One of the constant temptations of the biographer is that of seizing on some salient trait in his subject, magnifying it beyond all relation to others which supplement or modify it, and portraying an eccentric rather than a rounded personality, a monster rather than a man. Human nature is complex, many-sided, even self-contradictory to any but the most penetrative view; and so slender are the resources of literature for dealing with such a paradox as a man, that writers, resorting to simplification, sacrifice fullness to intelligibility. In books Napoleon is apt to be denied all scruples, Keats all virility, Marcus Aurelius all engaging folly; the real men were probably not so simple. It is certain, at any rate, that Tschaïkowsky, the greatest of Russian musicians, one of the two greatest of all composers since Wagner, cannot have been the mere incarnation of concentrated gloom that his critics have drawn. Some worthier powers than that of eloquent lamenting must have contributed to mold him. He was not simply a sort of neurasthenic Jeremiah with a faculty for orchestration. It is only too easy and plausible, to be sure, to label him with one of those insidiously blighting epithets, «neurasthenic,» «decadent,» or «morbid.» He was, in fact, of an unfortunate heredity; his grandfather was epileptic, and his own symptoms pointed to an inherited nervous irritability. He was troubled more or less, all his life, by sleeplessness, fatigue, depression; and in his thirty-seventh year had a complete nervous collapse. But to discredit a man's insight by pointing out his physical misfortunes is as misleading as it is unkind. The fact that Schopenhauer, with whose temperament Tschaïkowsky's had much in common, had some insane and idiotic ancestors, and suffered much from his own unusual sensitiveness, does not in the least abate the truth of his philosophic teaching, though it may call attention to its one-sidedness. And so with the musician; knowledge of his personal twist ought not to make us deaf to whatever is universal in his utterance. We may remember that he reports but one aspect of the truth; but if he reports that truly, we may supply the other, and need not carp at the way he got his information. And indeed is it not, after all, an artificial circumscription of life to ignore its sadder verities, however moral Pharisees may stigmatize the perception of them as «morbid»? Has not disease, as well as health, its relation to our fortunes? Is not man's weakness an organic part of his strength, his fear of his courage, his doubt of his faith? That mere facile optimism which smiles blandly at all experience, with unseeing eyes, is as partial and false as the unrelieved pessimism into which the contemplation of it sometimes drives the sensitive. The world is no more all light than it is all shadow. All human life, with its suffering as well as its happiness, is one, and every sincere human experience has its own weight. And so Tschaïkowsky, in spite of