Page:Anecdotes of Great Musicians.djvu/68

56 arrival there illustrates the difficulty which foreigners have in conquering the English language. One evening, when the cloth had been removed and the hostess had asked him what fruit he preferred, he hastily referred to the knowledge of English he had secured by a study of the dictionary, and politely answered that he wished to be helped to "some sneers."

This answer produced a burst of laughter on the part of the guests, who could not contain their merriment at the dilemma in which the musician's ignorance of the language had placed him. Moscheles hastened to explain. It seemed that on searching for English sentences he had learned that the idiom "not to care a fig" was synonymous with the verb "to sneer," and so supposed that in asking for "sneers" he had the right word for fig. Turn about is fair play; we must have our laugh at the foreigners, as they have so much fun at our expense.  

A musical artist without any jealous feeling toward his brother musicians would be almost as rare as one who does not think himself perfect in his chosen art. But when jealousy enters a family, one might expect it to meet the fate of the "house divided against itself." An extreme case of this kind may be noted in a tenor named Ansari and his wife, who lived about a hundred years ago. These kindred spirits were so enraged, if perchance one secured more applause than the other, that they were known to employ men to hiss each other off the stage!  

We hate to be convinced that our preconceived opinions and hastily uttered statements are not in accord with the facts of the case. Musicians and musical critics (the two terms are not always synonymous) are like the