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istinct emotions--the first a wearing tension lest some one should come to interrupt, and the second that I did not deserve this, that I had not earned it.... The instrument had that excellence of the finely evolved things. It seemed to me that the workmen had done something that money should not be able to buy. One does not buy such voices and genius for the assembly of tones. It seemed to me that I should have spent years of study to be worthy of this. There is a difference, as deep as life, in the listening and in the doing. Something of the plan of it all, is in that difference. I found that the spirit I brought was more designed to be worthy of this happiness, than any money could be. I found that a man does not do real work for money. That which he takes for his labour is but the incident of bread and hire, but the real thing he puts into a fine task, must be given. One after another, for many decades, workmen had given their best to perfect this thing that charmed me. Every part from Bach's scale to the pneumatic boxes in the making of a piano and player had been drawn from the spirit of things by men who made themselves ready to receive. They had toiled until they were fine; then they received. It was something the same as one feels when he has learned to read; when the first messages come home to him from black and white, and he realises that all the world's great literature is open to his hand. Again the great things are gifts. You cannot pay in matter for a spiritual thing; you can only pay in kind. I saw that the brutalisation of the player-piano resulted from people who thought they had earned the whole right, because they paid a price; that they did not bring the awe and reverence to their interpretations, and therefore they got nothing but jingle and tinkle and din. I didn't know the buttons and levers, but I had an idea how a certain slow movement should sound, if decently played. In two hours the instrument gradually fitted itself to this conception. It was ready in every detail; only I was to blame for the failures. The excitement and exultation is difficult to tell, as I entered deeper and deeper into the genius of the machine. It answered, not in _tempo_ and volume alone, but in the pedal relaxations and throbs of force. I thought of the young musicians who had laboured half their lives to bring to concert pitch the _Waldstein_ or the _Emperor_, and that I had now merely to punctuate and read fort
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