ture; it is a picture that sings, and that sings in all
its lines. There is something in her aspect, what shall I call it?
tenacious; it is a woman who is an artist because she is a woman, who
takes in energy at all her senses and gives out energy at all her
senses. She sang some tragic songs of Schumann, some mysterious songs of
Maeterlinck, some delicate love-songs of Charles van Lerberghe. As one
looked and listened it was impossible to think more of the words than of
the music or of the music than of the words. One took them
simultaneously, as one feels at once the softness and the perfume of a
flower. I understood why Mallarme had seemed to see in her the
realisation of one of his dreams. Here was a new art, made up of a new
mixing of the arts, in one subtly intoxicating elixir. To Mallarme it
was the more exquisite because there was in it none of the broad general
appeal of opera, of the gross recognised proportions of things.

This dramatisation of song, done by any one less subtly, less
completely, and less sincerely an artist, would lead us, I am afraid,
into something more disastrous than even the official concert, with its
rigid persons in evening dress holding sheets of music in their
tremulous hands, and singing the notes set down for them to the best of
their vocal ability. Madame Georgette Leblanc is an exceptional artist,
and she has made an art after her own likeness, which exists because it
is the expression of herself, of a strong nature always in vibration.
What she feels as a woman she can render as an artist; she is at once
instinctive and deliberate, deliberate because it is her natural
instinct, the natural instinct of a woman who is essentially a woman, to
be so. I imagine her always singing in front of a mirror, always
recognising her own shadow there, and the more absolutely abandoned to
what the song is saying through her because of that uninterrupted
communion with herself.

THE MEININGEN ORCHESTRA

Other orchestras give performances, readings, approximations; the
Meiningen orchestra gives an interpretation, that is, the thing itself.
When this orchestra plays a piece of music every note lives, and not, as
with most orchestras, every particularly significant note. Brahms is
sometimes dull, but he is never dull when these people play him;
Schubert is sometimes tame, but not when they play him. What they do is
precisely to put vitality into even those parts of a composition in
which