It is in the staging and acting, the whole performance and management, of such typical plays of Shakespeare as "Hamlet," "Romeo and Juliet," and "Twelfth Night" that Mr. Sothern and Miss Marlowe have shown the whole extent of their powers, and have read us the lesson we most needed. The mission of these two guests has been to show us what we have lost on our stage and what we have forgotten in our Shakespeare. And first of all I would note the extraordinary novelty and life which they give to each play as a whole by their way of setting it in action. I have always felt that a play of Shakespeare, seen on the stage, should give one the same kind of impression as when one is assisting at "a solemn music." The rhythm of Shakespeare's art is not fundamentally different from that of Beethoven, and "Romeo and Juliet" is a suite, "Hamlet" a symphony. To act either of these plays with whatever qualities of another kind, and to fail in producing this musical rhythm from beginning to end, is to fail in the very foundation. Here the music was unflawed; there were no digressions, no eccentricities, no sacrifice to the actor. This astonishing thing occurred: that a play was presented for its own sake, with reverence, not with ostentation; for Shakespeare's sake, not for the actor-manager's.

And from this intelligent, unostentatious way of giving Shakespeare there come to us, naturally, many lessons. Until I saw this performance of "Romeo and Juliet" I thought there was rhetoric in the play, as well as the natural poetry of drama. But I see that it only needs to be acted with genius and intelligence, and the poetry consumes the rhetoric. I never knew before that this play was so near to life, or that every beauty in it could be made so inevitably human. And this is because no one else has rendered, with so deep a truth, with so beautiful a fidelity, all that is passionate and desperate and an ecstatic agony in this tragic love which glorifies and destroys Juliet. The decorative Juliet of the stage we know, the lovely picture, the ingenue, the prattler of pretty phrases; but this mysterious, tragic child, whom love has made wise in making her a woman, is unknown to us outside Shakespeare, and perhaps even there. Mr. Sothern's Romeo has an exquisite passion, young and extravagant as a lover's, and is alive. But Miss Marlowe is not only lovely and pathetic as Juliet; she is Juliet. I would not say that Mr. Sothern's Hamlet is the only Hamlet, for there are still, no doubt, "points in Hamlet's soul unseized by the Germans yet." Yet what a Hamlet! How majestical, how simple, how much a poet and a gentleman! To what depth he suffers! How magnificently he interprets, in the crucifixion of his own soul, the main riddles of the universe! In "Hamlet," too, I saw deeper meanings than I had ever seen in the play when it was acted. Mr. Sothern was the only quite sane Hamlet; his madness is all the outer coverings of wisdom; there was nothing fantastic in his grave, subdued, powerful, and piteous representation, in which no symbol, no metaphysical Faust, no figment of a German brain, loomed before us, but a man, more to be pitied and not less to be honoured than any man in Elsinore. I have seen romantic, tragic, exceptional Hamlets, the very bells on the cap of "Fortune's fool." But at last I have seen the man himself, as Shakespeare saw him living, a gentleman, as well as a philosopher, a nature of fundamental sincerity; no melancholy clown, but the greatest of all critics of life. And the play, with its melodrama and its lyrical ecstasy, moved before one's eyes like a religious service. How is it that we get from the acting and management of these two actors a result which no one in England has ever been able to get? Well, in the first place, as I have said, they have the odd caprice of preferring Shakespeare to themselves; the odd conviction that fidelity to Shakespeare will give them the best chance of doing great things themselves. Nothing is accidental, everything obeys a single intention; and what, above all, obeys that intention is the quality of inspiration, which is never absent and never uncontrolled. Intention without the power of achievement is almost as lamentable a thing as achievement not directed by intention. Now here are two players in whom technique has been carried to a supreme point. There is no actor on our stage who can speak either English or verse as these two American actors can. It is on this preliminary technique, this power of using speech as one uses the notes of a musical instrument, that all possibility of great acting depends. Who is there that can give us, not the external gesture, but the inner meaning, of some beautiful and subtle passage in Shakespeare? One of our actors will give it sonorously, as rhetoric, and another eagerly, as passionate speech, but no one with the precise accent of a man who is speaking his thoughts, which is what Shakespeare makes his characters do when he puts his loveliest poetry into their mouths. Look at Mr. Sothern when he gives the soliloquy "To be or not to be," which we are accustomed to hear spoken to the public in one or another of many rhetorical manners. Mr. Sothern's Hamlet curls himself up in a chair, exactly as sensitive reflective people do when they want to make their bodies comfortable before setting their minds to work; and he lets you overhear his thoughts. Every soliloquy of Shakespeare is meant to be overheard, and just so casually. To render this on the stage requires, first, an understanding of what poetry is; next, a perfect capacity of producing by the sound and intonation of the voice the exact meaning of those words and cadences. Who is there on our stage who has completely mastered those two first requirements of acting? No one now acting in English, except Julia Marlowe and Edward Sothern.

What these two players do is to give us, not the impression which we get when we see and admire fine limitations, but the impression which we get from real people who, when they speak in verse, seem to be speaking merely the language of their own hearts. They give us every character in the round, whereas with our actors we see no more than profiles. Look, for contrast, at the Malvolio of Mr. Sothern. It is an elaborate travesty, done in a disguise like the solemn dandy's head of Disraeli. He acts with his eyelids, which move while all the rest of the face is motionless; with his pursed, reticent mouth, with his prim and pompous gestures; with that self-consciousness which brings all Malvolio's troubles upon him. It is a fantastic, tragically comic thing, done with rare calculation, and it has its formal, almost cruel share in the immense gaiety of the piece. The play is great and wild, a mockery and a happiness; and it is all seen and not interpreted, but the mystery of it deepened, in the clown's song at the end, which, for once, has been allowed its full effect, not theatrical, but of pure imagination.

So far I have spoken only of those first requirements, those elementary principles of acting, which we ought to be able to take for granted; only in England, we cannot. These once granted, the individual work of the actor begins, his power to create with the means at his disposal. Let us look, then, a little more closely at Miss Marlowe. I have spoken of her Juliet, which is no doubt her finest part. But now look at her Ophelia. It is not, perhaps, so great a triumph as her Juliet, and merely for the reason that there is little in Ophelia but an image of some beautiful bright thing broken. Yet the mad scene will be remembered among all other renderings for its edged lightness, the quite simple poetry it makes of madness; above all, the natural pity which comes into it from a complete abandonment to what is essence, and not mere decoration, in the spoiled brain of this kind, loving and will-less woman. She suffers, and is pitifully unaware of it, there before you, the very soul naked and shameless with an innocence beyond innocence. She makes the rage and tenderness of Hamlet towards her a credible thing.

In Juliet Miss Marlowe is ripe humanity, in Ophelia that same humanity broken down from within. As Viola, in "Twelfth Night" she is the woman let loose, to be bewitching in spite of herself; and here again her art is tested, and triumphs, for she is bewitching, and never trespasses into jauntiness on the one hand, or, on the other, into that modern sentiment which the theatre has accustomed itself to under the name of romance. She is serious, with a calm and even simplicity, to which everything is a kind of child's play, putting no unnecessary pathos into a matter destined to come right in the end. And so her delicate and restrained gaiety in masquerade interprets perfectly, satisfies every requirement, of what for the moment is whimsical in Shakespeare's art.

Now turn from Shakespeare, and see what can be done with the modern make-believe. Here, in "Jeanne d'Arc," is a recent American melodrama, written ambitiously, in verse which labours to be poetry. The subject was made for Miss Marlowe, but the play was made for effect, and it is lamentable to see her, in scenes made up of false sentiment and theatrical situations, trying to do what she is ready and able to do; what, indeed, some of the scenes give her the chance to be: the little peasant girl, perplexed by visions and possessed by them, and also the peasant saint, too simple to know that she is heroic. Out of a play of shreds and patches one remembers only something which has given it its whole value: the vital image of a divine child, a thing of peace and love, who makes war angelically.

Yet even in this play there was ambition and an aim. Turn, last of all, to a piece which succeeded with London audiences better than Shakespeare, a burlesque of American origin, called "When Knighthood was in Flower." Here too I seemed to discern a lesson for the English stage. Even through the silly disguises of this inconceivable production, which pleased innocent London as it had pleased indifferent New York, one felt a certain lilt and go, a touch of nature among the fool's fabric of the melodrama, which set the action far above our steady practitioners in the same art of sinking. And, above all, a sense of parody pierced through words and actions, commenting wittily on the nonsense of romance which so many were so willing to take seriously. She was a live thing, defiantly and gaily conscious of every absurdity with which she indulged the babyish tastes of one more public.

An actor or actress who is limited by talent, personality, or preference to a single kind of role is not properly an artist at all. It is the curse of success that, in any art, a man who has pleased the public in any single thing is called upon, if he would turn it into money, to repeat it, as exactly as he can, as often as he can. If he does so, he is, again, not an artist. It is the business of every kind of artist to be ceaselessly creative, and, above all, not to repeat himself. When I have seen Miss Marlowe as Juliet, as Ophelia, and as Viola, I am content to have seen her also in a worthless farce, because she showed me that she could go without vulgarity, lightly, safely, through a part that she despised: she did not spoil it out of self-respect; out of a rarer self-respect she carried it through without capitulating to it. Then I hear of her having done Lady Teazle and Imogen, the Fiammetta of Catulle Mendes and the Salome of Hauptmann; I do not know even the names of half the parts she has played, but I can imagine her playing them all, not with the same poignancy and success, but with a skill hardly varying from one to another. There is no doubt that she has a natural genius for acting. This genius she has so carefully and so subtly trained that it may strike you at first sight as not being genius at all; because it is so much on the level, because there are no fits and starts in it; because, in short, it has none of the attractiveness of excess. It is by excess that we for the most part distinguish what seems to us genius; and it is often by its excess that genius first really shows itself. But the rarest genius is without excess, and may seem colourless in his perfection, as Giorgione seems beside Titian. But Giorgione will always be the greater.

