digious and heavenly energy,-at what point of the course they acquire this capacity of angels, being, up to that point, mere particles trembling hither and thither, these are, in the present state of our knowledge, mysteries which no man can unravel.

It is through this relation of music to man that it becomes, as I said in the principles affirmed at the outset, a moral agent. Let us not pester ourselves with remembering how such and such a musician was a profligate, a beast, a trifler, and so on. This is only submitting ourselves to what our wise Emerson calls the tyranny of particulars. The clear judgment in the matter is to be formed by looking at the consummate masters of the art.

Palestrina, Bach, Beethoven,-what had these gentlemen to do with sheriffs and police, with penalties and legal sanctions? They were lawabiding citizens; but their adherence to the law was the outcome of an inner desire after the beauty of Order, not from fear of the law's punitive power.

In short, they were artists, and they loved goodness because goodness is beautiful. Badness was not a temptation, because it is ugly, and the true artist recoils energetically from ugliness.

I know very well how many names there are in art which are associated with profligacy. But I think it clearly demonstrable that in all these artists there was a failure in the artistic sense precisely to the extent of the failure in apprehending those enormous laws of nature whose practical execution by the individual we call morality. You can always see where the half-way good man was but the half-way artist.

Óne hears all about the world nowadays that art is wholly un-moral, that art is for art's sake, that art has nothing to do with good or bad in behavior. These are the cries of clever men whose cleverness can imitate genius so aptly as to persuade many that they have genius, and whose smartness can preach so incisively about art that many believe them to be artists. But such catch-words will never deceive the genius, the true artist. The true artist will never remain a bad man ; he will always wonder at a wicked artist. The simplicity of this wonder renders it wholly impregnable. The argument of it is merely this: the artist loves beauty supremely: because the good is beautiful, he will clamber continuously towards it, through all possible sloughs, over all possible obstacles, in spite of all possible falls.

This is the artist's creed. Now, just as music increases in hearty acceptance among men, so will this true artistic sense of the loveliness of morality spread, so will the attractiveness of all that is pure and lovely grow in power, and so will the race progress towards that time described in the beginning of this essay as one in which the law would cease to rely upon terror for its sanction, but depend wholly upon love and desire.

If any ask whether there are signs of such a beneficial spreading of music among the general classes of men, one has but to reply, Look around. In the first place, there is the wonderful growth of music in the churches, which has already been spoken of. But that is only half the phenomenon. Turn from the churches into the homes of the United States. It is often asserted that ours is a materialistic age, and

VOL. XLI.-42

that romance is dead. But this is marvellously untrue, and it may be counter-asserted with perfect confidence that there was never an age of the world when art was enthroned by so many hearthstones and intimate in so many common houses as now. For the pianos are almost everywhere. Where there are not pianos, there are cabinet-organs; and where not these, the guitars; not to speak of the stray violins, the flutes, the horns, the clarinets, which lie about in houses here and there and are brought out on the nights when the sister is home from boarding-school or when the village orchestra meets. These pianos have done a great work for music. No one who knows the orchestra well can admit the piano for itself as a final good, because it is an instrument of fixed tones and therefore imperfect; but when one thinks of the incalculable service which the piano has rendered in diffusing conceptions of harmony (which is the distinguishing characteristic of modern music) among the masses, one must regard it with reverent

affection.

Never was any art so completely a household art as is the music of to-day; and the piano has made this possible.

As the American is, with all his shortcomings of other sorts, at any rate most completely the man of to-day, so it is directly in the line. of this argument to say that one finds more "talent for music" among the Americans, especially among American women, than among any other people. The musical sense is very widely diffused among us, and the capacity for musical execution is strikingly frequent.

When Americans shall have learned the supreme value and glory of the orchestra,-when we shall have advanced beyond the piano, which is, as matters now exist, a quite necessary stage in musical growth,-when our musical young women shall have found that, if their hands are too small for the piano, or if they have no voices, they can study the flute, the violin, the oboe, the bassoon, the viola, the violoncello, the horn, the corno Inglese,-in short, every orchestral instrument, and that they are quite as capable as men-in some cases much better fitted by nature than any man-to play all these, then I look to see America the home of the orchestra, and to hear everywhere the profound messages of Beethoven and Bach to men.

