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We always seem to see you sitting on the concert-platform before us, immersed in the expression of your passion, your disgust of passion, your renunciation of passion. But the absorption is not quite as complete as it would appear to be. During the entire performance, you have been secretly keeping one wicked little eye trained on the ladies of the audience. Sometimes you play the religious.
You were the man whose life is lived on the concert-platform, whose values are those of the concert-room, who finds his highest good in the instantaneous effect achieved by his performance. From childhood you were the idolized piano-virtuoso. All your days you were smothered in the adulation showered upon you in very tangible form by the great ladies of every capital of Europe.
The spear, the arrow, the attack, the charge, the footfall, the pinion, nay, the very stepping of the moon, the walk of the wind, are mimicked in this enchanting verse. Like to programme-music we must call it, but I wish the concert-platform had ever justified this slight perversion of aim, this excess almost corruption of one kind of skill, thus miraculously well.
From the concert-platform she still seemed to discount, almost to flout, the years, but in secret she yielded unmistakably to their pressure. It was this yielding, pliant attitude that struck Stillman as he came upon her almost unawares on that early December afternoon, a yielding, pliant attitude which gave a curious sense of tenacity under the surface.
And Joscelyn, standing by Aunty Nan's bed, in the sunset light, sang the song she had sung to many a brilliant audience on many a noted concert-platform sang it as even she had never sung before, while Aunty Nan lay and listened beatifically, and downstairs even Mrs. William held her breath, entranced by the exquisite melody that floated through the old farmhouse.
But all the leisure that could be made or stolen was occupied in labours which proved their own reward. Straight from the concert-platform rushed the musician to his workshop, and many a lace ruffle was torn by nails or bespattered by molten pitch; to say nothing of the positive danger to which Herschel continually exposed himself by the precipitancy of his movements.
He spoke with a morbid horror yet as if the idea of it fascinated him of the publicity of the concert-platform, and painted in glowing colours a monastery he knew of, standing on a wooded hill, not far from Vienna.
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