have the freedom of the whole country. Suddenly, turning a corner, she came upon the panel, and her first feeling was one of disappointment, for she had, ignorantly, expected a statue.

For full five minutes Mrs. Pym stood there behind the railing. The sun was rushing to its decline, and shadows cut across the torso, making it look even more disproportionate than it would otherwise have done. 'Of course,' said Mrs. Pym to herself, 'I don't like it; who would? That Rima! The beautiful fairylike Rima! Why, there's no beauty even such hands! I was told about the hands. Out of all proportion. And the face... beauty! It might be that of an Egyptian Pharaoh.'

But still Mrs. Pym continued to gaze even after she had told herself that Hudson's Rima and Egyptian carving were in a different category. Something arrested and held. If not beauty, then what? 'I don't know,' she murmured, half aloud, 'I don't know whether I like it or not.'

Mrs. Pym's watch told her that she still had an hour to spare before she need catch her train, and, walking leisurely away, she decided to sit for a while on one of the green chairs and watch the riders in the Row. A beautiful afternoon, indeed, when even, as Mrs. Pym was forced to admit, the simulacrum of God's open spaces in the heart of the biggest city in the world was invested with glamour. Soft wistful sunshine, a kind of brooding stillness, mysterious purple distances . . . only if silly little dogs and dressed-up children, and prancing horses - prancing on purpose to show off, thought

Mrs. Pym disdainfully had not obtruded themselves. And then she realized that she was n't thinking of any of these things at all, but of something strong and free and vital, something much more alive than the armchair riders, something that drew her in spite of herself. Leaving her chair suddenly, Mrs. Pym hurried back to the Bird Sanctuary.

That face, eagerly stretching forward- no, in spite of the fact that circumscribed space flattened the head, giving it an almost wooden aspect, it was too eager, too alive to be ugly; the large left hand inviting birds to perch on it too large, of course, but a beautiful, most beautiful hand; the sway of the body, its expression of rhythm . . . what did it mean exactly, what had the artist in mind? Not an embodiment of Rima, the light, the airy, though she might be there too, but something greater, vaster, more eternal. Surely here, carved from a single block raised out of the womb of the earth, was the type of Mother Earth herself, — Hathor, the giver of life, the fruitful one, the spirit of Love as embodied in all nature.

Mrs. Pym's heart beat faster than usual as she finally walked rapidly away with the object of reaching the station. She was excited as real live things were apt to excite her; and as she made her way through the Oxford Street crowds, who seemed to have nothing more purposeful in life than to gaze at models in shop windows which they did their best to imitate, she felt that Epstein's symbolism had more value than anything else she had seen in London that day.

[MR. NEWMAN, one of the most distinguished of English music critics, is the author of a standard biography of Wagner.]

THE musical public has queer little ways of its own; and in nothing is it queerer than in the varying attitudes it adopts toward the question of the connection between a man and his music. Does a biographer depict his hero as a saint in a stained-glass window, all the world grows lyrical over the beauty of the portrait, and thanks God for yet another demonstration that supremely good music can be written only by a supremely good man. Does a later biographer, using documents of which his predecessor either did not know or which, knowing them well, he thought it policy to garble or suppress, suggest that the hero was just like the rest of us, a mixture of good and bad, of heroism and baseness, of generosity and meanness, all the world cries out that we have no right to pry into the mundane life of a great artist, and that anyhow his life has nothing to do with his art, or his art with his life. Would it help us to understand the B Minor Mass better, we are asked in tones of magisterial reproof, if a document were discovered to-morrow proving that, while the rector of St. Thomas's Church was in the cellar drawing beer for the cantor, the latter had kissed the rector's servant-girl?

The current confusion of ideas on the

1 From the Sunday Times (London pro-French Sunday paper), February 7

subject comes from people not recognizing that it has several sides to it. First of all, since we must have biographies of composers, we may as well have truthful ones; and I have suggested that we are more likely to get the sober truth from a nonmusical biographer, such as Thayer, than from one who, like Ashton Ellis in the case of Wagner, or Romain Rolland in the case of Beethoven, cannot see the man clearly because he looks at him through the romantic heat-haze of the fine music that surrounds him. Let us have one thing or the other, either a true account of the man or no account at all; but do not let us say that because Beethoven wrote the Ninth Symphony it is right for a biographer to tell how kind he was to his nephew, but wrong to tell how he fibbed over the state of his finances in the latter years. Secondly, when the truthful biography is done, another question arises to what extent the man's life bears upon the artist's work. The extremists who say that the two are inseparably bound up together at every point, that the man is the music and the music the man, that everything he writes is an unconscious record of his experience, and the other extremists who say that the composer's life as an artist is lived in an ideal world that runs concurrently with his life as a man but has no relation of cause or effect to it, seem to me to be equally wrong. They both leave out of consideration the infinite diversity of human nature. There are, at the one ex

treme, artists whose work would have been fundamentally different had they lived another life. No one, I fancy, will have the hardihood to contend that the great 129th sonnet of Shakespeare, or Oscar Wilde's sonnet, "To drift with every passion till my soul,' did not come out of definite personal experience of sensuality and the revulsion from them.

