After his concert was over, Paderewski gave seven encores, in the midst of an enthusiasm which recurs whenever and wherever he gives a concert.  What is the peculiar quality in this artist which acts always with the same intoxicating effect?  Is it anything quite normal in his fingers, or is it, in the image of a brilliant and fantastic writer on music in America, Mr. James Huneker, a soul like the soul of Belus, “the Raphael of the piano,” which, “suspended above him, like a coat of many colors,” mesmerises the audience, while he sits motionless, not touching the notes?

Is Paderewski after all a Belus?  Is it his many coloured soul that “magnetises our poor vertebras,” in Verlaine’s phrase, and not the mere skill of his fingers?  Art, it has been said, is contagious, and to compel universal sympathy is to succeed in the last requirements of an art.  Of what difference is it whether, like Keats, he perpetuates his personal magnetism in a stanza, or, like Paderewski, sheds it, like a perfume, for that passing moment which is all the eternity ever given to the creator of beautiful sounds?

A REFLECTION AT A DOLMETSCH CONCERT

The interpreter of ancient music, Arnold Dolmetsch, is one of those rare magicians who are able to make roses blossom in mid-winter.  While music has been modernising itself until the piano becomes an orchestra, and Berlioz requires four orchestras to obtain a pianissimo, this strange man of genius has quietly gone back a few centuries and discovered for himself an exquisite lost world, which was disappearing like a fresco peeling off a wall.  He has burrowed in libraries and found unknown manuscripts like a savant, he has worked at misunderstood notations and found out a way of reading them like a cryptogrammatist, he has first found out how to restore and then how to make over again harpsichord, and virginals, and clavichord, and all those instruments which had become silent curiosities in museums.

It is only beginning to be realised, even by musical people, that the clavecin music of, for instance, Bach, loses at least half its charm, almost its identity, when played on the modern grand piano; that the exquisite music of Rameau and Couperin, the brilliant and beautiful music of Scarlatti, is almost inaudible on everything but the harpsichord and the viols; and that there exists, far earlier than these writers, a mass of English and Italian music of extreme beauty, which has never been spoiled on the piano because it has never been played on it.  To any one who has once touched a spinet, harpsichord, or clavichord, the piano must always remain a somewhat inadequate instrument; lacking in the precision, the penetrating charm, the infinite definite reasons for existence of those instruments of wires and jacks and quills which its metallic rumble has been supposed so entirely to have superseded.  As for the clavichord, to have once touched it, feeling