hundred and one special gifts of tone and technic, gifts often alluded
to by his admiring colleagues? For Ysaye is the greatest exponent of
that wonderful Belgian school of violin playing which is rooted in his
teachers Vieuxtemps and Wieniawski, and which as Ysaye himself says,
"during a period covering seventy years reigned supreme at the
_Conservatoire_ in Paris in the persons of Massart, Remi, Marsick, and
others of its great interpreters."

What most impresses one who meets Ysaye and talks with him for the
first time is the mental breadth and vision of the man; his kindness and
amiability; his utter lack of small vanity. When the writer first called
on him in New York with a note of introductio from his friend and
admirer Adolfo Betti, and later at Scarsdale where, in company with his
friend Thibaud, he was dividing his time between music and tennis, Ysaye
made him entirely at home, and willingly talked of his art and its
ideals. In reply to some questions anent his own study years, he said:

"Strange to say, my father was my very first teacher--it is not often
the case. I studied with him until I went to the Liège Conservatory in
1867, where I won a second prize, sharing it with Ovide Musin, for
playing Viotti's 22d Concerto. Then I had lessons from Wieniawski in
Brussels and studied two years with Vieuxtemps in Paris. Vieuxtemps was
a paralytic when I came to him; yet a wonderful teacher, though he could
no longer play. And I was already a concertizing artist when I met him.
He was a very great man, the grandeur of whose tradition lives in the
whole 'romantic school' of violin playing. Look at his seven
concertos--of course they are written with an eye to effect, from the
virtuoso's standpoint, yet how firmly and solidly they are built up!
How interesting is their working-out: and the orchestral score is far
more than a mere accompaniment. As regards virtuose effect only