hey seem mere echoes, instead of
forewarnings. We cannot fail to see the fine parallel, how the masterful
command is effective as was the similar call at the beginning.

Significantly brief is the ending, at once of the story and of the
music. In the brevity lies the point of the plot: in the curt dismissal
of the humbled spirit, at the height of his revel, to his place as broom
in the corner. Wistful almost is the slow vanishing until the last
chords come like the breaking of a fairy trance.

CHAPTER X

TSCHAIKOWSKY

The Byron of music is Tschaikowsky for a certain alluring melancholy and
an almost uncanny flow and sparkle. His own personal vein deepened the
morbid tinge of his national humor.

We cannot ignore the inheritance from Liszt, both spiritual and musical.
More and more does the Hungarian loom up as an overmastering influence
of his own and a succeeding age. It seems as if Liszt, not Wagner, was
the musical prophet who struck the rock of modern pessimism, from which
flowed a stream of ravishing art. The national current in Tschaikowsky's
music was less potent than with his younger compatriots; or at least it
lay farther beneath the surface.

For nationalism in music has two very different bearings. The concrete
elements of folk-song, rhythm and scale, as they are more apparent, are
far less important. The true significance lies in the motive of an
unexpressed national idea that presses irresistibly towards fulfilment.
Here is the main secret of the Russian achievement in modern music,--as
of other nations like the Finnish. It is the cause that counts. Though
Russian song has less striking traits than Hungarian or Spanish, it has
blossomed in a far richer harvest of noble works of art.

Facile, fluent, full of color, Tschaikowsky seems equipped less for
subjective than for lyric and dramatic utterance, as in his "Romeo and
Juliet" overture. In the "Manfred" Symphony we may see the most fitting
employment of his talent. Nor is it unlikely that the special
correspondence of treatment and subject may cause this symphony to
survive the others, may leave it long a rival of Schumann's "Manfred"
music.

With Tschaikowsky feeling is always highly stressed, never in a certain
natural poise. He quite lacks the noble restraint of the masters who, in
their symphonic lyrics, wonderfully suggest the still waters that run
deep.

Feeling with Tschaikowsky was frenzy, violent passion, so that with all
aband