Average Jones Samuel Hopkins Adams

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Copyright © 1911 by Samuel Hopkins Adams
Introduction and notes © 2022 by Leslie S. Klinger
Cover and internal design © 2022 by Sourcebooks and Library of
Congress
Cover design by Sourcebooks
Cover image: Poster advertising the New York Sunday Journal.
George Reiter Brill, 1896. Prints & Photographs Division, Library of
Congress, LC-DIG-ds-14496.
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The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are
used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is
purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
Published by Poisoned Pen Press, an imprint of Sourcebooks, in
association with the Library of Congress
P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410
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This edition of Average Jones is based on the first edition in the
Library of Congress’s collection, originally published in 1911 by the
Bobbs-Merrill Company. The illustrations by M. Leone Bracker are
original to the book.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Adams, Samuel Hopkins, author. | Klinger, Leslie S., editor.
Title: Average Jones / Samuel Hopkins Adams ; Edited, with an
introduction
and notes, by Leslie S. Klinger.
Description: Naperville, Illinois : Library of Congress/Poisoned Pen
Press,
[2022] | Series: Library of Congress Crime Classics | Includes
bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021056037 (print) | LCCN 2021056038 (ebook) |
(trade paperback) | (epub)
Classification: LCC PS3501.D317 A94 2022 (print) | LCC
PS3501.D317
(ebook) | DDC 813/.52--dc23/eng/20220118
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021056037
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021056038
 Contents

Front Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Foreword

Introduction

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX
Chapter X

Chapter XI

Reading Group Guide

Further Reading

About the Author

Back Cover
 Foreword

Crime writing as we know it first appeared in 1841, with the

publication of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Written by
American author Edgar Allan Poe, the short story introduced C.
Auguste Dupin, the world’s first wholly fictional detective. Other
American and British authors had begun working in the genre by the
1860s, and by the 1920s we had officially entered the golden age of
detective fiction.
Throughout this short history, many authors who paved the way
have been lost or forgotten. Library of Congress Crime Classics bring
back into print some of the finest American crime writing from the
1860s to the 1960s, showcasing rare and lesser-known titles that
represent a range of genres, from cozies to police procedurals. With
cover designs inspired by images from the Library’s collections, each
book in this series includes the original text, reproduced faithfully
from an early edition in the Library’s collections and complete with
strange spellings and unorthodox punctuation. Also included are a
contextual introduction, a brief biography of the author, notes,
recommendations for further reading, and suggested discussion
questions. Our hope is for these books to start conversations, inspire
further research, and bring obscure works to a new generation of
readers.
 Early American crime fiction is not only entertaining to read, but it
also sheds light on the culture of its time. While many of the titles in
this series include outmoded language and stereotypes now
considered offensive, these books give readers the opportunity to
reflect on how our society’s perceptions of race, gender, ethnicity,
and social standing have evolved over more than a century.
More dark secrets and bloody deeds lurk in the massive collections
of the Library of Congress. I encourage you to explore these works
for yourself, here in Washington, DC, or online at www.loc.gov.
—Carla D. Hayden, Librarian of Congress
 Introduction

The enormous success of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes

stories led to dozens of English and American writers seeking to
create imitations of the Great Detective, with Holmes’s reported
death in 18931 encouraging many to fill the vacuum. Most, however,
lacked originality or skill,2 and few of the Holmes copies are
remembered today. In America, however, a different kind of
detective was also developing—a detective immersed in social and
political issues of the day. This was perhaps the natural result of the
growing list of journalists who began writing fiction, including Willa
Cather, Stephen Crane, Richard Harding Davis, Theodore Dreiser,
William Dean Howells, Jack London, and, of course, Mark Twain. An
unexpected addition to that corps was Samuel Hopkins Adams
(1871–1958). In the first few years of the twentieth century, Adams
distinguished himself as a “muckraking” journalist, taking on the
patent medicine industry in a series of articles. He was also critical of
the government’s failure to enforce the newly enacted Pure Food
and Drug Act and wrote extensively about medicine, public health,
and false advertising. By the middle of the decade, however, Adams
began to write short stories, many of which had a crusading
element.
Adams was already an experienced crime writer—he wrote thirty-
eight bylined stories on the sensational 1907 trial of playboy Harry
Kendall Thaw for the murder of the prominent architect Stanford
White—and decided to try his hand at detective fiction.3 He chose as
his protagonist an American version of a British aristocrat (in some
ways, an early Lord Peter Wimsey, the detective created by Dorothy
Sayers in 1923 in her novel Whose Body?), a very wealthy young
man named Adrian Van Reypen Egerton Jones, known wittily as
“Average” Jones. Jones decides on detection as a hobby—he has no
need of income—because everyone else in his favorite club, the
Cosmic Club, has a unique pastime. He chooses a specialized form of
detection, finding his investigative leads among the “agony
columns”—the romantic, often bizarre personal and commercial
advertisements that populated the pages of many American
newspapers. These ranged from the despairing4 to the tantalizing5
to the ridiculous.6 Of course, for Adams, this was a natural tie-in
with his intense interest in false advertising.
With his lead character in mind, Adams looked for a market for a
series of stories. Having written previously for McClure’s, Collier’s,
Everybody’s, and American magazines, he approached his former
Collier’s colleague Sam Merwin, who had begun publishing fiction in
Success magazine. Success, founded by Orison Swett Marden7 in
1891, was originally subtitled “A monthly journal of inspiration,
progress, and self-help” and was devoted to articles about successful
men. By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century,
however, Marden sought to expand the readership by publishing
commentary on public affairs as well as fiction. Zane Grey was one
of the first authors to contribute fiction, with several stories
appearing in late 1910.
The result was the publication of ten stories by Adams between
April 1910 and April 1911 featuring Jones.8 The stories were
regarded well enough for Adams to take them to a book publisher.
The publisher of his first two novels, McClure, had gone out of
business, but he managed to interest the venerable Indiana-based
Bobbs-Merrill Company. Bobbs-Merrill had already achieved success
with crime fiction, publishing many of the later novels of Anna
Katharine Green (hailed as the “mother of American crime fiction”)
as well as Mary Roberts Rinehart (the first American mystery writer
to achieve lasting fame after Green). Average Jones appeared in
1911, a year that Ellery Queen later dubbed the beginning of the
second golden era of crime fiction.9
According to the anonymous author of the dust jacket on the first
edition, Average Jones was “the cleverest detective since Sherlock
Holmes. Everything about the book is refreshingly original. Humor is
as strong as mystery. Adventure is emphasized above sensation.
Instead of the ghastly and the grewsome, here is an entertainment
always gay, brisk, and fascinating.” “The blurb-writer was over-
enthusiastic,” remarked Ellery Queen, “yet more accurate than most
of his craft.”10 The book did well commercially too. While it did not
make the Bookman’s monthly list of the top six books in sales, it sold
more than five thousand copies.11
In fact, Adams’s stories combine elements never before seen in
detective fiction. The dialogue is topical and clever, the conundrums
zany (a falling asteroid, a man who speaks only Latin, a strolling
trombone player), the diction facetious. Jones, who styles himself an
“Ad-Visor,” deceptively appears to be a young man bored with life.
There are numerous allusions to college life, and a clubby
atmosphere prevails. The brilliant Jones is contrasted with his
occasional sidekick, a semicomical idler, Robert Bertram, who is far
from the model of the redoubtable Dr. Watson.12 These features
would appear soon enough in the writings of P. G. Wodehouse, and
a decade later they would populate the crime fiction of Margery
Allingham and Dorothy Sayers. While some of Adams’s tales involve
serious muckraking, with corrupt politicians, quack patent medicine,
and the meatpacking industry, most are concerned with personal
issues, which do not have serious consequences. Murder is actually
committed in only one of the ten stories.13
The Jones tales are remarkable forerunners of the golden age that
was to follow. LeRoy Lad Panek observed, in Probable Cause: Crime
Fiction in America: “Almost ten years before they appeared in
England, Adams assembled the parts of the Golden Age story: witty
dialogue, disparate facts, the truly sophisticated amateur, the
emphasis on thinking without a lot of mumbo jumbo, all focused on
a case that has few mortal consequences. It may be, then, that the
Golden Age detective formula is yet another product that can be
labeled Made in America.”14
The stories are also delightful. Howard Haycraft, one of the great
historians of the mystery field, lamented in 1942, “The tales [are]
well above the level of their era, both in conception and style, and it
is a source of perennial regret that this excellent storyteller has
shown no inclination to revive his attractive hero.”15 Adams wrote for
many more years (his last work appearing in 1959),16 but sadly,
Average Jones was not to return.
—Leslie S. Klinger

