hear some well-meaning person play or sing at a party. Last night,
at the Simpsons', a worthy young man, who was staying there, sang
some Schubert songs in a perfectly correct, weak, inexpressive
voice, accompanying himself in a wooden and inanimate fashion--the
whole thing might have been turned out by a machine. I was, I
suppose, in a fretful mood. "Good God!" I thought to myself, "what
is the meaning of this woeful performance?--a party of absurd
dressed-up people, who have eaten and drunk too much, sitting in a
circle in this hot room listening gravely to this lugubrious
performance! And this is the best that Schubert can do! This is the
real Schubert! Here have I been all my life pouring pints of
subjective emotion into this dreary writer of songs, believing that
I was stirred and moved, when it was my own hopes and aspirations
all along, which I was stuffing into this conventional vehicle,
just as an ecclesiastical person puts his emotion into the
grotesque repetitions of a liturgy." I thought to myself that I had
made a discovery, and that all was vanity. Well, we thanked the
singer gravely enough, and went on, smiling and grimacing, to talk
local gossip. A few minutes later, a young girl, very shy and
painfully ingenuous, was hauled protesting to the piano. I could
see her hands tremble as she arranged her music, and the first
chords she struck were halting and timid. Then she began to sing--
it was some simple old-fashioned song--what had happened? the world
was somehow different; she had one of those low thrilling voices,
charged with utterly inexplicable emotion, haunted with old
mysterious echoes out of some region of dreams, so near and yet so
far away. I do not think that the girl had any great intensity of
mind, or even of soul, neither was she a great performer; but there
was some strange and beautiful quality about the voice, that now
rose clear and sustained, while the accompaniment charged and