The third compartment is entitled "Drawing-room music of the Future." Here five performers are laboring at and around the piano-forte, the top of which has been taken off. They are all men; tough-brained-looking fellows: one a violinist, one a violoncellist; two are at the key-board, and one stands music in hand and mouth wide open. They are toiling as if at day's work by the piece; and all are singing. They are engaged upon "Twenty-four consecutive interdependent Logarithmic studies for Violin and Violoncello, with Double Differential and Integral accompaniment for the Piano-forte, supplemented by Unisonal Descriptive and Corroborative vocal exposition in five modern languages." They have evidently got well into harness, and have dragged their hearers some distance over their rugged road, which is a "hard road to travel." The mass of the assembled company are rushing madly for the door. On an ottoman in the foreground sit five victims, four young ladies and a bald-headed old gentleman, who are all fast asleep. At one side a determined fellow sits with his elbows on his knees grasping his head with both hands, resolved to endure unto the end. Not even in the faces of the performers is there the slightest manifestation of the soothing, the elevating, or even the pleasurably exciting influence which belongs peculiarly to music. With dogged determination they are working out a knotty intellectual problem. They do not exhibit even the tickled vanity of musical virtuosity; they are there--to use a cant phrase of musical criticism--to "interpret" what the composer has with infinite toil and trouble put upon paper; and very tough work they find it; somewhat like reading mathematics written in the Basque language. And their souls are unmoved. The musical sounds go through their ears straight to their brains, leaving their hearts untouched. They are engaged in an intellectual process.
Of these designs, the last two, although they are laughable caricatures, express with very little exaggeration (allowing for the notes made visible in the second) the character, the quality, and the effect of certain schools of musical composition. The first is not a caricature, as any one will see; but although it is quite the contrary, it is not on the other hand idealized. It merely represents with skilful touch and felicitous arrangement what might have actually occurred and what doubtless did many times occur in drawing-rooms at the end of the last century and the first years of this; indeed, what might happen and even does happen now. There has been a change in costume and in manners; but there is none in the effect upon musical souls of a melody by Mozart.