with you.' It did not seem at all likely that he still lived in his atelier in Montmartre; but he was living there all the same, and that did not astonish me so long as he seemed so like his old self. A little bit heavier, that was all, and more substantial looking. He did not look hungry any more, but he still wore a great cloak which covered him up from neck to ankle. However, it was all new, and pretty nearly new was a felt hat witha velvet ribbon, buttoned shortcoat, and a pair of trousers narrowing toward his shoes. Altogether they Altogether they gave him the conventional appearance of a bourgeois.

It is not altogether agreeable to meet friends from whom you have been separated for a long time. These witnesses of our youthful dreams make us understand how little we have realized them. They make us measure the degree in which we have failed of their ideals of us. That is not pleasant, for where is the man who can boast that he is not a hopeless debtor to his youth?

Very well. And now for dear Boutin. He used to paint with the face of a conqueror and his hair floating in the wind. To-day, bald, and having failed to conquer anything, it was in that guise that it pleased me to remember him. I thought that that young man, full of ardor, had come back, and that I was pressing under my arm the arm of my old companion.

We questioned one another curiously: "Twenty years without seeing one another! - How the time passes! Nobody would believe it.' What banalities! And so on and so on.

One talks about other people to keep from talking about himself. In times gone by, was he not to surpass Rembrandt, and did not I count on going farther than Shakespeare? How could one dream that he had fallen so far short.

ture, I assure you. I don't write anything. Oh, now and then a study in a technical review that's absolutely all. But you? Always a painter? Always to be faithful?'

Alas, in twenty years, during which he had been a painter, I had not seen his name in any exposition or in any gallery. And that walk of his! Like a fat dauber in a comic opera! What mediocrity!

'Where does one see the things you paint, my dear fellow? At the National? Or at the Artistes Français? Do you remember the antiquarian's daughter whose store was there?'

'Yes, indeed, and do you remember what a fine model he was? What was his name then?'

'Hortal, I think. What has become of him?'

'Oh, I don't see him any more.'

Ashes! Ashes! This landscape which is always the same the Seine, the Pont des Arts, the Louvre! And meantime our life is half-gone.

'Do you still go to paint on the quays as you used to do?'

'Not very often.'

'Well, do you make portraits mainly or landscapes?'

'Do you remember when there was still a garden in the Carrousel?'

Now again, because of all the memories that he called up, I had not observed at once that Boutin was still trying to keep me from talking about his activity as an artist. Now he was talking to me about his wife, for he had a wife, and about everything except his painting. He had no hesitancy in giving me a profusion of details which sometimes embarrassed me. Here we were lounging in front of the shop windows on the boulevard.

'Do you have any connections with the art dealers? I know one or two who are good and I will present you to them

VOL. 310-NO. 4018

'Do you remember the times we used to visit Durand-Ruel's? To think that we still had to fight then for Manet and the Impressionists.'

At this moment in the show window of an antiquary, I remarked a little picture by Delacroix. It represented an interior, something unusual in the works of that master, but the interior of an atelier, where objects and pieces of furniture of all kinds were tumbled together in picturesque confusion. Banners and flags, gilt, red, and blue, were to be seen in the back of the hall near a big divan, which had a mahogany Psyche, with the feet of a griffon, for a neighbor. Great green patches of tapestry ornamented a part of the wall. Farther off, a brass stove, of which the bent pipe went into the wall, stood near a heap of pit-coal.

The fancy of the painter had added to this amusing composition, the head of a stuffed lion, some Moorish platters and, next to a reproduction of the Venus of Milo, a lay figure clothed in variegated tinsel. This painting charmed me, with its delightful vigor and its glowing and sombre colors.

'It is too bad that things like that don't get directly to the Louvre,' I said. "That canvas ought to be across the gallery from the Duke of Moncey which has just been added to the collection.'

'Do you think so?'

'Well, it is just as good.'

From the ceiling of the atelier hung an ostrich's egg suspended by a red silk cord. That detail revived another memory.

'Do you remember the ostrich egg hanging from the ceiling of the atelier in that book of the Goncourts of which I have forgotten the name?'

'Manette Salomon.'

'Dieu! How we used to like them, those Goncourts. How one changes!'

'Oh, I still like them.' 'Really?'

'In those days, you were n't content to like them. You used to imitate them cleverly. Do you remember that bit of yours,

'Le chic, cette forme nouvelle de l'élégance française"?

'Do you remember that, my old friend?'

'Yes, and that famous description of the atelier. Why, we used to know it by heart!'

'Perhaps, if we tried, we might still remember it.'

