s game; himself,
in short, that is to say inhuman. His fingers have in them a cold magic,
as of soulless elves who have sold their souls for beauty. And this
beauty, which is not of the soul, is not of the flesh; it is a
sea-change, the life of the foam on the edge of the depths. Or it
transports him into some mid-region of the air, between hell and heaven,
where he hangs listening. He listens at all his senses. The dew, as well
as the raindrop, has a sound for him.

In Pachmann's playing there is a frozen tenderness, with, at moments,
the elvish triumph of a gnome who has found a bright crystal or a
diamond. Pachmann is inhuman, and music, too, is inhuman. To him, and
rightly, it is a thing not domesticated, not familiar as a household cat
with our hearth. When he plays it, music speaks no language known to us,
has nothing of ourselves to tell us, but is shy, alien, and speaks a
language which we do not know. It comes to us a divine hallucination,
chills us a little with its "airs from heaven" or elsewhere, and breaks
down for an instant the too solid walls of the world, showing us the
gulf. When d'Albert plays Chopin's Berceuse, beautifully, it is a
lullaby for healthy male children growing too big for the cradle.
Pachmann's is a lullaby for fairy changelings who have never had a soul,
but in whose veins music vibrates; and in this intimate alien thing he
finds a kind of humour.

In the attempt to humanise music, that attempt which almost every
executant makes, knowing that he will be judged by his success or
failure in it, what is most fatally lost is that sense of mystery which,
to music, is atmosphere. In this atmosphere alone music breathes
tranquilly. So remote is it from us that it can only be reached through
some not quite healthy nervous tension, and Pachmann's physical
disquietude when he plays is but a sign of what it has cost him to
venture outside humanity, into music. Yet in music this mystery is a
simple thing, its native air; and the art of the musician has less
difficulty in its evocation than the art of the poet or the painter.
With what an effort do we persuade words or colours back from their
vulgar articulateness into at least some recollection of that mystery
which is deeper than sight or speech. Music can never wholly be detached
from mystery, can never wholly become articulate, and it is in our
ignorance of its true nature that we would tame it to humanity and teach
it to express human emotion