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artist is permitted in some places to only use suggestion. But what he does tell must be the truth. He cannot make the wind blow the grass in one way and the smoke in another direction unless there is a whirlwind. So while it is necessary to be gifted to be full of rhythm and possessed of a sense of harmony in line and in color, the sense of repose, the sense for color and line, and of composition. Yet it is essential that the artist be grounded in good drawing and modeling by patience and by much practice. Natural assets without knowledge do not go far in art.

When one uses the expression "I hain't got," no matter how good his ideas are, he will not be and never has been classed among the great writers though by pretty ways he may catch the eye or ear of the unsophisticated.

A painter must be more than a

photographer, or he must not charge more. The photograph is just as good as a portrait that has only the photographic quality. The artist and the camera have widely different fields. Nature is beautiful but the artist expresses on the canvas what his feelings are when he looks at the scene before him. His picture will be great if he has revealed his own point of view, if he has expressed the coloring and the poesy of his soul. This explains why a dozen artists will paint the same scene so differently. The greater the artist, the stronger the individuality will appear. Send our artists to paint a picture of a corn patch. Evans would give us a dry hot noon. Hafen would choose morning or moonlight. Harwood's choice would be the half hour when the new moon and evening star are seen at once. Mary Teasdel would give a water-color of a moon-light.

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Fairbanks would wait till the November fog hangs among the corn stalks. M. M. Young would etch an evening. Lambourne would give a very poetic scene, or perhaps it would be just a poem. Pratt might give a corn shucking in the field, Richards would be sure to have a gray day, George Ottinger would not care so much what the weather was as that one or two or three figures should be in it. Wesley Browning would be there at dawn, Myra Sawyer might give a ghostly night

-a Halloween perhaps, Rose Hartwell would have the long shadows falling just as at sunset, Lu Deen Christensen would make her picture when the shadows have "folded their tents," and J. Leo Fairbanks would show a company of young people "roasting ears" around bonfire. Then there would be a wet day, a spring, a study in browns and, did I give my fancy wing, I might go on-for there are still others. I hope my readers get now the point I hope to have made that great individuality is required to produce great works of art.

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There can be no real competition among true artists. A good natured rivalry of course exists. have heard of one who poses as an artist, who said, “Now I will make Mr. R green with envy." This is only laughable. The artist who succeeds pulls up all his companions. The one who fails drags all the rest down. The artists are sensibly affected by the failures and successes of their fellows. The real artist can have only joy when another artist produces a work of art.

A good singer surely should not be enraged because others have the gift of song. He who stands at the top enjoys most the successful

works of other artists. Jealousy he must cast to the winds if he would rise. Such things make pitfalls for the foolish and weak. Do you profess love for music and are jealous when others sing? Thou hypocrite! Christ would scourge thee from the temple.

Love that which is akin to the best that is within you, if you would grow. Your light should shine beyond you and you should be illumined by the wave of light from the lamp of your friend. The real art lover is the one who has most power to see the individual point of view from which brother artists work. The artist that is able to see only from one point of view is to be pitied for his smallness. Such a man once said to the great Whistler, "Really, Mr. Whistler, I can't see things as you see them," and deserved the witty reply, “No? But don't you wish you could?"

It is not the privilege nor even the forte of an artist to explain what his pictures mean. The onlooker must be the interpreter. If the artist tells his story in a language that is understood by you then he is blessed and you will have joy.

If you

If simple things do not appeal to you, I fear you will find our artists tiresome. If you cone looking for faults behold them they are there! Even the best picture that ever was painted can be criticised. are looking for good color, for harmony, for composition, for drawing, tone, feeling, agreeable proportions, you will be interested and you will find the great things in art are there. But if you really want to learn what art is, live with it: make it a part of your home and of your experi

ence.

Musical Composers of the Nineteenth

Century.

EDWARD ALEXANDER MACDOWELL.

Ethel M. Connelly.

The fate of MacDowell has often been likened to that of Schumann. The two died at very near the same age, Schumann when forty-six, when forty-six, MacDowell when forty-seven, and each dragged out his last days in darkness of mind. But here the similarity ends, for Schumann's early death was hastened by intemperance, while MacDowell's collapse was due solely to the man's insatiable passion for work. It is not quite two years since the great American composer passed away at his country home in Peterboro, and the interest that was aroused in the hearts of his countrymen by the sad ending of a brilliant career is still fresh enough to make a review of his life interesting.

Edward Alexander MacDowell was born in New York, December 18, 1861. He was descended from a Quaker family of Scotch-Irish extraction that had emigrated to America about the middle of the eighteenth century. As has been the case with many artists, it was his mother who encouraged him in the study of music and sought to secure for him the best possible instruction. His first teacher was a musician from South America, his next a Cuban, and his third the well known pianist Teresa Carreno, who was a native of Venezuela.

In 1876, when he was fifteen years old, his mother took him to Europe and placed him in the Paris. Conservatory, but he was soon convinced that he could never acquire artistic development there, where

musicians strove only for the effect of the moment. It was with the hope of better results that he next went to the Stuttgart Conservatory, but the stern pedantic atmosphere surrounding the stolid German professors was also distasteful to him, and in 1879 he went to Wiesbaden with the intention of studying under Ehlert, the eminent critic and teach

er.

This eccentric man, however, though he received the boy kindly, flatly refused to teach him. But he more than made up for his refusal by saying, "I shall be glad to study with you," and thereafter the German professor and the young American spent many a congenial hour in earnest study.

