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Rh l'Ukraine" and "La bonne chanson," for instance, are distinctly derivative and uncharacteristic in style. The idiom is derived in part from Fauré, in part from Wagner and other of the romanticists. The quintette has even been dubbed "A musical 'Trip Around the World in Eighty Days. Nor is the idiom of his later and more representative period primarily and originally any more characteristic. It never seems to surge quite wholly and cleanly and fairly. The chasing to which it has evidently been subjected cannot quite conceal its descent. The setting of "La Cloche félée" of Baudelaire, for instance, is curiously Germanic and heavy, for all the subtlety and filigree of the voice and the accompanying piano and viola. And "Hora Mystica" and the "Music for Four Stringed Instruments," which have a certain stylistic unity, nevertheless reveal the composer hampered by the gregorian and scholastic idiom which he has sought to assimilate.

Nor has he ever had the power to express and objectify himself completely, and achieve vital form. In performance, most of his works shrink and dwindle. The central and sustaining structure, the cathedral which is behind every living composition and manifests itself through it, is in these pieces so vague and attenuated that it fades into the background of the concert-hall, is like gray upon gray. The gems and gold thread and filigree with which this work i1s sewn tarnish in the gloom. Something is there, we perceive, something that moves and sways and rises and ebbs fitfully in the dim light. But it is a wraithlike thing, and undulates and falls before our eyes like flames that have neither redness nor heat. Even the terrible bagpipe of the "Clarinet Rhapsody"; even the cauldron of the "Pagan Poem," that transcription of the most sensual and impassioned of Virgil's eclogues, with its mystic dissonant trumpets; even the blasphemies of "La Villanelle du Diable," are curiously bloodless and ghostly and unsubstantial. Pages of sustained music occur rarely enough in his work. The lofty, almost metaphysical first few periods, the severe and pathetic second movement of the "Music for Four Stringed Instruments"; certain songs like "Le Son du Cor," that have atmosphere and a delicate poetry, are distinctly exceptional in this body of work. What chiefly lives in it are certain perfumed phrases, certain eloquent bars, a glowing winey bit of colour here, a velvety phrase for the oboe or the clarinet, a sharp brassy pricking horn-call, a dreamy wandering melody for