Page:The Dial (Volume 68).djvu/569

Rh is as nearly a commonplace in the post-impressionist curriculum as the alphabet is in that of a college professor. Bach, in other words, had his Beethoven no less certainly than Cézanne had his Matisse. And if Matisse, in turn, had his Duchamp, and Beethoven his Schumann, his Scriabine, and finally his Ornstein, who will care to deny that others will again succeed these latter men, or that such super-revolutionists, leaving behind them the monarchies, the oligarchies, and the anarchies of their pictorial and musical forerunners, will vote for a complete and earth-shaking nihilism?

And, if it comes, this post-futurist music will not, as the conventional may fear, crowd out the classic. Rivalry is for merchants, not for artists. The aim of the moderns is not to quarrel with the ancients but simply to depart from them. Music like Leo Ornstein's is so intricate, modally, that its composer not only leaves off the customary key-signature altogether, but warns you beforehand that an accidental affects merely the note before which it is immediately placed. This, to formalists like Richter and Sechter, would look like rank treason. But it is not treason: it is merely loyalty to a new government; it is fealty to another empire in the same world. Schumann will still live, and Haendel and Beethoven and Mozart. They will live, because they expressed ecstatically the vision of beauty that was theirs. And other men, if they are sincere, will live by their own vision of that same beauty, though seen through different techniques and under different skies. For there is neither growth in art, nor decay: there is only change.