vibrations of the upper strings of the piano for the proper effect of a piano sonata, so for the effect of an orchestral work he relies on the full rich tone and the subdued murmur, which are only produced by the members of the orchestra playing a little wrong.  That they play wrong in a million different ways does not matter:  provided they do not play too far wrong the result is always the same, just as the characteristic sound of an excited crowd is always the same whether there are a few more men or fewer women in one crowd than in another.  This may be wrong theoretically; but all theorising breaks down hopelessly before the fact that it was such an orchestra the masters wrote for.  Perhaps some day the foot-rule, the metronome, and the tuning-fork will take the place of the human ear and artistic judgment; but until that day arrives I prefer the wrongness of Mottl’s orchestra to the strict correctness which Lamoureux used to give us; and I leave the aesthetic illogical logic-choppers, who demand from the orchestra the correctness they would not stand from a solo-player, to find what delight they may in such playing as Lamoureux’s used to be in the “Meistersinger” overture, or the “Waldweben,” or the Good Friday music.  It must be remembered, however, that the excessive correctness of which I have complained was only one of the means through which Lamoureux attained excessive lucidity.  He sacrificed every other quality to lucidity; and those who preferred lucidity to every other qualify—­that is to say, all Frenchmen—­naturally preferred Lamoureux’s playing to that of any other conductor.  In the “Meistersinger” overture he would not allow the band to romp freely for a single moment; in the “Waldweben” he succeeded in playing every crescendo, every diminuendo, with astonishing evenness of gradation, even when a trifling irregularity to relieve the mechanical stiffness of the thing would have been as water to a thirsty traveller in the desert; in the Good Friday music he stuck rigidly to the composer’s directions, and would not permit a breath of his own life to go into the music.  In Berlioz’s “Chasse et Orage” (from “Les Troyens”) and a movement from the “Romeo and Juliet” symphony, he manifested the same qualities as when he played Beethoven and Wagner.  His playing wanted colour, suggestiveness, and human warmth; and, lacking these, its chill clearness, its cleanness and sharp-cut edges, merely made one think of an iceberg glittering in a wan Arctic sunlight.  Still he was a notable man; and his death robbed France of her one perfectly sincere musician.