usic, exists in him, too. And probably nothing
makes him so inexplicable and irritating to his audiences as his ironic
streak. People are willing to forgive an artist all, save only irony.

What the future holds for Maurice Ravel is known only to the three
norns. But, unless some unforeseen accident occur and interrupt his
career, it can only hold the most brilliant rewards. The man seems
surely bound for splendid shores. He is only in the forty-fifth year of
his life, and though his genius was already fresh and subtle in the
Quartet, written as early as 1903, it has grown beautifully in power
during the last two decades. The continued exploration of musical means
has given his personality increasingly free play, and has unbound him.
The gesture of the hand has grown swifter and more commanding. The
instruments have become more obedient. He has matured, become virile and
even magistral. The war has not softened him. He speaks as intimately as
ever in "Le Tombeau de Couperin." Already one can see in him one of the
most delightful and original musical geniuses that have been nourished
by the teeming soil of France. It is possible that the future will refer
to him in even more enthusiastic tone.

Borodin

Borodin's music is a reading of Russia's destiny in the book of her
past. "I live," the composer of "Prince Igor" wrote to a friend one
summer, "on a steep and lofty mountain whose base is washed by the
Volga. And for thirty _versts_ I can follow the windings of the river
through the blue of the immeasurable distance." And his music, at least
those rich fragments that are his music, make us feel as though that
summer sojourn had been symbolic of his career, as though in spirit he
had ever lived in some high, visionary place overlooking the sweep of
centuries in which Russia had waxed from infancy to maturity. It is as
though the chiming of the bells of innumerable Russian villages,
villages living and villages dead and underground a thousand years, had
mounted incessantly to his ears, telling him of the progress of a thing
round which sixty generations had risen and fallen like foam. It is as
though he had followed the Volga, flowing eastward, not alone for
thirty, but for thirty hundred _versts_ through plains reverberant with
the age-long combat and clashing, the bleeding and fusing of Slav and
Tartar; had followed it until it reached the zone where Asia, with her
caravans and plagues and shrill Mongolian fife