is necessary to continue to study single pieces, industriously and
artistically, and with great exactness; for otherwise the practice of
reading at sight, which often amounts to a passion, leads very soon to
slovenliness in piano-playing and to more or less vulgar machine-music.

MRS. SOLID. I am more and more convinced that a style of instruction
which is illogical, intermittent, superficial, and without method, can
lead to no good result, or at least to nothing satisfactory, even with
extraordinary talents; and that the unsound and eccentric manifestations
and caricatures of art, which cause the present false and deplorable
condition of piano-playing, are the consequence of such a prevalent mode
of instruction.




CHAPTER V.

ON THE PEDAL.


I have just returned exhausted and annihilated from a concert, where I
have been hearing the piano pounded. Two grand bravoura movements have
been thundered off, with the pedal continually raised; and then were
suddenly succeeded by a soft murmuring passage, during which the
thirteen convulsed and quivering bass notes of the _fortissimo_ were all
the time resounding. It was only by the aid of the concert programme
that my tortured ears could arrive at the conclusion that this confusion
of tones was meant to represent two pieces by Döhler and Thalberg.