I quoted to an old friend and fervent admirer of Miss Marlowe the words of Bacon which were always on the lips of Poe and of Baudelaire, about the "strangeness in the proportions" of all beauty. She asked me, in pained surprise, if I saw anything strange in Miss Marlowe. If I had not, she would have meant nothing for me, as the "faultily faultless" person, the Mrs. Kendal, means nothing to me. The confusion can easily be made, and there will probably always be people who will prefer Mrs. Kendal to Miss Marlowe, as there are those who will think Mme. Melba a greater operatic singer than Mme. Calve. What Miss Marlowe has is a great innocence, which is not, like Duse's, the innocence of wisdom, and a childish and yet wild innocence, such as we might find in a tamed wild beast, in whom there would always be a charm far beyond that of the domestic creature who has grown up on our hearth. This wildness comes to her perhaps from Pan, forces of nature that are always somewhere stealthily about the world, hidden in the blood, unaccountable, unconscious; without which we are tame christened things, fit for cloisters. Duse is the soul made flesh, Rejane the flesh made Parisian, Sarah Bernhardt the flesh and the devil; but Julia Marlowe is the joy of life, the plenitude of sap in the tree.

The personal appeal of Mr. Sothern and of Miss Marlowe is very different. In his manner of receiving applause there is something almost resentful, as if, being satisfied to do what he chooses to do, and in his own way, he were indifferent to the opinion of others. It is not the actor's attitude; but what a relief from the general subservience of that attitude! In Miss Marlowe there is something young, warm, and engaging, a way of giving herself wholly to the pleasure of pleasing, to which the footlights are scarcely a barrier. As if unconsciously, she fills and gladdens you with a sense of the single human being whom she is representing. And there is her strange beauty, in which the mind and the senses have an equal part, and which is full of savour and grace, alive to the finger-tips. Yet it is not with these personal qualities that I am here chiefly concerned. What I want to emphasise is the particular kind of lesson which this acting, so essentially English, though it comes to us as if set free by America, should have for all who are at all seriously considering the lamentable condition of our stage in the present day. We have nothing like it in England, nothing on the same level, no such honesty and capacity of art, no such worthy results. Are we capable of realising the difference? If not, Julia Marlowe and Edward Sothern will have come to England in vain.



A THEORY OF THE STAGE

Life and beauty are the body and soul of great drama. Mix the two as you will, so long as both are there, resolved into a single substance. But let there be, in the making, two ingredients, and while one is poetry, and comes bringing beauty, the other is a violent thing which has been scornfully called melodrama, and is the emphasis of action. The greatest plays are melodrama by their skeleton, and poetry by the flesh which clothes that skeleton.

The foundation of drama is that part of the action which can be represented in dumb show. Only the essential parts of action can be represented without words, and you would set the puppets vainly to work on any material but that which is common to humanity. The permanence of a drama might be tested by the continuance and universality of its appeal when played silently in gestures. I have seen the test applied. Companies of marionette players still go about the villages of Kent, and among their stock pieces is "Arden of Feversham," the play which Shakespeare is not too great to have written, at some moment when his right hand knew not what his left hand was doing. Well, that great little play can hold the eyes of every child and villager, as the puppets enact it; and its power has not gone out of it after three centuries. Dumb show apes the primal forces of nature, and is inarticulate, as they are; until relief gives words. When words come, there is no reason why they should not be in verse, for only in verse can we render what is deepest in humanity of the utmost beauty. Nothing but beauty should exist on the stage. Visible beauty comes with the ballet, an abstract thing; gesture adds pantomime, with which drama begins; and then words bring in the speech by which life tries to tell its secret. Because poetry, speaking its natural language of verse, can let out more of that secret than prose, the great drama of the past has been mainly drama in verse. The modern desire to escape from form, and to get at a raw thing which shall seem like what we know of the outside of nature, has led our latest dramatists to use prose in preference to verse, which indeed is more within their limits. It is Ibsen who has seemed to do most to justify the use of prose, for he carries his psychology far with it. Yet it remains prose, a meaner method, a limiting restraint, and his drama a thing less fundamental than the drama of the poets. Only one modern writer has brought something which is almost the equivalent of poetry out of prose speech: Tolstoi, in "The Powers of Darkness." The play is horrible and uncouth, but it is illuminated by a great inner light. There is not a beautiful word in it, but it is filled with beauty. And that is because Tolstoi has the vision which may be equally that of the poet and of the prophet. It is often said that the age of poetry is over, and that the great forms of the future must be in prose. That is the "exquisite reason" of those whom the gods have not made poetical. It is like saying that there will be no more music, or that love is out of date. Forms change, but not essence; and Whitman points the way, not to prose, but to a poetry which shall take in wider regions of the mind.

Yet, though it is by its poetry that, as Lamb pointed out, a play of Shakespeare differs from a play of Banks or Lillo, the poetry is not more essential to its making than the living substance, the melodrama. Poets who have written plays for reading have wasted their best opportunities. Why wear chains for dancing? The limitations necessary to the drama before it can be fitted to the stage are but hindrances and disabilities to the writer of a book. Where can we find more spilt wealth than in the plays of Swinburne, where all the magnificent speech builds up no structure, but wavers in orchestral floods, without beginning or ending? It has been said that Shakespeare will sacrifice his drama to his poetry, and even "Hamlet" has been quoted against him. But let "Hamlet" be rightly acted, and whatever has seemed mere lingering meditation will be recognised as a part of that thought which makes or waits on action. If poetry in Shakespeare may sometimes seem to delay action, it does but deepen it. The poetry is the life blood, or runs through it. Only bad actors and managers think that by stripping the flesh from the skeleton they can show us a more living body. The outlines of "Hamlet" are crude, irresistible melodrama, still irresistible to the gallery; and the greatness of the play, though it comes to us by means of the poetry, comes to us legitimately, as a growth out of melodrama.

The failure, the comparative failure, of every contemporary dramatist, however far he may go in one direction or another, comes from his neglect of one or another of these two primary and essential requirements. There is, at this time, a more serious dramatic movement in Germany than in any other country; with mechanicians, like Sudermann, as accomplished as the best of ours, and dramatists who are also poets, like Hauptmann. I do not know them well enough to bring them into my argument, but I can see that in Germany, whatever the actual result, the endeavour is in the right direction. Elsewhere, how often do we find even so much as this, in more than a single writer here and there? Consider Ibsen, who is the subtlest master of the stage since Sophocles. At his best he has a firm hold on structural melodrama, he is a marvellous analyst of life, he is the most ingenious of all the playwrights; but ask him for beauty and he will give you a phrase, "vine-leaves in the hair" or its equivalent; one of the cliches of the minor poet. In the end beauty revenged itself upon him by bringing him to a no-man's land where there were clouds and phantasms that he could no longer direct.

Maeterlinck began by a marvellous instinct, with plays "for marionettes," and, having discovered a forgotten secret, grew tired of limiting himself within its narrow circle, and came outside his magic. "Monna Vanna" is an attempt to be broadly human on the part of a man whose gift is of another kind: a visionary of the moods. His later speech, like his later dramatic material, is diluted; he becomes, in the conventional sense, eloquent, which poetry never is. But he has brought back mystery to the stage, which has been banished, or retained in exile, among phantasmagoric Faust-lights. The dramatist of the future will have more to learn from Maeterlinck than from any other playwright of our time. He has seen his puppets against the permanent darkness, which we had cloaked with light; he has given them supreme silences.

In d'Annunzio we have an art partly shaped by Maeterlinck, in which all is atmosphere, and a home for sensations which never become vital passions. The roses in the sarcophagus are part of the action in "Francesca," and in "The Dead City" the whole action arises out of the glorious mischief hidden like a deadly fume in the grave of Agamemnon. Speech and drama are there, clothing but not revealing one another; the speech always a lovely veil, never a human outline.

We have in England one man, and one only, who has some public claim to be named with these artists, though his aim is the negation of art. Mr. Shaw is a mind without a body, a whimsical intelligence without a soul. He is one of those tragic buffoons who play with eternal things, not only for the amusement of the crowd, but because an uneasy devil capers in their own brains. He is a merry preacher, a petulant critic, a great talker. It is partly because he is an Irishman that he has transplanted the art of talking to the soil of the stage: Sheridan, Wilde, Shaw, our only modern comedians, all Irishmen, all talkers. It is by his astonishing skill of saying everything that comes into his head, with a spirit really intoxicating, that Mr. Shaw has succeeded in holding the stage with undramatic plays, in which there is neither life nor beauty. Life gives up its wisdom only to reverence, and beauty is jealous of neglected altars. But those who amuse the world, no matter by what means, have their place in the world at any given moment. Mr. Shaw is a clock striking the hour.

