ition that, unlike Faustus and unlike Goethe, we seek not to show
her to others, and remain satisfied if the weird and glorious figure
haunt only our own imagination.

CHAPELMASTER KREISLER.

A STUDY OF MUSICAL ROMANTICISTS.

There is nothing stranger in the world than music: it exists only as
sound, is born of silence and dies away into silence, issuing from
nothing and relapsing into nothing; it is our own creation, yet it is
foreign to ourselves; we draw it from out of the silent wood and the
silent metal, it lives in our own breath, yet it seems to come to us
from a distant land which we shall never see, and to tell us of things
we shall never know. It is for ever striving to tell us something, for
ever imploring us to listen and to understand; we listen, we strain, we
try to take in its vague meaning; it is telling us sweet and mighty
secrets, letting drop precious talismanic words; we guess, but do not
understand. And shall we never understand? May we never know wherefore
the joy, wherefore the sadness? Can we not subtilise our minds, go
forth with our heart and fancy as interpreters, and distinguish in
the wreathing melodies and entangled chords some words of superhuman
emotion, even as the men of other ages distinguished in the sighing oak
woods and the rustling reeds the words of the great gods of nature?

To us music is no longer what it was to our grandfathers, a mere
pleasing woof of meaningless pattern; we have left those times far
behind, times whose great masters were prophets uttering mere empty
sounds to their contemporaries; we have shaken off the dust of the
schools of counterpoint, we have thrown aside the mechanical teachings
of the art; for us music has become an audible, quivering fata morgana
of life, the embodiment of the intangible, the expression of the
inexplicable, the realisation of the impossible. And it has become a
riddle, a something we would fain understand but cannot, a spell of our
own devising which we cannot decipher; we sit listening to it as we sit
looking into the deep, dreamy eyes of an animal, full of some mute
language, which we vainly strive to comprehend.

The animal seems as though it could say much if only it could speak; so
also music would seem to contain far deeper meanings than any spoken
word, to be fraught with emotion deeper than we can feel: it could
confide so much if we could understand. Yet the animal is but an animal,
with some of our virtues and