Beethoven, and Wagner: for that would be consistent with a belief that the present age is one of transition preliminary to the appearance of a further succession of great geniuses. Spengler's doctrine committed him to the unqualified condemnation of modern art as being degenerate.

The music of the post-Wagnerian epoch cannot be swept into one net. Not only does each of the leading composers naturally differ from the others in his aims and outlook and in the character of his art, but some of them may be said to mark the conclusion of an era which is now drawing-if indeed it has not already drawn to its close, as contrasted with others who seem to represent the start of a new age.

It is, I think, broadly true that ours is a generation of little men. Not merely is there no musician now in his prime who can be mentioned in the same breath as Bach or Beethoven: there is not a composer, the production of whose new works is awaited with such eager anticipation as was the case even with Debussy and Strauss some years ago. There have been many striking and interesting works produced in recent times by Stravinsky, Holst, de Falla, Ravel, Vaughan-Williams, Honegger, and Bartok-to name only a few of the leading composers of the present day. But he would be a bold man who would call any of these men giants of the stature of Brahms or Wagner.

It is undeniable that the era which was contemporaneous with the Victorian age in England was a great epoch-in other spheres besides music. Roughly about the close of the 19th century we seemed to reach the conclusion of a chapter, and there is a good deal to be said for the view that in music it was the finish of the diatonic, rather than that of the romantic, period. For romanticism existed even in music long before the so-called romantic movement initiated by Schumann, and will assuredly continue to manifest itself, because it appeals to a fundamental element of human nature in all ages-the faculty of imagination. Diatonic music has reigned supreme for several hundred years, and it is not surprising if its potentialities have by this time been worked out. In spite of the disturbing influence of Beethoven and the occasional lapses into

chromaticism that we find in Schumann, the diatonic style with its simple, sometimes almost obvious, melodies, its straightforward major and minor chords, and its regular rhythms-was still appropriate to an age so steady and peaceful as the 19th century mainly was, once that the Napoleonic Wars were over. But already with Wagner the restless element of chromaticism had begun to make itself felt more markedly than ever before-Wagner, in whose turbulent soul was revealed an early symptom of the rising tide of German ambition which eventually hurled itself against the forces of the world in the terrible year 1914. This chromaticism was present in even stronger degree in the art of RimskyKorsakof—a citizen of the country which was to witness the greatest internal cataclysm of modern times. It is true that in the pre-Beethoven epoch Bach sometimes wrote chromatic music, but that was because Bach seems to have anticipated most of the devices which his successors have utilised, and it is significant that he uses it to express great emotion, as in the Chromatic Fantasia and in the deeply affecting first chorus of the St. Matthew Passion. But it would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that Rimsky-Korsakof was steeped in chromaticism, and from him it passed as a direct legacy to his fellow-countryman Stravinsky, whose 'Firebird' was still plainly under the influence of Rimsky-Korsakof.

In the early days of the 20th century, chromaticism was a modern product, as was the whole-tone scale employed by Debussy. Rimsky-Korsakof, Debussy, and Stravinsky in his earlier works, were regarded as advanced composers. But to-day we have become so accustomed to those idioms, that we do not feel a musician to be in the forward movement at all now, if his music is merely chromatic, but only if it is atonal or polytonal. Thus Holst and Vaughan-Williams usually seem to be a step behind the most advanced wing. When the more adventurous spirits were writing chromatically, the works which these two composers were producing were still largely diatonic, and thus we got Holst's 'Hymns from the Rig Veda' and 'St Paul's suite for strings,' and Vaughan-Williams' 'Towards the Unknown Region,' 'A Sea Symphony,' and the 'London Symphony.' Later, when Stravinsky and Schönberg and some of the Vol. 250.-No. 495.

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younger men went on to atonality and free counterpoint, Holst and Vaughan-Williams advanced simply to a pronounced chromaticism. With Holst, The Planets' marked the transitional stage, while the 'Hymn of Jesus' and the 'Choral Symphony' were strongly chromatic in texture, as were the 'Pastoral Symphony' and 'Sancta Civitas' of Vaughan-Williams.

The composers who stuck to the diatonic mediumElgar and Strauss-are not modern at all. They belong to a bygone age and are really 19th-century musicians in spirit. With them, the diatonic period may be said to have come to a close, and the fact that they were contemporaries of the chromatically-minded RimskyKorsakof is beside the point. They mark the tail-end of an epoch, whereas his work points forward along a fresh path. The sort of thing that 20th-century diatonic music is liable to be is exhibited in the Alpine Symphony of Strauss-a pleasant enough entertainment of the old school, with nothing original or remarkable except its orchestration.