1 Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Final Problem,” The Memoirs of Sherlock

Holmes (London: George Newnes, 1894), 256–79.
2 One notable exception was fictional criminologist Craig Kennedy,
“the American Sherlock Holmes,” who first appeared in Arthur B.
Reeve’s The Silent Bullet and who was highly popular for a few
decades. However, as discussed in the introduction to the Library of
Congress Crime Classics edition of The Silent Bullet, Kennedy is
virtually forgotten today.
3 Adams had actually written a few undistinguished mystery short
stories previously, but none featured a detective, and his novels, The
Mystery (1907, cowritten with Stewart Edward Wright) and The
Flying Death (1908), were more adventure stories than mysteries.
4 “GOOD HOME wanted for two sisters: aged 11 and 6, in an
influential family. Address SISTERS, Box 14, Eagle office.” Brooklyn
Daily Eagle, February 2, 1910.
5 “Wanted: Men in every town and city to sell our latest specialty; no
talking needed; sells on sight. For full particulars, address The North
Shore Specialty Co., Salem, Mass.” New York Tribune, February 1,
1910.
6 “Run Down Nervous System. Mr. H. F. Corcoran When on the Verge
of Collapse Took Duffy’s Pure Malt Whiskey and Now He Feels Like a
New Man… It is recognized as a family medicine everywhere. It is
invaluable for overworked men, delicate women and sickly children.”
This “infomercial” appeared in The Sun, where Adams launched his
journalistic career in New York, on February 1, 1910.
7 Marden, a vital member of the New Thought Movement—which
itself dates to the teachings of mesmerist and healer Phineas
Quimby (1802–1866)—is regarded as the father of the American
self-help movement.
8 One of the ten, “The Million Dollar Dog,” was originally written
featuring a different detective, Everett King (not so coincidentally,
also a member of the Cosmic Club), and appeared in the Red Book
Magazine in March 1911. Perhaps Adams thought its semi-romantic
tale was unsuited for Success, where the Jones stories had all
appeared. But when he sold the collection of Jones stories to a book
publisher, Adams included this story, changing the detective’s name
and a few other small points and converting it to a coda to Jones’s
career. He also slightly edited the other stories to add cross-
references and arranged them in an order different from the
magazine publications to form more of an arc.
9 Howard Haycraft also called 1911 one of the “mile-posts in the
history of detective literature,” noting that it was the beginning of
the decade that saw the creation of both G. K. Chesterton’s Father
Brown (The Innocence of Father Brown, 1911) and Melville Davisson
Post’s Uncle Abner (Uncle Abner, Master of Mysteries, 1918). Howard
Haycraft, Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective
Story (London: Peter Davies, 1942), 93.
10 Queen’s Quorum: A History of the Detective-Crime Short Story as
Revealed by the 106 Most Important Books Published in this Field
since 1845 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1951), 61.
11 According to Samuel V. Kennedy III, however, the book failed to
earn Adams more than his $1,500 advance. Samuel Hopkins Adams
and the Business of Writing (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University
Press, 1999), 74.
12 Curiously, the Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce portrayals of Holmes
and Watson on film are closer to Adams’s mold than to the original
Doyle stories.
13 Three, if canine homicide is included.
14 LeRoy Lad Panek, Probable Cause: Crime Fiction in America
(Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press,
1990), 83.
15 Haycraft, Murder for Pleasure, 101–2.
16 Tenderloin (New York: Random House) was published
posthumously in 1959.
 Chapter I

The B-Flat Trombone

Three men sat in the Cosmic Club17 discussing the question: “What’s
the matter with Jones?” Waldemar, the oldest of the conferees, was
the owner, and at times the operator, of an important and decent
newspaper. His heavy face wore the expression of good-humored
power, characteristic of the experienced and successful journalist.
Beside him sat Robert Bertram, the club idler, slender and languidly
elegant. The third member of the conference was Jones himself.
Average Jones had come by his nickname inevitably. His parents
had foredoomed him to it when they furnished him with the initials
A. V. R. E. as preface to his birthright of J for Jones. His character
apparently justified the chance concomitance. He was, so to speak,
a composite photograph of any thousand well-conditioned, clean-
living Americans between the ages of twenty-five and thirty. Happily,
his otherwise commonplace face was relieved by the one unfailing
characteristic of composite photographs, large, deep-set and
thoughtful eyes. Otherwise he would have passed in any crowd, and
nobody would have noticed him pass. Now, at twenty-seven, he
looked back over the five years since his graduation from college and
wondered what he had done with them; and at the four previous
years of undergraduate life and wondered how he had done so well
with those and why he had not in some manner justified the parting
words of his favorite professor.
“You have one rare faculty, Jones. You can, when you choose,
sharpen the pencil of your mind to a very fine point. Specialize, my
boy, specialize.”
If the recipient of this admonition had specialized in anything, it
was in life. Having twenty-five thousand a year of his own18 he
might have continued in that path indefinitely, but for two influences.
One was an irruptive craving within him to take some part in the
dynamic activities of the surrounding world. The other was the
“freak” will of his late and little-lamented uncle, from whom he had
his present income, and his future expectations of some ten millions.
Adrian Van Reypen Egerton had, as Waldemar once put it, “gone
into the mayor’s chair with a good name and come out with a block
of ice stock.” In a will whose cynical humor was the topic of its day,
Mr. Egerton jeered posthumously at the public which he had
despoiled, and promised restitution, of a sort, through his heir.
“Therefore,” he had written, “I give and bequeath to the said
Adrian Van Reypen Egerton Jones, the residue of my property, the
principal to be taken over by him at such time as he shall have
completed five years of continuous residence in New York City. After
such time the virus of the metropolis will have worked through his
entire being. He will squander his unearned and undeserved fortune,
thus completing the vicious circle, and returning the millions
acquired by my political activities, in a poisoned shower upon the
city, for which, having bossed, bullied and looted it, I feel no
sentiment other than contempt.”
“And now,” remarked Waldemar in his heavy, rumbling voice, “you
aspire to disappoint that good old man.”
 “It’s only human nature, you know,” said Average Jones. “When a
man puts a ten-million-dollar curse on you and suggests that you
haven’t the backbone of a shrimp, you—you—”
“—naturally yearn to prove him a liar,” supplied Bertram.
“Exactly. Anyway, I’ve no taste for dissipation, either moral or
financial. I want action; something to do. I’m bored, in this infernal
city.”
“The wail of the unslaked romanticist,” commented Bertram.
“Romanticist nothing!” protested the other. “My ambitions are
practical enough if I could only get ’em stirred up.”
“Exactly. Boredom is simply romanticism with a morning-after
thirst. You’re panting for romance, for something bizarre. Egypt and
St. Petersburg and Buenos Ayres and Samoa have all become
commonplace to you. You’ve overdone them. That’s why you’re back
here in New York waiting with stretched nerves for the Adventure of
Life to cat-creep up from behind and toss the lariat of rainbow
dreams over your shoulders.”
Waldemar laughed. “Not a bad diagnosis. Why don’t you take up a
hobby, Mr. Jones?”
“What kind of a hobby?”
“Any kind. The club is full of hobby-riders. Of all people that I
know, they have the keenest appetite for life. Look at old
Denechaud; he was a misanthrope until he took to gathering
scarabs. Fenton, over there, has the finest collection of circus
posters in the world. Bellerding’s house is a museum of obsolete
musical instruments. De Gay collects venomous insects from all over
the world; no harmless ones need apply. Terriberry has a mania for
old railroad tickets. Some are really very curious. I’ve often wished I
had the time to be a crank. It’s a happy life.”
“What line would you choose?” asked Bertram languidly.
 “Nobody has gone in for queer advertisements yet, I believe,”
replied the older man. “If one could take the time to follow them up
—but it would mean all one’s leisure.”
“Would it be so demanding a career?” said Average Jones, smiling.
“Decidedly. I once knew a man who gave away twenty dollars daily
on clues from the day’s news. He wasn’t bored for lack of
occupation.”
“But the ordinary run of advertising is nothing more than an effort
to sell something by yelling in print,” objected Average Jones.
“Is it? Well perhaps you don’t look in the right place.”
Waldemar reached for the morning’s copy of the Universal and ran
his eye down the columns of “classified” matter. “Hark to this,” he
said, and read:

