liquid was somewhat
sinister and disagreeable, but immediately afterwards I changed my
opinion, and found it ingratiating, enticing, and stimulating, and yet
not strong.

'Do you like it?' he asked.

I nodded, and drank again.

'It is wonderful,' I answered. 'What do you call it?'

'Men call it absinthe,' he said.

'But--'

I put the glass on the mantelpiece and picked it up again.

'Don't be frightened,' he soothed me. 'I know what you were going to
say. You have always heard that absinthe is the deadliest of all poisons,
that it is the curse of Paris, and that it makes the most terrible of all
drunkards. So it is; so it does. But not as we are drinking it; not as I
invariably drink it.'

'Of course,' I said, proudly confident in him. 'You would not have
offered it to me otherwise.'

'Of course I should not,' he agreed. 'I give you my word that a few drops
of absinthe in a tumbler of water make the most effective and the least
harmful stimulant in the world.'

'I am sure of it,' I said.

'But drink slowly,' he advised me.

I refused the sandwiches. I had no need of them. I felt sufficient unto
myself. I no longer had any apprehension. My body, my brain, and my soul
seemed to be at the highest pitch of efficiency. The fear of being
maladroit departed from me. Ideas--delicate and subtle ideas--welled up
in me one after another; I was bound to give utterance to them. I began
to talk about my idol Chopin, and I explained to Diaz my esoteric
interpretation of the Fantasia. He was sitting down now, but I still
stood by the fire.

'Yes, he said, 'that is very interesting.'

'What does the Fantasia mean to you?' I asked him.

'Nothing,' he said.

'Nothing!'

'Nothing, in the sense you wish to convey. Everything, in another sense.
You can attach any ideas you please to music, but music, if you will
forgive me saying so, rejects them all equally. Art has to do with
emotions, not with ideas, and the great defect of literature is that it
can only express emotions by means of ideas. What makes music the
greatest of all the arts is that it can express emotions without ideas.
Literature can appeal to the soul only through the mind. Music goes
direct. Its language is a language which the soul alone understands, but
which the soul can never translate. Therefore all I can say of the
Fantasia is that it moves me profoundly. I _know how_ it moves me, but I
cannot tell you; I cannot even tell myself.'

Vistas of