Many
obscurer and younger men, poor Edward MacDowell, for instance, knew what
it was to receive cordial and commendatory letters from you, to be
assisted by you in their careers, to have their compositions brought to
performance by the best German orchestras through your aid. And you had
no conceit in you, smilingly referred to your symphonic poems as
"Gartenmusik," and replied to Wagner, when he informed you that he had
stolen such and such a theme from you, "Thank goodness, now it will at
least be heard!" Had you, O Liszt, expressed the nobility of your nature
as purely in your composition as you expressed it in your social
relations, we could have complained of no mountainous rubble, no squalor
marring the perfect splendor of your figure.
But, unhappily, the veritable grandeur of your endowment never begot
itself a body of work really symbolic of itself. For if your music, as a
whole, has any grandeur, it is the hollow grandeur of inflation, of
ostentation, of externality. Your music is almost entirely a monstrous
_decor de theatre_. It is forever seeking to establish tragical and
satanic and passional atmospheres, to suggest immense and regal and
terrific things, to gain tremendous effects. It is full of loud,
grandiloquent pronouncements, of whirlwinds, thunderstorms, coronations
on the Capitoline, ideals, lamentations, cavalcades across half of Asia,
draperies, massacres, frescoes, facades, magnificats, lurid sunsets,
scimitars, miracles, triumphs of the cross, retreats from the world.
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