“Is there any work on God’s green earth for a man who has just
got to have it?”

“Or this:

“WANTED—A venerable looking man with white beard and

medical degree. Good pay to right applicant.”

“What’s that?” asked Average Jones with awakened interest.

“Only a quack medical concern looking for a ‘stall’ to impress their
‘come-ons,’” explained Waldemar.
Average Jones leaned over to scan the paper in his turn.
“Here’s one,” said he, and read:

“WANTED—Performer on B-flat trombone.19 Can use at once.

Apply with instrument, after 1 p.m. 300 East 100th Street.”

“That seems ordinary enough,” said Waldemar.

 “What’s it doing in a daily paper? There must be—er—technical
publications—er—journals, you know, for this sort of demand.”
“When Average’s words come slow, you’ve got him interested,”
commented Bertram. “Sure sign.”
“Nevertheless, he’s right,” said Waldemar. “It is rather misplaced.”
“How is this for one that says what it means?” said Bertram.

“WANTED—At once, a brass howitzer20 and a man who isn’t

afraid to handle it. Mrs. Anne Cullen, Pier 49½ East River.”

“The woman who is fighting the barge combine,”21 explained

Waldemar. “Not so good as it looks. She’s bluffing.”
“Anyway, I’d like a shy22 at this business,” declared Average Jones
with sudden conviction. “It looks to me like something to do.”
“Make it a business, then,” advised Waldemar. “If you care really to
go in for it, my newspaper would be glad to pay for information such
as you might collect. We haven’t time, for example, to trace down
fraudulent advertisers. If you could start an enterprise of that sort,
you’d certainly find it amusing, and, at times, perhaps, even
adventurous.”
“I wouldn’t know how to establish it,” objected Average Jones.
The newspaper owner drew a rough diagram on a sheet of paper
and filled it in with writing, crossing out and revising liberally.
Divided, upon his pattern, into lines, the final draft read:
 “Ad-Visor! Do you expect me to blight my budding career by a
poisonous pun like that?” demanded Average Jones with a wry face.
“It may be a poisonous pun, but it’s an arresting catch-word,” said
Waldemar, unmoved. “Single column, about fifty lines will do it in
nice, open style. Caps and lower case, and black-faced type for the
name and title. Insert twice a week in every New York and Brooklyn
paper.”
“Isn’t it—er—a little blatant?” suggested Bertram, with lifted
eyebrows.
“Blatant?” repeated its inventor. “It’s more than that. It’s howlingly
vulgar. It’s a riot of glaring yellow.23 How else would you expect to
catch the public?”
 “Suppose, then, I do burst into flame to this effect?” queried the
prospective “Ad-Visor.” “Et après?24 as we proudly say after spending
a week in Paris.”
“Aprés? Oh, plenty of things. You hire an office, a clerk, two
stenographers and a clipping expert, and prepare to take care of the
work that comes in. You’ll be flooded,” promised Waldemar.
“And between times I’m to go skipping about, chasing long white
whiskers and brass howitzers and B-flat trombones, I suppose.”
“Until you get your work systematized you’ll have no time for
skipping. Within six months, if you’re not sandbagged or jailed on
fake libel suits, you’ll have a unique bibliography of swindles. Then
I’ll begin to come and buy your knowledge to keep my own columns
clean.”
The speaker looked up to meet the gaze of an iron-gray man with
a harsh, sallow face.
“Excuse my interrupting,” said the new-comer. “Just one question,
Waldemar. Who’s going to be the nominee?”25
“Linder.”
“Linder? Surely not! Why, his name hasn’t been heard.”
“It will be.”
“His Federal job?”
“He resigns in two weeks.”
“His record will kill him.”
“What record? You and I know he’s a grafter. But can we prove
anything? His clerk has always handled all the money.”
“Wasn’t there an old scandal—a woman case?” asked the
questioner vaguely.
“That Washington man’s wife? Too old. Linder would deny it flatly,
and there would be no witnesses. The woman is dead—killed by his
brutal treatment of her, they say. But the whole thing was hushed up
at the time by Linder’s pull, and when the husband threatened to kill
him Linder quietly set a commissioner of insanity26 on the case and
had the man put away. He’s never appeared since. No, that wouldn’t
be politically effective.”
The gray man nodded, and walked away, musing.
“Egbert, the traction boss,”27 explained Waldemar. “We’re generally
on opposite sides, but this time we’re both against Linder. Egbert
wants a cheaper man for mayor. I want a straighter one. And I could
get him this year if Linder wasn’t so well fortified. However, to get
back to our project, Mr. Jones—”
Get back to it they did with such absorption that when the group
broke up, several hours later, Average Jones was committed, by plan
and rote, to the new and hopeful Adventure of Life.
In the great human hunt which ever has been and ever shall be till
“the last bird flies into the last light”—some call it business, some
call it art, some call it love, and a very few know it for what it is, the
very mainspring of existence—the path of the pursuer and the prey
often run obscurely parallel. What time the Honorable William Linder
matured his designs on the mayoralty, Average Jones sat in a suite
of offices in Astor Court,28 a location which Waldemar had advised
as being central, expensive, and inspirational of confidence, and
considered, with a whirling brain, the minor woes of humanity. Other
people’s troubles had swarmed down upon him in answer to his
advertised offer of help, as sparrows flock to scattered bread
crumbs. Mostly these were of the lesser order of difficulties; but for
what he gave in advice and help the Ad-Visor took payment in
experience and knowledge of human nature. Still it was the hard,
honest study, and the helpful toil which held him to his task, rather
than the romance and adventure which he had hoped for and
Waldemar had foretold—until, in a quiet street in Brooklyn, of which
he had never so much as heard, there befell that which, first of
many events, justified the prophetic Waldemar and gave Average
Jones a part in the greater drama of the metropolis. The party of the
second part was the Honorable William Linder.
Mr. Linder sat at five P. M., of an early summer day, behind lock
and bolt. The third floor front room of his ornate mansion on
Brooklyn’s Park Slope29 was dedicated to peaceful thought. Sprawled
in a huge and softly upholstered chair at the window, he took his
ease in his house. The chair had been a recent gift from an
anonymous admirer whose political necessities, the Honorable Mr.
Linder idly surmised, had not yet driven him to reveal his identity. Its
occupant stretched his shoeless feet, as was his custom, upon the
broad window-sill, flooded by the seasonable warmth of sunshine,
the while he considered the ripening mayoralty situation. He found it
highly satisfactory. In the language of his inner man, it was a cinch.
Below, in Kennard Street,30 a solitary musician plodded. His
pretzel-shaped brass rested against his shoulder. He appeared to be
the “scout” of one of those prevalent and melancholious German
bands,31 which, under Brooklyn’s easy ordinances, are privileged to
draw echoes of the past writhing from their forgotten recesses. The
man looked slowly about him as if apprising potential returns. His
gravid glance encountered the prominent feet in the third-story
window of the Linder mansion, and rested. He moved forward.
Opposite the window he paused. He raised the mouthpiece to his
lips and embarked on a perilous sea of notes from which the tutored
ear might have inferred that once popular ditty, Egypt.
Love of music was not one of the Honorable William Linder’s
attributes. An irascible temper was. Of all instruments the B-flat
trombone possesses the most nerve-jarring tone. The master of the
mansion leaped from his restful chair. Where his feet had
ornamented the coping his face now appeared. Far out he leaned,
and roared at the musician below. The brass throat blared back at
him, while the soloist, his eyes closed in the ecstasy of art, brought
the “verse” part of his selection to an excruciating conclusion, half a
tone below pitch. Before the chorus there was a brief pause for
effect. In this pause, from Mr. Linder’s open face a voice fell like a
falling star. Although it did not cry “Excelsior,” its output of vocables
might have been mistaken, by a casual ear, for that clarion call.
What the Honorable Mr. Linder actually shouted was:
“Gettahelloutothere!”
The performer upturned a mild and vacant face.
