h the notes, and to present this as an
interpretation of what the notes have said in an unknown language. Yet
what method is there besides these two methods? None, indeed, that can
ever be wholly satisfactory; at the best, no more than a compromise.

In writing about poetry, while precisely that quality which makes it
poetry must always evade expression, there yet remain the whole definite
meaning of the words, and the whole easily explicable technique of the
verse, which can be made clear to every reader. In painting, you have
the subject of the picture, and you have the colour, handling, and the
like, which can be expressed hardly less precisely in words. But music
has no subject, outside itself; no meaning, outside its meaning as
music; and, to understand anything of what is meant by its technique, a
certain definite technical knowledge is necessary in the reader. What
subterfuges are required, in order to give the vaguest suggestion of
what a piece of music is like, and how little has been said, after all,
beyond generalisations, which would apply equally to half a dozen
different pieces! The composer himself, if you ask him, will tell you
that you may be quite correct in what you say, but that he has no
opinion in the matter.

Music has indeed a language, but it is a language in which birds and
other angels may talk, but out of which we cannot translate their
meaning. Emotion itself, how changed becomes even emotion when we
transport it into a new world, in which only sound has feeling! But I am
speaking as if it had died and been re-born there, whereas it was born
in its own region, and is wholly ignorant of ours.

TECHNIQUE AND THE ARTIST

Technique and the artist: that is a question, of interest to the student
of every art, which was brought home to me with unusual emphasis the
other afternoon, as I sat in the Queen's Hall, and listened to Ysaye and
Busoni. Are we always quite certain what we mean when we speak of an
artist? Have we quite realised in our own minds the extent to which
technique must go to the making of an artist, and the point at which
something else must be superadded? That is a matter which I often doubt,
and the old doubt came back to my mind the other afternoon, as I
listened to Ysaye and Busoni, and next day, as I turned over the
newspapers.

I read, in the first paper I happen to take up, that the violinist and
the pianist are "a perfectly matched pair"; the applause, at the
c