Old Fogy

Excerpt from Old Fogy: His Musical Opinions and Grotesques My friend the publisher has asked me to tell you what I know about Old Fogy, whose letters aroused much curiosity and comment when they appeared from time to time in the columns of The Etude. I confess I do this rather unwillingly. When I attempted to assemble my memories of the eccentric and irascible musician I found that, despite his enormous volubility and surface-frankness, the old gentleman seldom allowed us more than a peep at his personality. His was the expansive temperament, or, to employ a modem phrase, the dynamic temperament. Antiquated as were his modes of thought, he would bewilder you with an excursion into latter-day literature, and like a rift of light in a fogbank you then caught a gleam of an entirely different mentality. One day I found him reading a book by the French writer Huysmans, dealing with new art. And he confessed to me that he admired Hauptmann's Hannele, though he despised the same dramatist's Weavers. The truth is that no human being is made all of a piece; we are, mentally at least, more of a mosaic than we believe. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.