“Vhat you say?” he inquired in a softly Teutonic accent.
The Honorable William Linder made urgent gestures, like a
brakeman.
“Go away! Move on!”
The musician smiled reassuringly.
“I got already paid for this,” he explained.
Up went the brass to his lips again. The tonal stairway which leads
up to the chorus of Egypt rose in rasping wailfulness. It culminated
in an excessive, unendurable, brazen shriek—and the Honorable
William Linder experienced upon the undefended rear of his person
the most violent kick of a lifetime not always devoted to the arts of
peace. It projected him clear of the window-sill. His last sensible
vision was the face of the musician, the mouth absurdly hollow and
pursed above the suddenly removed mouthpiece. Then an awning
intercepted the politician’s flight. He passed through this, penetrated
a second and similar stretch of canvas shading the next window
below, and lay placid on his own front steps with three ribs caved in
and a variegated fracture of the collar-bone. By the time the descent
was ended the German musician had tucked his brass under his arm
and was hurrying, in panic, down the street, his ears still ringing
with the concussion which had blown the angry householder from
his own front window. He was intercepted by a running policeman.
“Where was the explosion?” demanded the officer.
“Explosion? I hear a noise in the larch house on the corner,” replied
the musician dully.
The policeman grabbed his arm. “Come along back. You fer a
witness! Come on; you an’ yer horn.”
“It iss not a horn,” explained the German patiently, “it iss a B-flat
trombone.”
Along with several million other readers, Average Jones followed
the Linder “bomb outrage” through the scandalized head-lines of the
local press. The perpetrator, declared the excited journals, had been
skillful. No clue was left. The explosion had taken care of that. The
police (with the characteristic stupidity of a corps of former truck-
drivers and bartenders, decorated with brass buttons and shields
and without further qualification dubbed “detectives”)32 vacillated
from theory to theory. Their putty-and-pasteboard fantasies did not
long survive the Honorable William Linder’s return to consciousness
and coherence. An “inside job,” they had said. The door was locked
and bolted, Mr. Linder declared, and there was no possible place for
an intruder to conceal himself. Clock-work, then.
“How would any human being guess what time to set it for,”
demanded the politician in disgust, “when I never know, myself,
where I’m going to be at any given hour of any given day?”
“Then that Dutch horn-player threw the bomb,” propounded the
head of the “Detective Bureau” ponderously.
“Of course; tossed it right up, three stories, and kept playing his
infernal trombone with the other hand all the time. You ought to be
carrying a hod!”33
 Nevertheless, the police hung tenaciously to the theory that the
musician was involved, chiefly because they had nothing else to
hang to. The explosion had been very localized, the room not
generally wrecked; but the chair which seemed to be the center of
disturbance, and from which the Honorable William Linder had risen
just in time to save his life, was blown to pieces, and a portion of the
floor beneath it was much shattered. The force of the explosion had
been from above the floor downward; not up through the flooring.
As to murderously inclined foes, Mr. Linder disclaimed knowledge of
any. The notion that the trombonist had given a signal he derided as
an “Old Sleuth pipe-dream.”34
As time went on and “clues” came to nothing, the police had no
greater concern than quietly to forget, according to custom, a
problem beyond their limited powers. With the release of the
German musician, who was found to be simple-minded to the verge
of half-wittedness, public interest waned, and the case faded out of
current print.
Average Jones, who was much occupied with a pair of blackmailers
operating through faked photographs, about that time, had almost
forgotten the Linder case, when, one day, a month after the
explosion, Waldemar dropped in at the Astor Court offices. He found
a changed Jones; much thinner and “finer” than when, eight weeks
before, he had embarked on his new career, at the newspaper
owner’s instance. The young man’s color was less pronounced, and
his eyes, though alert and eager, showed rings under them.
“You have found the work interesting, I take it,” remarked the
visitor.
“Ra-ather,” drawled Average Jones appreciatively.
“That was a good initial effort, running down the opium pill mail-
order enterprise.”
 “It was simple enough as soon as I saw the catch-word in the
‘Wanted’ line.”
“Anything is easy to a man who sees,” returned the older man
sententiously. “The open eye of the open mind—that has more to do
with real detective work than all the deduction and induction and
analysis ever devised.”
“It is the detective part that interests me most in the game, but I
haven’t had much of it, yet. You haven’t run across any promising
ads lately, have you?”
Waldemar’s wide, florid brow wrinkled.
“I haven’t thought or dreamed of anything for a month but this
infernal bomb explosion.”
“Oh, the Linder case. You’re personally interested?”
“Politically. It makes Linder’s nomination certain. Persecution.
Attempted assassination. He becomes a near-martyr. I’m almost
ready to believe that he planted a fake bomb himself.”
“And fell out of a third-story window to carry out the idea? That’s
pushing realism rather far, isn’t it?”
Waldemar laughed. “There’s the weakness. Unless we suppose that
he under-reckoned the charge of explosive.”
“They let the musician go, didn’t they?”
“Yes. There was absolutely no proof against him, except that he
was in the street below. Besides, he seemed quite lacking mentally.”
“Mightn’t that have been a sham?”
“Alienists35 of good standing examined him. They reported him just
a shade better than half-witted. He was like a one-ideaed child, his
whole being comprised in his ability and ambition to play his B-flat
trombone.”
“Well, if I needed an accomplice,” said Average Jones thoughtfully,
“I wouldn’t want any better one than a half-witted man. Did he play
well?”
“Atrociously. And if you know what a soul-shattering blare exudes
from a B-flat trombone—” Mr. Waldemar lifted expressive hands.
Within Average Jones’ overstocked mind something stirred at the
repetition of the words “B-flat trombone.” Somewhere they had
attracted his notice in print; and somehow they were connected with
Waldemar. Then from amidst the hundreds of advertisements with
which, in the past weeks, he had crowded his brain, one stood out
clear. It voiced the desire of an unknown gentleman on the near
border of Harlem for the services of a performer upon that semi-
exotic instrument. One among several, it had been cut from the
columns of the Universal, on the evening which had launched him
upon his new enterprise. Average Jones made two steps to a
bookcase, took down a huge scrapbook from an alphabeticized row,
and turned the leaves rapidly.
“Three Hundred East One Hundredth Street,” said he, slamming
the book shut again. “Three Hundred East One Hundredth. You
won’t mind, will you”—to Waldemar—“if I leave you
unceremoniously?”
“Recalled a forgotten engagement?” asked the other, rising.
“Yes. No. I mean I’m going to Harlem to hear some music. Thirty-
fourth’s the nearest station, isn’t it? Thanks. So long.”
Waldemar rubbed his head thoughtfully as the door slammed
behind the speeding Ad-Visor.
“Now, what kind of a tune is he on the track of, I wonder?” he
mused. “I wish it hadn’t struck him until I’d had time to go over the
Linder business with him.”
But while Waldemar rubbed his head in cogitatation and the
Honorable William Linder, in his Brooklyn headquarters, breathed
Another random document with
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brilliant solo instrument it still held its serviceable place in the
orchestra. When in the course of time overtures became
symphonies, it was still from the harpsichord that the conductor,
usually the composer, led the performance of them. Gluck wished to
banish it from the orchestra of the opera house; but, when Haydn
came to London in 1790 and again in 1794 to lead a performance of
his specially composed symphonies, he sat at the instrument which,
more than any other, had assisted at the growth of independent
instrumental music—at the harpsichord, now slowly but surely
withdrawing into the background before the victorious pianoforte.

