in Paris in 1797, make more amusing reading, but scarcely rank as literature.
Offenbach's account of his trip to America is the work of a fifth-rate journalistic hack, certainly not worthy of a man whose music has been compared to champagne. Saint-Saëns is ponderous enough in prose; his books remind me of the bassoon figure in the middle of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Gounod is insufferably sentimental. Anton Rubinstein was a great pianist and an indifferent composer, but his autobiography is even worse than his music. Rimsky-Korsakoff, in his Chronicle of My Musical Life, exhibits himself as utterly unskilled in the practice of writing; his book owes its position to the fact that he had something to write about. We see very little of the artist who created Carmen in the letters of Bizet. Alfred Bruneau, a composer of the second class, is a music critic of the third. Vincent d'Indy's César Franck is a scholarly piece of work which serves its purpose, but it is in no respect a literary masterpiece. It could be read only by a musician. What an opportunity Massenet missed in his Souvenirs! What a career the man had! The book, however, is noteworthy neither for revelations of character nor for inclusion of pertinent incident. It is written in very mediocre French; even the spelling is
