naudible on everything but the
harpsichord and the viols; and that there exists, far earlier than these
writers, a mass of English and Italian music of extreme beauty, which
has never been spoiled on the piano because it has never been played on
it. To any one who has once touched a spinet, harpsichord, or
clavichord, the piano must always remain a somewhat inadequate
instrument; lacking in the precision, the penetrating charm, the
infinite definite reasons for existence of those instruments of wires
and jacks and quills which its metallic rumble has been supposed so
entirely to have superseded. As for the clavichord, to have once touched
it, feeling the softness with which one's fingers make their own music,
like wind among the reeds, is to have lost something of one's relish
even for the music of the violin, which is also a windy music, but the
music of wind blowing sharply among the trees. It is on such instruments
that Mr. Dolmetsch plays to us; and he plays to us also on the lute, the
theorbo, the viola da gamba, the viola d'amore, and I know not how many
varieties of those stringed instruments which are most familiar to most
of us from the early Italian pictures in which whimsical little angels
with crossed legs hold them to their chins.

Mr. Dolmetsch is, I suppose, the only living man who can read lute-music
and play on the lute, an instrument of extraordinary beauty, which was
once as common in England as the guitar still is in Spain. And, having
made with his own hands the materials of the music which he has
recovered from oblivion, he has taught himself and he has taught others
to play this music on these instruments and to sing it to their
accompaniment. In a music room, which is really the living room of a
house, with viols hanging on the walls, a chamber-organ in one corner,
a harpsichord in another, a clavichord laid across the arms of a chair,
this music seems to carry one out of the world, and shut one in upon a
house of dreams, full of intimate and ghostly voices. It is a house of
peace, where music is still that refreshment which it was before it took
fever, and became accomplice and not minister to the nerves, and brought
the clamour of the world into its seclusion.

Go from a concert at Dolmetsch's to a Tschaikowsky concert at the
Queen's Hall. Tschaikowsky is a debauch, not so much passionate as
feverish. The rushing of his violins, like the rushing of an army of
large winged birds; the thud, snap