give and receive so much more than was possible.

Most discouraging of all was the struggle for recognition as a composer. Between lessons and playing for chapel, Charles found time to turn out art songs and piano pieces, to rewrite and polish them into jewels of writing. Among the poetry of William Sharp he found a verse about The White Peacock, which inspired one of his finest pieces, and was matched with other poems to make a set of Roman Sketches. Poems by Fiona McCleod inspired songs, and Griffes was delighted to discover that this fictitious lady was actually the same curious Irish poet, under a nomme de plume. Oriental subjects intrigued the composer, and he set Chinese and Japanese poems, and added the study of Chinese to his list of languages. From small pieces he went on to orchestra works, producing a Poem for Flute and Orchestra, and his most popular piece, "The Pleasure Dome of Kublai Khan," after Coleridge.

It was one thing to compose, another to get his work published and performed. Gradually both things were accomplished, but royalties on music sales came to only a pittance each year; and though recognition gradually came with ever increasing performance, no money came with it. Critical acclaim was slowly won, and in the last year before his death, performances of all his works were heard from coast to coast in avant garde circles and concert halls. The White Peacock was danced by a Japanese dancer, and Ito became a firm friend of the composer, taking him along on his tours. Friends made in the world of music and the theatre in New York brightened the dreary days of musiccopying and the endless round of visits to publishers and performers.

One day Charles turned up at a friend's with a patch over one eye, exhausted with hours of music copying.

As the year 1919 drew to a close his friends were shocked at his unhealthy look. In December he took to his bed with pneumonia, never to leave it. After three painful months he died on Easter Monday, 1920. Like Mozart, who died of neglect and poverty in a Vienna that rang with his music, Charles Griffes died on the threshold of fame, worn out with the bitter battle for existence.

It is a joy to record the fact that Griffes' last years were brightened with a rewarding, if odd, friendship. On one of his nocturnal visits to the city, Charles, in his loneliness, struck up an acquaintance with a policeman. Soon Dan and Charles were boon companions. The officer proudly introduced his musician friend to his family, showed him around his beat, treated him to beer and coffee at allnight bistros. Charles on his part idealized the policeman, discussed philosophy and art with him, took him to concerts. When Charles occupied a friend's apartment in the city. one summer, Dan came in, after his rounds, for snacks. Together they rode to the end of the car lines and back, Charles dreaming of the Gruenewald and Konrad.

It was to Dan that Griffes turned in the emotional crises that punctuated the years, when, like the older composer, Tchaikowsky, he was plunged into "sensation Z." Repression and sublimation in the lives of such passionate artists as these are but fictions dreamed up by respectable biographers for proper readers. Griffes' biographer is far is far more discerning. "When tortured so that neither music nor literature nor anything in nature or art would serve to deliver him, then, 'After all, that is the most powerful remedy,' Griffes wrote.”

*Maisel, Edward H., Charles T. Griffes, The Life of an American Composer, New York; Alfred A. Knopf, 1943.

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