No, says Simon Memmi.
By no means anything of the kind. After learning to reason, you will
learn to sing; for you will want to. There is so much reason for
singing in the sweet world, when one thinks rightly of it. None for
grumbling, provided always you _have_ entered in at the strait
gate. You will sing all along the road then, in a little while, in a
manner pleasant for other people to hear.
This figure has been one of the loveliest in the series, an extreme
refinement and tender severity being aimed at throughout. She is
crowned, not with laurel, but with small leaves,--I am not sure what
they are, being too much injured: the face thin, abstracted, wistful;
the lips not far open in their low singing; the hair rippling softly on
the shoulders. She plays on a small organ, richly ornamented with
Gothic tracery, the down slope of it set with crockets like those of
Santa Maria del Fiore. Simon Memmi means that _all_ music must be
"sacred." Not that you are never to sing anything but hymns, but that
whatever is rightly called music, or work of the Muses, is divine in
help and healing.
The actions of both hands are singularly sweet. The right is one of the
loveliest things I ever saw done in painting. She is keeping down one
note only, with her third finger, seen under the raised fourth: the
thumb, just passing under; all the curves of the fingers exquisite, and
the pale light and shade of the rosy flesh relieved against the ivory
white and brown of the notes.
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