A few months later MacDowell journeyed to Frankfort, and there studied under two musicians whose influence affected his whole career, -Karl Heymann, his piano teacher, who, he afterward said, "dared play the classics as if they had been written by men with blood in their veins," and Joachim Raff, the director of the Conservatory, whose instructions in composition MacDowell never forgot. It was through the influence of the latter that he became a prominent teacher of piano at Darmstadt two years later, when he was but twenty years old; and through his advice that he appeared successfully in concerts in several large Gerinan cities, and went, the next year, to pay his respects to Liszt. The great Liszt received the young man cordially, at once recognized his genius, and

secured a hearing for his first piano suite before the leading musical society of Germany. The approval of the master paved the way toward wider public recognition, and MacDowell spent two years in successful concert tours when he played many of his own compositions.

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In 1881 a young New York girl, Miss Maria Nevens, went to Frankfort to study, and after applying for piano lessons to Mme. Clara Schumann (Robert Schumann's widow) and Raff, was directed by the latter to the American teacher MacDowell. She was disappointed, and more than surprised to find that the young man was reluctant to receive her because he suspected that she would be lazy. But he at length consented to her, and she became his first pupil. She proved to be, not only a conscientious pupil, but so congenial a companion, that in 1884 MacDowell married her and settled down to teaching in Wiesbaden. After a short time his wife persuaded him to give up everything so that he might devote himself exclusively to composition, and in a tiny suburban cottage that caught a glimpse, in the distance of the Rhine and the Main in one direction, and a forest in the other, he lived a delightful, aimless life for the next year or two.

But at last the uselessness of such an existence forced itself upon him, and in 1889 he returned to the United States, and settled in Boston, where he soon gathered about him a large class of pupils. He found his name already well known, and the audiences glad to welcome his compositions when he played them. in public as they came rather slowly from his pen.

Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania con

ferred upon him the degree of Musical Doctor, and for two years he was conductor of the Mendelssohn Glee Club, one of the best and oldest male choruses in the United States. In 1896 two of his longest compositions were played by the Boston Symphony orchestra, and that same year he was cailed to the chair of music at Columbia University. For eight years he devoted himself untiringly to the advancement of music at Columbia till some disagreement with members of the faculty brought about his resignation in 1904.

Several years before this time he had purchased a home in Peterboro, New Hampshire, and here he had spent most of his summers in study and composition. It was a delightful retreat, ideally situated about seven hours ride from New York, and three hours from Boston, and now he retired there even oftener, working, as did Grieg, in a little log cabin that he had built in the woods as a studio. But the long years of continuous work began to tell upon him, he had long been troubled by insomnia, and in 1905 he suffered a total mental collapse. At his own request he was taken to Peterboro where he lingered on, a hopeless invalid, until January 23, 1908.

MacDowell is said to have been a man of rare attractiveness. With strangers he was shy, but with friends he was delightful. He had a droll, and truly American gift of humor, that shows itself in a letter that he once wrote to Mr. Finck of his student days in Faris. He said. that his life there seemed to him a "huge but rather ghastly joke." His fellow students "never seemed to miss the absence of the word. 'home' in their language. Most of them looked as if they had been up ever since they were born They

seemed to live on cigarettes, odd carafons of wine and an occasional shave."

As a teacher he was extremely popular, and always had as many pupils as he could handle, though he had no use for the would be student with more money than talent. He devoted one day a week to free classes, and these he continued even after he had given up all other teaching.

His numerous duties left him no time to practice six and seven hours a day, as the professional virtuoso. does, and this fact coupled with a natural extreme diffidence, and a lack of faith in his own powers both as a pianist and a composer, made him extremely nervous whenever he played in public. Finck says, "When he came on the stage and sat at the piano he looked like a school boy who has been sent to the blackboard on exhibition day, and doesn't feel quite sure of himself." But if he was playing music that he loved, and the audience was responsive he soon forgot himself and proved an exquisite and artistic performer.

Perhaps one of the best examples of his art as a composer is the "Indian Suite," which is built upon actual Indian themes. It breathes a newness and originality that was never borrowed from the old world. Of his longer pieces the "Keltic Sonata," and the "Norse Sonata," both dedicated to Grieg, the "Eroica Sonata" and the "Tragica Sonata," "Hamlet" and "Ophelia," poems for orchestra dedicated to Irving and Ellen Terry, and "Launcelot and Elaine" are most worthy of mention. "The Witches' Dance," "The Dryad Dance," and "The Eagle," a tone picture after Tennyson's poem, have a wide popularity. But the general public know MacDowell best from the "Woodland Sketches," and

the "New England Idylls" and the "Sea Pieces." The first collection includes that exquisite fragment fittingly called "To a Wild Rose," and that epitome of daintiness "To a Waterlily." From the "New England Idylls" we remember "In the Winter" and "In the Deep Woods." The "Sea Pieces" include "To a Wandering Iceberg," 'In Midocean," "To the Sea," "Star Light," and "From the Depths."

It would be impossible, in a limited review, to enumerate all of MacDowell's compositions that are worthy of note, but we must certainly not forget to mention that he wrote "thirty-seven songs which are the best that any American has yet produced. The gems of these are, "My Jean," "The Robin Sings in the Apple Tree," one of the most charming of modern love songs, "The West Wind Croons in the Cedar Trees," "In the Woods," "Is it the Shrewd October Wind?" "The Sea," "The Swan Bent Low to the Lily," and a song cycle "From an Old Garden" with words by Margaret Deland. Merely the names of these compositions breathe of MacDowell's love of the open.

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eker says, "For him always the heather, and the wind that sweeps across it, the crags of the highlands, and the bonny blue of the sky." His music is delightful because it is full of surprises of harmony that make gardens bloom the sea sing and dryads and elves float along on swiftly dancing feet."

Those who know his music concede that as a composer he was primarily a poet. He had a fine imagination, an artistic temperament, and the spirit of the romanticist that infused into his music earnestness, passion, and dramatic fire. The words for his songs, and the themes for his piano pieces were very often verses of his own com

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