eautiful and delicate artistic plant uprooted
just as it was bursting into blossom, and roughly thrown to wither in
the sterile dust of common life, while all around the insolent weeds
lift up their prosperous tawdry heads. Of this slender little dark
creature, with the delicate stern face of the young Augustus, not a soul
will ever remember the name. She will not even have enjoyed the cheap
triumphs of her art, the applause which endures two seconds, and the
stalkless flowers which wither in a day; the clapping which interrupts
the final flourish, the tight-packed nosegays which thump down before
the feet, of every fiftieth-rate mediocrity. Yet the artistic power will
have been there, though gone to waste in obscurity: and the singer will
have sung, though only for a day, and for that day unnoticed. Nothing
can alter that. And nothing can alter the fact that, while the logical
heads of all the critics, and the soulless throats of all the singers
in Christendom have done their best, and ever will do their best to
give us a real musical Cherubino, a real sentimental whipper-snapper of
a page, this utterly unnoticed little singer did persist in leaving out
the page most completely and entirely. Why? Had you asked her, she
would have been the last person in the world capable of answering the
question. Did she consider the expression of such a person as Cherubino
a prostitution of the art? Had she some theory respecting the propriety
of dramatic effects in music? Not in the very least; she considered
nothing and theorised about nothing: she probably never had such a
thing as a thought in the whole course of her existence. She had only
an unswerving artistic instinct, a complete incapacity of conceiving
the artistically wrong, an imperious unreasoning tendency to do the
artistically right. She had read Mozart's air, understood its exquisite
proportions, created it afresh in her appreciation, and she sang it
in such a way as to make its beauty more real, more complete. She had
unconsciously carried out the design of the composer, fulfilled all
that could be fulfilled, perfected the mere music of Mozart's air. And
as in Mozart's air there was and could be (inasmuch as it was purely
beautiful) no page Cherubino, so also in her singing of the air there
was none: Mozart had chosen, and she had abided by his choice.

Such is the little circle of fact and argument. We have seen what means
the inherent nature of music afforded to com