With Mr. Shaw we come to the play which is prose, and nothing but prose. The form is familiar among us, though it is cultivated with a more instinctive skill, as is natural, in France. There was a time, not so long ago, when Dumas fils was to France what Ibsen afterwards became to Europe. What remains of him now is hardly more than his first "fond adventure" the supremely playable "Dame aux Camelias." The other plays are already out of date, since Ibsen; the philosophy of "Tue-la!" was the special pleading of the moment, and a drama in which special pleading, and not the fundamental "criticism of life," is the dramatic motive can never outlast its technique, which has also died with the coming of Ibsen. Better technique, perhaps, than that of "La Femme de Claude," but with less rather than more weight of thought behind it, is to be found in many accomplished playwrights, who are doing all sorts of interesting temporary things, excellently made to entertain the attentive French public with a solid kind of entertainment. Here, in England, we have no such folk to command; our cleverest playwrights, apart from Mr. Shaw, are what we might call practitioners. There is Mr. Pinero, Mr. Jones, Mr. Grundy: what names are better known, or less to be associated with literature? There is Anthony Hope, who can write, and Mr. Barrie who has something both human and humourous. There are many more names, if I could remember them; but where is the serious playwright? Who is there that can be compared with our poets or our novelists, not only with a Swinburne or a Meredith, but, in a younger generation, with a Bridges or a Conrad? The Court Theatre has given us one or two good realistic plays, the best being Mr. Granville Barker's, besides giving Mr. Shaw his chance in England, after he had had and taken it in America. But is there, anywhere but in Ireland, an attempt to write imaginative literature in the form of drama? The Irish Literary Theatre has already, in Mr. Yeats and Mr. Synge, two notable writers, each wholly individual, one a poet in verse, the other a poet in prose. Neither has yet reached the public, in any effectual way, or perhaps the limits of his own powers as a dramatist. Yet who else is there for us to hope in, if we are to have once more an art of the stage, based on the great principles, and a theatre in which that art can be acted?

The whole universe lies open to the poet who is also a dramatist, affording him an incomparable choice of subject. Ibsen, the greatest of the playwrights of modern life, narrowed his stage, for ingenious plausible reasons of his own, to the four walls of a house, and, at his best, constrained his people to talk of nothing above their daily occupations. He got the illusion of everyday life, but at a cruel expense. These people, until they began to turn crazy, had no vision beyond their eyesight, and their thoughts never went deep enough to need a better form for expression than they could find in their newspapers. They discussed immortal problems as they would have discussed the entries in their ledger. Think for a moment how the peasants speak in that play of Tolstoi's which I have called the only modern play in prose which contains poetry. They speak as Russians speak, with a certain childishness, in which they are more primitive than our more civilised peasants. But the speech comes from deeper than they are aware, it stumbles into a revelation of the soul. A drunken man in Tolstoi has more wisdom in his cups than all Ibsen's strange ladies who fumble at their lips for sea-magic.

And as Tolstoi found in this sordid chaos material for tragedy which is as noble as the Greeks' (a like horror at the root of both, a like radiance at both summits), so the poet will find stories, as modern as this if he chooses, from which he can take the same ingredients for his art. The ingredients are unchanging since "Prometheus"; no human agony has ever grown old or lost its pity and terror. The great plays of the past were made out of great stories, and the great stories are repeated in our days and can be heard wherever an old man tells us a little of what has come to him in living. Verse lends itself to the lifting and adequate treatment of the primary emotions, because it can render them more as they are in the soul, not being tied down to probable words, as prose talk is. The probable words of prose talk can only render a part of what goes on among the obscure imageries of the inner life; for who, in a moment of crisis, responds to circumstances or destiny with an adequate answer? Poetry, which is spoken thought, or the speech of something deeper than thought, may let loose some part of that answer which would justify the soul, if it did not lie dumb upon its lips.



THE SICILIAN ACTORS

I

I have been seeing the Sicilian actors in London. They came here from Paris, where, I read, "la passion parait decidement," to a dramatic critic, "avoir partout ses inconvenients," especially on the stage. We are supposed to think so here, but for once London has applauded an acting which is more primitively passionate than anything we are accustomed to on our moderate stage. Some of it was spoken in Italian, some in the Sicilian dialect, and not many in the English part of the audience could follow very closely the words as they were spoken. Yet so marvellously real were these stage peasants, so clear and poignant their gestures and actions, that words seemed a hardly needless accompaniment to so evident, exciting, and absorbing a form of drama. It was a new intoxication, and people went, I am afraid, as to a wild-beast show.

It was really nothing of the kind, though the melodrama was often very crude; sometimes, in a simple way, horrible. But it was a fierce living thing, a life unknown to us in the North; it smouldered like the volcanoes of the South. And so we were seeing a new thing on the stage, rendered by actors who seemed, for the most part, scarcely actors at all, but the real peasants; and, above all, there was a woman of genius, the leader of the company, who was much more real than reality.

Mimi Aguglia has studied Duse, for her tones, for some of her attitudes; her art is more nearly the art of Rejane. While both of these are great artists, she is an improviser, a creature of wild moods, of animal energies, uncontrolled, spontaneous. She catches you in a fierce caress, like a tiger-cat. She gives you, as in "Malia," the whole animal, snarling, striking, suffering, all the pangs of the flesh, the emotions of fear and hate, but for the most part no more. In "La Folfaa" she can be piquant, passing from the naughty girl of the first act, with her delicious airs and angers, her tricks, gambols, petulances, to the soured wife of the second, in whom a kind of bad blood comes out, turning her to treacheries of mere spite, until her husband thrusts her brutally out of the house, where, if she will, she may follow her lover. Here, where there is no profound passion but mean quarrels among miserable workers in salt-mines, she is a noticeable figure, standing out from the others, and setting her prim, soubrette figure in motion with a genuine art, quite personal to her. But to see her after the Santuzza of Duse, in Verga's "Cavalleria Rusticana," is to realise the difference between this art of the animal and Duse's art of the soul. And if one thinks of Rejane's "Sapho," the difference is hardly less, though of another kind. I saw Duse for the first time in the part of Santuzza, and I remember to this day a certain gentle and pathetic gesture of her apparently unconscious hand, turning back the sleeve of her lover's coat over his wrist, while her eyes fasten on his eyes in a great thirst for what is to be found in them. The Santuzza of Mimi Aguglia is a stinging thing that bites when it is stepped on. There is no love in her heart, only love of possession, jealousy, an unreasonable hate; and she is not truly pathetic or tragic in her furious wrestle with her lover on the church steps or in her plot against him which sends an unanticipated knife into his heart.

Yet, in the Mila di Codra of d'Annunzio's "Figlia di Jorio" she has moments of absolute greatness. Her fear in the cave, before Lazaro di Roio, is the most ghastly and accurate rendering of that sensation that, I am sure, has been seen on any stage. She flings herself upright against a frame of wood on which the woodcarver has left his tools, and as one new shudder after another sets her body visibly quaking, some of the tools drop on the floor, with an astonishing effect on the nerves. Her face contracts into a staring, hopeless grimace, as if about to utter shrieks which cannot get past her lips. She shivers slowly downwards until she sinks on her rigid heels and clasps her knees with both arms. There, in the corner, she waits in twenty several anguishes, while the foul old man tempts her, crawling like a worm, nearer and nearer to her on the ground, with gestures of appeal that she repels time after time, with some shudder aside of her crouched body, hopping as if on all fours closer into the corner. The scene is terrible in its scarcely thinkable distress, but it is not horrible, as some would have it to be. Here, with her means, this actress creates; it is no mean copy of reality, but fear brought to a kind of greatness, so completely has the whole being passed into its possession.

And there is another scene in which she is absolute in a nobler catastrophe. In her last cry before she is dragged to the stake, "La fiamma e bella! la fiamma e bella!" d'Annunzio, I have no doubt, meant no more than the obvious rhetoric suited to a situation of heroism. Out of his rhetoric this woman has created the horror and beauty of a supreme irony of anguish. She has given up her life for her lover, he has denied and cursed her in the oblivion of the draught that should have been his death-drink, her hands have been clasped with the wooden fetters taken off from his hands, and her face covered with the dark veil he had worn, and the vile howling crowd draws her backward towards her martyrdom. Ornella has saluted her sister in Christ; she, the one who knows the truth, silent, helping her to die nobly. And now the woman, having willed beyond the power of mortal flesh to endure an anguish that now flames before her in its supreme reality, strains in the irrationality of utter fear backward into the midst of those clutching hands that are holding her up in the attitude of her death, and, with a shiver in which the soul, succumbing to the body, wrings its last triumph out of an ignominious glory, she cries, shrieking, feeling the flames eternally upon her: "La fiamma e bella! la fiamma e bella!" and thereat all evil seems to have been judged suddenly, and obliterated, as if God had laughed once, and wiped out the world.



II

Since Charles Lamb's essay "On the Tragedies of Shakespeare, considered with reference to their fitness for stage representation," there has been a great deal of argument as to whether the beauty of words, especially in verse, is necessarily lost on the stage, and whether a well-constructed play cannot exist by itself, either in dumb show or with words in a foreign language, which we may not understand. The acting, by the Sicilian actors, of "La Figlia di Jorio," seemed to me to do something towards the solution of part at least of this problem.

The play, as one reads it, has perhaps less than usual of the beauty which d'Annunzio elaborates in his dramatic speech. It is, on the other hand, closer to nature, carefully copied from the speech of the peasants of the Abruzzi, and from what remains of their folk-lore. The story on which it is founded is a striking one, and the action has, even in reading, the effect of a melodrama. Now see it on the stage, acted with the speed and fury of these actors. Imagine oneself ignorant of the language and of the play. Suddenly the words have become unnecessary; the bare outlines stand out, perfectly explicit in gesture and motion; the scene passes before you as if you were watching it in real life; and this primitively passionate acting, working on an action so cunningly contrived for its co-operation, gives us at last what the play, as we read it, had suggested to us, but without complete conviction. The beauty of the speech had become a secondary matter, or, if we did not understand it, the desire to know what was being said: the playwright and his players had eclipsed the poet, the visible action had put out the calculated cadences of the verse. And the play, from the point of view of the stage, had fulfilled every requirement, had achieved its aim.

And still the question remains: how much of this success is due to the playwright's skill or to the skill of the actors? How is it that in this play the actors obtain a fine result, act on a higher level, than in their realistic Sicilian tragedies? D'Annunzio is no doubt a better writer than Capuana or Verga, and his play is finer as literature than "Cavalleria Rusticana" or "Malia." But is it great poetry or great drama, and has the skilful playwright need of the stage and of actors like these, who come with their own life and ways upon it, in order to bring the men and women of his pages to life? Can it be said of him that he has fulfilled the great condition of poetic drama, that, as Coleridge said, "dramatic poetry must be poetry hid in thought and passion—not thought or passion disguised in the dress of poetry?"

