Page:The Borzoi 1920.djvu/59

PHILIP MOELLER America because he has had the wise wisdom of not writing about music at all. He is one of the few musically informed who has sensibly refrained from any vacant analysis of tonal mysteries, one of the very few indeed who realizes the futility of filling soundless books with sounding but empty treatises on sound. He has had the rare and modest grace of letting music sing or play or "symphonize" for itself. His chief concern has been with interpretations and interpreters. Taking the one or the other as his theme he has written critical variations and the result has been critical creation.

His work has the quality of rare, spontaneous and intriguing talk. There is about his writing an air of delicate and urbane gossip, a knowledge and thought that does not take itself in any sense or at any moment as too profound to admit of a digression into gaiety. It is not so much what he knows as the very particular and personal way in which he knows it. His one clichè is a desperate detestation of all critical clichès. The woof of his thought is a charming destroyal of all accepted standards, the web of his thinking is a delicate but constructive anarchy. When he builds up we are grateful, when he tears down we are equally grateful because he always leaves behind him the intricate, infernally informed and fascinating machinery of his annihilation.