MRS. SOLID.  Do you pursue the same course with longer and more difficult pieces?

DOMINIE.  Certainly, on the same principle.

MRS. SOLID.  But, if you are so particular about every piece, and always take so much pains to improve the touch, it will be a long time before Emily will be able to execute several long pieces and can learn other new ones beside.

DOMINIE.  Do you wish your daughter to learn to jingle on the piano, in order to become musical? or shall she grow more musical by learning to play finely?  I am sure the latter is your wish, as it is mine:  otherwise, you would be contented with an ordinary teacher.  You must consider that, when she has made a beginning, by learning to play one piece thoroughly and quite correctly, the following pieces will be learned more and more quickly; for she will have acquired a dexterity in playing, as you may observe with yourself and with every one.  To be able to drum off fifty pieces in an imperfect manner does not justify the expectation that the fifty-first piece will be learned more easily or better; but to attain a perfect mastery of four or five pieces gives a standard for the rest.

In this way, and by mechanical studies, such as I have begun with Emily, the greatest ease in reading at sight is gradually developed, in which all my pupils excel, when they have remained long enough under my instruction, and in which my daughters are pre-eminent.  But for this it is necessary to continue to study single pieces, industriously and artistically, and with great exactness; for otherwise the practice of reading at sight, which often amounts to a passion, leads very soon to slovenliness in piano-playing and to more or less vulgar machine-music.

MRS. SOLID.  I am more and more convinced that a style of instruction which is illogical, intermittent, superficial, and without method, can lead to no good result, or at least to nothing satisfactory, even with extraordinary talents; and that the unsound and eccentric manifestations and caricatures of art, which cause the present false and deplorable condition of piano-playing, are the consequence of such a prevalent mode of instruction.

CHAPTER V.

ON THE PEDAL.

I have just returned exhausted and annihilated from a concert, where I have been hearing the piano pounded.  Two grand bravoura movements have been thundered off, with the pedal continually raised; and then were suddenly succeeded by a soft murmuring passage, during which the thirteen convulsed and quivering bass notes of the fortissimo were all the time resounding.  It was only by the aid of the concert programme that my tortured ears could arrive at the conclusion that this confusion of tones was meant to represent two pieces by Doehler and Thalberg.