"You see, Lady Florence," she says very gently, and with that curious sorrowful look on her face that made it so like to the Ariadne's—"you see, he was not meant for any woman: he was a Saxon god."
A year later Lady Florence Ffolliott's engagement to her cousin, the little lovelorn viscount, was announced.
Sir Henry Leighton told me last week that he had been called in consultation with regard to Hyacinthe King, and that there were not three months of life in her. "She cannot act," said the great medical man: "she plays her parts, it is true, but the power to portray has gone out of her. She is going back to Rome for a while, and, I can assure you, she will never return."
Marguerite F. Aymar.
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MUSICAL NOTATION.
Why is it that the knowledge of music is not more common?—that is, why is it that there are so few people in this and every other country who are able to read and write music as they read and write their mother-tongue? Is it that the musical ear is a rare gift? Evidently not, for music is composed of a small number of elements, which are found for the most part in any popular air, and almost every person can sing one or more of these airs correctly. It is not, then, the musical ear nor the sense of time which is wanting. Neither is the cause to be attributed to the fact that few study music; for, although the teaching of music is by no means so general as it should be, still it is taught in our schools, public and private, singing-schools are common even in our small villages, and there is no lack of teachers both of vocal and instrumental music. And yet out of every hundred who take up the study of music, it is safe to say that about ninety abandon it after a short time, discouraged by the almost insurmountable difficulties presented at every turn. Only those succeed who are endowed with rare natural aptitude, an indomitable will, and time—four or five years at least—to devote to an art which is as yet a luxury to the masses of the people.
M. Galin, his pupil M. Chevé and other advocates of reform in musical notation declare that the people are deprived of this grand source of culture because of the blind, inconsistent and wholly unscientific nature of the ordinary musical notation. At first this seems incredible, but one has only to compare this notation with that elaborated by Émile Chevé after Galin's theory to become convinced that the statement is true. People are apt to say, "Why, it cannot be that our system of writing music is so defective: in this age of improvements and scientific precision gross inconsistencies would have been eliminated long ago." And so, indeed, they would have been but for the fact that the very basis of the system is altogether at fault. How are the Chinese, for example, to "improve" their system of writing? It is simply impossible. They have some thousands of abstract characters, hieroglyphs standing for things or thoughts. All these must be swept away, and in their place must come an alphabet where each letter stands for an elementary sound. These elementary sounds are few in number in any language. So of our musical notation. It is doubtful if it can be materially improved; it must be discarded for a system of fewer elements and a more clear and precise combination of them.