never a realist, his active, ranging mind demanded more than the romantic novels could ever give. Scott had the further disadvantage of being a Tory and, of course, his Life of Napoleon was anathema to any Frenchman except a Bourbon.

The real source of Stendhal's affection for England, and it was a genuine affection as long as St. Helena was not uppermost in his mind, was Shakespeare. In the year 1822 an English company attempting to produce Macbeth in Paris met with the most disastrous reception. Shouts of "à bas Shakespeare, l'adjutant de Wellington!" indicated that the failure was not entirely due to artistic shortcomings. Stendhal promptly set to work to pave the way for a more intelligent understanding of Elizabethan drama. His Racine et Shakespeare, published in the following year, was one of the first skirmishes in the Romantic campaign. Without pretending to be a carefully reasoned brief for Shakespeare, its pungent epigrammatic style cut through the national prejudice against anything English, so that when Kean and Macready appeared in Paris a few years later they played before respectful houses. The victory, as we all know, was never decisive. Othello, in Alfred de Vigny's translation, was condemned for its substitution of the plebeian pillow as an instrument of murder in place of the time-honored dagger. Even in our own day Anatole France has unequivocally maintained Racine's greater truth to nature, but Stendhal at least opened the question. His conception of Shakespeare's genius was thoroughly typical. Shakespeare was great because he knew nothing and because he surrendered himself to his sensations— in other words, because he could be fitted into Stendhal's theory 'qu'il faut sentir et non savoir."

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It may be bad policy to look a gift horse in the mouth, but we can not help feeling that his admiration for Shakespeare was marked more by enthusiasm than by intelligence. For once, Stendhal happened upon the truth unconsciously. In his own novels, however passionate the scene, he always subordinated the emotions to the intellect. Apparently in his criticism of the drama he reversed the process. Shakespeare, the wild untutored genius, was the necessary antithesis to Racine, the shallow rhetorician. If there was one quality that Stendhal disliked

most Frenchmen, but that was because his knowledge of foreign literature and foreign points of view was more extensive. Compare his Memoirs d'un Touriste with any other contemporary book of travel, and Stendhal's greater cosmopolitanism is at once apparent. He can discuss Andrew Jackson, The Edinburgh Review, and Gothic architecture, with equal gusto. With the best will in the world, intellectual curiosity can not be kept within national limits. Stendhal was born with a passion for analysis. The fortunes of a certain lieutenant of artillery created within him an abnormal appetite for knowledge and sensation. If he was ruthless in satisfying these cravings, he was at least ruthlessly honest in recording the fact to himself and to posterity. He will never be as popular abroad as he is at home, because the Frenchman thrills to what is net and to what is clair to a degree that no foreigner can understand. We envy his intellect and we respect his sincerity; but for all that, we pass by on the other side.

ARNOLD WHITRIDGE.

A MUSICAL TRAMP ABROAD

BY LAWRENCE GILMAN

London, June, 1923. ALL American concert-goers and critics should make an annual journey of observation to England-unless they choose to go to France. But as England is nearer to Carnegie Hall and the Philadelphia Academy of Music than Paris is, they had better aim at London. There they will, in some important respects, be put to shame, if they still have left the capacity for that salutary reaction. For in England, the public that goes to orchestral concerts displays none of that disinclination to listen to new works, modern or ultra-modern, which is so marked and so disheartening a trait of our American concert audiences. We all know that there is nothing but discouragement and opposition in America for the conductor who chooses to offer contemporary works, especially of an "advanced" character, to his audiences. The subscribers do not want them, the critics (with one or two nonconformist exceptions) do not want them, and the box office registers disapproval if the conductor persists. Barring the recurrent ululations of a few malcontents like Deems Taylor, Pitts Sanborn, and the present scribe, the reviewers do not repine over the neglect of contemporary novelties; and the public, far from inviting the exhibition of new scores, bitterly resents being asked to listen to them. It is of course everyone's privilege to dislike a Stravinsky or Casella or Schönberg work after he has heard it; but in New York most of us are unwilling even to hear such works, and would be perfectly content with an orchestral repertoire made up of standard pieces, classic and modern.

