave music when dressed in the unbecoming robes of Teutonic tone poems. The arts do not descend upon the people, but rise from them. The opera was the true child of Italy as the symphony was of Germany. The opera was before La Scala and the symphony before the Dresden Conservatory. George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue," for piano and orchestra, disclosed certain possibilities of jazz, but Liszt after all cannot father an American son.

Much of the music beloved of the people and called jazz is not jazz nor even closely related to it. The sentimental songs, which seem to awaken responsive chords in the souls of people apparently devoid of all sentiment and sunk in hopeless vulgarity and sordid views of life, are for the most part without traces of an origin similar to that of jazz. They are descendants not of the jig and the doubleshuffle but of the negro's religious melodies, his "Roll, Jordan, Roll" and "Come Tremblin' Down." The semihysterical emotion of the "spiritual," given over into the hands of "poor white trash," has been transformed into maudlin sentiment which one would expect to find lauded not by serious commentators but by the industrious society of "sob sisters." These tearful ditties are prone to fall into slow waltz tempo, unknown to negro music, while the real jazz seems unable to break away from the tyranny of the fox-trot.

If jazz is to rise to the level of musical art, it must overthrow the government of the bass drum and the banjo. It must permit itself to make excursions into the regions of elastic rhythms. When Paul Whiteman gave his now historic concert in Æolian Hall, Victor Herbert was the one composer who pointed out definitely the way to freedom. If jazz must be wed to the dance, then let it seek new dance forms and rhythms. Mr. Herbert's suite of dances was a triumphant demonstration of the possibilities of the popular melody in this direction. It proved effectively that jazz need not be a poor thing, though assuredly our own.

遙遙

I

N the days of my childhood the kaleidoscope was a popular toy; and during many an hour I marvelled at the figures of colored glass formed in a long black tube by the mere turning of a handle. In a way, memory is a kaleidoscope; only its reflections are not symmetrical like those of the optical instrument; nor are they changeable at will. Moreover, in looking through darkened years upon the faces of Parisians I knew in the days of long ago, I find that of some a bare outline of the face, or only the suggestion of a trait, remains, while of others there are full-length portraits in memory's halls, even though the name of the subject may have been obliterated by the ravages of time. In fact, while the recollection of many with whom I was once on terms of intimacy has become dimmed, that of others whom I merely looked upon with admiration or curiosity at the age when impressions are deepest, remains vivid to this day.

Thus, I remember the tawny face of Marshal Mac-Mahon, with its high cheekbones, grizzled mustache, and tuft of beard beneath the lower lip. Attired in baggy trousers and an epauletted tunic, I see him leaving the Elysée Palace in a stately carriage surrounded by troopers whose breast-plates glisten in the sun, while I, a boy of ten, stand on the sidewalk watching him go forth to grace some occasion, the purport of which I have forgotten.

Both Gambetta and Victor Hugo I saw, as well; but there is a confusion in regard to their bearded faces which renders them indistinct the one from the other. Thiers and Ferdinand de Lesseps, too, are Frenchmen I gazed upon in those days of boyhood; but I was of an age when men of action appealed to me far more than men of parts; so, while the recollection of these great men of France

is hazy, that of a beau sabreur whom I watched with awe and admiration as he took his daily constitutional aboard an ocean liner, is as vivid as if I had seen him yesterday. General de Charette, who led the Papal Zouaves in vain, but valiantly, to battle on the Loire, is the soldier I have in mind, and I can see him planking the deck hour by hour, slim of limb as a greyhound, straight as an Iroquois brave.

General de Galliffet I remember, too, though I met him long after he had ridden to glory upon the field of Sedan; for, while the plain about him was strewn with the corpses of his azure-coated Chasseurs d'Afrique, he had struggled from it in a dying state, to be saved for a ripe old age by the skill of a surgeon, who placed a silver plate within him where the wall of his stomach had been. Like General de Charette, this hero of Sedan remains in memory as my ideal of the aristocrat to whom fighting for France is a dutiful tradition.

"Le brave Général Boulanger," made the hero of an hour by a march sung by Polus, a music hall idol of the eighties, was a soldier of another ilk, whom I once saw in the Champs Elysées acknowledging the plaudits of the crowd, but lacking in the courage to turn his popularity to political account. He had been in America to attend the centenary of the surrender of Yorktown, and had sat at a club in my native city drinking with a few young sparks until the early hours of morning; so, even upon a black charger, he appeared far from a hero in my eyes, an opinion justified by subsequent events.

Opéra bouffe soldiers, however, such as Boulanger, are not alone in their failure to display courage and tact at crucial moments; in fact, if those who are intrusted with the management of international relations were endowed more frequently with those faculties I would not have been tempted, as happened not long ago, to declare, during the course of

an argument concerning the European outlook, that our ambassadors ought to be chosen from among the criminal lawyers of the land. Yet no sooner had this cynicism passed my lips than I was both shamed and heartened by the recollection of two French diplomats I had known in years gone by.