Delius is apart from all the rest. We can hardly reckon him as a modern. His ill-health has unfortunately prevented him from composing anything recently and he is no longer young. His art is so individual in character, that to those who, while recognising the beauty of the sounds which he produces, declare that his music is formless, we are tempted to reply that he has created his own forms. Although in his early days he was influenced by Wagner, the force of his imagination has called forth such a multiplicity of shifting harmonies and colours that we are left in amazement that anything short of a system of quarter-tones could have produced so endless a variety. His is a chromaticism mellowed and softened by the loving finger of a poet. In his hands, all that had gone before is 'rounded with a sleep.' He is the greatest musical genius since Franck, and Spengler can hardly have made the acquaintance of 'A Mass of Life' and 'The Song of the High Hills' when he delivered his sweeping invective against postWagnerian music. After Delius, the art is ready for new developments, and while he was producing his later works the change began.

There can be no doubt that the quality and texture

of modern music marks a greater break with the past than any innovations such as those introduced by Beethoven, Wagner, or Strauss at their respective epochs. The switch over from the art of diatonic and chromatic music to the world of atonality and free counterpoint is not on the same footing as that deepening of emotion in the instrumental forms which Beethoven effected, or as the development of the music drama or of programme music. Strong and significant as those changes were, they marked but the onward strides of an art which in its essence remained the same in spite of them. Each of those great masters was a much-indebted man. But the composers in the forward movement to-day are exploring in an unknown region. It may turn out that they

'have ventured,

Like little wanton boys that swim on bladders,
This many summers in a sea of glory,

But far beyond their depth.'

But whatever be their fate, it seems undeniable that the experiments which they have made and are making constitute a veritable revolution in the history of the art—analogous not to the comparatively orderly developments of the great innovators of the past to whom I have referred, but rather to those bold adventurers who first introduced the simultaneous sounding of notes of different pitch in the Middle Ages and thus paved the way for the age of polyphony.

When we listen to the bewildering tone smudges of Anton Webern's Five pieces for String Quartet, to the scraping and gibbering of Hindemith's first pianoforte concerto, or the gruff, dissonant opening of Bartok's concerto for piano and orchestra, it is manifest that we have crossed over the border into a country where the manners and customs of the people are so utterly different from those to which we have been brought up that we can hardly recognise them as belonging to the same order of society. Stravinsky had started in this direction in his 'Sacre du Printemps'-a work which in its strange combination of remote loveliness with apparently intentional barbaric crudity, seems to mark the turning point. Thereafter it was almost inevitable that he should go a stage further. It was unthinkable

that he should return to the bewitching glamour of the 'Firebird' or even to the grotesque brilliance of 'Petrouchka,' both of which still maintained strong elements of diatonic and chromatic writing. The time was ripe for a keyless music and for a counterpoint which ignored the old harmonic laws. Thus in the 'Symphony for Wind Instruments in Memory of Debussy' and in 'L'Histoire du Soldat,' Stravinsky struck out on new paths, which differed as completely from his earlier style as Schönberg's astonishing 'Pierrot Lunaire' diverged from the Wagnerian timbre of his early Sextet for Strings (Verklärte Nacht'), and from the first string quartet (Opus 7) which in spirit and technique (apart from the great length of its single movement) harked back to the 19th century or at least to the earlier days of the 20th.

It may be asked, what is the significance of this violent disturbance of our musical equanimity? Is it a mere flash in the pan-a temporary aberration from the straight path which the art may hereafter resume once more? Or does it herald a new era in which atonality and quarter-tones and free counterpoint will be the order of the day? My own belief is that we are living in an age of transition to a period in which the great man will once more bestride the world like a colossus. The existing generation of modernist composers contains not a single artist of outstanding genius; for we are living in an age of small men, whose function it is to experiment with chemicals of which their ancestors had never dreamed. They are making important discoveries, but as so often happens in these cases, the men who have to do the research work in its preliminary stages are not themselves persons of mighty genius, but skilful, imaginative investigators whose task it is to pave the way for the inspired masters who are to come. When the great genius eventually arises, he will profit by the pioneer work done by our contemporaries, absorbing into his creative net all that he finds suited to his artistic purpose and discarding the useless and superfluous matter. On such a foundation he-or they -(for there will surely be more than one) will build a superstructure of which we cannot form the slightest notion at the present time. The modern works of