ime be impatient with our thirst for mere force, mere
personality, for the tumult of the blood. If it begin to slip away we
must go after it, for Shelley's Chapel of the Morning Star is better
than Burns's beer-house--surely it was beer, not barleycorn--except at
the day's weary end; and it is always better than that uncomfortable
place where there is no beer, the machine shop of the realists.

THE MUSICIAN AND THE ORATOR

Walter Pater says music is the type of all the Arts, but somebody else,
I forget now who, that oratory is their type. You will side with the one
or the other according to the nature of your energy, and I in my present
mood am all for the man who, with an average audience before him, uses
all means of persuasion--stories, laughter, tears, and but so much music
as he can discover on the wings of words. I would even avoid the
conversation of the lovers of music, who would draw us into the
impersonal land of sound and colour, and I would have no one write with
a sonata in his memory. We may even speak a little evil of musicians,
having admitted that they will see before we do that melodious crown. We
may remind them that the housemaid does not respect the piano-tuner as
she does the plumber, and of the enmity that they have aroused among all
poets. Music is the most impersonal of things, and words the most
personal, and that is why musicians do not like words. They masticate
them for a long time, being afraid they would not be able to digest
them, and when the words are so broken and softened and mixed with
spittle that they are not words any longer, they swallow them.

A GUITAR PLAYER

A girl has been playing on the guitar. She is pretty, and if I didn't
listen to her I could have watched her, and if I didn't watch her I
could have listened. Her voice, the movements of her body, the
expression of her face, all said the same thing. A player of a different
temper and body would have made all different, and might have 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 moveme