In England (and also, as I shall later remark, in France) the situation is entirely different. London concert-goers display no advance antipathy to an ultra-modern score. They may and often do dislike it after they have heard it,—which is their privi

lege, of course, but they do not object to hearing it and giving the composer a run for his money. Consequently, Sir Henry Wood and Coates and Goossens feel free to keep their English audiences abreast of the times in the creative field, and their programmes exhibit a stimulating condition of aliveness and variety; whereas Mengelberg or Stokowski or Monteux or Hertz cannot perform a typical contemporaneous work in our halcyon republic without the certainty of provoking complaint among their subscribers and hostility in the press. Coates and Wood and Goossens can count at least upon interest and receptiveness, if not upon an approving attitude toward the music itself-which is of course another matter altogether.

I reached London after the close of the regular orchestral season; but I heard the London Symphony Orchestra play under Weingartner in a special series of concerts, and I also heard Goossens direct his orchestra in a concert given by Murray Lambert, who is what is known in England as a "lady violinist”.

The London orchestras operate under grave difficulties. They are, for the most part, unassisted. The Government provides no help for them; and such magnificent private subsidies by music-loving and public spirited millionaires as our American orchestras enjoy are unknown in England. One of the orchestras is to some extent backed by a certain prosperous music firm; but this is rather a disadvantage than otherwise, as it is said to predispose that orchestra's choice of programmes in favor of the firm's publications, so far as new works are concerned. Generally speaking, the educated and prosperous classes in England, from whom support of the orchestras would normally come, are unmusical. It is not "smart" to be musical in London-chiefly, they will tell you here, because those at the Top are not musical. There is a very small minority of cultivated people who center about the activities of the Younger School of British composers and writers-music-makers like Goossens, Arnold Bax, Lord Berners and Lady Dean Paul, and critics and expounders like Edwin Evans and Leigh Henry. But this minority is better known outside of England than in London itself-the average upper-class London dowager has never heard of Bax or Goossens; she is still devoted to Clara Butt, remembers with regret the old

days of Italian opera at Covent Garden, has a secret passion for sentimental ballads, and thinks Elgar very "modern". It is a significant fact that the British National Opera Company, now producing opera in English at Covent Garden, drew its most fashionable and crowded audience on the night that Melba appeared in a polyglot performance of La Bohème, Nellie singing Mimi in Italian, and the other members of the cast warbling in the speech of the British Isles.

One of the results of this situation is that the English orchestras, being unsubsidized, are always badly off for funds, and are unable to pay for adequate rehearsals. Naturally, the performances suffer in quality. There are good players, for instance, in the London Symphony Orchestra and in Goossens's Orchestra (which is a picked body of men, made up of the best elements in the other organizations). But the London Symphony Orchestra, playing under even so experienced a drill master as Weingartner, lacked precision and balance, and gave a performance of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony which Mr. Stock or Mr. Mengelberg or Mr. Sokoloff would have regarded as merely a good beginning for the first day's rehearsal.

A word here concerning Mr. Weingartner: He appeared in London after many years' absence, and was greeted with fervid enthusiasm, not only by the public, which cheered him lustily, but by the press, which praised him without a dissenting voice. I confess that I was unable to share in this enthusiasm. Mr. Weingartner played the Allegro of the Schubert Unfinished as an Andante, and the Andante as an Allegro; but this eccentricity might have been pardoned him if he had not read through Schubert's symphony-and, later, Beethoven's Seventh-in a rigid, wooden, metronomic style that ignored innumerable subtleties of pace and accent. Most of his conducting was mere time-beating, stiff and insensitive. I have heard far less illustrious conductors than Mr. Weingartner give finer performances of the Unfinished than he achieved; and Weingartner's reading of the Seventh was not to be mentioned in the same breath with even Monteux's.

But Englishmen's standards of orchestral performance are not ours, and their ears appear to be insensitive. They have heard