a curious way.  One can scarcely say with truth that Tschaikowsky is popular:  only his “Pathetic” symphony and one or two smaller things are popular.  Had he not written the “Pathetic,” one may doubt whether he would be much better known to-day than he was in 1893.  It caught the public fancy as no other work of his caught it, and on the strength of its popularity many of the critics do not hesitate to call it a great symphony, and on the strength of the symphony Tschaikowsky a great composer. (For in England criticism largely means saying what the public thinks.) Passionately though that symphony is admired, hardly any other of his music can be truly said to get a hearing; for, on the rare occasions when it is played, the public thoughtfully stays away.  It is true that the Casse Noisette suite is always applauded, but it is a trifling work compared with his best.  Tschaikowsky shares with Gray and one or two others in ancient and modern times the distinction of being famous by a single achievement.  The public is jealous for the supremacy of that achievement, and will not hear of there being another equal to it.

Whether the public is right or wrong, and whether we all are or are not just a little inclined to-day to exaggerate Tschaikowsky’s gifts and the value of his music, there can be no doubt whatever that he was a singularly fine craftsman, who brought into music a number of fresh and living elements.  He seems to me to have been an extraordinary combination of the barbarian and the civilised man, of the Slav and the Latin or Teuton, the Slav barbarian preponderating.  He saw things as neither Slav nor Latin nor Teuton had seen them before; the touch of things aroused in him moods dissimilar from those that had been aroused in anyone before.  Hence, while we English regard him as a representative Russian, or at anyrate Slav, composer, many Russians repudiate him, calling him virtually a Western.  He has the Slav fire, rash impetuosity, passion and intense melancholy, and much also of that Slav naivete which in the case of Dvorak degenerates into sheer brainlessness; he has an Oriental love of a wealth of extravagant embroidery, of pomp and show and masses of gorgeous colour; but the other, what I might call the Western, civilised element in his character, showed itself in his lifelong striving to get into touch with contemporary thought, to acquire a full measure of modern culture, and to curb his riotous, lawless impulse towards mere sound and fury.  It is this unique fusion of apparently mutually destructive elements and instincts that gives to Tschaikowsky’s music much of its novelty and piquancy.  But, apart from this uncommon fusion, it must be remembered that his was an original mind—­original not only in colour but in its very structure.  Had he been pure Slav, or pure Latin, his music might have been very different, but it would certainly have been original.  He had true creative imagination, a fund of original, underived emotion, and a copiousness