One of these Frenchmen was Monsieur Jules Cambon, Ambassador of his country in our own land for a time and, during a fateful period, its representative in Berlin. Only a few weeks before he was handed his passports by a brutal enemy and, at the same time, denied the courtesy, customary in such circumstances, of a safe conduct to the French frontier, my wife and I happened to pass through the German capital on our way to take ship at Hamburg. Years had gone by since we had known Monsieur Cambon in Washington; yet the thought of annoying one in his arduous and exalted position by attempting to recall to mind Americans, whom he had quite likely forgotten altogether, did not occur to either of us. He happened, however, to hear a few days after our departure from Berlin of our visit, and even in those fatal days found time to write reproaching us for having passed through that city without making "an old friend," as he expressed it, aware of our presence. Small wonder that he appears to me as the embodiment of French courtesy.

The other diplomat I had in mind is Monsieur Jusserand, "Ambassador of the Republic of Letters," as he was aptly called when representing his land in Washington, and who, by the tact and understanding shown during trying years, endeared himself to American hearts. In the earlier weeks of the war, when it became apparent that the enemies of his land were conducting an unscrupulous propaganda in our midst, I had the temerity to write Monsieur Jusserand suggesting the name of an American correspondent who had recently been expelled from Berlin as that of a man well qualified, both by sentiment and experience, to direct an Allied Press Bureau. His reply was to the effect that neither the British Ambassador nor he had any funds at their disposal for such a purpose, and, furthermore, that he doubted the

advisability of inaugurating a press campaign, it being his belief that the enemy would do more harm than good to himself by the underhand methods he was pursuing, since in a land of truth and justice such as ours the righteousness of the Allied cause would surely prevail in the end. If there were more diplomats possessing the prescience and tact of Monsieur Jusserand there would be less reason than appears, alas, to be the case at present for concurring in an opinion held by Grotius centuries ago that diplomacy is either useless or mischievous.

From distinguished diplomats to an American painter is a far cry, yet a vision of a lofty studio filled with the likenesses of noted men and women comes to mind without rhyme or reason. "A beautiful disorder," runs a French proverb, "is an effect of art"; and this describes the impression I retain of the studio of G. P. A. Healy, as well as of the man himself; for I recall him in ill-fitting clothes, wearing one of those flowing ties which the French term so aptly une cravate flottante. But I remember him too as one of the most courtly of men and also as a painter of more skill than he has been generally accredited with possessing. He was an artist, moreover, who painted not only his own generation in his own land but many of the crowned heads and great men of Europe as well; his chivalrous personality having made him a sort of courtly ambassador-at-large of the United States at a time when our land was looked upon abroad as a wilderness inhabited by boors and savages.

Puvis de Chavannes, Bonnat, and Carolus Duran I knew in the humble way in which a young man knows the exalted of a generation older than his own; but when I try to recall their personalities, only the shiny bald head of Bonnat and the suavity and ample beard of "Carolus," as he was familiarly called, stand forth with any distinctness. Of Puvis de Chavannes, the only one of this trio whose work I look upon to-day in the light of greatness, not a trait remains in memory. Raffaelli and Madrazo, too, were painters whom I knew with some degree of intimacy, yet the memory of them has been sadly diminished by the years. Of dan

dified Whistler, with a glass in his eye and spats on his ankles, the picture is more distinct. He came into a Parisian restaurant one morning and spoke to a friend with whom I was lunching. I believe I was introduced to him, and he deigned to extend a hand; but in those days of joyous youth I was more interested in driving a coach to Versailles or a tandem in the Bois than in meeting great artists.

In fact, I blush while thinking of a dinner at which I sat beside a dumpy man with a low forehead, a big nose, and an unkempt reddish beard that reached halfway to his waist. Because of the sententious remarks about questions of the day he occasionally let fall and the interest he seemed to take in his food and drink, I thought him either a lawyer or a fonctionnaire of the bourgeois class; and I am constrained to confess that when the hostess asked me at the moment of leavetaking if I had made the most of my opportunity of talking to Rodin, I was forced, while thanking her for a privilege I had failed to appreciate, to simulate a knowledge I did not possess.

Not long ago I visited the museum in the old Hôtel Biron which bears the name of the great sculptor who was my neighbor that evening, and there I saw examples of his skill that made me feel him to have been both the most modern and the most classical artist of our day. Faithful to the traditions of his craft, he had been frankly true to nature, as well; and as I viewed his handiwork it seemed to me that his genius united the present age to that of both Michael Angelo and Phidias. At the same time I felt that in sensuality he was an utter pagan, spirituality, or shall I say faith, being the one quality that was lacking to make him, perhaps, the greatest sculptor of all time.