It is easy to pick flaws in it, now that we can thunder it to silence with
our powerful concert grands. It is natural to smile at its thin and none
too certain sounds. It is difficult to imagine that the hottest soul of a
musician-poet could warm away the chill of it. But what a place it
held, and how inextricably is it woven with the development of nearly
all the music that now seems the freest speech of passion and
imagination! What men gave service to it: Domenico Scarlatti,
François Couperin, and Rameau; great Bach and Handel; the sons
of Bach, some of them more famous once than their father; and the
child Mozart, with a dozen courts at worship of him! The music they
wrote for it has come down to us; we hear it daily in our concert
halls. Few will deny that it gains in beauty and speaks with richer
voice through our pianoforte; but they who wrote it never heard it so;
and we who hear it, hear it not as they. Even when by the efforts of
some devoted student it is brought to performance upon the
instrument which saw its birth, we cannot truly hear it as it sounded
once. We listen, as it were, to an intruder hailing from the past,
whose usurpation of our modern ears we tolerate because we are
curious and because he is winning. With the wigs and powder, the
breeches and slippers, the bows and elegancies, it has faded into
the past. Its sound is dumb and its spirit is gone.

II
The clavichord and the harpsichord were the instruments upon which
music was first shaped for the pianoforte during the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. Looming behind them and quite dominating
them until the last quarter of the seventeenth, until even much later
in Germany, was the organ. Instrumental music had a long road to
travel before either of the two smaller instruments received the
special attention of composers. The organ led this uncertain way,
setting out milestones which mark the successive stages in the
development of the great forms of instrumental music. Later bands of
strings took this leadership away from her. Always the clavichord and
the harpsichord followed submissively in the trail of the organ, or
carried the impedimenta for the strings, until late in the seventeenth
century. Considering the wilderness through which composers had to
make their way, their progress was rapid. In the course of the
seventeenth century they found forms and styles of music quite
unknown when the march began.
 Top: the virginal and the gravicembalo.
Bottom: the clavicord and the harpsichord.
In the year 1600 there was no pure-blooded instrumental music. The
sets of pieces for organ, lute, or groups of instruments which had
appeared up to that time, and such sets had appeared as early as
1502, were almost strict copies of vocal forms, in which the vocal
style was scarcely altered. Frequently they were simply
arrangements of famous madrigals and chansons of the day. The
reason is obvious. For well over a century and a half, the best
energy of musicians had gone into the perfecting of unaccompanied
choral music, into masses and motets for the church, and into
madrigals, the secular counterparts of the motets. Long years of
labor had amassed a truly astonishing technique in writing this sort
of music. The only art of music was the special art of vocal
polyphony. Instruments were denied a style and almost a music of
their own.[1] But improvements in sonority and mechanism brought
instruments into prominence, and the spirit of the Renaissance
stimulated composers to experiment with music for them. This was
the beginning of a new art, fraught with difficulties and problems, to
meet which composers had only the skill acquired in the old.

By far the most serious of these was the problem of form. The new
music was independent of words, and, in order to enjoy freedom
from words of any sort and at the same time to exist and to walk
abroad, it had to become articulate of itself; had, so to speak, to build
a frame or a skeleton out of its proper stuff. It had to be firmly knit
and well balanced.

The music of the masses of Palestrina, woven about a well-known

text, like that of the madrigals and chansons of Arcadelt and
Jannequin, which depended upon popular love-poems, was vague
and formless. Such inner coherence as it had of itself was the result
of continuous and skillful repetition of short phrases or motives in the
course of the various voice-parts. In religious music these motives
were for the most part fragments of the plain-song chant, nearly as
old as the church itself; and masses frequently went by the name of
the plain-song formula out of which they were thus built. Over and
over again these bits of melody appeared, now in one part, now in
another, the voices imitating each other so constantly that the style
has been aptly called the imitative style. It was this style in which the
great organists of the sixteenth and early seventeenth century first
shaped music for the organ. It was the one principle of musical form
upon which they knew how to build.

Thus were constructed the ricercars of the famous Andrea Gabrieli

(d. 1586), Claudio Merulo (d. 1604), and Giovanni Gabrieli (d. 1612),
the great pioneers. The name ricercar is itself significant. It came
from ricercare (rechercher), to seek out over and over again. Such
were the pieces, a constant seeking after the fleeing fragment of a
theme. Older names, originally applied to vocal music, were fuga
and caccia—flight and chase. Always there was the idea of pursuit.
A little motive of a few notes was announced by one part. The other
parts entered one by one upon the hunt of this leader, following, as
best the composer could make them, in its very footsteps.

There was a unity in this singleness of purpose, a very logical

coherence, so long as the leader was not lost sight of. Little counter-
themes might join in the chase and give a spice of variety within the
unity. But unhappily for the musical form of these early works, the
theme which began was run to earth long before the end of the
piece; another took its place and was off on a new trail, again to be
run down and to give way to yet a third leader. Unity and coherence
were lost, the piece ambled on without definite aim or limit. There is,
however, a piece by Giovanni Gabrieli in which the opening theme
and a definite counter-theme are adhered to throughout. This is a
rather brilliant exception, becoming as the century grows older more
and more the rule until, other principles mastered and applied,
composers have built up one of the great forms, the true fugue.
Toward the end of the sixteenth century the name fantasia is applied
to this same incoherent form and in the seventeenth that of capriccio
appears. Later, at the time of Bach, the word ricercar signified a
fugue worked with unusual technical skill.[2]
The ricercar was the most important of the early instrumental forms,
if form it may be called which was at first but a style. The canzona,
another form at first equally favored by composers, was destined to
have but little effect upon the development of keyboard music. There
was no real principle of construction underlying it. It was merely the
instrumental counterpart of the famous French chansons of the day.
These were part-songs divided into several contrasting sections
according to the stanzas of the poems to which they were set. Some
of the sections were in simple chord style, like hymns of the present
day; others in more or less elaborate polyphonic style. The
instrumental canzona followed the same plan. The sections were
irregular in length, in number and in metre; and the piece as a whole
lacked unity and balance. After the middle of the seventeenth
century it was generally abandoned by organists. Other composers,
however, took it up, and by regulating the length and number of the
various sections, by expanding them, and, finally, by bringing each to
a definite close, laid the foundations for the famous Italian sonata da
chiesa, cousin germain to the better known Suite.

Other names appear in the old collections, such as Toccata and

Prelude, which even today have more or less vague meaning and
then were vaguer still. Toccata was at first a general name for any
keyboard music. All instrumental music was originally sonata (from
sonare, to sound), in distinction from cantata (from cantare, to sing);
and from sonata keyboard music was specially distinguished by the
appellation toccata (from toccare, to touch). When a characteristic
keyboard style had at last worked itself free of the old vocal style, the
word toccata signified a piece of music which need have no
particular form but must display the particular brilliance of the new
style.

