As for Ornstein himself, I think he is a sincere person who means to go on doing his work. I sometimes judge the sensitiveness of a nature by the intensity of expression that moves across the cheek-bones. You might look carefully at Ornstein’s face instead of judging him by the fact that his hair falls into his eyes when he plays. Of course he has been indiscreet enough to mention that he does not like Beethoven. Why that is unforgivable I can’t imagine. A man may surely like what he pleases. The high genius of a Mozart or a Haydn is a thing he feels intensely. He admires Chopin deeply as an artist who could do one thing very well and was content to let it go at that. Grieg he thinks is not a worthy mouthpiece for all that Norway has to give a musician. He loves Debussy, but thinks that Ravel is the greater man: “Debussy stands beside a pond and tells you beautifully of all he sees there; Ravel plunges into the pond and gives you the life of it.” Stravinsky and Scriabine are the two he cares for most, as I remember. “Schönberg has worked out his theory before he has worked out his art.” Something of that sort might apply to Ornstein himself, as in the case of his Chopin _Nocturne in E Flat_: I disliked his “exaggeration” in it as much as anything I have ever heard on a piano. * * * * * Oh, does no one realize what the unique beauty of a piano is, and that there are secrets of sound in it which have not yet been touched upon? Nocturne (_From the French of Paul Verlaine_) CLARA SHANAFELT Your soul is like a lovely garden place Where masque and bergamasque move graciously, Playing the lute and dancing, yet of face Half sad beneath their guise of fantasy. The while they sing in minor key Love conquering, life opportune, They seem to doubt their own felicity— Their song floats faintly upward in the moon, In the clear moonlight, sad and fair, That makes birds dream where dim boughs sway, And fountains sigh their rapture on the air From marble pools—the tall slim fountain spray. White Mists[1] There are grey stone rat-traps on the earth Where human beings are put to die By other human beings. They die hour after hour, a million million times, And still face death.... There is blue air between the clouds and the earth Which they once saw; There are gold stars, And suns that come up red, And trees that turn to purple in the evening— But they cannot remember.... Now their days are bundles of soiled rags, Their nights are stone.... I dare not think of them: It drives me toward the whiteness of insanity. M. C. A. ----------