Page:The Dial (Volume 68).djvu/47

Rh that was expended on the darkening and spicing and sharpening of the style in certain of his orchestral poems; the effort to create a new idiom based on the gregorian modes, to which "Hora Mystica" and the recent work for string quartet, with its antiphonies for violin and cello, bear witness, must in itself have been large. But though in result of all the chasing and hammering on gold, the filing and polishing, the vessel of his art has perhaps become richer and finer, it has not become any fuller. His second period differs from his first only in the fact that in it he has gone from one form of uncreativity to another somewhat more dignified and unusual. The. compositions of both periods have, after all, the selfsame lack. His destiny seems to have been inevitable.

And so, in its confused argentry and ghostliness, its crystallization and diaphaneity, his music resembles at times nothing so much as the precious remains and specimens of an extinct planet; things transfixed in cold eternal night, icy and phosphorescent of hue. No atmosphere bathes them. Sap does not mount in them. Should we touch them, they would crumble. This might have been a flower. But now it glistens with crystals of mica and quartz. These are jewels. But their fires are quenched. These candied petals are the passage from the "Music for Four Stringed Instruments" glossed in the score "un jardin des fleurs naïves," while this vial of gemmy green liquid is that entitled "une plaine d'émeraude gardée par des peupliers." The petrified saurian there, whose bones have suffered

is the Spanish rhapsody for 'cello; the string of steely beads the setting of the "To Helen" of Poe. And the objects that float preserved in those little flasks are some of the popular ditties with which Loeffler is so fond of incrustating his work. Once they were "à La Villette," and the Malagueña, and the eighteenth-century marching song of the Lorraine soldiery, and flourished under the windy heaven. But when Loeffler transplanted them respectively into "La Villanelle du Diable," into the Cello Rhapsody," and into the "Music for Four Stringed Instruments," they underwent the fate that befalls everything subjected to his exquisite and sterilizing touch.