The Prelude, too, was at first equally free of the limits of form. As the
name plainly tells, it was a short bit of music preparatory to the
greater piece to come. Not long ago it was still the fashion for
concert pianists to preludize before beginning their programs,
running scales and arpeggios over an improvised series of
harmonies. The old preludes were essentially the same, very
seriously limited, of course, by the childish condition of instrumental
technique, and more or less aimless because harmonies were then
undefined and unstable. Toward the middle of the seventeenth
century organists built up definite schemes, if not forms, of
preludizing before the singing of chorales in the Lutheran Church;
but this art was naturally restricted to the organ. Preludes for the
harpsichord and clavichord took on definite form only when the
relatively modern system of major and minor keys had grown up out
of the ruin of the ancient system of ecclesiastical modes.

Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to say that all forms of instrumental

music had to attend the definite shaping and establishment of the
harmonic idea of music. This was a slow process, and nearly all
instrumental music written before 1650, no matter how skillfully the
thematic material is woven, lacks to our ears logical form, because of
the vagueness or the monotony of its harmony. The system of
harmony upon which our great instrumental music rests is so clear
and familiar that it is hard for us to imagine another art of music in
which it did not constitute a groundwork, in the structure of which,
indeed, it held no firm place. Yet in the magnificent vocal music in the
style of which Palestrina has left imperishable models, harmony, as
we understand it today, did not enter. He and his great predecessors
were guided seldom, it is easy to say they were guided not at all, by
the beauties of chord progressions. They did not aim at modulations.
Rather, by the rules of the art of their day, modulation was forbidden
them. No composer might lead his music out of the mode in which it
began, to bewilder his hearer in a vague ecstasy of unrest, later to
soothe him, gently shifting the harmonies back again home. Before
his mind was the ideal of weaving many voice-parts, and to his pen
the skill of countless imitations and independent melodies. The
beauty of consonance after dissonance could not be appreciated by
him, since to him each dissonance was a blemish. His was a music
of flowing concord. Such harmonic discord as was inevitable was so
smoothly prepared, so gently touched, that it now passes all but
unobserved. This was essentially religious music.
Many causes brought about the awakening of musicians to the
beauty of harmony and its expressive power. The most effectual was
the growing opera. The aim of the first writers of opera was the
combination of dramatic recitation and music, from the union of
which they shaped a style of music we now call recitative. The
singing or reciting voice was accompanied by a few scattered chords
upon the harpsichord, these chords serving at first mainly to mark
cadences, later little by little to intensify the emotion of the play. It
was then but a step to dramatic effects of harmony, to harsh,
unprepared discords. The player at the harpsichord, always the
nucleus about which the operatic orchestra grouped itself, began to
appreciate chords as a power in music. The organist, under the
influence of the dramatic style, thought of chords now and then in his
slow-moving ricercars. The modes were broken down. A new system
of scales, our own, grew up, which was adaptable to the new need of
composers, to the sequence and contrast of chords. Harmony grew
into music, became more than themes, than imitation and pursuit,
the balance of its form.

Until music had thus knit itself anew upon harmony, it was
fundamentally unstable. Toccatas, ricercars, canzonas, preludes,
even fugues, all wandered unevenly, without proper aim, until
harmony came to lay the contrast and balance of chords and keys as
the great principle of form. Especially was instrumental music
dependent upon this logical principle, for, as we have noted, music
without words stands in vital need of self-sufficing form, and without
it totters and falls in scattered pieces.

The best skill at knitting themes together was of no avail without

harmony. It left but a texture of music flapping to the caprice of the
wind of invention. Or, to change the figure, composers laid block by
block along the ground; but, without harmony, had not the art to build
them up one upon the other into lasting temples. And so the music of
the Gabrielis, of Merulo, and of many another man from many a wide
corner of Europe lies hidden in the past. It is tentative, not perfect.
And the music of later and perhaps greater men lies similarly hidden.
 III
The construction of instrumental music on the basis of one central
key with excursions or modulations into other keys for the sake of
development and variety began to be understood about the middle of
the seventeenth century. A very noticeable advance in this direction
shows in the music of Girolamo Frescobaldi (1583-1644), one of the
most brilliant organists before the time of Bach. Much of his music
has an archaic sound to our ears. He is by no means wholly free of
the old modal restrictions. But he stands as one of the pioneers in
the relatively new art of organ music—a bold innovator, guided by
the unerring taste of a great artist.

A romantic glory is about his name. As a player he was probably

unmatched in his day, and his fame was widespread. It is said that
when he played in St. Peter’s at Rome, where for many years he
held the position of organist, the vast cathedral was filled with people
come to hear him. One of the great masters of the next generation,
the German Froberger, was granted four years of absence from his
duties at the court of Vienna, that he might go to study with
Frescobaldi in Rome. His compositions were published in several
sets, which included ricercars, toccatas, preludes, canzonas,
capriccios, and so forth. All these, not excepting even the preludes,
are in the contrapuntal style which is the outgrowth of the old vocal
polyphony. But they are greatly enlivened by rapid figures, scales
and arpeggios as well as trills and ornamental devices. Such figures,
being not at all suitable to voices but only to a keyboard instrument,
mark the progress of the keyboard style toward a distinct individuality
if not independence from the ancient past of vocal masses and
motets, an independence which no great music has ever quite
achieved.

All these sets of pieces were written in good faith for the harpsichord
as well as for the organ. But in reality, except in so far as certain
principles of form are valuable to all music, and a few figures of
musical ornamentation are common to all keyboard music,
harpsichord music profits but vicariously from Frescobaldi. His music
is essentially organ music, and the development it marks as
accomplished, and that toward which it points, are proper to the
organ and not to the harpsichord. To the one instrument breadth and
power are fitting, to the other lightness and fleetness. Inasmuch as
the same distinction exists between the organ and the pianoforte at
the present day, with some allowances made for improvements in
the mechanism of the organ and for the great sonority of the
pianoforte, which allowances affect only the degree but not the kind
of differences, Frescobaldi can be said to have influenced the
development of pianoforte music only by what he contributed toward
the solution of very general problems of form and structure.

The same must be said of many other great organists of his and of
later days, such as Zweelinck, Samuel Scheidt, Buxtehude, Bohm,
Pachelbel, and others. It may be noted that after the death of
Frescobaldi the art of organ-playing passed from Italy, the land of its
birth and first considerable growth, to Germany. Here a great line of
virtuosi added more and more to the splendor and dignity of organ
music, perfecting and embellishing style, inventing new forms and
making them firm. They remained loyal to the polyphonic style, partly
because this is almost essentially proper to the organ with its
unlimited power to sustain tone; partly because it is the impressive
and noble style of music most in keeping with the spirit of the church,
from which the organ will apparently never be wholly dissociated.[3]

It cannot be said that this style is in any measure so fitting to the

harpsichord and the clavichord or to the pianoforte. For these, a
markedly different sort of polyphony has been devised. But so long
as organists alone walked in music with the power of assurance—
and they were well in command of the problems of their special art
while other instrumentalists and writers of operas were floundering
about—so long did their influence keep instrumental music in sway.

How, then, did the great organists of the sixteenth and the
seventeenth century affect the growth of pianoforte music? By
establishing certain forms, notably the fugue, which have been
adapted to every kind of serious instrumental music and to the
pianoforte with only less propriety than to the organ; by helping to lay
the harmonic foundation of music which, as we have said, is the
basis for all music down to the present day and is but now being
forsaken; by discovering the effectiveness of certain styles of
ornamentation and runs which are essentially common to all
keyboard instruments. They helped to give music a form made of its
own stuff, and a beauty and permanence which is the result of such
form perfected. In their workshops two of such forms were rough-
hewn which proved of later service to pianoforte music—the
harmonic prelude and the fugue.