That is a question which I am not here concerned to answer. Perhaps I have already answered it. Perhaps Lamb had answered it when he said, of a performance of Shakespeare in which there were two great actors, that "it seemed to embody and realise conceptions which had hitherto assumed no distinct shape," but that, "when the novelty is past, we find to our cost that instead of realising an idea, we have only materialised and brought down a fine vision to the standard of flesh and blood." If that is true of Shakespeare, the greatest of dramatic poets, how far is it from the impression which I have described in speaking of d'Annunzio. What fine vision was there to bring down? what poetry hid in thought or passion was lost to us in its passage across the stage?

And now let us consider the play in which these actors have found their finest opportunity for abandoning themselves to those instincts out of which they have made their art. "Malia," a Sicilian play of Capuana, is an exhibition of the witchcraft of desire, and it is justified against all accusation by that thrill with which something in us responds to it, admitting: This is I, myself, so it has been given to me to sin and to suffer. And so, if we think deeply enough we shall find, in these sinning, suffering, insatiable beings, who present themselves as if naked before us, the image of our own souls, visible for once, and unashamed, in the mirror of these bodies. It is we, who shudder before them, and maybe laugh at the extravagance of their gestures, it is ourselves whom they are showing to us, caught unawares and set in symbolical action. Let not the base word realism be used for this spontaneous energy by which we are shown the devastating inner forces, by which nature creates and destroys us. Here is one part of life, the source of its existence: and here it is shown us crude as nature, absolute as art. This new, living art of the body, which we see struggling in the clay of Rodin, concentrates itself for once in this woman who expresses, without reticence and without offence, all that the poets have ever said of the supreme witchcraft, animal desire, without passion, carnal, its own self-devouring agony. Art has for once justified itself by being mere nature.

And, here again, this play is no masterpiece in itself, only the occasion for a masterpiece of acting. The whole company, Sig. Grasso and the others, acted with perfect unanimity, singly and in crowds. What stage-crowd of a hundred drilled and dumpish people, as we see it at our big theatres, has ever given us that sense of a real, surging crowd as the dozen or so supers in that last struggle which ends the play? But the play really existed for Aguglia, and was made by her. Rejane has done greater things in her own way, in her own way she is a greater artist. But not even Rejane has given us the whole animal, in its self-martyrdom, as this woman has given it to us. Such knowledge and command of the body, and so frank an abandonment to its instinctive motions, has never been seen on our stage, not even in Sada Yacco and the Japanese. They could outdo Sarah in a death-scene, but not Aguglia in the scene in which she betrays her secret. Done by anyone else, it would have been an imitation of a woman in hysterics, a thing meaningless and disgusting. Done by her, it was the visible contest between will and desire, a battle, a shipwreck, in which you watch helplessly from the shore every plank as the sea tears if off and swallows it. "I feel as if I had died," said the friend who was with me in the theatre, speaking out of an uncontrollable sympathy; died with the woman, she meant, or in the woman's place.

Our critics here have for the most part seen fit, like the French critic whom I quoted at the beginning, to qualify their natural admiration by a hesitating consciousness that "la passion parait decidement avoir partout ses inconvenients." But the critic who sets himself against a magnetic current can do no more than accept the shock which has cast him gently aside. All art is magnetism. The greatest art is a magnetism through which the soul reaches the soul. There is another, terrible, authentic art through which the body communicates its thrilling secrets. And against all these currents there is no barrier and no appeal.



MUSIC



ON WRITING ABOUT MUSIC

The reason why music is so much more difficult to write about than any other art, is because music is the one absolutely disembodied art, when it is heard, and no more than a proposition of Euclid, when it is written. It is wholly useless, to the student no less than to the general reader, to write about music in the style of the programmes for which we pay sixpence at the concerts. "Repeated by flute and oboe, with accompaniment for clarionet (in triplets) and strings pizzicato, and then worked up by the full orchestra, this melody is eventually allotted to the 'cellos, its accompaniment now taking the form of chromatic passages," and so forth. Not less useless is it to write a rhapsody which has nothing to do with the notes, and to present this as an interpretation of what the notes have said in an unknown language. Yet what method is there besides these two methods? None, indeed, that can ever be wholly satisfactory; at the best, no more than a compromise.

In writing about poetry, while precisely that quality which makes it poetry must always evade expression, there yet remain the whole definite meaning of the words, and the whole easily explicable technique of the verse, which can be made clear to every reader. In painting, you have the subject of the picture, and you have the colour, handling, and the like, which can be expressed hardly less precisely in words. But music has no subject, outside itself; no meaning, outside its meaning as music; and, to understand anything of what is meant by its technique, a certain definite technical knowledge is necessary in the reader. What subterfuges are required, in order to give the vaguest suggestion of what a piece of music is like, and how little has been said, after all, beyond generalisations, which would apply equally to half a dozen different pieces! The composer himself, if you ask him, will tell you that you may be quite correct in what you say, but that he has no opinion in the matter.

Music has indeed a language, but it is a language in which birds and other angels may talk, but out of which we cannot translate their meaning. Emotion itself, how changed becomes even emotion when we transport it into a new world, in which only sound has feeling! But I am speaking as if it had died and been re-born there, whereas it was born in its own region, and is wholly ignorant of ours.



TECHNIQUE AND THE ARTIST

Technique and the artist: that is a question, of interest to the student of every art, which was brought home to me with unusual emphasis the other afternoon, as I sat in the Queen's Hall, and listened to Ysaye and Busoni. Are we always quite certain what we mean when we speak of an artist? Have we quite realised in our own minds the extent to which technique must go to the making of an artist, and the point at which something else must be superadded? That is a matter which I often doubt, and the old doubt came back to my mind the other afternoon, as I listened to Ysaye and Busoni, and next day, as I turned over the newspapers.

I read, in the first paper I happen to take up, that the violinist and the pianist are "a perfectly matched pair"; the applause, at the concert, was even more enthusiastic for Busoni than for Ysaye. I hear both spoken of as artists, as great artists; and yet, if words have any meaning, it seems to me that only one of the two is an artist at all, and the other, with all his ability, only an executant. Admit, for a moment, that the technique of the two is equal, though it is not quite possible to admit even that, in the strictest sense. So far, we have made only a beginning. Without technique, perfect of its kind, no one is worth consideration in any art. The rope-dancer or the acrobat must be perfect in technique before he appears on the stage at all; in his case, a lapse from perfection brings its own penalty, death perhaps; his art begins when his technique is already perfect. Artists who deal in materials less fragile than human life should have no less undeviating a sense of responsibility to themselves and to art. But the performance comes afterwards, and it is the performance with which we are concerned. Of two acrobats, each equally skilful, one will be individual and an artist, the other will remain consummately skilful and uninteresting; the one having begun where the other leaves off. Now Busoni can do, on the pianoforte, whatever he can conceive; the question is, what can he conceive? As he sat at the piano playing Chopin, I thought of Busoni, of the Bechstein piano, of what fingers can do, of many other extraneous things, never of Chopin. I saw the pianist with the Christ-like head, the carefully negligent elegance of his appearance, and I heard wonderful sounds coming out of the Bechstein piano; but, try as hard as I liked, I could not feel the contact of soul and instrument, I could not feel that a human being was expressing himself in sound. A task was magnificently accomplished, but a new beauty had not come into the world. Then the Kreutzer Sonata began, and I looked at Ysaye, as he stood, an almost shapeless mass of flesh, holding the violin between his fat fingers, and looking vaguely into the air. He put the violin to his shoulder. The face had been like a mass of clay, waiting the sculptor's thumb. As the music came, an invisible touch seemed to pass over it; the heavy mouth and chin remained firm, pressed down on the violin; but the eyelids and the eyebrows began to move, as if the eyes saw the sound, and were drawing it in luxuriously, with a kind of sleepy ecstasy, as one draws in perfume out of a flower. Then, in that instant, a beauty which had never been in the world came into the world; a new thing was created, lived, died, having revealed itself to all those who were capable of receiving it. That thing was neither Beethoven nor Ysaye, it was made out of their meeting; it was music, not abstract, but embodied in sound; and just that miracle could never occur again, though others like it might be repeated for ever. When the sound stopped, the face returned to its blind and deaf waiting; the interval, like all the rest of life probably, not counting in the existence of that particular soul, which came and went with the music.

And Ysaye seems to me the type of the artist, not because he is faultless in technique, but because he begins to create his art at the point where faultless technique leaves off. With him, every faculty is in harmony; he has not even too much of any good thing. There are times when Busoni astonishes one; Ysaye never astonishes one, it seems natural that he should do everything that he does, just as he does it. Art, as Aristotle has said finally, should always have "a continual slight novelty"; it should never astonish, for we are astonished only by some excess or default, never by a thing being what it ought to be. It is a fashion of the moment to prize extravagance and to be timid of perfection. That is why we give the name of artist to those who can startle us most. We have come to value technique for the violence which it gives into the hands of those who possess it, in their assault upon our nerves. We have come to look upon technique as an end in itself, rather than as a means to an end. We have but one word of praise, and we use that one word lavishly. An Ysaye and a Busoni are the same to us, and it is to our credit if we are even aware that Ysaye is the equal of Busoni.



