can communicate a new shiver to the most languid or the most experienced nerves.  Like the art of Verlaine, the art of Pachmann is one wholly of suggestion; his fingers state nothing, they evoke.  I said like the art of Verlaine, because there is a singular likeness between the two methods.  But is not all art a suggestion, an evocation, never a statement?  Many of the great forces of the present day have set themselves to the task of building up a large, positive art in which everything shall be said with emphasis:  the art of Zola, the art of Mr. Kipling, in literature; the art of Mr. Sargent in painting; the art of Richard Strauss in music.  In all these remarkable men there is some small, essential thing lacking; and it is in men like Verlaine, like Whistler, like Pachmann, that we find the small, essential thing, and nothing else.

II

  The sounds torture me:  I see them in my brain;
  They spin a flickering web of living threads,
  Like butterflies upon the garden beds,
  Nets of bright sound.  I follow them:  in vain. 
  I must not brush the least dust from their wings: 
  They die of a touch; but I must capture them,
  Or they will turn to a caressing flame,
  And lick my soul up with their flutterings.

  The sounds torture me:  I count them with my eyes,
  I feel them like a thirst between my lips;
  Is it my body or my soul that cries
  With little coloured mouths of sound, and drips
  In these bright drops that turn to butterflies
  Dying delicately at my finger tips?

III

Pachmann has the head of a monk who has had commerce with the Devil, and it is whispered that he has sold his soul to the diabolical instrument, which, since buying it, can speak in a human voice.  The sounds torture him, as a wizard is tortured by the shapes he has evoked.  He makes them dance for his pleasure, and you hear their breath come and go, in the swell and subsiding of those marvellous crescendoes and diminuendoes which set the strings pulsating like a sea.  He listens for the sound, listens for the last echo of it after it is gone, and is caught away from us visibly into that unholy company.

Pachmann is the greatest player of the piano now living.  He cannot interpret every kind of music, though his actual power is more varied than he has led the public to suppose.  I have heard him play in private a show-piece of Liszt, a thunderous thing of immense difficulty, requiring a technique quite different from the technique which alone he cares to reveal to us; he had not played it for twenty years, and he played it with exactly the right crackling splendour that it demanded.  On the rare occasions when he plays Bach, something that no one of our time has ever perceived or rendered in that composer seems to be evoked, and Bach lives again, with something of