international tribunal would refuse to admit any one of them to an
equality with Sophocles, Shakspere, and Molière, the greatest of the
Greeks, the greatest of the English, the greatest of the French, the
three races that have excelled in the arts of the theater.

Even tho no German can sustain a claim to supremacy in the drama, it is
to the Germans that the consent of the whole world now awards the
incontestable supremacy in the sister art of music. To the race that
gave birth to Bach and Beethoven, to Mozart and Schubert and Wagner, it
matters little whether the chiefs of music number two only, or whether
they may be so many as four or five. Indeed, it may be admitted at once
that the list would need to be widely extended before it would include
the name of any composer who was not a scion of the Teutonic stock.

There is a certain significance, also, in the probability that the
outsider who could best justify a claim for inclusion would be a Russian
rather than an Italian or a Frenchman. And this estimate, it may be well
to confess, is not personal to the present writer, who has no skill in
music and scant acquaintance with its intricacies; it is the outcome of
a disinterested endeavor to discover the consensus of expert opinion,
free from any racial bias.

But the northern races who excel in the art of the musician seem to be
inferior to the southern in the arts of the painter and of the
sculptor,--more particularly in the latter. The supreme sculptors are
apparently two or three: Phidias and Michelangelo, beyond all question,
and with them probably we ought also to place Donatello. Of Praxiteles
we know too little. Of most other artists in marble and in bronze we
know too much, however fine their occasional achievements,--Verrocchio's
'Colleoni,' for example. They do not sustain themselves at the lofty