PACHMANN AND THE PIANO

I

It seems to me that Pachmann is the only pianist who plays the piano as it ought to be played. I admit his limitations, I admit that he can play only certain things, but I contend that he is the greatest living pianist because he can play those things better than any other pianist can play anything. Pachmann is the Verlaine of pianists, and when I hear him I think of Verlaine reading his own verse, in a faint, reluctant voice, which you overheard. Other players have mastered the piano, Pachmann absorbs its soul, and it is only when he touches it that it really speaks its own voice.

The art of the pianist, after all, lies mainly in one thing, touch. It is by the skill, precision, and beauty of his touch that he makes music at all; it is by the quality of his touch that he evokes a more or less miraculous vision of sound for us. Touch gives him his only means of expression; it is to him what relief is to the sculptor or what values are to the painter. To "understand," as it is called, a piece of music, is not so much as the beginning of good playing; if you do not understand it with your fingers, what shall your brain profit you? In the interpretation of music all action of the brain which does not translate itself perfectly in touch is useless. You may as well not think at all as not think in terms of your instrument, and the piano responds to one thing only, touch. Now Pachmann, beyond all other pianists, has this magic. When he plays it, the piano ceases to be a compromise. He makes it as living and penetrating as the violin, as responsive and elusive as the clavichord.

Chopin wrote for the piano with a more perfect sense of his instrument than any other composer, and Pachmann plays Chopin with an infallible sense of what Chopin meant to express in his mind. He seems to touch the notes with a kind of agony of delight; his face twitches with the actual muscular contraction of the fingers as they suspend themselves in the very act of touch. I am told that Pachmann plays Chopin in a morbid way. Well, Chopin was morbid; there are fevers and cold sweats in his music; it is not healthy music, and it is not to be interpreted in a robust way. It must be played, as Pachmann plays it, somnambulistically, with a tremulous delicacy of intensity, as if it were a living thing on whose nerves one were operating, and as if every touch might mean life or death.

I have heard pianists who played Chopin in what they called a healthy way. The notes swung, spun, and clattered, with a heroic repercussion of sound, a hurrying reiteration of fury, signifying nothing. The piano stormed through the applause; the pianist sat imperturbably, hammering. Well, I do not think any music should be played like that, not Liszt even. Liszt connives at the suicide, but with Chopin it is a murder. When Pachmann plays Chopin the music sings itself, as if without the intervention of an executant, of one who stands between the music and our hearing. The music has to intoxicate him before he can play with it; then he becomes its comrade, in a kind of very serious game; himself, in short, that is to say inhuman. His fingers have in them a cold magic, as of soulless elves who have sold their souls for beauty. And this beauty, which is not of the soul, is not of the flesh; it is a sea-change, the life of the foam on the edge of the depths. Or it transports him into some mid-region of the air, between hell and heaven, where he hangs listening. He listens at all his senses. The dew, as well as the raindrop, has a sound for him.

In Pachmann's playing there is a frozen tenderness, with, at moments, the elvish triumph of a gnome who has found a bright crystal or a diamond. Pachmann is inhuman, and music, too, is inhuman. To him, and rightly, it is a thing not domesticated, not familiar as a household cat with our hearth. When he plays it, music speaks no language known to us, has nothing of ourselves to tell us, but is shy, alien, and speaks a language which we do not know. It comes to us a divine hallucination, chills us a little with its "airs from heaven" or elsewhere, and breaks down for an instant the too solid walls of the world, showing us the gulf. When d'Albert plays Chopin's Berceuse, beautifully, it is a lullaby for healthy male children growing too big for the cradle. Pachmann's is a lullaby for fairy changelings who have never had a soul, but in whose veins music vibrates; and in this intimate alien thing he finds a kind of humour.

In the attempt to humanise music, that attempt which almost every executant makes, knowing that he will be judged by his success or failure in it, what is most fatally lost is that sense of mystery which, to music, is atmosphere. In this atmosphere alone music breathes tranquilly. So remote is it from us that it can only be reached through some not quite healthy nervous tension, and Pachmann's physical disquietude when he plays is but a sign of what it has cost him to venture outside humanity, into music. Yet in music this mystery is a simple thing, its native air; and the art of the musician has less difficulty in its evocation than the art of the poet or the painter. With what an effort do we persuade words or colours back from their vulgar articulateness into at least some recollection of that mystery which is deeper than sight or speech. Music can never wholly be detached from mystery, can never wholly become articulate, and it is in our ignorance of its true nature that we would tame it to humanity and teach it to express human emotions, not its own.

Pachmann gives you pure music, not states of soul or of temperament, not interpretations, but echoes. He gives you the notes in their own atmosphere, where they live for him an individual life, which has nothing to do with emotions or ideas. Thus he does not need to translate out of two languages: first, from sound to emotion, temperament, what you will; then from that back again to sound. The notes exist; it is enough that they exist. They mean for him just the sound and nothing else. You see his fingers feeling after it, his face calling to it, his whole body imploring it. Sometimes it comes upon him in such a burst of light that he has to cry aloud, in order that he may endure the ecstasy. You see him speaking to the music; he lifts his finger, that you may listen for it not less attentively. But it is always the thing itself that he evokes for you, as it rises flower-like out of silence, and comes to exist in the world. Every note lives, with the whole vitality of its existence. To Swinburne every word lives, just in the same way; when he says "light," he sees the sunrise; when he says "fire," he is warmed through all his blood. And so Pachmann calls up, with this ghostly magic of his, the innermost life of music. I do not think he has ever put an intention into Chopin. Chopin had no intentions. He was a man, and he suffered; and he was a musician, and he wrote music; and very likely George Sand, and Majorca, and his disease, and Scotland, and the woman who sang to him when he died, are all in the music; but that is not the question. The notes sob and shiver, stab you like a knife, caress you like the fur of a cat; and are beautiful sound, the most beautiful sound that has been called out of the piano. Pachmann calls it out for you, disinterestedly, easily, with ecstasy, inevitably; you do not realise that he has had difficulties to conquer, that music is a thing for acrobats and athletes. He smiles to you, that you may realise how beautiful the notes are, when they trickle out of his fingers like singing water; he adores them and his own playing, as you do, and as if he had nothing to do with them but to pour them out of his hands. Pachmann is less showy with his fingers than any other pianist; his hands are stealthy acrobats, going quietly about their difficult business. They talk with the piano and the piano answers them. All that violence cannot do with the notes of the instrument, he does. His art begins where violence leaves off; that is why he can give you fortissimo without hurting the nerves of a single string; that is why he can play a run as if every note had its meaning. To the others a run is a flourish, a tassel hung on for display, a thing extra; when Pachmann plays a run you realise that it may have its own legitimate sparkle of gay life. With him every note lives, has its own body and its own soul, and that is why it is worth hearing him play even trivial music like Mendelssohn's "Spring Song" or meaningless music like Taubert's Waltz: he creates a beauty out of sound itself and a beauty which is at the root of music. There are moments when a single chord seems to say in itself everything that music has to say. That is the moment in which everything but sound is annihilated, the moment of ecstasy; and it is of such moments that Pachmann is the poet.

And so his playing of Bach, as in the Italian Concerto in F, reveals Bach as if the dust had suddenly been brushed off his music. All that in the playing of others had seemed hard or dry becomes suddenly luminous, alive, and, above all, a miracle of sound. Through a delicacy of shading, like the art of Bach himself for purity, poignancy, and clarity, he envelops us with the thrilling atmosphere of the most absolutely musical music in the world. The playing of this concerto is the greatest thing I have ever heard Pachmann do, but when he went on to play Mozart I heard another only less beautiful world of sound rise softly about me. There was the "glittering peace" undimmed, and there was the nervous spring, the diamond hardness, as well as the glowing light and ardent sweetness. Yet another manner of playing, not less appropriate to its subject, brought before me the bubbling flow, the romantic moonlight, of Weber; this music that is a little showy, a little luscious, but with a gracious feminine beauty of its own. Chopin followed, and when Pachmann plays Chopin it is as if the soul of Chopin had returned to its divine body, the notes of this sinewy and feverish music, in which beauty becomes a torture and energy pierces to the centre and becomes grace, and languor swoons and is reborn a winged energy. The great third Scherzo was played with grandeur, and it is in the Scherzos, perhaps, that Chopin has built his most enduring work. The Barcarolle, which I have heard played as if it were Niagara and not Venice, was given with perfect quietude, and the second Mazurka of Op. 50 had that boldness of attack, with an almost stealthy intimacy in its secret rhythms, which in Pachmann's playing, and in his playing alone, gives you the dance and the reverie together. But I am not sure that the Etudes are not, in a very personal sense, what is most essential in Chopin, and I am not sure that Pachmann is not at his best in the playing of the Etudes.

Other pianists think, perhaps, but Pachmann plays. As he plays he is like one hypnotised by the music; he sees it beckoning, smiles to it, lifts his finger on a pause that you may listen to the note which is coming. This apparent hypnotism is really a fixed and continuous act of creation; there is not a note which he does not create for himself, to which he does not give his own vitality, the sensitive and yet controlling vitality of the medium. In playing the Bach he had the music before him that he might be wholly free from even the slight strain which comes from the almost unconscious act of remembering. It was for a precisely similar reason that Coleridge, in whose verse inspiration and art are more perfectly balanced than in any other English verse, often wrote down his poems first in prose that he might be unhampered by the conscious act of thought while listening for the music.

"There is no exquisite beauty," said Bacon in a subtle definition, "which has not some strangeness in its proportions." The playing of Pachmann escapes the insipidity of that beauty which is without strangeness; it has in it something fantastically inhuman, like fiery ice, and it is for this reason that it remains a thing uncapturable, a thing whose secret he himself could never reveal. It is like the secret of the rhythms of Verlaine, and no prosodist will ever tell us why a line like:

Dans un palais, soie et or, dans Ecbatane,

can communicate a new shiver to the most languid or the most experienced nerves. Like the art of Verlaine, the art of Pachmann is one wholly of suggestion; his fingers state nothing, they evoke. I said like the art of Verlaine, because there is a singular likeness between the two methods. But is not all art a suggestion, an evocation, never a statement? Many of the great forces of the present day have set themselves to the task of building up a large, positive art in which everything shall be said with emphasis: the art of Zola, the art of Mr. Kipling, in literature; the art of Mr. Sargent in painting; the art of Richard Strauss in music. In all these remarkable men there is some small, essential thing lacking; and it is in men like Verlaine, like Whistler, like Pachmann, that we find the small, essential thing, and nothing else.



