addressed—­ “Liszt!  Liszt—­c’est le seul!” was the reply.  This is the spirit in which great artists should be judged.  It is oftener narrowness of sympathy than acuteness of discrimination which makes people exalt one artist and disparage another who differs from him.  In the wide realm of art there are to be found many kinds of excellence; one man cannot possess them all and in the highest degree.  Some of these excellences are indeed irreconcilable and exclude each other; most of them can only be combined by a compromise.  Hence, of two artists who differ from each other, one is not necessarily superior to the other; and he who is the greater on the whole may in some respects be inferior to the lesser.  Perhaps the reader will say that these are truisms.  To be sure they are.  And yet if he considers only the judgments which are every day pronounced, he may easily be led to believe that these truisms are most recondite truths now for the first time revealed.  When Liszt after his first return from Switzerland did not find Thalberg himself, he tried to satisfy his curiosity by a careful examination of that pianist’s compositions.  The conclusions he came to be set forth in a criticism of Thalberg’s Grande Fantaisie, Op. 22, and the Caprices, Op. 15 and 19, which in 1837 made its appearance in the Gazette musicale, accompanied by an editorial foot-note expressing dissent.  I called Liszt’s article a criticism, but “lampoon” or “libel” would have been a more appropriate designation.  In the introductory part Liszt sneers at Thalberg’s title of “Pianist to His Majesty the Emperor of Austria,” and alludes to his rival’s distant (i.e., illegitimate) relationship to a noble family, ascribing his success to a great extent to these two circumstances.  The personalities and abusiveness of the criticism remind one somewhat of the manner in which the scholars of earlier centuries, more especially of the sixteenth and seventeenth, dealt critically with each other.  Liszt declares that love of truth, not jealousy, urged him to write; but he deceived himself.  Nor did his special knowledge and experience as a musician and virtuoso qualify him, as he pretended, above others for the task he had undertaken; he forgot that no man can be a good judge in his own cause.  No wonder, therefore, that Fetis, enraged at this unprovoked attack of one artist on a brother-artist, took up his pen in defence of the injured party.  Unfortunately, his retort was a lengthy and pedantic dissertation, which along with some true statements contained many questionable, not to say silly, ones.  In nothing, however, was he so far off the mark as in his comparative estimate of Liszt and Thalberg.  The sentences in which he sums up the whole of his reasoning show this clearly:  “You are the pre-eminent man of the school which is effete and which has nothing more to do, but you are not the man of a new school!  Thalberg is this man—­herein lies the whole difference between you two.”  Who can help