Carl Van Vechten has told us of Erich Satie, the eccentric French composer, who sets snails and oysters to music, and, no doubt, has composed a Cooties Serenade for wind instruments with a fine-tooth comb obbligato, and we are amazed at the critical exposition of such a perplexing “case.” To let his music speak for itself, would be unwise, as it is not sufficiently explicative. Rhizopods can’t converse. Just here is where your music-critic, your calico cat, intervenes. After Van Vechten has polished off his man, we feel that we know all about Satie, so much so that we never wish to hear a bar of his crustacean music. The difference between tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee is infinitesimal, but that very difference may contain great art. Professor, now Sir Walter Raleigh, has said that “Criticism, after all, is not to legislate but to raise the dead.” Sometimes it raises hades. Millet declared that “there is no isolated truth”; Constable denied that a good thing is ever done twice, and Alfred Stevens--the Belgian painter, not the English sculptor--defined art as “nature seen through the prism of an emotion,” thus forestalling the more pompous pronouncement of Zola in The Experimental Novel. These are not merely epigrams, but truths. On the other hand, recall what Velasquez is reported to have said to Salvator Rosa, according to Boschini and Carl Justi. Salvator had asked the incomparable Spaniard whether he did not believe Raphael to be the best of all the painters he had seen in Italy. Velasquez answered: “Raphael, to be plain with you, for I like to be candid and outspoken, does not please me at all.” There were the mountains criticising, deep calling unto deep. All said and done, a question of temperament, this opinion of one great man about the work of another. Therefore, brethren, it behooves us to be humble, as pride goeth before a fall. Like the industrious crow, the critic, or, as you will, the calico cat, should hop after the sowers of beauty, content to pick up in the furrowed field the grains dropped by genius. At best the critic sits down to a Barmecide’s feast, to see, to smell, but not to taste the celestial manna vouchsafed by the gods. We are only contemporaries of genius, all of us, and the calico cat is the badge of our tribe. But who dares confess this shocking truth? And who shall bell the calico cat? XIII CHOPIN OR THE CIRCUS?