hundred instruments which have all one tone; else, how does that unity reach us sitting in our stalls? That is the eternal mystery of music, which alone of the arts deals with its materials direct. It is not an imitation of sound, but sound itself, the employment of the actual waves of air that are the whistle of the wind, and the crash of breakers, and the love-song of nightingales. All other branches of art deal only second-hand; they but give us an imitation of what they wish to represent. The pictorial artist can do no more than lay a splash of pigment from a leaden tube on to his canvas when he wishes to speak to us of sunlight; he can only touch an eye with a reflection in its corner to show grief, or take a little from the size of the pupil to produce in us who look the feeling of terror that contracts it. Similarly, too, the sculptor has to render the soft swell of a woman’s bosom in marble, as if it was on marble a man would pillow his head. It is all a translation, a rendering in another material, of the image that fills us with love or pity, or the open-air intoxication of an April morning. But the musician works first-hand; the intangible waves of air, not a representation of them, are his material. It is not with a pigment of sound, so to speak, that the violins shiver, or the trumpets tell us that the gods are entering Valhalla. Music deals with sound itself, with the whisper that went round the formless void when God said, ‘Let there be light,’ with all that makes this delicate orchestra of the world, no copy of it, no translation of it, but it itself. And for the time being, while the curtain is up, the control of these forces, their wail and their triumph, belongs to the conductor. He gives them birth in the strings and the wind; he by the movement of a hand makes them express all that sound expressed to the magician who first mapped them on his paper. Indeed, he does more; he interprets them through his own personality, giving them, as it were, an extra dip in the bath of life, so that their colours are more brilliant, more vital of hue. Or is the member of the Purcell Society right, and is the man who gives us this wonderful Isolde only a metronome? It is often said that the deaf are far more lonely, far more remotely sundered from the world we know, than are the blind. It is impossible to imagine that this should not be so, for it is not only the sounds that we know we hear, but the sounds of which for the most part we are unconscious, that form the link between us and external things. It commonly happens, as in the dark, that we are cut off from all exercise of the eyes, and yet at such moments we have not been very conscious of loneliness. But it is rare that we are cut off from all sound, and the loneliness of that isolation is indescribable. It happened to me once in the golden desert to the west of Luxor, above the limestone cliffs that rise from the valley where the Kings of Egypt lie entombed.