cience of sound incline
to believe that the hearing of music is always attended with movements,
however imperceptible, in the throat, which, being true, would prove
that, in a fashion, we _perform_ the melodies which we think we only
_hear_; living echoes, nerves vibrating beneath the composer's touch as
literally as does the string of the fiddle, or its wooden fibres. A very
delicate instrument this, called the _Hearer_, and, as we all know, more
liable to being out of tune, to refusing to act altogether, than any
instrument (fortunately for performers) hitherto made by the hand of
man. Thus, in a way, one might paraphrase the answer which Mme.
Gabbrielli is said to have made to the Empress Catherine, "Your
Majesty's policemen can make me _scream_, not _sing_!" and say to some
queen of piano keys or emperor of _ut de poitrine_ that there is no
violence or blandishment which can secure the _inner ear_, however much
the outer ear may be solicited or bullied.

'Tis in this sense, methinks, that we should understand the saying of
Keats--to wit, that in a great many cases the happiest conjunction of
music and the soul occurs during what the profane call silence; the very
fact of music haunting our mind, while every other sort of sound may be
battering our ear, showing our highest receptivity. And, as a fact, we
do not know that real musicians, _real_ Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha and
Abt Voglers, not written ones, require organs neither of glass nor of
metal; but build their palaces of sound on a plain deal table with a
paper covered with little lines and dots before them? And was not
Beethoven, in what some folk consider his mightiest era, as deaf as a
post?

I do not advocate deafness. Nay, privately, being quite incapable of
deciphering a score, I confess that there is something dry and dreary in
absolutely soundless music--music which from the silent composer passes
to the silent performer, who is at the same time a silent listener,
without the neighbours being even one bit the wiser? Besides, were this
gift universal, it would deprive us of that delightful personality the
mere performer, whose high-strung nervousness, or opulent joviality, is,
after all, a pleasant item in art, a humorous dramatic interlude, in the
excessive spirituality of music.

I am not, therefore, in favour of absolute silence in the art of sounds.
I am only asking people to remember that sound waves and the auditive
apparatus put in connection,