Boïto’s devil is greater than Gounod’s. The French devil is not a terrible fellow; he is too fond of high living, and has a pretty taste in wine. The sardonic, mocking arch fiend of Boïto is more like the popular notion of mankind’s enemy. He is familiar with the Powers, and is contemptuous of earthworms. His defiant and evil song of Triumph is the best thing in the work. The solo in the Brocken scene, Here is the World Empty and Round, does not make the same impression as the Denial song. Faust in this version is rather colorless, and more philosopher than lover. Marguerite’s most musical episode is when she recalls her lost happiness in the mad scene. And there is much music that is ugly and dreary, for Boïto, no matter what he has accomplished in his unpublished music-drama, is in Mefistofele rather the poet than the composer. Of rich, red, musical blood, of vital figures, we are offered but little. This composition is a product for the closet. It lacks that quality possessed by musicians of meaner attainments than Boïto—the quality of humanity. There are dramatic moments, but the story halts, the symbolism is not appreciable, and the mystic element not quite realized. To give the world a Faust in tone one must be a musical Goethe. Neither Gounod nor Boïto was strong enough to cope with the grandeur and beauty of Goethe’s masterpiece among masterpieces. Gounod was a musical sensualist, lacking lofty imagination; Boïto fails in the sensuous temperament and is ever cerebral. VIII THE ETERNAL FEMININE I A Grand Piano underneath the Bough, A Gramophone, a Chinese Gong, and Thou Trying to sing an Anthem off the Key— Oh, Paradise were Wilderness enow! —WALLACE IRWIN. To the girl who plays Chopin! This sounds like a toast, and a cynic would certainly add: “May her pretty fingers ne’er touch ivory again!” But it is not a health that I wish to propose, nor yet an exhortation. My notion is to put the question boldly: Can women play Chopin? Before the rigor of such a query the hardiest-souled male must retire abashed, or write with the usual masculine brutality and lack of finesse. Chopin is the favorite composer of women; Chopin rules the soul of the girl, and to Chopin is addressed a particular form of worship. This consists of inarticulate gasps, irregular sighs, and the glance which is called psychic. To girls of eighteen or thereabouts Chopin is a religion—a sentimental one. Sympathetic medical men diagnose the symptoms and declare them Chopinitis. We have, many of us, suffered severely from it; most musical and unmusical people do. Chopin is in the emotional curriculum of every woman who plays the piano; therefore it shocks one if this question be posed: Can women play Chopin?