II

The sounds torture me: I see them in my brain; They spin a flickering web of living threads, Like butterflies upon the garden beds, Nets of bright sound. I follow them: in vain. I must not brush the least dust from their wings: They die of a touch; but I must capture them, Or they will turn to a caressing flame, And lick my soul up with their flutterings.

The sounds torture me: I count them with my eyes, I feel them like a thirst between my lips; Is it my body or my soul that cries With little coloured mouths of sound, and drips In these bright drops that turn to butterflies Dying delicately at my finger tips?



III

Pachmann has the head of a monk who has had commerce with the Devil, and it is whispered that he has sold his soul to the diabolical instrument, which, since buying it, can speak in a human voice. The sounds torture him, as a wizard is tortured by the shapes he has evoked. He makes them dance for his pleasure, and you hear their breath come and go, in the swell and subsiding of those marvellous crescendoes and diminuendoes which set the strings pulsating like a sea. He listens for the sound, listens for the last echo of it after it is gone, and is caught away from us visibly into that unholy company.

Pachmann is the greatest player of the piano now living. He cannot interpret every kind of music, though his actual power is more varied than he has led the public to suppose. I have heard him play in private a show-piece of Liszt, a thunderous thing of immense difficulty, requiring a technique quite different from the technique which alone he cares to reveal to us; he had not played it for twenty years, and he played it with exactly the right crackling splendour that it demanded. On the rare occasions when he plays Bach, something that no one of our time has ever perceived or rendered in that composer seems to be evoked, and Bach lives again, with something of that forgotten life which only the harpsichord can help us to remember under the fingers of other players. Mozart and Weber are two of the composers whom he plays with the most natural instinct, for in both he finds and unweaves that dainty web of bright melody which Mozart made out of sunlight and Weber out of moonlight. There is nothing between him and them, as there is in Beethoven, for instance, who hides himself in the depths of a cloud, in the depths of wisdom, in the depths of the heart. And to Pachmann all this is as strange as mortal firesides to a fairy. He wanders round it, wondering at the great walls and bars that have been set about the faint, escaping spirit of flame. There is nothing human in him, and as music turns towards humanity it slips from between his hands. What he seeks and finds in music is the inarticulate, ultimate thing in sound: the music, in fact.

It has been complained that Pachmann's readings are not intellectual, that he does not interpret. It is true that he does not interpret between the brain and music, but he is able to disimprison sound, as no one has ever done with mortal hands, and the piano, when he touches it, becomes a joyous, disembodied thing, a voice and nothing more, but a voice which is music itself. To reduce music to terms of human intelligence or even of human emotion is to lower it from its own region, where it is Ariel. There is something in music, which we can apprehend only as sound, that comes to us out of heaven or hell, mocking the human agency that gives it speech, and taking flight beyond it. When Pachmann plays a Prelude of Chopin, all that Chopin was conscious of saying in it will, no doubt, be there; it is all there, if Godowsky plays it; every note, every shade of expression, every heightening and quickening, everything that the notes actually say. But under Pachmann's miraculous hands a miracle takes place; mystery comes about it like an atmosphere, an icy thrill traverses it, the terror and ecstasy of a beauty that is not in the world envelop it; we hear sounds that are awful and exquisite, crying outside time and space. Is it through Pachmann's nerves, or through ours, that this communion takes place? Is it technique, temperament, touch, that reveals to us what we have never dreamed was hidden in sounds? Could Pachmann himself explain to us his own magic?

He would tell us that he had practised the piano with more patience than others, that he had taken more trouble to acquire a certain touch which is really the only way to the secret of his instrument. He could tell you little more; but, if you saw his hands settle on the keys, and fly and poise there, as if they had nothing to do with the perturbed, listening face that smiles away from them, you would know how little he had told you. Now let us ask Godowsky, whom Pachmann himself sets above all other pianists, what he has to tell us about the way in which he plays.

When Godowsky plays he sits bent and motionless, as if picking out a pattern with his fingers. He seems to keep surreptitious watch upon them, as they run swiftly on their appointed errands. There is no errand they are not nimble enough to carry without a stumble to the journey's end. They obey him as if in fear; they dare not turn aside from the straight path; for their whole aim is to get to the end of the journey, having done their task faultlessly. Sometimes, but without relaxing his learned gravity, he plays a difficult game, as in the Paganini variations of Brahms, which were done with a skill as sure and as soulless as Paganini's may have been. Sometimes he forgets that the notes are living things, and tosses them about a little cruelly, as if they were a juggler's balls. They drop like stones; you are sorry for them, because they are alive. How Chopin suffers, when he plays the Preludes! He plays them without a throb; the scholar has driven out the magic; Chopin becomes a mathematician. In Brahms, in the G Minor Rhapsody, you hear much more of what Brahms meant to do; for Brahms has set strange shapes dancing, like the skeletons "in the ghosts' moonshine" in a ballad of Beddoes; and these bodiless things take shape in the music, as Godowsky plays it unflinchingly, giving it to you exactly as it is, without comment. Here his fidelity to every outline of form becomes an interpretation. But Chopin is so much more than form that to follow every outline of it may be to leave Chopin out of the outline.

Pachmann, of all the interpreters of Chopin, is the most subtle, the one most likely to do for the most part what Chopin wanted. The test, I think, is in the Third Scherzo. That great composition, one of the greatest among Chopin's works, for it contains all his qualities in an intense measure, might have been thought less likely to be done perfectly by Pachmann than such Coleridge in music, such murmurings out of paradise, as the Etude in F Minor (Op. 25, No. 2) or one of those Mazurkas in which Chopin is more poignantly fantastic in substance, more wild and whimsical in rhythm, than elsewhere in his music; and indeed, as Pachmann played them, they were strange and lovely gambols of unchristened elves. But in the Scherzo he mastered this great, violent, heroic thing as he had mastered the little freakish things and the trickling and whispering things. He gave meaning to every part of its decoration, yet lost none of the splendour and wave-like motion of the whole tossing and eager sea of sound.

Pachmann's art, like Chopin's, which it perpetuates, is of that peculiarly modern kind which aims at giving the essence of things in their fine shades: "la nuance encor!" Is there, it may be asked, any essential thing left out in the process; do we have attenuation in what is certainly a way of sharpening one's steel to a very fine point? The sharpened steel gains in what is most vital in its purpose by this very paring away of its substance; and why should not a form of art strike deeper for the same reason? Our only answer to Whistler and Verlaine is the existence of Rodin and Wagner. There we have weight as well as sharpness; these giants fly. It was curious to hear, in the vast luminous music of the "Rheingold," flowing like water about the earth, bare to its roots, not only an amplitude but a delicacy of fine shades not less realised than in Chopin. Wagner, it is true, welds the lyric into drama, without losing its lyrical quality. Yet there is no perfect lyric which is made less by the greatness of even a perfect drama.

Chopin was once thought to be a drawing-room composer; Pachmann was once thought to be no "serious artist." Both have triumphed, not because the taste of any public has improved, but because a few people who knew have whispered the truth to one another, and at last it has leaked out like a secret.



PADEREWSKI

I shall never cease to associate Paderewski with the night of the Jubilee. I had gone on foot from the Temple through those packed, gaudy, noisy, and vulgarised streets, through which no vehicles could pass, to a rare and fantastic house at the other end of London, a famous house hospitable to all the arts; and Paderewski sat with closed eyes and played the piano, there in his friend's house, as if he were in his own home. After the music was over, someone said to me, "I feel as if I had been in hell," so profound was the emotion she had experienced from the playing. I would have said heaven rather than hell, for there seemed to be nothing but pure beauty, beauty half asleep and dreaming of itself, in the marvellous playing. A spell, certainly, was over everyone, and then the exorciser became human, and jested deliciously till the early morning, when, as I went home through the still garrulous and peopled streets, I saw the last flutter of flags and streamers between night and dawn. All the world had been rioting for pleasure in the gross way of popular demonstrations; and in the very heart of this up-roar there had been, for a few people, this divine escape.

No less magical, soothing, enchanting was the apparition, in Queen's Hall, ten years later, of this unchanged creature with the tortured Burne-Jones face, level and bewildering eyes, the web of gold hair still poised like a halo. Beauty grew up around him like a sudden, exuberant growth, more vigorous and from a deeper root than before. I realised, more than ever, how the musician had always been the foundation of the virtuoso. I have used the word apparition advisedly. There is something, not only in the aspect of Paderewski, which seems to come mysteriously, but full of light, from a great distance. He startles music into a surprised awakening.

