Why so much worship of Bauer’s art? He is a mere man who has approached the goal of art through human effort—through such a material thing as hard practice. Anybody will tell you that when he was in Paris he was not even out of the ordinary in technical skill, and that he really transgressed the piano. Those beautiful tonal effects are only mechanical things done to perfection. While Paderewski—that spiritual thing—who dares not even listen to his own breathing, who makes the piano a living thing, capable of everything. That god! who was born to touch the piano with such divine significance that you sometimes dare not listen. With Bauer it is only that you can listen—so wonderfully beautiful it is. It is the same with Mary Garden. There you have that same spiritual thing. With Paderewski it is now serenity. With Mary Garden it is the same. And Bauer can never reach that for he is not born into it. Paderewski may sometimes play badly—make mistakes—but that is only when something material disturbs or penetrates that far-a-way vision—that mind which communes with space. When Bauer expresses passion it is only that physical nervous tension. But when Paderewski plays! It is that scarlet-colored heat which dims the light of day! [This sounds like my own ravings in the early days of _The Little Review_, when I talked straight out of the air without anything to back up my words. So I will have to excuse you. But if you’re going to talk about “spirit”, with any meaning behind it, you will have to give up those wild phrases like “communing with space” and “the goal of art through human effort” and that very awful “dimming the light of day”. I heard a woman say the other day that Marcella Craft “spiritualized” the role of Salome because she made her a spoiled child instead of what she really was—a woman in whom sex had become too mad a thing. How such denials of the essence of things can become “spiritualizations” is beyond my comprehension. I suppose, by the same reasoning, that because Mary Garden understands that drama of “nature too-heavily laden” her performance should be called a “materialization”. What do you mean when you say that Paderewski has that spiritual thing and Bauer has not—is not “born into it”? Any one with the slightest discrimination of human values will know from one glance at the two men that Paderewski was born with the look of a magician and that Bauer was born with the look of a maker. Both qualities are matters of “spirit”. What vague mist is in your mind when you talk of “spiritual”?