Page:Anthology of Modern Slavonic Literature in Prose and Verse by Paul Selver.djvu/113

Rh gated only in its music. And every nation possesses a specific tone, to which its whole spirit is attuned. This tone is quite different in the soul of the Germanic or Latin peoples, and a quite peculiar one, entirely different from every other, among the Slavonic peoples.

To grasp the specific value of this mysterious tone in its whole range, to possess the power of harmonically attuning all other tones to this basic dominant,—herein lies the power of every artist and, at the same time, is afforded the standard as to how far an artist belongs to his own race or not.

This tone is the rudimentary and the earliest unity in the spiritual shaping of each nation. It is a kind of nucleus around which all the other ingredients of that nation are deposited, around which they oscillate and harden to an organic body. This fundamental tone affects all feelings, all impressions, and all development with a pitch peculiar to itself, and with its vivifying sap it saturates and strengthens all spiritual processes.

And hence it comes about that the soul of every nation is mirrored at its purest and at its strongest in music, and it is far easier to grasp the peculiar spiritual qualities of a nation in its music than in the word.

And the tone, to which the spirit of the Pole is attuned, is not a casual phenomenon,—it is the music of his blood, it is his breath, it is the