Evening Republican, Volume 18, Number 17, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 20 January 1914 — GRIERSON A WONDER [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

GRIERSON A WONDER

Doesn’t Know a Note of Music Yet is a Musician. ** Has Played Before Crowned Heads— Raised In Illinois, as a -Lad, He Amazed Salons of Second Empire With Talent New York—The Btory of Francis Grierson’s life, the essayist and pianist who came here from London is in* arresting.. °Mr. Grierson was a lad of about ten years of age when he trudged into Alton, 111., on a memorable October day with grownups of his family to hear the great Llncoln-Douglas debate —the “memorable day on which the ‘irrepressible conflict’ predicted by Seward actually began,” as Mr. Grierson puts it in bis “The Valley of Shadows” With these vital statistics at hand you'll have to figure out his ige yourself. The last time he was In America was twenty-one years ago. His first visit here, and it was a lengthy one, began when he was an Infant in arms. Six months after his birth in England his father, a cousin of Gen. Grierson, who fought under Grant, brought him to America. The father took a farm in the Mississippi valley, became an ‘American citizen and simultaneously raised little Francis and produce on the farm until shortly before the Civil war. The future musician and writer was a youngster when the war began. Promptly he got a job of a more or less exciting character as messenger boy for Gen. Fremont, memories of which he was to recount years after in his "Valley of Shadows" Already too he had begun to show the first signs of an uncanny faculty for improvising on the piano, although, as he says of his very early boyhood days on the farm “we-didn’t have pianos on the prairies in the ’sos.” He didn’t know a note of music then. He didn’t when later he played for Auber, for Wagner and others of -tSe-great that included royalty. And he can’t read a note of music today. He hasn’t even a piano In his London apartments and doesn’t own one. He never practices. The Illinois farmer boy's “city” experience consisted only of a time spent In St. Louis and in a Chicago that antedated Mrs. O’Leary’s cow when the wanderlust struck him. In the last year of the last empire the young man from Illinois, now in his 20s, and, to judge from Geslin’s portrait, somewhat of an etherealized Poe In that day, he was invited to a great French lady’s salon to play. That was the day Prudhomme, then eighty years old, Auber and the other

notables gathered with smiles to hear the American prodigy—“freak” better describes the Frenchmen’s opinion of him, formed on hearsay. “Don’t study,” cried Auber, after he had expressed his amazement and admiration. “Perhaps if you study music here you will lose, at least spoil, your strange gift.” And Prudhomme, then perhaps the most profound scholar of France, came over to him to say, “You have placed me on the threshold of the other world.” A year or two In and about Paris Caused his fame to spread in limited but important circles on the continent. A recital In St. Petersburg resulted In an Invitation to play at the Gatschina palace, not only to play but to be the guest of royalty. From Russia he went to the Austrian Tyrol and in a little inn there he played on invitation for a royal group that Included representatives of Austria, Denmark, Germany and England. He had been playing for years In the capitals of Europe when one day he dropped hls salon recitals. He would be a writer. Although he had left the United States knowing only the English language he sat down—he was forty years old now—and wrote a volume of essays In French. Ten years later his first book of essays in English, “Modern Mysticism,” brought him a 'message, from Maurice Maeterlinck that ran: “This volume is full of thoughts and meditations of the very highest order. You have deliciously ahd profoundly surprised me—you have said so many things which I should like to have written. »ys?lf.”

Francis Grierson.