been
delightful in some other way. A movement not of music only but of life
came to its perfection. I was delighted and I did not know why until I
thought 'that is the way my people, the people I see in the mind's eye,
play music, and I like it because it is all personal, as personal as
Villon's poetry.' The little instrument is quite light and the player
can move freely and express a joy that is not of the fingers and the
mind only but of the whole being; and all the while her movements call
up into the mind, so erect and natural she is, whatever is most
beautiful in her daily life. Nearly all the old instruments were like
that, even the organ was once a little instrument and when it grew big
our wise forefathers gave it to God in the cathedrals where it befits
Him to be everything. But if you sit at the piano it is the piano, the
mechanism, that is the important thing, and nothing of you means
anything but your fingers and your intellect.

THE LOOKING-GLASS

I have just been talking to a girl with a shrill monotonous voice and an
abrupt way of moving. She is fresh from school where they have taught
her history and geography 'whereby a soul can be discerned,' but what is
the value of an education, or even in the long run of a science, that
does not begin with the personality, the habitual self, and illustrate
all by that? Somebody should have taught her to speak for the most part
on whatever note of her voice is most musical, and soften those harsh
notes by speaking, not singing, to some stringed instrument, taking note
after note and, as it were, caressing her words a little as if she loved
the sound of them, and have taught her after this some beautiful
pantomimic dance, till it had grown a habit to live for eye and ear. A
wise theatre might make a training in strong and beautiful life the
fashion, teaching before all else the heroic discipline of the
looking-glass, for is not beauty, even as lasting love, one of the most
difficult of the arts?

THE TREE OF LIFE

We artists have taken over-much to heart that old commandment about
seeking after the Kingdom of Heaven. Verlaine told me that he had tried
to translate 'In Memoriam,' but could not because Tennyson was 'too
noble, too Anglais, and when he should have been broken-hearted had many
reminiscences.' About that time I found in some English review an essay
of his on Shakespeare. 'I had once a fine Shakespeare,' he wrote, or
some such words, '