ugger-mugger and five-little-bears-in-a-bed mode of
existence), my soul, for instance, if your soul should honour it with a
visit, would be able, methinks, to talk quite freely and pleasantly
about the Ingres Museum at Montauban, and the autograph of Mozart in the
glass case alongside the fiddle.... The manuscript is only a half sheet
full score, torn or cut through its height; and the voice part is broken
off with one word only--insufficient to identify it among Mozart's
Italian works, though, perhaps, most suggestive of "Don Giovanni"--the
word "Guai." The manuscript is exquisitely neat, yet has none of the
look of a copy, and we know that Mozart was never obliged to make any.
The writing is so like the man's adorable personality, the little
pattern of notes so like his music. The sight of it moved me, flooding
my mind with divine things, that Concerto for Flute and Harp, for
instance, which dear Mme. H---- had recently been playing for me. And
during that dull, rainy day of waiting for trains at Montauban, it made
me live over again another day of rainy travel, but with the
"Zauberfloete" at the end of it, about which I will also tell you, since
I am permitted to know my own mind and to speak it.

But I find I have incidentally raised the question _de gustibus_, or, as
our language puts it, the _accounting for tastes_. And I must settle and
put myself right in the matter of M. Ingres before proceeding any
further. The Latin saying, then, "De gustibus non est disputandum,"
contains an excellent piece of advice, since disputing about tastes or
anything else is but a sorry employment. But the English version is
absolutely wide of the mark, since tastes can be accounted for just as
much as climate, history, and bodily complexion. Indeed, we should know
implicitly what people like and dislike if we knew what they were and
how they had come to be so. The very diversity in taste proves its
deep-down reality: preference and antipathy being consubstantial with
the soul--nay, inherent in the very mechanism and chemistry of the body.
And for this reason tastes are at once so universal and uniform, and so
variously marked by minor differences. There are human beings all shank
and thigh and wrist, with contemplative, deep-set eyes and compressed,
silent lips; and others running to rounds and segments of circles, like
M. Ingres' drawings, their eyes a trifle prominent for the better
understanding of others, and mouth, like the typi