mastered this great, violent,
heroic thing as he had mastered the little freakish things and the
trickling and whispering things. He gave meaning to every part of its
decoration, yet lost none of the splendour and wave-like motion of the
whole tossing and eager sea of sound.

Pachmann's art, like Chopin's, which it perpetuates, is of that
peculiarly modern kind which aims at giving the essence of things in
their fine shades: "la nuance encor!" Is there, it may be asked, any
essential thing left out in the process; do we have attenuation in what
is certainly a way of sharpening one's steel to a very fine point? The
sharpened steel gains in what is most vital in its purpose by this very
paring away of its substance; and why should not a form of art strike
deeper for the same reason? Our only answer to Whistler and Verlaine is
the existence of Rodin and Wagner. There we have weight as well as
sharpness; these giants fly. It was curious to hear, in the vast
luminous music of the "Rheingold," flowing like water about the earth,
bare to its roots, not only an amplitude but a delicacy of fine shades
not less realised than in Chopin. Wagner, it is true, welds the lyric
into drama, without losing its lyrical quality. Yet there is no perfect
lyric which is made less by the greatness of even a perfect drama.

Chopin was once thought to be a drawing-room composer; Pachmann was once
thought to be no "serious artist." Both have triumphed, not because the
taste of any public has improved, but because a few people who knew have
whispered the truth to one another, and at last it has leaked out like a
secret.

PADEREWSKI

I shall never cease to associate Paderewski with the night of the
Jubilee. I had gone on foot from the Temple through those packed, gaudy,
noisy, and vulgarised streets, through which no vehicles could pass, to
a rare and fantastic house at the other end of London, a famous house
hospitable to all the arts; and Paderewski sat with closed eyes and
played the piano, there in his friend's house, as if he were in his own
home. After the music was over, someone said to me, "I feel as if I had
been in hell," so profound was the emotion she had experienced from the
playing. I would have said heaven rather than hell, for there seemed to
be nothing but pure beauty, beauty half asleep and dreaming of itself,
in the marvellous playing. A spell, certainly, was over everyone, and
then the exorciser became human, and jest