We must look elsewhere for the development of other forms, less

perfect perhaps, but no less important in the history of pianoforte
music. Such are the rondo and the variation form. The rondo may be
mentioned here because of its great antiquity. Like the ballade, it
was originally a dance song, really a song with a burden and varying
couplets. No form could be simpler. The burden recurring regularly
gives an impression of unity, which, only in case of too many
recurrences, has the fault of monotony. The varying couplets,
constituting the episodes between the reiterations of the burden or
main theme, offer variety and contrast. Yet, in spite of the merits of
this scheme of musical structure, the form was little used by
composers down to the beginning of the eighteenth century.
Relatively long pieces of music, in which the rondo form could be
used, were generally written in the style of fugues. Furthermore, until
the harmonic art was developed and the contrast of keys
appreciated, the episodes, being restricted by the old modal laws to
the tonality of the main theme, would be in a great measure without
the virtue of contrast.

The variation form, on the other hand, was greatly used,

conspicuously so by a number of writers for the virginal in England,
whose works, surviving in several ancient collections, form a unique
and practically isolated monument in the history of pianoforte music.
These collections have often been described in detail and carefully
analyzed. The most comprehensive is that long known as the Queen
Elizabeth Virginal Book, now called merely the Fitzwilliam Collection,
a beautifully worked manuscript preserved in the Fitzwilliam Museum
at Cambridge. Others are Benjamin Cosyn’s Virginal Book and Will
Foster’s, both of which are at Buckingham Palace; a smaller book,
known as Lady Nevile’s Book, and the Parthenia, famous as the first
collection of virginal music printed in England.

The Parthenia was printed in 1611. But an old manuscript collection,

the Mulliner Collection, contains music that can hardly be later than
1565. The activity of the English composers, therefore, during the
years between 1565 and 1611 produced an extraordinary amount of
music designed expressly for the virginal or harpsichord. Among the
composers three stand out prominently: John Bull, William Byrd, and
Orlando Gibbons; Byrd by reason of his fine artistic sense, Bull by
his instinct for instrumental effect. Indeed, Bull, though a great
organist, was a virtuoso for the harpsichord quite as remarkable in a
limited sphere as Liszt was to be in a much broader one. In much of
his virginal music there is a variety of figuration far more in keeping
with the peculiar nature of the instrument for which it was written
than that which is to be found in the work of his successors of any
land, nearly to the time of Domenico Scarlatti.

Of all forms of musical structure, the most frequently employed in the

works which make up these collections is the variation form. It is to
be understood, of course, that these variations are not the variations
of Bach, of Beethoven, Schumann, and Brahms. These great
masters subjected their chosen themes to the influences of diverse
moods, as it were, from which the themes took on new rhythm, new
form, even new harmony. They were born with a great instrumental
technique to hand, from which to select a thousand devices
wherewith to adorn and color their themes. Byrd, Bull, and Gibbons,
for all their conspicuous genius, could not expand to great proportion
the art of writing for domestic keyboard instruments. It was still in a
weak infancy. Nor was the emotional power of music at all
appreciated at that time, nor the treatment of the same theme as the
expression of various emotions in turn likely to occur to the mind of
the most gifted of musicians.
The variation form, then, was merely a means to spin out a piece of
considerable length, which should yet have consistency and
coherence. The theme itself was scarcely if at all altered in its
various repetitions, but went on over and over again, while the
composer added above it an ever more complicated or a more
animated counterpoint. The counterpoint was for the most part
conjunct; that is to say, that it progressed by short steps, not by
skips. Scales are therefore far more frequent than arpeggios. The
shade of the old vocal art is deep even over these composers. John
Bull alone is, as we have said, at times astonishingly modern. His
brilliant imagination devised arpeggio figures which today have by no
means lost their effectiveness, and he could split up the theme itself
into a series of lively, skipping figures.

Any theme, from the ancient plain-song or from the treasure of folk-
music, was suitable to serve as a ‘ground’ to these variations, or
divisions, as they were called. One comes across delightful old
dance-tunes and songs popular in that day. These in themselves are
full of the charm of English melody, but when harnessed, as it were,
to the slow-moving counterpoint of the variation style, with its archaic
harmony and lifeless rhythm, they are robbed of their spirit and their
life. We have saved to us again a dead music.

Most lifeless of all, and almost laughably pompous in their rigor, are
the variations on the first six notes of the scale, the so-called
Fantasias on ut re mi fa sol la. Every composer tried a hand at this
sort of composition. The six notes usually marched up and down the
scale, with no intermission. A great deal of modulation was
attempted. Sometimes the formula was gone through upon the
successive notes of the scale. It was set upon its way in various
rhythms, sometimes in long, steady notes, again in rapid notes, yet
again in dotted rhythms. At the best the result was a display of some
cleverness on the part of the composer, a bit of daring in chromatic
alterations, some novelty in combinations of rhythms. It can hardly
be supposed that they expressed any æsthetic aspiration. They
stand in relation to the development of pianoforte music only as
technical exercises of a sort.
The same may be said in some instances of the variations upon
songs, but is not in the main true. Here is distinctly a groping toward
beauty, largely in the dark, to be sure, but tending, on the one hand,
toward the development of a fitness of style and, on the other, of a
broad and varied form, the noble possibilities of which have become
manifest through the genius of all the great instrumental composers
since the time of Bach.

The influence of these gifted Englishmen and their extraordinary

work upon the development of harpsichord music in general was
probably relatively slight. A piece by Sweelinck, the famous Dutch
organist, is in the Fitzwilliam collection; a fact which points to the
intimacy between Holland and England in matters musical. The
presence of famous English organists in Holland throughout the first
half of the seventeenth century points in the same direction. But the
course of harpsichord music in Holland and Germany was, down to
the time of Emanuel Bach, guided by organ music. Inasmuch as
perhaps the most remarkable feature of this English virginal music is
the occasional flashes of instrumental skill and of intuition for
harpsichordal effects from the pen of John Bull, and as these stirred
to no emulation in Germany, the effect of the English virginal music
as such upon the history of the special art may be set down as
practically negligible. The famous collections endure, quite like
Purcell’s music a whole century later, as an isolated monument of a
sudden national development.

The toccata, prelude, fugue, and variations are the results of the
labor of musicians during the sixteenth and the first half of the
seventeenth centuries to invent and improve forms of music which,
as independent compositions, might impress the hearer with their
organic unity, so to speak, and serve as dignified expression of their
own skill and their own ideals of beauty. Of these the prelude alone,
with its basis of chord sequences, is wholly a product of the new
time. The others rest heavily upon the vocal skill of the past. None of
them, however, is perfect. Skill in laying a harmonic groundwork of
wide proportions is still to be acquired; and, so far as the harpsichord
and clavichord are concerned, a sense for instrumental style and
special instrumental effects has to be cultivated much further. We
shall have to wait another half-century before that sense has
become keen enough to influence development of harpsichord
music.

IV
Meanwhile the growth and relative perfection of another form is to be
observed, namely, the suite.[4] This is a conventional group of four
short pieces in dance forms and rhythms. A great amount of dance
music had been published for the lute in Italy as early as 1502. Of
the twenty-one pieces published in the Parthenia more than a
hundred years later, five were pavans and ten were galliards. In all
these early dance pieces the rhythm is more or less disguised under
a heavy polyphonic style; so we may presume that they were not
intended to be played in the ballroom, but rather that the short and
symmetrical forms of good dance music were regarded by
composers as serviceable molds into which to cast their musical
inspirations. Indeed, they must have made a strong appeal to
composers at a time when they were baffled in their instrumental
music by ignorance of the elementary principles of musical structure.