Meantime, what shall we say of an art which thus is becoming so much the daily companion of man as to sit by every fireside and in every church,-nay, which, I might have added, thrusts itself into the crowded streets in a thousand shapes, wherever the newsboy whistles, the running clerk hums the bass he is to sing in the chorus, the handorgan drones, the street-band blares, which presides at weddings, at feasts, at great funerals, which marches at the head of battle, and opens the triumphant ceremonials of peace?

As for Beethoven, it is only of late that his happy students have begun to conceive the true height and magnitude of his nature. The educational value of his works upon the understanding soul which has yielded itself to the rapture of their teaching is unspeakable, and is of a sort which almost compels a man to shed tears of gratitude at every mention of this master's name. For in these works are many qualities which one could not expect to find cohering in any one human spirit.

Taking Beethoven's sonatas (which, by the way, no one will ever properly appreciate until he regards them really as symphonies and mentally distributes the parts among flutes, reeds, horns, and strings as he goes through them), his songs, his symphonies, together, I know not where one will go to find in any human products such largeness, such simplicity, such robust manliness, such womanly tenderness, such variety of invention, such parsimony of means with such splendor of effects, such royal grandeur without pretence, such pomp with such modesty, such unfailing moderation and exquisite right feeling in art, such prodigious transformations and re-transformations of the same melody, -as if the blue sky should alternately shrink into a blue violet and then expand into a sky again,—such love-making to the infinite and the finite, such range of susceptibility, such many-sidedness in offering some gift to every nature and every need, such comprehension of the whole of human life.

There is but one name to which one can refer in speaking of Beethoven: it is Shakespeare.

For as Shakespeare is, so far, our king of conventional tones, so is Beethoven our king of unconventional tones. And as music takes up the thread which language drops, so it is where Shakespeare ends that Beethoven begins.

DING DONG.

HEN the world grows old by the chimney-side,
Then forth to the youngling rocks I glide,

Where over the water and over the land

The bells are booming on either hand.

Andante.

Now up they go ding, then down again dong,
And awhile they swing to the same old song;
For the metal goes round to a single bound,
A-cutting the fields with its measured sound,
While the tired tongues fall with a lengthened boom
As solemn and loud as the crack of doom.

Allegro.

Then changed is their measure to tone upon tone,
And seldom it is that one sound comes alone,
For they ring out their peals in a mingled throng,
And the breeze wafts the loud ding dong along.

When the echo hath reached me in this lone vale,
I am straightway a hero in coat of mail.
I tug at my belt and I march on my post,
And feel myself more than a match for a host.

MR. SONNENSCHEIN'S INHERITANCE.

I.

SCHLEMIEL.

HE English language very likely possesses an equivalent for the

for

Briefly, a Schlemiel is a person who never prospers, with whom everything goes wrong. Born under an evil star, or with a leaden spoon in his mouth, he is constitutionally unsuccessful. Misfortune has marked him for her own; il luck accompanies him through life. The witty Jewish author Leopold Kompert says that while other people seize opportunities by the head, the Schlemiel lays hold of them by the foot, and allows them to wriggle and kick themselves loose. Put gold into the hands of your Schlemiel, adds Kompert, it turns to copper. Let him purchase a cask of wine; when he opens the spigot, vinegar gushes forth. Yet, of all mortal men, the Schlemiel is usually the best-natured, the lightest-hearted. A perpetual sunny smile illuminates his face. He seems to regard his sorry destiny as an excellent practical joke, at which, though it be at his own expense, he can laugh as well as another. Calamity is his native element. He is impervious to it. He minds it no more than a salamander minds fire, or a duck water. The Lord shapes the back to the burden. That same careless and irresponsible temperament which is constantly bringing the Schlemiel to grief, enables him to accept it with a shrug. Not but that, once in a while, you may meet a melancholy, even a crabbed and misanthropic, Schlemiel; but he will also be a highly exceptional Schlemiel.

