Art and Science 



player be never so proficient on any instru- 

 ment, he will be put out if the normal con- 

 ditions under which he plays are too widely 

 departed from, and will then do consciously, if 

 indeed he can do it at all, what he had hitherto 

 been doing unconsciously. It is an axiom as 

 regards actions acquired after birth, that we 

 never do them automatically save as the result 

 of long practice ; the stages in the case of any 

 acquired facility, the inception of which we 

 have been able to watch, have invariably been 

 from a nothingness of ignorant impotence to a 

 little somethingness of highly self-conscious, 

 arduous performance, and thence to the un- 

 self-consciousness of easy mastery. I saw one 

 year a poor blind lad of about eighteen sit- 

 ting on a wall by the wayside at Varese, play- 

 ing the concertina with his whole body, and 

 snorting like a child. The next year the 

 boy no longer snorted, and he played with 

 his fingers only ; the year after that he seemed 

 hardly to know whether he was playing or 

 not, it came so easily to him. I know no 

 exception to this rule. Where is the intricate 

 and at one time difficult art in which perfect 



automatic ease has been reached except as the 



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