Then, turn and turn about, we fell to reciting the fragments of that celebrated passage: "The day sank insensibly into night. The blue haze of the evening began to mingle with the smoke of the cigarettes.-The pictures seemed to grow faint. The likeness of a dream came over their silhouettes. The space about the panel was decorated with a group of banners and flags, gilt, red, and blue. The rear of the atelier was occupied by a big divan which gave place to a Psyche of mahogany with the feet of a griffon.'

I interrupted him and dragged him back to the window of the antiquary. 'Is n't it funny, all the details of that description are in that Delacroix! It's impossible, but just look! The flags, the Psyche, the divan, the cast of Venus, the disguised lay figure -'

Boutin got slightly pale. For my part, I was very much excited, and we must have looked like two crazy men there on the pavement of the rue Laffitte.

Then, squeezing my arm with all his might, and looking me straight in the face, he said to me hurriedly, in a low voice, 'Look here, mon bon vieux, you must n't tell this to a soul. I tell you this because it's you: I'm the man who painted that Delacroix.'

HAD the war not cut us off from German and Austrian music, Schönberg would, no doubt, have become as familiar a name as Scriabin in our concert programmes. In 1914 his own inner circle of admirers believed that England was one of the few countries which appreciated his greatness. In Germany and Austria there had been violent demonstrations of hostility to his works; in this country the leaders of music are more ready to welcome what is new, and the herd more willing to accept whatever is offered. So far from refusing pearls, it crunches and digests them in

complete indifference. The war diverted attention from Schönberg and his group to the French, the Russians, and latterly to the younger Italians, whom we credited with having evolved a number of new ideas which, in reality, they owed largely to Schönberg. By the irony of fate Schönberg has now abandoned composition owing to the nervous strain of military service during the war, and most of the important works of his which are still unknown to us demand so large an orchestra and such elaborate rehearsal that there is very little likelihood of their being heard here.

The Chamber Symphony, played at Mr. Edward Clark's concert last week for the first time in London, was composed in 1906. It is later than the 'Sextette,' which can be regarded as a now popular work, and earlier than the five orchestral pieces which Sir Henry Wood played at the Promenades in 1912. It is a pity that it was not played here in its proper chronological place, for it is the work which definitely bridges the gulf between the composer's first style and his second. To ears that have become accustomed to Stravinsky and Malipiero it must have sounded almost as old-fashioned as Richard Strauss, for, in spite of whole-tone scales and chords based on a succession of fourths, it sticks clearly to the classical keysystem. Its form is original, but classical in principle, and remarkable for its extreme lucidity. It stood out in curious contrast to the rest of the programme - Busoni's courtly and elegant Concertino for Clarinet, Delius's languorous landscapes, Arthur Bliss's vivacious exuberance.

Schönberg's symphony was grim and tense, passionately serious, almost self-consciously ugly, especially in its orchestral coloring. That quality which we English are inclined to call ugliness or brutality is characteristic of most modern German music, and most modern German art of all kinds. A juster name for it would be asceticism, but we are apt to limit the word 'asceticism' to the renunciation that has an outspokenly religious basis, as in the music of Vincent d'Indy, and, perhaps, of Hans Pfitzner. With most German artists their puritanism is definitely anti-religious. It comes from a rigorous determination to pursue truth and truth only. To call it savagery or megalomania is to misunderstand it completely. Certainly there has been a strong element of savagery, and megalomania too, in certain phases of German life,

but it has never been the inspiration of the real artistic leaders.

What we English people call ugliness in German art is simply the furious reaction against what Germans call süsses Kitsch, the art of the picture postcard, and of what corresponds to the royalty ballad. It has for years been their constant reproach against us that England is the great country of Kitsch. Many years ago a German who loved England only too well said to me, 'I like your English word plain; it is a word for which we have no equivalent in German, because all German women are plain.' He might well have balanced it by saying that English has no equivalent for the word Kitsch. The English reader will, no doubt, be horrified to hear that the English eighteenth-century portraits which were once exhibited by order of the Emperor William II at the Royal Academy in Berlin were at once classified by the modern paint

ers

since grown to be classics themselves in the same category.

The passion for large forms and monstrous orchestras is also due largely to a moral principle. Every German composer hopes that he may some day come to succeed Beethoven and Wagner, to be regarded as a symbol of the whole country, perhaps of the whole world. It is the reaction against the over-cultured dilettantism of an aristocratic few. If Schönberg is appreciated in England it is only by a select circle, hardly as numerous as the chorus and orchestra which would be required to perform his 'Gurre-Lieder.'

The extreme elaboration of the modern orchestra in German music has been further fostered by the influence of Mahler. Mahler was for the art of conducting what Liszt was for the pianoforte and Paganini for the violin. Since his death he has become a legendary figure, especially at Vienna. Schönberg was one of his intimate friends.