p.184 Perhaps the most exquisite and the most fragile thing in the world at present is the Chopin playing of Vladimir de Pachmann. For more than a quarter of a century writers have been attempting to reproduce his coloured music in coloured words: they have all failed. De Pachmann is an exotic, a hothouse plant. Not a hothouse plant among many other plants, but a plant living luxuriously and solitarily and with exaggerated selfconsciousness in its own hothouse.

In thinking of him, one feels that he belongs to the very last minute of civilisation's progress. All the civilisations of the past have come and gone and returned; they have worked age-long with tireless industry; mankind has struggled upwards and rushed precipitately downwards through thousands of years; cities have been sacked and countries ravaged; Babylon, Nineveh, Athens and Rome have bloomed flauntingly and wilted most tragically: and the most exquisite thing that has been produced by all this suffering, all this unimaginable labour, is the p.185 Chopin playing of de Pachmann. The world has toiled for thousands of years and has at last given us this thing more delicate than lace, more brittle than porcelain, more shining than gold. . . .

There is the rather painful question of this pianist's eccentricities. One can discuss them publicly for de Pachmann himself continually thrusts them on the public. You know to what I refer: the running commentary of words, gestures, nods, smiles and leers which he almost invariably passes not only on the music he plays, but also on his manner of playing it. I refuse to believe that this most extraordinary behaviour is mere affectation: it seems to me a direct and irrepressible expression of the man's very soul. It is not ridiculous, because it is so serious and so natural. Nevertheless, it is entirely ineffective. It does not help in the least. Rather does it mar. To see the performer winking slyly at you when he has, as it were, "pulled off" a particularly delicate nuance does not give that nuance a more subtle flavour: it merely distracts the attention and sets one conjecturing what really is going on in the performer's mind. It has appeared to me that the pianist has been saying: "You noticed that, didn't you? Well, you couldn't do it if you spent a whole lifetime trying; yet how easily I achieved it!".

The large, smooth face, with its loose mouth and dizzied eyes, is the face of a magician out of a story book. It is not a real face. It has only one of the attributes of power—egotism. Egotism has furrowed every line on that countenance; it dilates the eyes. Egotism runs through the sensitive fingers. I have stood by his side and wilfully shut my ears on the music and fastened my eyes on his face; but I learned nothing. I do not know if his mind dwells aloof from all emotion, his intellect functioning automatically—as would seem to be the case; or if, experienced and cynical, he has the power of pouring the very essence of his spirit into sound, laughing at himself 186 and us as he does so—but laughing more at us than at himself, for we are deceived whilst he is not.

It is strange that so exotic a personality should have a firm and unrelaxing hold on the public. He is not caviare to the general. Villiers de l'lsle Adam is worshipped by the few; Walter Pater cannot have more than a thousand sincere disciples, but de Pachmann is adored by millions. "Millions" is no exaggeration. People are taken out of themselves whilst he plays. You remember, don't you? the Paderewski craze in America fifteen years ago, when the platform was stormed and taken by assault night after night by society ladies. I witnessed pretty much the same kind of thing at a de Pachmann recital in a Lancashire town; but the latter pianist was stormed, not by society ladies, but by unemotional bank clerks, stockbrokers, merchants, working men and women. At the end of the concert, they flowed on to the platform in hundreds, and surrounded the pianist whilst he played encore after encore, smiling vacantly the while and enjoying himself immensely, pausing between each piece only to motion his ring of worshippers a little farther from the piano.

An enigmatic creature, this; a creature who will never give up his secret; perhaps, even, a creature who is not aware that he possesses a secret.