At the other extreme we have artists, like Mozart, in whom, broadly speaking, the material life and the artistic life seem to be lived in different worlds. MM. Wyzewa and Saint-Foix, in their masterly study of Mozart's development, have rightly insisted upon this characteristic of his. There is this great difference, they say, 'between the genius of a Mozart and that of a Rembrandt or a Beethoven, that the innumerable and touching episodes of the interior drama of a Mozart come from external musical impulses.' He was extremely susceptible to musical influences, and under this or that of them his 'real' life would take this or that turn for the moment. Women were for him the realization, or fancied realization, of an ideal conceived musically. 'We must remember that the mistresses who one by one fascinated and subjugated him for the moment were not the banal creatures commemorated by the biographers, the Madame Duscheks or the Aloysia Webers, but, so to speak, the noble muses evoked before his eyes by the works of a Johann Christoph Bach, a Schubert, a Michael Haydn.' Take just a little off this perhaps too thoroughgoing statement, and the essential truth of it is indisputable. There remains a third type of artist, in which the work and the man are often so different that it is hard to see any spiritual connection between them. The supreme example of this type is Wagner. Mozart, after all, was like his music, even if his life

appears to come out of his music rather than his music out of his life; but it is difficult to see the composer of Tristan and Parsifal in the man we know Wagner to have been. I would not say that there is no connection, but only that our psychological instruments at present are too clumsy to detect it.

It is probably, in the last analysis, a mistake to suppose that in the majority of cases the man's art is influenced by his life. The truer explanation would seem to be that the art and the life are just two ways that the same personality has of expressing itself. Even when we point to the susceptibility of Mozart to outer musical influences, do we not forget that a man can be 'influenced' only by what he is constituted from his birth to assimilate, so that, while apparently the influence moulds him, fundamentally it is he who instinctively, unconsciously, selects this particular influence from a hundred others? We thus come back to the sort of determinism expressed in Pascal's memorable phrase, 'You would not have sought me unless you had already found me.' In one sense, Liszt's early life as the pet of fashionable drawingrooms was responsible for his lack, not only of technical groundwork, — apart, of course, from the piano, but of intellectual foundations; he sniffed at every flower, sipped at every cup, but got the full odor and the full flavor of none. But viewing the facts from the other angle, can we not as truly say that it was not his life that made him a trifle superficial and showy, but a basic showiness and shallowness of soul that made him touch all sorts of surfaces without getting beneath any of them?

How the one fundamental quality of a man works through both his life and his art is clearly seen, I think, in the case of Beethoven. No one can deny that there was a vein of something like

stupidity running through the gold of his genius; his life affords many illustrations of it. His art shows here and there a similar slowness of apprehension. Look at his sketchbooks and see the really inept form in which some of his ideas first occurred to him, afterward to be purified and shaped by a seemingly almost mechanical application of the file and the hammer, and you will understand better the dullness of his wits on many an occasion in his outer life.

And is not the ethical quality of his music, both at its best and at its worst, paralleled in his daily talk and action? Occasionally he rose to the utmost moral grandeur in both spheres. At other times he remained, in both, only a tiresome moral platitudinarian, the preacher of sermons without a touch of genius in expression. He was far too much given to assuming an air of moral superiority over others; it is to this trait in him that we can attribute much of his lack of success in his dealings

with his brother's widow, who, let us remember in justice to her, saw him not as we see him, as the giant musician who bestrode two epochs of art, but only as a rather arrogant, disagreeable, ill-mannered, and self-opinionated old man who, having notoriously made anything but a success of his own life, thought himself qualified to tell other people how they should run theirs.

And of how many of his slow movements are we not tired now, with how many are we not disillusioned, because we recognize in them, not the moral profundity he was aiming at, but only a moral purpose expressed in terms of commonplace? Here, surely, is a clear case, not of the man's life influencing his art or vice versa, but of the art and the life both being the unconscious expression of a certain prenatal bias. And we should probably find correspondences of the same kind in other composers did we study their lives and their work closely and penetratingly enough.

SHOULD applause be tolerated in the theatre at all, and, if so, how much of it, and when? Is this kind of overt approval necessary, first, to the audience as an expression of its feelings, and, second, to the performers as an incitement to good acting? Is it as fitting as applause at a baseball game, or as inappropriate as applause after a sermon? Is a demonstration after each act, when the curtain has fallen, sufficient, or must the actors as is generally the case be applauded on their first entrance and on as many occasions during the play as the audience sees fit to respond?

These questions are raised by a letter to the Daily Telegraph from 'An Old Playgoer,' who protests against all hand-clapping and the like except at the end of acts, and who has been answered by a chorus of eminent dramatists, players, and managers, most of whom differ from him decisively. Miss Irene Vanbrugh, for instance, holds that, objectionable as applause is from an æsthetic point of view, it is 'the only way by which an audience can communicate its appreciation of an artist.' Yet the same limitation must be felt by many pulpit orators, and there is no reason to believe that, in the cant phrase, it has cramped their style. What, on that score, is the effect on movie actors of their removal from an approving and demonstrative audience? The Devil's advocate, of course, might have much to say in answer!

Seriously, however, it may be asked

why immediate and audible applause is more indispensable to one class of artist than to another to actors than, for example, poets and cabinetmakers. If it is answered that these latter can always contemplate their handiwork ex post facto, as no actor can, and imagine an applauding spectator, it can only be objected that imaginary applause must at the best be pretty cold comfort. Perhaps the only solution to the puzzle is to say that, as the movies themselves demonstrate, applause is essential as an outlet to the audience's emotions, not as a reassurance to the performers. We must not believe that actors as a class are in unique need of approval.

A letter to the Telegraph from Mr. Bernard Shaw gives expression to characteristically unambiguous views on the subject:

'As far as serious work in the theatre is concerned, I should put applause during the performance on the footing of brawling in church.

"The first condition of an artistic performance is that the players should be able to forget the audience and the audience to forget itself. The moment the audience makes an uproar, and the players are compelled to stop and wait until silence is restored, there is an end of the artistic conditions which have been established in the uninterrupted silence of rehearsal with great care and labor. Also, the time occupied by the entire performance is being prolonged, which means, if the play is timed at