and instinctive.
For Ravel has been vouchsafed a high grace. He has been permitted to
remain, in all his manhood, the child that once we all were. In him the
powerful and spontaneous flow of emotion from out the depths of being
has never been dammed. He can still speak from the fullness of his
heart, cry his sorrows piercingly, produce himself completely. Gracious
and urbane as his music is, proper to the world of modern things and
modern adventures and modern people, there is still a gray, piercing
lyrical note in it that is almost primitive, and reflects the childlike
singleness and intensity of the animating spirit. The man who shaped not
only the deliberately infantine "Ma Mere l'Oye," but also things as
quiveringly simple and expressive and songful as "Oiseaux tristes," as
"Sainte," as "Le Gibet," or the "Sonatine," as the passacaglia of the
Trio or the vocal interlude in "Daphnis et Chloe," has a pureness of
feeling that we have lost. And it is this crying, passionate tone, this
directness of expression, this largeness of effort, even in tiny forms
and limited scope, that, more than his polyphonic style or any other of
the easily recognizable earmarks of his art, distinguishes his work from
Debussy's. The other man has a greater sensuousness, completeness,
inventiveness perhaps. But Ravel is full of a lyricism, a piercingness,
a passionateness, that much of the music of Debussy successive to
"Pelleas" wants. We understand Ravel's music, in the famous phrase of
Beethoven, as speech "vom Herz--zu Herzen."

And we turn to it gratefully, as we turn to all art full of the "sense
of tears in mortal things," and into which the pulse of human life has
passed directly. For there are times when he is close to the bourne of
life, when his art is immediately the orifice of the dark, flowering,
germinating region where lie lodged the dynamics of the human soul.
There are times when it taps vasty regions. There are times when Ravel
has but to touch a note, and we unclose; when he has but to let an
instrument sing a certain phrase, and things which lie buried deep in
the heart rise out of the dark, like the nymph in his piano-poem,
dripping with stars. The music of "Daphnis," from the very moment of the
introduction with its softly unfolding chords, its far, glamorous
fanfares, its human throats swollen with songs, seems to thrust open
doors into the unplumbed caverns of the soul, and summon forth the stuff
to shape the dream. L