The art of Paderewski recalls to me the art of the most skilled and the most distinguished of equilibrists, himself a Pole, Paul Cinquevalli. People often speak, wrongly, of Paderewski's skill as acrobatic. The word conveys some sense of disparagement and, so used, is inaccurate. But there is much in common between two forms of an art in which physical dexterity counts for so much, and that passionate precision to which error must be impossible. It is the same kind of joy that you get from Cinquevalli when he juggles with cannon-balls and from Paderewski when he brings a continuous thunder out of the piano. Other people do the same things, but no else can handle thunder or a cannon-ball delicately. And Paderewski, in his absolute mastery of his instrument, seems to do the most difficult things without difficulty, with a scornful ease, an almost accidental quality which, found in perfection, marvellously decorates it. It is difficult to imagine that anyone since Liszt has had so complete a mastery of every capacity of the piano, and Liszt, though probably even more brilliant, can hardly be imagined with this particular kind of charm. His playing is in the true sense an inspiration; he plays nothing as if he had learned it with toil, but as if it had come to him out of a kind of fiery meditation. Even his thunder is not so much a thing specially cultivated for its own sake as a single prominent detail in a vast accomplishment. When he plays, the piano seems to become thrillingly and tempestuously alive, as if brother met brother in some joyous triumph. He collaborates with it, urging it to battle like a war-horse. And the quality of the sonority which he gets out of it is unlike that which is teased or provoked from the instrument by any other player. Fierce exuberant delight wakens under his fingers, in which there is a sensitiveness almost impatient, and under his feet, which are as busy as an organist's with the pedals. The music leaps like pouring water, flood after flood of sound, caught together and flung onward by a central energy. The separate notes are never picked out and made into ornaments; all the expression goes to passage after passage, realised acutely in their sequence. Where others give you hammering on an anvil, he gives you thunder as if heard through clouds. And he is full of leisure and meditation, brooding thoughtfully over certain exquisite things as if loth to let them pass over and be gone. And he seems to play out of a dream, in which the fingers are secondary to the meaning, but report that meaning with entire felicity.

In the playing of the "Moonlight" sonata there was no Paderewski, there was nothing but Beethoven. The finale, of course, was done with the due brilliance, the executant's share in a composition not written for modern players. But what was wonderful, for its reverence, its perfection of fidelity, was the playing of the slow movement and of the little sharp movement which follows, like the crying and hopping of a bird. The ear waited, and was satisfied in every shade of anticipation; nothing was missed, nothing was added; the pianist was as it were a faithful and obedient shadow. As you listened you forgot technique, or that it was anybody in particular who was playing: the sonata was there, with all its moonlight, as every lover of Beethoven had known that it existed.

Before the Beethoven there had been a "Variation and Fugue on an original theme," in which Paderewski played his own music, really as if he were improvising it there and then. I am not sure that that feeling is altogether to the credit of the music, which, as I heard it for the first time, seemed almost too perilously effective, in its large contrasts, its Liszt-like succession of contradictory moods. Sound was evoked that it might swell and subside like waves, break suddenly, and die out in a white rain of stinging foam. Pauses, surprises, all were delicately calculated and the weaver of these bewildered dreams seemed to watch over them like a Loge of celestial ingenuity.

When the actual Liszt came, the interminable Sonata in B minor, in which the sugar and the fire are so strangely mixed, it was as if Paderewski were still playing his own music. If ever there was a show piece for the piano, this was it, and if ever there was a divine showman for it, it was Paderewski. You felt at once the personal sympathy of the great pianist for the great pianist. He was no longer reverential, as with Beethoven, not doing homage but taking part, sharing almost in a creation, comet-like, of stars in the sky. Nothing in the bravura disconcerted or even displeased him, no lack of coherence or obviousness in contrasts disturbed him; what was loud, boisterous, explosive, he tossed about as in a colossal game, he bathed luxuriously in what was luscious in the melodies, giving them almost more than their real worth by the delighted skill with which he set them singing. A more astonishing, a more convincing, a more overwhelming tour de force could hardly be achieved on the piano: could an eruption of Vesuvius be more spectacularly magnificent?

Liszt's music for the piano was written for a pianist who could do anything that has ever been done with the instrument, and the result is not so wholly satisfactory as in the ease of Chopin, who, with a smaller technique, knew more of the secret of music. Chopin never dazzles, Liszt blinds. It is a question if he ever did full justice to his own genius, which was partly that of an innovator, and people are only now beginning to do justice to what was original as well as fine in his work. How many ideas Wagner caught from him, in his shameless transfiguring triumphant way! The melody of the Flower-Maidens, for instance, in "Parsifal," is borrowed frankly from a tone-poem of Liszt in which it is no more than a thin, rocking melody, without any of the mysterious fascination that Wagner put into it. But in writing for the piano Liszt certainly remembered that it was he, and not some unknown person, who was to play these hard and showy rhapsodies, in which there are no depths, though there are splendours. That is why Liszt is the test rather of the virtuoso than of the interpreter, why, therefore, it was so infinitely more important that Paderewski should have played the Beethoven sonata as impersonally as he did than that he should have played the Liszt sonata with so much personal abandonment. Between those limits there seems to be contained the whole art of the pianist, and Paderewski has attained both limits.

After his concert was over, Paderewski gave seven encores, in the midst of an enthusiasm which recurs whenever and wherever he gives a concert. What is the peculiar quality in this artist which acts always with the same intoxicating effect? Is it anything quite normal in his fingers, or is it, in the image of a brilliant and fantastic writer on music in America, Mr. James Huneker, a soul like the soul of Belus, "the Raphael of the piano," which, "suspended above him, like a coat of many colors," mesmerises the audience, while he sits motionless, not touching the notes?

Is Paderewski after all a Belus? Is it his many coloured soul that "magnetises our poor vertebras," in Verlaine's phrase, and not the mere skill of his fingers? Art, it has been said, is contagious, and to compel universal sympathy is to succeed in the last requirements of an art. Of what difference is it whether, like Keats, he perpetuates his personal magnetism in a stanza, or, like Paderewski, sheds it, like a perfume, for that passing moment which is all the eternity ever given to the creator of beautiful sounds?



A REFLECTION AT A DOLMETSCH CONCERT

The interpreter of ancient music, Arnold Dolmetsch, is one of those rare magicians who are able to make roses blossom in mid-winter. While music has been modernising itself until the piano becomes an orchestra, and Berlioz requires four orchestras to obtain a pianissimo, this strange man of genius has quietly gone back a few centuries and discovered for himself an exquisite lost world, which was disappearing like a fresco peeling off a wall. He has burrowed in libraries and found unknown manuscripts like a savant, he has worked at misunderstood notations and found out a way of reading them like a cryptogrammatist, he has first found out how to restore and then how to make over again harpsichord, and virginals, and clavichord, and all those instruments which had become silent curiosities in museums.

It is only beginning to be realised, even by musical people, that the clavecin music of, for instance, Bach, loses at least half its charm, almost its identity, when played on the modern grand piano; that the exquisite music of Rameau and Couperin, the brilliant and beautiful music of Scarlatti, is almost inaudible on everything but the harpsichord and the viols; and that there exists, far earlier than these writers, a mass of English and Italian music of extreme beauty, which has never been spoiled on the piano because it has never been played on it. To any one who has once touched a spinet, harpsichord, or clavichord, the piano must always remain a somewhat inadequate instrument; lacking in the precision, the penetrating charm, the infinite definite reasons for existence of those instruments of wires and jacks and quills which its metallic rumble has been supposed so entirely to have superseded. As for the clavichord, to have once touched it, feeling the softness with which one's fingers make their own music, like wind among the reeds, is to have lost something of one's relish even for the music of the violin, which is also a windy music, but the music of wind blowing sharply among the trees. It is on such instruments that Mr. Dolmetsch plays to us; and he plays to us also on the lute, the theorbo, the viola da gamba, the viola d'amore, and I know not how many varieties of those stringed instruments which are most familiar to most of us from the early Italian pictures in which whimsical little angels with crossed legs hold them to their chins.

Mr. Dolmetsch is, I suppose, the only living man who can read lute-music and play on the lute, an instrument of extraordinary beauty, which was once as common in England as the guitar still is in Spain. And, having made with his own hands the materials of the music which he has recovered from oblivion, he has taught himself and he has taught others to play this music on these instruments and to sing it to their accompaniment. In a music room, which is really the living room of a house, with viols hanging on the walls, a chamber-organ in one corner, a harpsichord in another, a clavichord laid across the arms of a chair, this music seems to carry one out of the world, and shut one in upon a house of dreams, full of intimate and ghostly voices. It is a house of peace, where music is still that refreshment which it was before it took fever, and became accomplice and not minister to the nerves, and brought the clamour of the world into its seclusion.

Go from a concert at Dolmetsch's to a Tschaikowsky concert at the Queen's Hall. Tschaikowsky is a debauch, not so much passionate as feverish. The rushing of his violins, like the rushing of an army of large winged birds; the thud, snap, and tingle of his strange orchestra; the riotous image of Russian peasants leaping and hopping in their country dances, which his dance measures call up before one; those sweet solid harmonies in which (if I may quote the voluptuous phrase of a woman) one sets one's teeth as into nougat; all this is like a very material kind of pleasure, in which the senses for a moment forget the soul. For a moment only, for is it not the soul, a kind of discontented crying out against pleasure and pain, which comes back distressingly into this after all pathetic music? All modern music is pathetic; discontent (so much idealism as that!) has come into all modern music, that it may be sharpened and disturbed enough to fix our attention. And Tschaikowsky speaks straight to the nerves, with that touch of unmanliness which is another characteristic of modern art. There is a vehement and mighty sorrow in the Passion Music of Bach, by the side of which the grief of Tschaikowsky is like the whimpering of a child. He is unconscious of reticence, unconscious of self-control. He is unhappy, and he weeps floods of tears, beats his breast, curses the daylight; he sees only the misery of the moment, and he sees the misery of the moment as a thing endless and overwhelming. The child who has broken his toy can realise nothing in the future but a passionate regret for the toy.

In Tschaikowsky there is none of the quieting of thought. The only healing for our nerves lies in abstract thought, and he can never get far enough from his nerves to look calmly at his own discontent. All those wild, broken rhythms, rushing this way and that, are letting out his secret all the time: "I am unhappy, and I know not why I am unhappy; I want, but I know not what I want." In the most passionate and the most questioning music of Wagner there is always air; Tschaikowsky is suffocating. It is himself that he pities so much, and not himself because he shares in the general sorrow of the world. To Tristan and Isolde the whole universe is an exultant and martyred sharer in their love; they know only the absolute. Even suffering does not bring nobility to Tschaikowsky.

