have passed over black torrents and desolate
moorlands, through pallid sunlight and grim primeval forests, and become
drenched with them. The instrumentation is all wet grays and blacks,
relieved only by bits of brightness wan and elusive as the northern
summer, frostily green as the polar lights. The works are full of the
gnawing of bassoons and the bleakness of the English horn, full of
shattering trombones and screaming violins, full of the sinister rolling
of drums, the menacing reverberation of cymbals, the icy glittering of
harps. The musical ideas of those of the compositions that are finely
realized recall the ruggedness and hardiness and starkness of things
that persist in the Finnish winter. The rhythms seem to approach the
wild, unnumbered rhythms of the forest and the wind and the nickering
sunlight. Music has forever been a movement "up to nature," and
Schoenberg's motto is but the precision of a motive that has governed
all composers. But Sibelius has written music that seems to come as the
very answer to the call, and to be the North indeed.

Such a discovery of nature was necessarily a part of his
self-revelation. For Sibelius is essentially the Norseman. For all his
personal accomplishment, his cultural position, he is still the Finnish
peasant, preserving intact within himself the racial inheritance. Other
musicians, having found life still a grim brief welter of bloody combats
and the straining of high, unyielding hearts and the falling of sure
inalienable doom, have fancied themselves the successors of the Skalds,
and dreamt themselves within the gray primeval North. But, in the
presence of Sibelius, they seem only too evidently men of a gentler,
later generation. Beside his, their music appears swathed in romantic
glamour. For there are times when he comes into the concert-room like
some man of a former age, like some spare, knotted barbarian from the
world of the sagas. There are times when he comes amongst us like one
who might quite conceivably have been comrade to pelted warriors who
fought with clubs and hammers, like one who might have beaten out a
rude music by black, smoking hearthsides quite as readily as made
tone-poems for the modern concert-room. And his music with its viking
blows and wild, crying accents, its harsh and uncouth speech, sets us
without circumstance in that sunken world, sets us in the very midst of
the stark men and grave, savage women for whom the sagas were made, so
t