ed deliciously till the early
morning, when, as I went home through the still garrulous and peopled
streets, I saw the last flutter of flags and streamers between night and
dawn. All the world had been rioting for pleasure in the gross way of
popular demonstrations; and in the very heart of this up-roar there had
been, for a few people, this divine escape.

No less magical, soothing, enchanting was the apparition, in Queen's
Hall, ten years later, of this unchanged creature with the tortured
Burne-Jones face, level and bewildering eyes, the web of gold hair still
poised like a halo. Beauty grew up around him like a sudden, exuberant
growth, more vigorous and from a deeper root than before. I realised,
more than ever, how the musician had always been the foundation of the
virtuoso. I have used the word apparition advisedly. There is something,
not only in the aspect of Paderewski, which seems to come mysteriously,
but full of light, from a great distance. He startles music into a
surprised awakening.

The art of Paderewski recalls to me the art of the most skilled and the
most distinguished of equilibrists, himself a Pole, Paul Cinquevalli.
People often speak, wrongly, of Paderewski's skill as acrobatic. The
word conveys some sense of disparagement and, so used, is inaccurate.
But there is much in common between two forms of an art in which
physical dexterity counts for so much, and that passionate precision to
which error must be impossible. It is the same kind of joy that you get
from Cinquevalli when he juggles with cannon-balls and from Paderewski
when he brings a continuous thunder out of the piano. Other people do
the same things, but no else can handle thunder or a cannon-ball
delicately. And Paderewski, in his absolute mastery of his instrument,
seems to do the most difficult things without difficulty, with a
scornful ease, an almost accidental quality which, found in perfection,
marvellously decorates it. It is difficult to imagine that anyone since
Liszt has had so complete a mastery of every capacity of the piano, and
Liszt, though probably even more brilliant, can hardly be imagined with
this particular kind of charm. His playing is in the true sense an
inspiration; he plays nothing as if he had learned it with toil, but as
if it had come to him out of a kind of fiery meditation. Even his
thunder is not so much a thing specially cultivated for its own sake as
a single prominent detail in a vast accomplishmen