Balakirev was rather short. I do not know his pedigree, but he did not belong to the tall, fair type of Great Russia. There was to my mind a touch of the oriental about him: Tatar, perhaps, not Jewish. His figure was thickset, but his face was worn and thin, and his complexion brownish; his air somewhat weary and nervous. He looked like a man who strained his mental energies almost to breaking point; but his eyes--I do not remember their colour--were extraordinarily magnetic, full of fire and sympathy, the eyes of the seer and the bard. As he sat at the piano he recalled for a moment my last remembrance of Hans von Bülow. Something, too, in his style of playing confirmed this impression. He was not a master of sensational technique like Paderewski or Rosenthal. His execution was irreproachable, but one did not think of his virtuosity in hearing him play for the first time; nor did he, as I expected, carry me away on a whirlwind of fiery emotion. A nature so ardent could not be a cold executant, but he had neither the emotional force nor the poetry of expression which were the leading characteristics of Rubinstein's art. What struck me most in Balakirev, and reminded me of Bülow, was the intelligence, the sympathy, and the authority of his interpretations. He observed, analysed, and set the work in a lucid atmosphere. He might have adopted Stendhal's formula: "_Voir clair dans ce qui est._" It would be wrong, however, to think of Balakirev as a dry pedagogue. If he was a professor, he was an enlightened one--a sympathetic and inspired interpreter who knew how to reconstruct in imagination the period and personality of a composer instead of substituting his own. Having finished his rather arduous but self-imposed programme, we were all afraid that he might disappear as quietly as he came. An inspiration on my part to address him some remarks, in extremely ungrammatical Russian, on the subject of his songs and their wonderful, independent accompaniments, sent him back to the piano, where he continued to converse with me, illustrating his words with examples of unusual rhythms employed in his songs, and gliding half unconsciously into some of his own and other people's compositions. He could not be persuaded to play me "Islamey," the Oriental Fantasia beloved of Liszt, but I remember one delicate and graceful valse which he had recently written. By this time the _samovar_ was bubbling on the table and the room was filled with the perfume of tea and lemon. Happily Balakirev showed no signs of departure. He took his place at the table and talked with all his old passion of music in general, but chiefly of the master who had dominated the renaissance of Russian music--Michael Ivanovich Glinka.