The early Italian lute collections already reveal a tendency on the

part of composers to group at least two of these dances together.
The two chosen are the pavan and the galliard, the one a slow and
stately dance in double time, the other a livelier dance in triple time.
Often, it is true, these two are not grouped together in the printed
collections; but it seems likely that the lutenists of the sixteenth
century were fond of such a selection in performance. In 1597
Thomas Morley, an English musician, published in the form of
dialogues his ‘Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke.’ In
this he treated of dance music at some length, and made special
note of the pleasing effect to be got by alternating pavans and
galliards.
This group of two pieces is the nucleus about which the suite
developed during the first half of the seventeenth century. The
several steps in its growth are rather obscure; and, as they are to be
observed more in music for groups of strings than in harpsichord
music, it will serve us merely to mention them. The pavan and the
galliard gave way early to the allemande and the courante. The
origin of the former is doubtful. There were two kinds of courantes—
one evidently native to France, the other to Italy. Both were in triple
time, but were in many other ways clearly differentiated. To the
allemande and courante was later added a slow dance from Spain—
the sarabande; and before the middle of the century the gigue, or
giga, from Italy, made secure its place as the last of the standard
group of four. These four pieces so combined were invariably in the
same key. Apart from this they had no relationship.[5] The tie which
held them together was wholly one of convention.

Such is the stereotype of the suite when it becomes firmly

established in music for the harpsichord, as we find it in the works of
the German J. J. Froberger. Froberger died in 1667, but his suites for
harpsichord, twenty-eight in all, were written earlier; some in 1649,
others in 1656, according to autograph copies. He had been a
wanderer over the face of Europe. After studying with Frescobaldi in
Rome he had spent some years in Paris, where he had come into
contact with French composers for the harpsichord, whose work we
shall discuss later on. Thence he had gone to London, where his skill
in playing the organ and harpsichord seems to have lifted him from
the mean position of pumping air into the organ at Westminster (he
had been robbed on his journey and had reached London friendless
and poverty-stricken) to that of court favorite. Later he returned to
Europe, evidently pursued by ill luck, and he died at Héricourt, near
Montbelliard, at the home of Sibylla, Duchess of Würtemberg, a pupil
who had offered him refuge.

By far the majority of his suites for the harpsichord, and be it noted
they are for harpsichord and not for organ, are in the orthodox order
of Allemande, Courante, Sarabande, and Gigue. The dances are all
constructed upon the same plan, a plan at the basis of which the
new idea of harmony has at last been solidly established. Each piece
is divided neatly into two sections of about equal length, each of
which is repeated. The harmonic groundwork is simple and clear.
The dance opens in the tonic key. If the piece is major it modulates
to the dominant, if minor to the relative major; and in that key the first
section ends. This section having been repeated, the second section
begins in the key in which the first section left off, and modulates
back again, usually through one or two keys, to end in the tonic. The
whole makes a compact little piece, very neatly balanced. It would
seem to be quite sealed in perfection and to contain no possibilities
of new growth; but the short passages of free modulation through
which the second section pursues its way from dominant or relative
major back to tonic contained germs of harmonic unrest which were
to swell the whole to proportions undreamed of.

The change from tonic to dominant and back, with the few timid
modulations in the second section, offered practically all the contrast
and variety there was within the limits of a single piece. Except in the
sarabande, the musical texture was woven in a flowing style. The
effect is one of constant motion. A figure, not a theme,
predominated. The opening figure, it is true, was modified, often
gave way to quite a different figure in the dominant key; but the style
remained always the same, and there was but the slightest
suggestion of contrast in the way one figure glided into another.

In the suite as a whole, the uniformity of key which ruled over all four
movements precluded in the main all contrast but the contrast of
rhythm. Yet a few peculiarities of style became associated with each
of the dances and thus gave more than rhythmical variety to the
whole. The counterpoint of the allemande, for example, was more
open and more dignified, so to speak, than that of the fleet, sparkling
Italian courante. In the French courante a counterpoint of dotted
quarters and eighths prevailed, and a shifting between 6/4 and 3/2
rhythm stamped the movement with a rhythmic complexity not at all
present in the other movements. The second section of the gigue
was almost invariably built upon an inversion of the figures of the first
section, and the solid chord style of the sarabande not only
contrasted radically with the style of allemande, courante, and gigue,
but, moreover, beguiled composers into the expression of personal
emotion now noble, now tender, which put sarabandes in general in
a class by themselves amid the music of that time.

Though the normal suite was constituted of these four dances in the
order we have named, other dances came to find a place therein. Of
these the favorites were gavottes, minuets, bourrées, loures,
passepieds, and others; and they were inserted in any variety or
sequence between the sarabande and the gigue. Sometimes in
place of extra dances, or among them, is to be found an air or aria,
the salient quality of which is not rhythm, but melody, usually highly
ornamented in the style made universally welcome by the Italian
opera. More rarely the air was simple and was followed by several
variations. The best known of these airs and variations which were
incorporated into suites is probably Handel’s famous set upon a
melody, not his own, which has long gone by the name of ‘The
Harmonious Blacksmith.’ By the beginning of the eighteenth century
many composers were accustomed to begin their suites with a
prelude, usually in harmonic style.

In the music of the great French lutenists and clavecinists of the

seventeenth century the suite never crystallized into a stereotyped
sequence. The principle of setting together several short pieces in
the same key was none the less clearly at work, though nothing but
the fancy of the composer seems to have limited the number of
pieces which might be so united. On the other hand, the idea of
emphasizing rhythm as the chief element of contrast within the suite
was often secondary to the idea of contrasting mood. How much of
this contrast of mood was actually effective it is hard to say, but the
great number of little pieces composed either for lute or clavecin in
France of the seventeenth century, were given picturesque or
fanciful names by their composers.

This custom was firmly established by the great lutenist, Denis

Gaultier, whose collection of pieces, La rhétorique des dieux,
comprises some of the most exquisite and most beautifully worked
music of the century. The pieces in the collection are grouped
together by modes; but the modes by this time have become keys,
and differ from each other in little except pitch. The greater part of
the pieces are given names, borrowed for the most part from Greek
mythology. Phaèton foudroyé, and Juno, ou la jalouse are indicative
of the general tone of them.

Close upon Gaultier’s pieces for lute came the harpsichord pieces of
Jacques Champion, son of a family of organists, who took upon
himself the name of Chambonnières. Two books of his pieces were
published in 1670. Here again the pieces are grouped in keys, in,
however, no definite number; and, though most have still only dance
names to distinguish them, many are labelled with a title.

In spite of these titles, the tendency to call upon an external idea to

aid in the construction of a piece of music is not evident in this early
harpsichord music. There is little attempt at picture drawing in music.
The names are at the most suggestive of a mood, indicative of the
humor which in the composer gave birth to the music, hints to the
listener upon the humor in which he was to take it. The structure of
the music is independent of the titles, and is of a piece with the
structure of the dance tunes which make up the German suite. The
influence of this music was not important upon the growth of form,
but upon the molding and refinement of style.

To be sure, a tendency toward realistic music crops out from time to

time all through the seventeenth century. The twitter of birds no less
than the roar of battle was attempted by many a composer, resulting,
in the case of the latter especially, in hardly more than laughably
childish imitations. Further than this composers did not often go until,
just before Bach entered upon his professional career, J. F. Kuhnau,
of Leipzig, published his extraordinary Biblical sonatas. Besides
these, the ‘Rhetoric of Gods,’ the ‘Hundred Varieties of Musical
Fruit,’ the ‘jealous ladies’ and the ‘rare ladies,’ even the battles and
the gossips, all of which have been imitated in music, appear
conventional and absolute. Here is narrative in music and a
flimsiness of structure which is meaningless without a program.