He knew that his memory of the piano falsified
still further the perspective in which he saw the music, that the field
open to the musician is not a miserable stave of seven notes, but an
immeasurable keyboard (still, almost all of it, unknown), on which, here
and there only, separated by the gross darkness of its unexplored tracts,
some few among the millions of keys, keys of tenderness, of passion, of
courage, of serenity, which compose it, each one differing from all the
rest as one universe differs from another, have been discovered by certain
great artists who do us the service, when they awaken in us the emotion
corresponding to the theme which they have found, of shewing us what
richness, what variety lies hidden, unknown to us, in that great black
impenetrable night, discouraging exploration, of our soul, which we have
been content to regard as valueless and waste and void. Vinteuil had been
one of those musicians. In his little phrase, albeit it presented to the
mind's eye a clouded surface, there was contained, one felt, a matter so
consistent, so explicit, to which the phrase gave so new, so original a
force, that those who had once heard it preserved the memory of it in the
treasure-chamber of their minds.
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