"He was like Watteau in more than that. Watteau took the elegancies and fripperies of the corrupt French court and fixed them in art immortal, as if the moment had been arrested and held in actual motion. Foster took the curious and melancholy spectacle of African slavery at its height, superimposed by the most elegant and picturesque social manners this country has known, at the moment the institution was at its zenith. He saw the glamor, the humor, the tragedy, the contrasts, the emotional depths--that lay unplumbed beneath it all. He fixed it there for all time, for all hearts and minds everywhere. His songs are not only the pictorial canvas of that time, they are the emotional history of the times. It was done by a boy who was not prophet enough to foresee the end, or philosopher enough to demonstrate the conditions, but who was born with the intuition to feel it all and set it forth deeply and truly from every aspect.
"While Foster wrote many comic songs there is ever in them something of the melancholy undercurrent that has been detected under the laces and arabesques of Chopin's nominally frivolous dances. Foster's ballad form was extremely attenuated, but the melodic content filled it so completely that it seems to strain at the bounds and must be repeated and repeated to furnish full gratification to the ear. His form when compared with the modern ballad's amplitude seems like a Tanagra figurine beside a Michelangelo statue--but the figurine is as fine in its scope as the statue is in the greater.
"I hope you will think Foster over and revise him 'upward.'"
All of us need to be admonished to speak no evil of the dead. I am trying in Looking Backward to square the adjuration with the truth. Perhaps I should speak only of that which is known directly to myself. It costs me nothing to accept this statement of Mr. Allison and to incorporate it as an essential part of the record as far as it relates to the most famous and in his day the most beloved of American song writers.
Once at a Grand Army encampment General Sherman and I were seated together on the platform when the band began to play Marching Through Georgia, when the general said rather impatiently: "I wish I had a dollar for every time I have had to listen to that blasted tune."