By his own admission, as well as by the judgment of his friends, Emmanuel Sonnenschein was a Schlemiel. "I ain't no goot," he used to say, with an hilarious twinkle in his eye. "I ain't got no sense. I'm a raikular Schlemiel." He was a very old man, white, and bent, and wrinkled; but, though he rather prided himself upon his age, and loved to prate about it, the exact figure of it he would never tell. He had been in this country a great many years; and that again was a subject of pride with him; but again, for some unimaginable reason, he chose to make a secret of the date of his immigration.

"Old!" he would exclaim, lifting his hands toward the ceiling, and swinging his head from side to side in that peculiarly Jewish manner. "Old! Gott in Himmel!... Vail, Saimmy," he always called me Saimmy, never would Mister me, having made my acquaintance when I was in swaddling-clothes,-"vail, Saimmy, I don't suppose you aifer knew nobody so old as me. Vail, if I told you my aich, you'd be aistonished; you vould, honor bright. You'd be frightened, Saimmy; it's fearful, it simply is. Or else, I guess maybe you vouldn't belief me; you'd tink I vas trying to fool you. Vail, ainyhow, I von't say anudder vord about it; but I tell you fat you can do. You can bet a hat dot I'm vun of de very oldest shentlemen de Lord aifer

mait; you can bet a hat on dot. . . . Oh, yais, I been in dis country an awful long time already,-longer as you yourself, dough you vas born here. I come ofer fen I vas kervite a young feller, not more as terventy-fife or tirty; and I've krown oop mit de country. Yais, I vent into de paittling business right avay aifter I lainded, and I've paittled on and oaff aifer since. My kracious, I've paittled pretty much aiferydings a party could; hair-oil, and coatton lace, and maitches, and insect-powter, and letter-paper, and pins and neetles, and chewelry, and toilet-soap, and suspainters, and toot-ache droaps, and marking-ink, and ague cure, and Yainkee notions; but I ain't naifer mait no money; I ain't naifer haid no luck; I vas a raikular Schlemiel. Vail, I vas a pretty old shentleman already fen I got mairried; dot vas in eighteenhoonert-sixty. Den in sixty-vun my dowter Nettie vas born, and my vife she died. Vail, I guess maybe if my vife haid lived, I guess maybe I got rich. She vas vun of de very smartest ladies in de United States. She haid sense enough for a whole faimily. But I didn't naifer haif no kind of luck; and fen Nettie vas born, my vife she died. I vas a raikular Schlemiel, dere's no two vays about it. Vail, it vas shust exaictly tree veeks aifterwarts, fen Nettie vas shust exaictly tree veeks old, vun day I vas cairrying her oop and down de room, to stoap her crying,-fen I let her droap on de floor, and her spine got inchured, and she's been a cripple aifer since. I couldn't help it, Saimmy; I couldn't, honor bright. I felt awful about it. Mein Gott, I cut my troat sooner as done it! But I couldn't help it, no more as I could help de color of my hair. I vas a Schlemiel. . . . Vail, Saimmy, you vas born in dot same year, eighteen-sixty-vun,―vasn't you? Yais, you and Nettie vas shust about de same aich. But, lieber Herr, fat a difference! You-rich, hainsome, healty! Nettie-poor, crippled, bait-ritten all her life! And it vasn't your fault dot you got dem advaintaches, no more as it vas her fault dot she ain't got 'em. Vail, dis is a funny vorld; but de Lord is goot; and I suppose he's got some reason for it. . . . My kracious, Saimmy, don't I remaimber de day you vas born, and how glaid your popper feel dot you vasn't a kirl! He vas simply delighted, Saimmy, he simply vas. Fen I look at you now, so tall and hainsome, and mit dot graind mustache and aiferydings, vail, honor bright, I couldn't hartly belief it. Vail, dis is a vunderful vorld; it is, and no mistake. Vail, Saimmy, how's your mommer?"

II.

SCHLEMIEL'S EXPECTATIONS.

He lived with his crippled daughter Nettie up several flights of dark and rickety stairs, in a tenement-house overlooking Tompkins Square. Nettie passed her life between her bed and her easy-chair. Mr. Sonnenschein did the house-work,-cooked the meals and washed the dishes, made the beds and kept the quarters clean. Nettie's fingers were the only members of her disabled body that remained fit for service. These she busied from morning till night each day, crocheting tidies and pillow-shams and such like articles,-marvellous in their expert workmanship and in their unexampled ugliness,-which her