Diaz was standing up and bowing to his public.  What did they understand?  Did they understand anything?  I cannot tell.  But I know that they felt.  A shudder of feeling had gone through the hall.  It was in vain that people tried to emancipate themselves from the spell by the violence of their applause.  They could not.  We were all together under the enchantment.  Some may have seen clearly, some darkly, but we were equal before the throne of that mighty enchanter.  And the enchanter bowed and bowed with a grave, sympathetic smile, and then disappeared.  I had not clapped my hands; I had not moved.  Only my full eyes had followed him as he left the platform; and when he returned—­because the applause would not cease—­my eyes watched over him as he came back to the centre of the platform.  He stood directly in front of me, smiling more gaily now.  And suddenly our glances met!  Yes; I could not be mistaken.  They met, and mine held his for several seconds....  Diaz had looked at me.  Diaz had singled me out from the crowd.  I blushed hotly, and I was conscious of a surpassing joy.  My spirit was transfigured.  I knew that such a man was above kings.  I knew that the world and everything of loveliness that it contained was his.  I knew that he moved like a beautiful god through the groves of delight, and that what he did was right, and whom he beckoned came, and whom he touched was blessed.  And my eyes had held his eyes for a little space.

The enchantment deepened.  I had read that the secret of playing Chopin had died with Chopin; but I felt sure that evening, as I have felt sure since, that Chopin himself, aristocrat of the soul as he was, would have received Diaz as an equal, might even have acknowledged in him a superior.  For Diaz had a physique, and he had a mastery, a tyranny, of the keyboard that Chopin could not have possessed.  Diaz had come to the front in a generation of pianists who had lifted technique to a plane of which neither Liszt nor Rubinstein dreamed.  He had succeeded primarily by his gigantic and incredible technique.  And then, when his technique had astounded the world, he had invited the world to forget it, as the glass is forgotten through which is seen beauty.  And Diaz’s gift was now such that there appeared to intervene nothing between his conception of the music and the strings of the piano, so perfected was the mechanism.  Difficulties had ceased to exist.

The performance of some pianists is so wonderful that it seems as if they were crossing Niagara on a tight-rope, and you tremble lest they should fall off.  It was not so with Diaz.  When Diaz played you experienced the pure emotions caused by the unblurred contemplation of that beauty which the great masters had created, and which Diaz had tinted with the rare dyes of his personality.  You forgot all but beauty.  The piano was not a piano; it was an Arabian magic beyond physical laws, and it, too, had a soul.