ound as
the theory that Friday is an unlucky day, and is dying as hard. One even
finds some trace of it in Anatole France, surely a man who should know
better. The true function of art is to criticise, embellish and edit
nature--particularly to edit it, and so make it coherent and lovely. The
artist is a sort of impassioned proof-reader, blue-pencilling the
_lapsus calami_ of God. The sounds in a Beethoven symphony, even the
Pastoral, are infinitely more orderly, varied and beautiful than those
of the woods. The worst flute is never as bad as the worst soprano. The
best violoncello is immeasurably better than the best tenor.

All first-rate music suffers by the fact that it has to be performed by
human beings--that is, that nature must be permitted to corrupt it. The
performance one hears in a concert hall or opera house is no more than a
baroque parody upon the thing the composer imagined. In an orchestra of
eighty men there is inevitably at least one man with a sore thumb, or
bad kidneys, or a brutal wife, or _katzenjammer_--and one is enough.
Some day the natural clumsiness and imperfection of fingers, lips and
larynxes will be overcome by mechanical devices, and we shall have
Beethoven and Mozart and Schubert in such wonderful and perfect beauty
that it will be almost unbearable. If half as much ingenuity had been
lavished upon music machines as has been lavished upon the telephone and
the steam engine, we would have had mechanical orchestras long ago.
Mechanical pianos are already here. Piano-players, bound to put some
value on the tortures of Czerny, affect to laugh at all such
contrivances, but that is no more than a pale phosphorescence of an
outraged _wille zur macht_. Setting aside half a dozen--perhaps a
dozen--great masters of a moribund craft, who will say that the average
mechanical piano is not as competent as the average pianist?

When the human performer of music goes the way of the galley-slave, the
charm of personality, of course, will be pumped out of the performance
of music. But the charm of personality does not help music; it hinders
it. It is not a reinforcement to music; it is a rival. When a beautiful
singer comes upon the stage, two shows, as it were, go on at once: first
the music show, and then the arms, shoulders, neck, nose, ankles, eyes,
hips, calves and ruby lips--in brief, the sex-show. The second of these
shows, to the majority of persons present, is more interesting than the
first--t