t what we may call the life of the piano
explains the necessity.

Music is pre-eminently the social art; no art draws people so
conveniently together, no art so lends itself to conversation, no art is
in a maidenly sense at once so agreeable, so easy to acquire, and so
eminently useful. A flirtation is never conducted under greater
advantages than amid the deafening thunders of a grand finale; the
victim doomed to the bondage of turning over is chained to the
fascination of fine arms and delicate hands. Talk, too, may be conducted
without much trouble over music on the small principles of female
criticism. "Pretty" and "exquisite" go a great way with the Italian and
the Romantic schools; "sublime" does pretty universally for the German.
The opera is, of course, the crown and sum of things, the most charming
and social of lounges, the readiest of conversational topics. It must be
a very happy Guardsman indeed who cannot kindle over the Flower-song or
the Jewel-scene. And it is at the opera that woman is supreme. The
strange mingling of eye and ear, the confused appeal to every sensuous
faculty, the littleness as well as the greatness of it all, echo the
conclusion within woman herself.

Moreover there is no boredom--no absolute appeal to thought or deeper
feeling. It is in good taste to drop in after the first act, and to
leave before the last. It is true that an opera is supposed to be the
great creation of a great artist, and an artist's work is presumed to
have a certain order and unity of its own; but woman is the Queen of
Art, and it is hard if she may not display her royalty by docking the
Fidelio of its head and its tail. But, if woman is obliged to content
herself with mutilating art in the opera or the concert-room, she is
able to create art itself over her piano. A host of Claribels and
Rosalies exist simply because woman is a musical creature. We turn over
the heap of rubbish on the piano with a sense of wonder, and ask,
without hope of an answer, why nine-tenths of our modern songs are
written at all, or why, being written, they can find a publisher.

But the answer is a simple one, after all; it is merely that aesthetic
creatures, that queens of art and of song, cannot play good music and
can play bad.

There is not a publisher in London who would not tell us that the
patronage of musical women is simply a patronage of trash. The fact is
that woman is a very practical being, and she has learned by experi