substance; and why should not a form of art strike deeper for the same reason?  Our only answer to Whistler and Verlaine is the existence of Rodin and Wagner.  There we have weight as well as sharpness; these giants fly.  It was curious to hear, in the vast luminous music of the “Rheingold,” flowing like water about the earth, bare to its roots, not only an amplitude but a delicacy of fine shades not less realised than in Chopin.  Wagner, it is true, welds the lyric into drama, without losing its lyrical quality.  Yet there is no perfect lyric which is made less by the greatness of even a perfect drama.

Chopin was once thought to be a drawing-room composer; Pachmann was once thought to be no “serious artist.”  Both have triumphed, not because the taste of any public has improved, but because a few people who knew have whispered the truth to one another, and at last it has leaked out like a secret.

PADEREWSKI

I shall never cease to associate Paderewski with the night of the Jubilee.  I had gone on foot from the Temple through those packed, gaudy, noisy, and vulgarised streets, through which no vehicles could pass, to a rare and fantastic house at the other end of London, a famous house hospitable to all the arts; and Paderewski sat with closed eyes and played the piano, there in his friend’s house, as if he were in his own home.  After the music was over, someone said to me, “I feel as if I had been in hell,” so profound was the emotion she had experienced from the playing.  I would have said heaven rather than hell, for there seemed to be nothing but pure beauty, beauty half asleep and dreaming of itself, in the marvellous playing.  A spell, certainly, was over everyone, and then the exorciser became human, and jested 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.