line with the sustaining chorus; or when Bach
leaps to his harmonic heights in organ fantasy and toccata; or Mozart
sings his exquisite clashes in the G Minor Symphony.

As the true poet begins by absorption of the art that he finds, his
early utterance will be imitative. His ultimate goal is not the
strikingly new but the eternally true. It is a question less of men than
of a point of view.

It seems sometimes that in art as in politics two parties are needed,
one balancing the weaknesses of the other. As certain epochs are
overburdened by the spirit of a past poet, so others are marred by the
opposite excess, by a kind of neo-mania. The latter comes naturally as
reaction from the former. Between them the poet holds the balance of
clear vision.

When Peri overthrew the trammels of counterpoint, in a dream of Hellenic
revival of drama, he could not hope to write a master-work. Destructive
rebellion cannot be blended with constructive beauty. An antidote is of
necessity not nourishment. Others may follow the path-breaker and slowly
reclaim the best of old tradition from the new soil. The strange part of
this rebellion is that it is always marked by the quality of stereotype
which it seeks to avoid. This is an invariable symptom. It cannot be
otherwise; for the rejection of existing art leaves too few resources.
Moreover, the pioneer has his eye too exclusively upon the mere manner.

A wholesome reaction there may be against excess. When Gluck dared to
move the hearts of his hearers instead of tickling their ears, he
achieved his purpose by positive beauty, without actual loss. In this
sense every work of art is a work of revolution. So Wagner, especially
in his earlier dramas,[A] by sheer sincerity and poetic directness,
corrected a frivolous tradition of opera. But when he grew destructive
of melody and form, by theory and practice, he sank to the role of
innovator, with pervading trait of stereotype, in the main merely adding
to the lesser resources of the art. His later works, though they contain
episodes of overwhelming beauty, cannot have a place among the permanent
classics, alone by reason of their excessive reiteration.

[Footnote A: The "Flying Dutchman," "Lohengrin" and "Tannhaeuser" seemed
destined to survive Wagner's later works.]

One of the most charming instances of this iconoclasm is the music of
Claude Debussy.[A] In a way we are reminded of the first flash of
Wagner's later manner: the same vaguen