rd Strauss in music. In all these remarkable men there is some
small, essential thing lacking; and it is in men like Verlaine, like
Whistler, like Pachmann, that we find the small, essential thing, and
nothing else.

II

The sounds torture me: I see them in my brain;
They spin a flickering web of living threads,
Like butterflies upon the garden beds,
Nets of bright sound. I follow them: in vain.
I must not brush the least dust from their wings:
They die of a touch; but I must capture them,
Or they will turn to a caressing flame,
And lick my soul up with their flutterings.

The sounds torture me: I count them with my eyes,
I feel them like a thirst between my lips;
Is it my body or my soul that cries
With little coloured mouths of sound, and drips
In these bright drops that turn to butterflies
Dying delicately at my finger tips?

III

Pachmann has the head of a monk who has had commerce with the Devil, and
it is whispered that he has sold his soul to the diabolical instrument,
which, since buying it, can speak in a human voice. The sounds torture
him, as a wizard is tortured by the shapes he has evoked. He makes them
dance for his pleasure, and you hear their breath come and go, in the
swell and subsiding of those marvellous crescendoes and diminuendoes
which set the strings pulsating like a sea. He listens for the sound,
listens for the last echo of it after it is gone, and is caught away
from us visibly into that unholy company.

Pachmann is the greatest player of the piano now living. He cannot
interpret every kind of music, though his actual power is more varied
than he has led the public to suppose. I have heard him play in private
a show-piece of Liszt, a thunderous thing of immense difficulty,
requiring a technique quite different from the technique which alone he
cares to reveal to us; he had not played it for twenty years, and he
played it with exactly the right crackling splendour that it demanded.
On the rare occasions when he plays Bach, something that no one of our
time has ever perceived or rendered in that composer seems to be evoked,
and Bach lives again, with something of that forgotten life which only
the harpsichord can help us to remember under the fingers of other
players. Mozart and Weber are two of the composers whom he plays with
the most natural instinct, for in both he finds and unweaves that dainty
web of bright melody which Mozart made out