o the message spoken
through her. The tumult and insatiable outcry of the Appassionata spread
like a river over her listeners. And as she played her face grew more
rapt in its brooding concentration, the eyes half-closed, the nostrils
wide, the jaw dropping and giving to the mouth an expression at once
relaxed and vigilant.

To criticize with the spell of Madame Okraska's personality upon one was
hardly possible. Emerged from the glamour, there were those, pretending
to professional discriminations, who suggested that she lacked the
masculine and classic disciplines of interpretation; that her rendering,
though breathed through with noble dignities, was coloured by a
capricious and passionate personality; that it was the feeling rather
than the thought of the music that she excelled in expressing, its
suffering rather than its serenity. Only a rare listener, here and there
among her world-wide audiences, was aware of deeper deficiencies and of
the slow changes that time had wrought in her art. For it was
inspiration no longer; it was the memory of inspiration. The Nemesis of
the artist who expresses, not what he feels, but what he is expected to
feel, what he has undertaken to feel, had fallen upon the great woman.
Her art, too, showed the fragrant taint of an artificial atmosphere. She
had played ten times when she should have played once. She lived on her
capital of experience, no longer renewing her life, and her renderings
had lost that quality of the greatest, the living communication with the
experience embodied in the music. It was on the stereotyped memories of
such communication that she depended, on the half hypnotic possession by
the past; filling in vacancies with temperamental caprice or an emotion
no longer the music's but her own.

But to the enchanted ear of the multitude, professional and
unprofessional, the essential vitality was there, the vitality embodied
to the enchanted eye by the white figure with its drooping,
pearl-wreathed head and face sunken in sombre ecstasy. She gave them all
they craved:--passion, stormy struggle, the tears of hopeless love, the
chill smile of lassitude in accepted defeat, the unappeasable longing
for the past. They listened, and their hearts lapsed back from the
hallucinated unity of enthusiasm each to its own identity, an identity
isolated, intensified, tortured exquisitely by the expression of dim
yearnings. All that had been beautiful in the pain and joy that through