Puslapio vaizdai
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are well taken care of by pension guide its destinies and to conduct the funds.

239

To return once more to the scarcity of great new music to-day; this perhaps more than anything else is responsible for the growing practice of importing guest-conductors. Hearing the standard works played several times a season, year after year, the music public naturally asks to have its interest whetted, and the method many of our symphonic organizations use to satisfy this desire, is to put new personalities on the conductor's stand.

The visits we have had from some of the really great European conductors have done much to quicken our musical pulse and to awaken new vibrations among both orchestras and audiences that sometimes have gone to sleep under their regular conductors. The custom of importation has now assumed such proportions, however, as to be something of a menace to the best development of symphonic music. It is not good for an orchestra to have too many drill masters of different temperaments and ideals, succeeding each other in quick order, and there should always be one supreme in command to

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greater part of the season.

Some of these guest-conductors with a clever appreciation and understanding of the American eagerness for novelty, endeavor to give new and often forced readings of the old masters. They will play an accelerando where the composer indicates a ritardando. And they will make uncalled for pauses, dramatizing themselves and their eccentricities, instead of interpreting the composers' intentions. It is easy enough to distinguish between the conductor who thinks constantly of the audience behind him and the "effect" he desires to produce, and the one who is so immersed in the composition that he is blind to everything but its message and the best way in which he can draw this message from the musicians under his eye and baton.

But I have allowed myself to wander far down the fifty years which span the life of the Symphony Society of New York. We are all proud of what it has accomplished and know that it is due to the man who founded it, who inspired it, and who planted its flag so high that our eyes are still turned upward in our march toward perfection.

ATALANTA

After the Race

ROSELLE MERCIER MONTGOMERY

THESE golden apples! And Hippomenes
Still thinks he stayed my flying feet with these!

True, in the race that other men had run
Only to death, his strength and swiftness won;
Or was it strategy? He tossed, indeed,
The gold before me and I lost my lead-
My pausing, if for but a moment's space,
To pick the apples up, gave him the race.
So much as this he and the world know well-
But there is somewhat more I do not tell . .

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Oh, yes! he might be glad to know-but then
The rôle of conqueror is dear to men;
Now I am symbol of his victory,
And he, he values me accordingly.
What if he knew the victory was won
Before the goal was set, the race begun?

So long, so long I had been known to fame

As unattainable until he came!

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Too long, perhaps. But who was there to guess

An Atalanta-touched by loneliness?

And who could dream that thoughts came to my mind,

Of prisoned Daphne sighing on the wind?

Of Syrinx, by the river, safe, indeed,

But moaning at her fate-to be a reed?

And who could know it sometimes came to me

That gods take maidens' prayers too seriously?

The satyr-look my suitors' eyes would wear;
A look that summed me up-appraisingly,
That seemed to strip my draperies from me.
I would not stay-to stand before them, shamed;
I fled from them in some dark fear unnamed.
And oh, the swift, sick dread, the wild alarms
When they outstretched to me their hairy arms!
And when they drew on me with panting breath,
I whispered to my heart, "Oh, better, death!"

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And then one day-he came! I marked him there
Among the suitors. I seemed unaware
I turned away indifferently from him
Coolly I let my maidens oil each limb,
Lace on my sandals, calmly took my place-
But well I knew I would not win this race!

I had a maiden's and a runner's pride-
Both must be saved, but if he failed, he died!
I knew I was the fleeter, if I tried . .

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These golden apples? They served well indeed
As subterfuge excuse to slack my speed!
But he goes proudly, my Hippomenes,
Believing that he won the race with these;
And somewhat boastful of the strategy
By which he gained the victory-and me!

Sometimes I almost think I will explain-
And then I muse on men—and I refrain!
Women are wise who think and think again!

T

WINSTON CHURCHILL, M. P.

Enough of His Life to Show Which Way He Is Going

"EPHESIAN"

HERE is surely something significant in the fact that the most picturesque, perhaps the most highly destined figure in British political life to-day, Mr. Winston Churchill, is half American by birth.

