The Monster (Deems Taylor)

 

He was an undersized little man, with a head too big for his body--a sickly little man. His nerves were bad. He had skin trouble. It was agony for him to wear anything next to his skin coarser than silk. And he had delusions of grandeur.

He was a monster of conceit. Never for one minute did he look at the world or at people, except in relation to himself. He was not only the most important person in the world, to himself; in his own eyes he was the only person who existed. He believed himself to be one of the greatest thinkers, and one of the greatest composers. To hear him talk, he was Shakespeare, and Beethoven, and Plato, rolled into one. And you would have had no difficulty in hearing him talk. He was n f the most exhausting conversationalists that ever lived. An evening with him was an evening spent in listening to a monologue. Sometimes he was brilliant; sometimes he was maddeningly tiresome. But whether he was being brilliant or dull, he had one sole topic of conversation: himself-what he thought and what he did.

He had a mania for being in the right. The slightest hint of disagreenment, from anyone, on the most trivial point, was enough to set him off on a harangue that might last for hours, in which he proved himself right in so many ways, and with such exhausting volubility, that in the end his hearer, stunned and deafened, would agree with him, for the sake of peace.

It never occureed to him that he and his doings were not of the most intense and fascinating interest to anyone with whom he came in contact. he had theories about almost any subject under the sun, including vegetarianism, the drama, politics, and music; and in support of these theories he wrote pamphlets, letters, books... thousands upon thousands of words, hundreds and hundreds of pages. he not only wrote these things, and published them--usually at sombody's else's expense--but he would sit and read them aloud, for hours, to his friends and his family.

he wrote operas; and no sooner did he have the synopsis of story, but he would invite--or rather summon--a crowd of his friends to his house and read it to them: not for criticism; for applause. When the complete poem was written, the friends had to come again, and hear that read aloud. Then he would publish the poems, sometimes years before the music that went with it was written. he played the piano like a composer, in the worst sense of what that implies, and he would sit down at the piano before parties that included some of the finest pianists of his time, and play for them, by the hour, his own music, needless to say. He had a composer's voice. And he would invite eminent vocalists to his house and sing them his operas, taking all the parts.

He had the emotional stability of a six-year old child. When he felt out of sorts, he would rave and stamp, or sink into suicidal gloom and talk darkly of going to the East to end his days as a Buddhist monk. Ten minutes later, when something pleased him, he would rush out of doors and run around the garden, or jump up and down on the sofa, or stand on his head. He could be grief-stricken over the death of a pet dog, and he could be callous and heartless, to a degree that would have made a Roman emperor shudder.

He was almost innocent of any sense of responsibility. Not only did he seem incapable of suporting himself, but it never occured to him that he was under any obligation to do so. He was convinced that the world owed him a living. In suport of this belif, he borrowed money from everybody who was good for a loan-men, women, friends, or strangers. he wrote begging letters by the score, sometimes groveling without shame, in others loftily offering his intended benefactor the privilege of contributing to his support, and being mortally offended if the recipient declined the honor. i have found no record of his ever paying or repaying money to anyone who did not have a legal claim upon it.

What money he could lay his hands on he spent like an Indian rajah. The mere prospect of a performance of one of his operas was enough to set him to running up bills amounting to ten times the amount of his prospective royalties.