What the composer's inspiration _necessarily_ loses[H] through notation, his interpreter should restore by his own. [H] How strongly notation influences style in music, and fetters imagination, how "form" grew up out of it and from form arose "conventionalism" in expression, is shown very convincingly and avenges itself in tragic wise in E. T. A. Hoffmann, who occurs to me here as a typical example. This remarkable man's mental conceptions, lost in visionary moods and revelling in transcendentalism, as his writings set forth in oft inimitable fashion, must naturally--so one would infer--have found in the dreamlike and transcendental art of tones a language and mode of expression peculiarly congenial. The veil of mysticism, the secret harmonies of Nature, the thrill of the supernatural, the twilight vagueness of the borderland of dreams, everything, in fact, which he so effectively limned with the precision of _words_--all this, one would suppose, he could have interpreted to fullest effect by the aid of music. And yet, comparing Hoffmann's best musical work with the weakest of his literary productions, you will discover to your sorrow how a conventional system of measures, periods and keys--whereto the hackneyed opera-style of the time adds its share--could turn a poet into a Philistine. But that his fancy cherished another ideal of music, we learn from many, and frequently admirable, observations of Hoffmann the _littérateur_. To the lawgivers, the signs themselves are the most important matter, and are continually growing in their estimation; the new art of music is derived from the old signs--_and these now stand for musical art itself_. If the lawgivers had their way, any given composition would always be reproduced in precisely the same tempo, whensoever, by whomsoever, and under whatsoever conditions it might be performed. But, it _is_ not possible; the buoyant, expansive nature of the divine child rebels--it demands the opposite. Each day begins differently from the preceding, yet always with the flush of dawn.--Great artists play their own works differently at each repetition, remodel them on the spur of the moment, accelerate and retard, in a way which they could not indicate by signs--and always according to the given conditions of that "eternal harmony." And then the lawgiver chafes, and refers the creator to his own handwriting. As matters stand to-day, the lawgiver has the best of the argument. * * *