hat we can see them in all their hurtling strength and rank barbarity,
can well-nigh touch them with the fingers of our hands. And because
Sibelius is so fundamentally man as combat with the North has made him,
only vision of his native earth could bring him rich self-consciousness.
For his individuality is but the shape of soul given his race by its
century-long adjustment. It is the North that has given him his profound
experience. Its rhythms have distinguished him. Its color, and the color
of his spirit, are twin. And so he turns toward it as to a mirror. Like
that of the hero of his tone-poem, his life is a long journey toward
Finland. Contact with Finnish earth gives him back into his own hands.
It is the North, the wind and the moorland and the sea, that gathers the
fragments of his broken soul, and makes him whole again.

It was with the sanction of a people that Sibelius came to his task. For
centuries before his birth the race that bore him had lain prone upon
its inclement coasts. But now a new vigor was germinating within it.
Youth had overtaken it once more, and filled it with the desire of
independence. Chained to the Russian Empire, it was reaching out toward
all that could give it the strength to persist and endure, toward all
that could give it knowledge of its proper soul. And so Sibelius, in the
search for the expression of his own personality, so much at one with
that of his fellows, was traveling in the common way. The word that he
was seeking, the word that should bring fulfilment to his proper soul,
was deeply needed by his fellows. Inarticulate thousands, unaware though
they were of his existence, awaited his work, wanted the sustenance it
could give. And, certainly, the sense of the needfulness of his work,
the sense of the large value set upon his best and purest attainments by
life itself, must have been with Sibelius always, must have supplied him
with a powerful incentive and made enormously for his achievements. He
must have felt all the surge of the race driving him. He must have had
continually the marvelous stimulus of feeling about him, for all the
night and the cold, the forms of comrades straining toward a single
lofty goal, felt himself one of an army of marching men. This folk, far
in its past, had imagined the figure of a hero-poet, Vainemunden, and
placed in his hands an instrument "shaped out of very sorrow," and
attributed magical power to his song. And Sibelius, bowed over his
m