SOURCE: "Modern Musical Fiction," in Interpreters and Interpretations, Alfred A. Knopf, 1917, pp. 299-353.

In the following essay, Van Vechten comments on novels that have musical themes, giving particular consideration to Gertrude Atherton's Tower of Ivory, Bernard Shaw's Love among the Artists, and Henry Handel Richardson's Maurice Guest.

I

It has been the fashion for musicians to sneer at the attempts of literary men and women to celebrate their fellow-craftsmen. Novels which float in a tonal atmosphere frequently do contain a large percentage of errors, but is this not as true of novels which deal with electrical engineers, book-binders, painters, politicians, or clowns of the circus? Perhaps not quite. To learn the technical phraseology, the bibliography, the iconography, the history, the chronology of music, a man must devote a lifetime to its study. Happy the musical pedant who does not make blunders now and again. They cannot be avoided...