ullaby sings its strain
in the minor. In the close the original Allegro theme has a literal,
vigorous dispute with the march-phrase for the last word of all.

The work does less to exploit American music than to show a certain
community in all true folk-song. Nor is this to deny a strain peculiar
to the new world. It seems a poet of distant land at the same time and
in the same tones uttered his longing for his own country and expressed
the pathos and the romance of the new. Dvorak, like all true workers,
did more than he thought: he taught Americans not so much the power of a
song of their own, as their right of heritage in all folk-music. And
this is based not merely on an actual physical inheritance from the
various older races.

If the matter, in Dvorak's symphony, is of American negro-song, the
manner is Bohemian. A stranger-poet may light more clearly upon the
traits of a foreign lore. But his celebration will be more conscious if
he endeavor to cling throughout to the special dialect. A true national
expression will come from the particular soil and will be unconscious of
its own idiom.

The permanent hold that Dvorak's symphony has gained is due to an
intrinsic merit of art and sincere sentiment; it has little to do with
the nominal title or purpose.

CHAPTER XIV

THE EARLIER BRUCKNER[A]

[Footnote A: Anton Bruckner, born at Annsfelden, Austria, 1828; died in
Vienna in 1896.]

Whatever be the final answer of the mooted question of the greatness of
Bruckner's symphonies, there is no doubt that he had his full share of
technical profundity, and a striking mastery of the melodious weaving of
a maze of concordant strains. The question inevitably arises with
Bruckner as to the value of the world's judgments on its contemporary
poets. There can be no doubt that the _furore_ of the musical public
tends to settle on one or two favorites with a concentration of praise
that ignores the work of others, though it be of a finer grain. Thus
Schubert's greatest--his one completed--symphony was never acclaimed
until ten years after his death. Even his songs somehow brought more
glory to the singer than to the composer. Bach's oratorios lay buried
for a full century. On the other hand, names great in their day are
utterly lost from the horizon. It is hard to conceive the _eclat_ of a
Buononcini or a Monteverde,--whose works were once preeminent. There are
elements in art, of special, sensational effect, that mak