cond Mazurka of Op.
50 had that boldness of attack, with an almost stealthy intimacy in its
secret rhythms, which in Pachmann's playing, and in his playing alone,
gives you the dance and the reverie together. But I am not sure that the
Etudes are not, in a very personal sense, what is most essential in
Chopin, and I am not sure that Pachmann is not at his best in the
playing of the Etudes.

Other pianists think, perhaps, but Pachmann plays. As he plays he is
like one hypnotised by the music; he sees it beckoning, smiles to it,
lifts his finger on a pause that you may listen to the note which is
coming. This apparent hypnotism is really a fixed and continuous act of
creation; there is not a note which he does not create for himself, to
which he does not give his own vitality, the sensitive and yet
controlling vitality of the medium. In playing the Bach he had the music
before him that he might be wholly free from even the slight strain
which comes from the almost unconscious act of remembering. It was for a
precisely similar reason that Coleridge, in whose verse inspiration and
art are more perfectly balanced than in any other English verse, often
wrote down his poems first in prose that he might be unhampered by the
conscious act of thought while listening for the music.

"There is no exquisite beauty," said Bacon in a subtle definition,
"which has not some strangeness in its proportions." The playing of
Pachmann escapes the insipidity of that beauty which is without
strangeness; it has in it something fantastically inhuman, like fiery
ice, and it is for this reason that it remains a thing uncapturable, a
thing whose secret he himself could never reveal. It is like the secret
of the rhythms of Verlaine, and no prosodist will ever tell us why a
line like:

Dans un palais, soie et or, dans Ecbatane,

can communicate a new shiver to the most languid or the most experienced
nerves. Like the art of Verlaine, the art of Pachmann is one wholly of
suggestion; his fingers state nothing, they evoke. I said like the art
of Verlaine, because there is a singular likeness between the two
methods. But is not all art a suggestion, an evocation, never a
statement? Many of the great forces of the present day have set
themselves to the task of building up a large, positive art in which
everything shall be said with emphasis: the art of Zola, the art of Mr.
Kipling, in literature; the art of Mr. Sargent in painting; the art of
Richa