can really
understand a master's thoughts, are not distressed by the shortcomings
of their own performance, the notes they play or sing merely serving to
suggest those which they hear.

This transcendental doctrine (fraught, I confess, like all transcendent
truths, with gravest practical dangers) was matured in my mind by
friendship with one of the most singular of musicians. This person
(since deceased, and by profession a clerk) suffered from nervousness
so excessive that, despite a fair knowledge of music, the fact of
putting his hands upon the keys produced a maddening sort of stammer,
let alone a notable tendency to strike wrong notes and miss his octaves;
peculiarities of which he was so morbidly conscious that it was only an
accident which revealed to me, after years of acquaintance, that he ever
played the piano at all. Yet I know as a fact that this poor blundering
player, who stopped convulsively if he heard steps in the passage, and
actually _closed the lid of his instrument_ when the maid came in with
the tea-things, was united more closely with the divine ones of music
during his excruciating performance, than many a listener at a splendid
concert. Mozart, for whom he had a special _cultus_, would surely have
felt satisfied, if his clairvoyant spirit had been abroad, with my
friend's marvellous bungling over that first finale of "Don Giovanni."
The soul, the whole innermost nervous body (which felt of the shape of
the music, fluid and infinitely sensitive) of the poor creature at the
piano would draw itself up, parade grandly through that minuet, dance it
in glory with the most glorious ghosts of glorious ladies--pshaw! not
with anything so trifling! Dance it _with the notes themselves_, would
sway with them, bow to them, rise to them, live with them, become in
fact part and parcel of the music itself....

So, to return whence I began, it is no use imagining that we necessarily
hear music by going to concerts and festivals and operas, exposing our
bodily ear to showers and floods of sound, unless we happen to be in the
right humour, unless we dispose, at the moment, of that rare and
capricious thing--the _inner ear_.

RECEIVING LETTERS

I think I shall not treat of writing them. That is a different matter,
with pains and pleasures of its own, which do not correspond (the word
fits nicely to this subject) with those of letters received. For 'tis a
metaphysical mistake, or myth of language, like