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, and tingle of his strange orchestra; the riotous image of Russian peasants leaping and hopping in their country dances, which his dance measures call up before one; those sweet solid harmonies in which (if I may quote the voluptuous phrase of a woman) one sets one’s teeth as into nougat; all this is like a very material kind of pleasure, in which the senses for a moment forget the soul.  For a moment only, for is it not the soul, a kind of discontented crying out against pleasure and pain, which comes back distressingly into this after all pathetic music?  All modern music is pathetic; discontent (so much idealism as that!) has come into all modern music, that it may be sharpened and disturbed enough to fix our attention.  And Tschaikowsky speaks straight to the nerves, with that touch of unmanliness which is another characteristic of modern art.  There is a vehement and mighty sorrow in the Passion Music of Bach, by the side of which the grief of Tschaikowsky is like the whimpering of a child.  He is unconscious of reticence, unconscious of self-control.  He is unhappy, and he weeps floods of tears, beats his breast, curses the daylight; he sees only the misery of the moment, and he sees the misery of the moment as a thing endless and overwhelming.  The child who has broken his toy can realise nothing in the future but a passionate regret for the toy.