Mark Twain certainly thought so. More than a quarter of a century ago the humorist presided at a New York lecture; the speaker was a young, red-haired, snub-nosed British subaltern who had just effected a sensational escape from a Boer prison in South Africa. "Ladies and Gentlemen," drawled Mark Twain, "the lecturer to-night is Mr. Winston Churchill. By his father he is an Englishman, by his mother, an American. Behold the perfect man!" Whether this brief introduction set the youthful lecturer at his ease, it certainly put the audience in good humor. True, the first time Churchill mentioned the Boers, a group of Irishmen in the hall rose to their feet and cheered vociferously. "I am glad to hear those cheers, gentlemen," remarked the unperturbed speaker; "you are quite right to cheer the Boers. They are a brave people, and they deserve all the cheers you can give them." Then even the Irishmen were content to listen.

Less modest than his client, however, Churchill's lecture-agent de

scribed him in an advertisement as "The hero of five wars, the author of six books, and the future prime minister of Great Britain." Churchill objected strongly to this description, although the first two claims were not untrue, and the third is to-day extremely likely to be realized. Who was the twenty-six-year-old youth who could be presented in such superlative terms?

was

Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill was born on November 30, 1874, at Blenheim Palace, the ancestral home of the dukes of Marlborough. His father was Lord Randolph Churchill, a son of the seventh duke, and himself one of the meteoric figures of British politics in the latter half of the last century. Lord Randolph sat in the House of Commons and was the founder of the small but famous "Fourth party," to which his distant cousin, Mr. Arthur (now Lord) Balfour, also belonged. The aim of the Fourth party was to "ginger" the Conservative party, emasculated by the withdrawal of Disraeli to the House of Lords, and to embarrass the closing years of Gladstone's premiership. Lord Randolph and his three colleagues succeeded so well in this twofold task, that they caused the downfall of the Gladstone administration, captured their own

party caucus, and secured for their leader high rank in the subsequent Conservative Government. Finally, Lord Randolph became chancellor of the exchequer at the age of thirtyseven, but unexpectedly resigned after a quarrel with Lord Salisbury. With his fall from power he virtually ceased to play a part in politics. Illness and long journeys abroad closed his life, and he died in 1895, leaving behind him a memory of brilliance and independence that were unique until his son, Winston Churchill, succeeded to and surpassed his political inheritance.

22

Lord Randolph, as a young man of twenty-four, married Miss Jennie Jerome, of New York, the elder of the beautiful "Jerome sisters." Their father, Mr. Leonard Jerome, was the owner and editor of the "New York Times"; he founded also the first two great American race-courses, Jerome Park and Coney Island Jockey Club, and shared with Mr. August Belmont the title of Father of the American Turf. During the Civil War he gave half his fortune to the North, and, when in 1862, the war became temporarily unpopular, the "New York Times" office was attacked by a mob. But Leonard Jerome swiftly assembled a battery of artillery and armed his journalists with rifles. They fired on the crowd and dispersed them, not without bloodshed. He afterward represented his country at Trieste. From this energetic and adventurous man, who won and lost and won again a great fortune, Winston Churchill certainly inherits many of the remarkable characteristics which have singled him out from his contemporaries in European politics.

Does he owe to Leonard Jerome his extraordinary physical courage? Or is this a legacy from his great British ancestor, John Churchill, first Duke of Marlborough, that paragon of generals of all time? Reckless bravery has distinguished Winston Churchill from the outset of his career. His father, not recognizing the boy's intellectual gifts, sent him into the army, and it was as a subaltern in the Hussars that young Winston first attracted notice. As a youngster youngster of twenty, he took part in the Spanish campaign in Cuba. Technically he was only the correspondent of a London newspaper, but he underwent his baptism of fire and received a Spanish military decoration. Two years later, bored with the peaceful procedure of garrison life in the south of India, he attached himself, again in the guise of a correspondent, to an expeditionary force operating on the Northwest frontier of that peninsula. In the following year he served again with a similar force, on each occasion distinguishing himself by his contempt of danger.

But these were little wars, and Churchill has never lacked ambition. He returned to England in 1897 eager to take sides in one of the Balkan wars or, what was much more difficult, to be included in the Nile expeditionary force that was about to advance into the Sudan under the command of Lord Kitchener. The Balkan combatants refused his services, while Lord Kitchener was known to dislike Churchill for his combination of journalism with soldiering and for his often undisguised criticism of operations. The young man nevertheless made his way to Egypt with a commission in the

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