Bit by bit the thoughts of this Talk will become clear to you. You will feel more friendly toward them. Then you will really begin to think about hands; your own hands and everybody's hands. You will become truthful of hand, guiding your own thoughtfully; watching those of others carefully. And you will find that in the smallest tasks of your hands you can put forethought, while every use to which people put their hands will teach you something if you observe carefully. It may be folding a paper or picking up a pin, or anything else quite common; that matters not, common things, like any others, can be done rightly.
By this observation we shall see hands performing all sorts of odd tricks. The fingers are drumming, twitching, twirling, closing, opening, doing a multitude of motions which mean what? Nothing, do you say? Oh! no, indeed; not nothing but something. Fingers and hands which perform all these unnecessary motions are not being commanded by the thoughts, and are acting as a result of no thought; that is, of thoughtlessness. Every one does it do you say? No, that is not true. Many do these things, but those who command their thoughts never allow it. If we never moved the hands except in a task when we commanded them, we should soon become hand-skilled. The useless movements I have spoken of _un_skill the hand. They are undoing motions, and teach us that we must govern ourselves if we would become anything. Do you know how it is that people do great things? They command themselves. Having determined to do something, they work and work and work to finish it at any cost. That gives strength and character.
Having observed the hands and their duties, we can readily see the kind of task they must do in music. It is just the same kind of task as laying a wall of stone. Every motion must be done honorably. Everything must be thought out in the mind and heart before the hands are called upon to act. Wise people always go about their tasks this way. Unwise people try the other way, of acting first and thinking it out afterward, and, of course, they always fail. You can now understand that a great pianist is one who has great thought with which to command the hands. And to be sure they will obey his commands at once, he has made them obey him continuously for years. This teaching the hands to obey is called Practice.
The Italian artist, Giotto, once said:
"You may judge my masterhood of craft by seeing that I can draw a circle unerringly."
CHAPTER XVII.
WHAT THE ROMAN LADY SAID.
"You may always be successful if you do but set out well, and let good thoughts and practice proceed upon right method."—Marcus Aurelius.[55]
The same wise Roman emperor who said this tells us a very pretty thing about his mother, which shows us what a wise lady she must have been, and how in the days of his manhood, with the cares of a great nation upon him, he yet pondered upon the childhood teaching of home. First, he speaks of his grandfather Verus, who, by his example, taught him not to be prone to anger; then of his father, the Emperor Antoninus Pius, from whom he learned to be modest and manly; then of his mother, whose name was Domitia Calvilla. Let us read some of his own words about her, dwelling particularly upon a few of them. He writes: "As for my mother, she taught me to have regard for religion, to be generous and open-handed, and not only to forbear from doing anybody an ill turn, but not so much as to endure the thought of it."
Now these words are the more wonderful when we remember that they were not taken down by a scribe in the pleasant apartments of the royal palace in Rome, but were written by the Emperor himself on the battlefield; for this part of his famous book is signed: "Written in the country of the Quadi."