"And all your learning has not enabled you to answer so easy a question?" she said, in a tone of sarcasm.
"I do not pretend to much learning," I answered, "but I have never heard any explanation of the fact."
"Very likely not," she answered; "the man who put the poor animal out of the room knew, possibly, less of his art than his dog did. The dog cried for the same reason that a human being might have cried, because the music roused in its mind unsatisfied longings that tortured it by the vagueness and uncertainty with which they spoke of a state higher and better than the poor animal could understand."
"I am surprised I did not think of so natural an explanation," I said. "My friends say I am music mad, and, indeed, music is almost a mania with me. I wonder it did not occur to me why the lower animals are affected by music as we are."
"Because," she answered, "they have got the highest power of the critic, the power of spontaneously registering the effect of what they hear on their own minds, whilst we, as a rule, can do little more than judge of what we hear, not by our own original capacity of appreciation, which is for each individual the true touchstone of art, but by some preconceived, and probably badly conceived model, as if the beautiful were molded in any one form. No wonder that with such principles of criticism Haydn and Mozart had unfitted the world to understand Beethoven—melodists in excelsis though they were."
"Then Beethoven is your favorite composer," I ventured to remark.
"Yes," she said. "I think I may say his works are my principal recreation."
"I am afraid it is against etiquette to make such a request," I said, diffidently, "but I too am a worshiper of Beethoven. Unfortunately, I was never taught any instrument, and I do not hear his music as often as I could wish. Will you forgive me if I say that it would give me great pleasure to hear you play some of his works?"
She replied in a laughing tone, which at once brought the conversation down from the rather sentimental latitudes into which it had been straying.
"You should speak of my 'reading' of his works—that is, I believe the correct expression. I am afraid that if you heard my poor performance you would say, as a gentleman said to his daughter, on whose musical education he had been expending a great deal of money—