and gives out energy at all her senses.  She sang some tragic songs of Schumann, some mysterious songs of Maeterlinck, some delicate love-songs of Charles van Lerberghe.  As one looked and listened it was impossible to think more of the words than of the music or of the music than of the words.  One took them simultaneously, as one feels at once the softness and the perfume of a flower.  I understood why Mallarme had seemed to see in her the realisation of one of his dreams.  Here was a new art, made up of a new mixing of the arts, in one subtly intoxicating elixir.  To Mallarme it was the more exquisite because there was in it none of the broad general appeal of opera, of the gross recognised proportions of things.

This dramatisation of song, done by any one less subtly, less completely, and less sincerely an artist, would lead us, I am afraid, into something more disastrous than even the official concert, with its rigid persons in evening dress holding sheets of music in their tremulous hands, and singing the notes set down for them to the best of their vocal ability.  Madame Georgette Leblanc is an exceptional artist, and she has made an art after her own likeness, which exists because it is the expression of herself, of a strong nature always in vibration.  What she feels as a woman she can render as an artist; she is at once instinctive and deliberate, deliberate because it is her natural instinct, the natural instinct of a woman who is essentially a woman, to be so.  I imagine her always singing in front of a mirror, always recognising her own shadow there, and the more absolutely abandoned to what the song is saying through her because of that uninterrupted communion with herself.

THE MEININGEN ORCHESTRA

Other orchestras give performances, readings, approximations; the Meiningen orchestra gives an interpretation, that is, the thing itself.  When this orchestra plays a piece of music every note lives, and not, as with most orchestras, every particularly significant note.  Brahms is sometimes dull, but he is never dull when these people play him; Schubert is sometimes tame, but not when they play him.  What they do is precisely to put vitality into even those parts of a composition in which it is scarcely present, or scarcely realisable; and that is a much more difficult thing, and really a more important thing, for the proper appreciation of music, than the heightening of what is already fine, and obviously fine in itself.  And this particular quality of interpretation has its value too as criticism.  For, while it gives the utmost value to what is implicitly there, there at least in embryo, it cannot create out of nothing; it cannot make insincere work sincere, or fill empty work with meaning which never could have belonged to it.  Brahms, at his moments of least vitality, comes into a new vigour of life; but Strauss, played by these sincere, precise, thoughtful