To pass from Wagner to Tschaikowsky, from "Parsifal" to the Pathetic Symphony, is like passing from a church in which priests are offering mass to a hut in which peasants are quarrelling, dancing, and making love. Tschaikowsky has both force and sincerity, but it is the force and sincerity of a ferocious child. He takes the orchestra in both hands, tears it to pieces, catches up a fragment of it here, a fragment of it there, masters it like an enemy; he makes it do what he wants. But he uses his fist where Wagner touches with the tips of his fingers; he shows ill-breeding after the manners of the supreme gentleman. Wagner can use the whole strength of the orchestra, and not make a noise: he never ends on a bang. But Tschaikowsky loves noise for its own sake; he likes to pound the drum, and to hear the violins running up and down scales like acrobats. Wagner takes his rhythms from the sea, as in "Tristan," from fire, as in parts of the "Ring," from light, as in "Parsifal." But Tschaikowsky deforms the rhythms of nature with the caprices of half-civilised impulses. He puts the frog-like dancing of the Russian peasant into his tunes; he cries and roars like a child in a rage. He gives himself to you just as he is; he is immensely conscious of himself and of his need to take you into his confidence. In your delight at finding any one so alive, you are inclined to welcome him without reserve, and to forget that a man of genius is not necessarily a great artist, and that, if he is not a great artist, he is not a satisfactory man of genius.

I contrast him with Wagner because it seems to me that Wagner, alone among quite modern musicians, and though indeed he appeals to our nerves more forcibly than any of them, has that breadth and universality by which emotion ceases to be merely personal and becomes elemental. To the musicians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, music was an art which had to be carefully guarded from the too disturbing presence of emotion; emotion is there always, whenever the music is fine music; but the music is something much more than a means for the expression of emotion. It is a pattern, its beauty lies in its obedience to a law, it is music made for music's sake, with what might be called a more exclusive devotion to art than that of our modern musician. This music aims at the creation of beauty in sound; it conceives of beautiful sound as a thing which cannot exist outside order and measure; it has not yet come to look upon transgression as an essential part of liberty. It does not even desire liberty, but is content with loving obedience. It can express emotion, but it will never express an emotion carried to that excess at which the modern idea of emotion begins. Thus, for all its suggestions of pain, grief, melancholy, it will remain, for us at least, happy music, voices of a house of peace. Is there, in the future of music, after it has expressed for us all our emotions, and we are tired of our emotions, and weary enough to be content with a little rest, any likelihood of a return to this happy music, into which beauty shall come without the selfishness of desire?



THE DRAMATISATION OF SONG

All art is a compromise, in which the choice of what is to be foregone must be left somewhat to the discretion of nature. When the sculptor foregoes colour, when the painter foregoes relief, when the poet foregoes the music which soars beyond words and the musician that precise meaning which lies in words alone, he follows a kind of necessity in things, and the compromise seems to be ready-made for him. But there will always be those who are discontented with no matter what fixed limits, who dream, like Wagner, of a possible, or, like Mallarme, of an impossible, fusion of the arts. These would invent for themselves a compromise which has not yet come into the world, a gain without loss, a re-adjustment in which the scales shall bear so much additional weight without trembling. But nature is not always obedient to this too autocratic command. Take the art of the voice. In its essence, the art of the voice is the same in the nightingale and in Melba. The same note is produced in the same way; the expression given to that note, the syllable which that note renders, are quite different things. Song does not in itself require words in order to realise even the utmost of its capacities. The voice is an instrument like the violin, and no more in need of words for its expression than the violin. Perhaps the ideal of singing would be attained when a marvellous voice, which had absorbed into itself all that temperament and training had to give it, sang inarticulate music, like a violin which could play itself. There is nothing which such an instrument could not express, nothing which exists as pure music; and, in this way, we should have the art of the voice, with the least possible compromise.

The compromise is already far on its way when words begin to come into the song. Here are two arts helping one another; something is gained, but how much is lost? Undoubtedly the words lose, and does not the voice lose something also, in its directness of appeal? Add acting to voice and words, and you get the ultimate compromise, opera, in which other arts as well have their share and in which Wagner would have us see the supreme form of art. Again something is lost; we lose more and more, perhaps for a greater gain. Tristan sings lying on his back, in order to represent a sick man; the actual notes which he sings are written partly in order to indicate the voice of a sick man. For the sake of what we gain in dramatic and even theatrical expressiveness, we have lost a two-fold means of producing vocal beauty. Let us rejoice in the gain, by all means; but not without some consciousness of the loss, not with too ready a belief that the final solution of the problem has been found.

An attempt at some solution is, at this moment, being made in Paris by a singer who is not content to be Carmen or Charlotte Corday, but who wants to invent a method of her own for singing and acting at the same time, not as a character in an opera, but as a private interpreter between poetry and the world.

Imagine a woman who suggests at the same time Sarah Bernhardt and Mrs. Brown-Potter, without being really like either; she is small, exuberantly blonde, her head is surrounded by masses of loosely twisted blonde hair; she has large grey eyes, that can be grave, or mocking, or passionate, or cruel, or watchful; a large nose, an intent, eloquent mouth. She wears a trailing dress that follows the lines of the figure vaguely, supple to every movement. When she sings, she has an old, high-backed chair in which she can sit, or on which she can lean. When I heard her, there was a mirror on the other side of the room, opposite to her; she saw no one else in the room, once she had surrendered herself to the possession of the song, but she was always conscious of that image of herself which came back to her out of the mirror: it was herself watching herself, in a kind of delight at the beauty which she was evoking out of words, notes, and expressive movement. Her voice is strong and rich, imperfectly trained, but the voice of a born singer; her acting is even more the acting of a born actress; but it is the temperament of the woman that flames into her voice and gestures, and sets her whole being violently and delicately before you. She makes a drama of each song, and she re-creates that drama over again, in her rendering of the intentions of the words and of the music. It is as much with her eyes and her hands, as with her voice, that she evokes the melody of a picture; it is a picture that sings, and that sings in all its lines. There is something in her aspect, what shall I call it? tenacious; it is a woman who is an artist because she is a woman, who takes in energy at all her senses and gives out energy at all her senses. She sang some tragic songs of Schumann, some mysterious songs of Maeterlinck, some delicate love-songs of Charles van Lerberghe. As one looked and listened it was impossible to think more of the words than of the music or of the music than of the words. One took them simultaneously, as one feels at once the softness and the perfume of a flower. I understood why Mallarme had seemed to see in her the realisation of one of his dreams. Here was a new art, made up of a new mixing of the arts, in one subtly intoxicating elixir. To Mallarme it was the more exquisite because there was in it none of the broad general appeal of opera, of the gross recognised proportions of things.

This dramatisation of song, done by any one less subtly, less completely, and less sincerely an artist, would lead us, I am afraid, into something more disastrous than even the official concert, with its rigid persons in evening dress holding sheets of music in their tremulous hands, and singing the notes set down for them to the best of their vocal ability. Madame Georgette Leblanc is an exceptional artist, and she has made an art after her own likeness, which exists because it is the expression of herself, of a strong nature always in vibration. What she feels as a woman she can render as an artist; she is at once instinctive and deliberate, deliberate because it is her natural instinct, the natural instinct of a woman who is essentially a woman, to be so. I imagine her always singing in front of a mirror, always recognising her own shadow there, and the more absolutely abandoned to what the song is saying through her because of that uninterrupted communion with herself.



THE MEININGEN ORCHESTRA

Other orchestras give performances, readings, approximations; the Meiningen orchestra gives an interpretation, that is, the thing itself. When this orchestra plays a piece of music every note lives, and not, as with most orchestras, every particularly significant note. Brahms is sometimes dull, but he is never dull when these people play him; Schubert is sometimes tame, but not when they play him. What they do is precisely to put vitality into even those parts of a composition in which it is scarcely present, or scarcely realisable; and that is a much more difficult thing, and really a more important thing, for the proper appreciation of music, than the heightening of what is already fine, and obviously fine in itself. And this particular quality of interpretation has its value too as criticism. For, while it gives the utmost value to what is implicitly there, there at least in embryo, it cannot create out of nothing; it cannot make insincere work sincere, or fill empty work with meaning which never could have belonged to it. Brahms, at his moments of least vitality, comes into a new vigour of life; but Strauss, played by these sincere, precise, thoughtful musicians shows, as he never could show otherwise, the distance at which his lively spectre stands from life. When I heard the "Don Juan," which I had heard twice before, and liked less the second time than the first, I realised finally the whole strain, pretence, and emptiness of the thing. Played with this earnest attention to the meaning of every note, it was like a trivial drama when Duse acts it; it went to pieces through being taken at its own word. It was as if a threadbare piece of stuff were held up to the full sunlight; you saw every stitch that was wanting.

The "Don Juan" was followed by the Entr'acte and Ballet music from "Rosamunde," and here the same sunlight was no longer criticism, but rather an illumination. I have never heard any music more beautifully played. I could only think of the piano playing of Pachmann. The faint, delicate music just came into existence, breathed a little, and was gone. Here for once was an orchestra which could literally be overheard. The overture to the "Meistersinger" followed, and here, for the first time, I got, quite flawless and uncontradictory, the two impressions which that piece presents to one simultaneously. I heard the unimpeded march forward, and I distinguished at the same time every delicate impediment thronging the way. Some renderings give you a sense of solidity and straightforward movement; others of the elaborate and various life which informs this so solid structure. Here one got the complete thing, completely rendered.