But I am straying into a perilous byway; therefore let me cross without delay the threshold of a palace where Madame de Pompadour, Murat, and the Napoleons, both great and little, once dwelt and where the President of France now lives both in splendor and simplicity; for while there are helmeted sentries without and a host of liveried flunkies within, as well as gorgeous tapestries upon corniced

walls and crystal chandeliers hanging from frescoed ceilings, there was in the manner of both Monsieur Millerand, who was President of the Republic at the time, and his beautiful wife a democracy genuine in its simplicity. The occasion was a reception given during the tercentenary celebration of the birth of Molière in honor of the délégués étrangers, as the foreign guests of the nation were styled. Monsieur and Madame Millerand received their guests cordially at the door of their drawing-room, then moved among them as unceremoniously as any host and hostess in private life. Meanwhile officers of their military household, wearing war medals on their breasts and wound or service stripes upon their arms, politely engaged us foreigners in conversation while helping us to refreshments with their white-gloved hands.

When Madame Millerand asked my wife, in English charmingly spoken, if she would take tea, and, after handing her a cup, stood talking with her while she drank its contents, I became convinced that the spirit of hospitality pervading the Elysée was due to the tact and good breeding of its hostess rather than to any democratic tradition of the land. In fact, never have I met in an official position a more gracious lady than the wife of the eleventh President of the third French Republic, a woman whose charm and simplicity upset entirely a prejudice I had long entertained against the wives of les politiciens.

That afternoon I was introduced to a number of Parisian intellectuals who were either members of the Academy or incumbents of posts such as the directorship of the Comédie Française or the presidency of La Société des Gens de Lettres; but it was in the perfunctory way of a courteous bow and the exchange of a polite word or two, as I had met, in years gone by, other Parisians of literary fame, such as Anatole France and Victorien Sardou.

For the recollection of a French man of letters of more import than the gratification of an idle curiosity, the pages of memory must be turned back fully thirty years, to a time when Monsieur Paul Bourget was in my own land. He asked me to translate an article he had written

for an American magazine and in discussing my version with him line by line I learned that his knowledge of English was of no mean order. I learned, too, that, apart from literary mastery, he possessed the rare quality of generosity, which he displayed by reading, without any solicitation, a first novel the critics had scored unmercifully. Not only did he point out its faults with kindliness, but in its jejune pages he found virtues to praise such as even the pride of authorship had not led me to suspect them of possessing. "Pay no attention to the critics," he said, "but study unremittingly the writings of Thackeray, George Eliot, Stendhal, and Flaubert."

To find George Eliot in so small a galaxy surprised me, I confess, but having re-read several of her novels of late I begin to understand her appeal to this great analyst of the human heart. Too little attention, alas, was paid by me to his advice. I repeat it here in the hope that it may be heeded by some young writer of to-day who chances to read these lines. That he may be heartened in his darkest hour by so helpful and kindly a master as Monsieur Paul Bourget is my fervent wish.

But all French men of letters do not possess the generous qualities of this great novelist. In fact, I have in mind an Academician whose genius I had admired even to the extent of acclaiming it in print, and whose acquaintance I had been more anxious to make than that of any Parisian writer of the day. Yet when this desire was gratified not long ago, in the drawing-room of a mutual acquaintance, his greeting was so condescending and his manner so supercilious that he became antipathetic at once.

A few weeks later I chanced to attend a notable meeting at the Sorbonne. When the President of the Republic, preceded by black-clad mace-bearers and the Doctors of the University in their gorgeous robes and followed by the orators of the day, entered the huge amphitheatre, I found not only that the man I have in mind was to be one of the speakers but that his seat upon the platform was directly in front of my own. Instinctively I slipped into a chair that stood vacant a few steps away, and when

this "Immortal," attired in his habit vert, trembled like the proverbial aspen leaf while reading in a faltering voice the manuscript of his address, I experienced a secret delight at seeing him ill at ease before so vast and distinguished an audience.

How different is my recollection of Jules Claretie, director of the Comédie Française for over a quarter of a century. Although his work as manager, dramatist, novelist, and publicist was manifold, this lovable Academician never failed to return a call, answer a letter, or write the line of encouragement or appreciation he felt to be due, even when the fulfilment of such a courtesy necessitated the laying aside of the task in hand. During Monsieur Claretie's directorship of the "House of Molière" I was his guest, not only at répétitions générales, but at preliminary rehearsals as well, when the actors were in street dress and the scenery for the play of the evening was leaning against bare walls.

How free those rehearsals were from rowdyism! No swearing on the part of the scene-shifters, no boorish shouting by a stage-manager with a cigar in the corner of his mouth and a hat on the back of his head; but a courtesy and an artistic earnestness such as I have never seen in any other playhouse. Yet what other theatre has the traditions of centuries to inspire its players? And what other theatre possesses a green-room adorned with portraits of the notable actors of its past, a foyer filled with statues of the dramatists whose plays have held its boards, or an entrance-hall hung with tapestries representing the crowning of its greatest genius? What other theatre, moreover, has a library containing every work of value concerned with its history, presided over by a librarian of the attainments of either that ardent Moliériste, the late Monsieur Georges Monval, or Monsieur Jules Couet, his scholarly successor? Only in good ventilation is the Comédie Française excelled by any other playhouse. In fact, after many an evening spent within its walls I have been led to suspect that the air in its auditorium had not been changed since the year 1799, at which time the sociétaires and pensionnaires of the national troupe