ousness and the last
secret of his beauty is pity, not for himself and his own little
troubles, but for the whole bitter earnestness of mortal children. And
in this pity he seems not to weep for us, still less for himself, but to
tell us to dry our tears and be good, and listen to his magic flute.
That is what he would have told the Prussians, after he had set them
marching the goose-step backwards. Even they would not be the villains
of a tragedy for him, but only beasts to be tamed with his music until
they should be fit to sing their own bass part in the last chorus of
reconciliation. And this pity of his sounds all through _The Magic
Flute_ and gives to its beauty a thrill and a wonder far beyond what any
fleshly passion can give. Sarostro is a priest, not a magician, because
there is in him the lovely wisdom of pity, because he has a place in his
paradise for Papageno, the child of nature, where he shall be made happy
with his mate Papagena. There is a moment when Papageno is about to hang
himself because there is no one to love him; he will hang himself in
Sarostro's lonely paradise. But there is a sly laughter in the music
which tells us that he will be interrupted with the rope round his neck.
And so he is, and Papagena is given to him, and the paradise is no
longer lonely; and the two sing their part in the chorus of
reconciliation at the end. And we are sure that the Queen of Night, and
the ugly negro and all his goose-stepping attendants, are not punished.
They have been naughty for no reason that anyone can discover, just like
Prussians and other human beings; and now the magic flute triumphs over
their naughtiness, and the silver bells ring from every tree and the
enchanted nightingales sing in all the thickets, and the sages and the
lovers smile like children; and the laughter passes naturally into the
divine beauty of Mozart's religion, which is solemn because laughter and
pity are reconciled in it, not rejected as profane.

Process or Person?

Nearly all war pictures in the past have been merely pictures that
happened to represent war. Paolo Uccello's battle scenes are but
pretexts for his peculiar version of the visible world. They might as
well be still life for all the effect the subject has had upon his
treatment of it. Leonardo, in his lost battle picture, was no doubt
dramatic, and expressed in it his infinite curiosity; he has left notes
about the manner in which