en lament the lack of these. It is well to
remember that the genuine musical artist is able to create an atmosphere
whose influences may compel an average audience to sympathetic
listening. A good plan for the artist is to be surrounded in fancy with
an audience having sensitively attuned ears, intellectual minds, and
warm, throbbing hearts. Music played in private before such an imaginary
audience will gain in quality, and when repeated before an actual public
will hold that public captive.

We have it from Ruskin that all fatal faults in art that might otherwise
be good arise from one or other of three things: either from the
pretence to feel what we do not; the indolence in exercise necessary to
obtain the power of expressing the Truth; or the presumptuous insistence
upon, or indulgence in, our own powers and delights, with no care or
wish that they should be useful to other people, so only they should be
admired by them.

These three fatal faults must be avoided, or conquered, by the person
who would interpret music.

V

How to Listen to Music

Listening is an art. It requires close and accurate attention, sympathy,
imagination and genuine culture. Listening to music is an art of high
degree. Many derive exquisite enjoyment from it, for music is potent and
universal in its appeal. To listen intelligently to music is an
accomplishment few have acquired.

A great painting presents itself as a completed whole before the
observer's eye. It holds on the canvas the fixed place given it by the
master from whose genius it proceeded. No intermediary force is needed
to come between it and the impression it makes on the beholder. Music,
on the contrary, must be aroused from the written, or printed page to
living tone by the hand or voice of the interpreter, and but a fragment
at a time can be made perceptible to the listener's ear. Like a
panorama, it comes and goes before the imagination, its kaleidoscopic
tints and forms now sharply contrasted, now almost imperceptibly
graduated one into the other, but all shaping themselves into a logical
union, stamped with the design of a creative mind. Properly to inspect
the successive musical images, and grasp their significance, in parts
and as a whole, demands keen mental alertness.

Many are content to listen to music for the mere sensuous impression it
creates as it wraps itself about the inner being, lulling a perturbed
spirit to rest, or awakening longing and asp