usic-paper, must have felt the dream stir within him, must have felt
incarnate within himself, however incompletely, that mysterious image,
and so proceeded with his work everlastingly assured that all he
actually accomplished woke from out of the heart of the people, and
responded to its immemorial need.

Out of such an impulse his art has come. No doubt, some of it is not the
response entirely worthy of so high a stimulus. Few modern composers of
eminence are as singularly uneven as Sibelius. Moods like that which
mothered the amiable elegance of the "Valse Triste" and that which
produced the hard and naked essentiality of the Fourth Symphony are
almost foreign to each other. The creative power itself is
extraordinarily fitful in him. It is as if, for all his physical
robustness, he has not quite the spiritual indefatigability of the major
artist. He has not that inventive heat that permits the composer of
indisputably the first rank to realize himself unflaggingly in all his
independence and intensity. Too often Sibelius's individuality is
cluttered and muffled by that of other men. No doubt every creative
artist passes through a period of submission to alien faiths. But in
Sibelius there appear to exist two distinct personalities, the one
strong and independent, the other timid and uninventive, who dominate
him alternately. Even some of the music contemporaneous with the
magnificent Fourth Symphony is curiously ineffectual and pointless.
True, the color, the air and tone of the North are never entirely
absent from his work. His songs invariably recapture, sometimes almost
miraculously, the dark and mourning accents of the Scandinavian
folk-song. For all the modernity of medium they are simple and sober.
Moreover, in those of his compositions that approach banality most
closely, there is a certain saving hardness and virility and honesty.
Unlike his neighbor, Grieg, he is never mincing and meretricious. We
never find him languishing in a pretty boudoir. He is always out under
the sky. It is only that he is not always free and resourceful and
deeply self-critical. Even through the bold and rugged and splendid
Violin Concerto there flit at moments the shadows of Beethoven and
Wagner and Tchaikowsky. The first theme of the quartet "Voces intimae"
resembles not a little a certain theme in "Boris." The close of
"Nightride and Sunrise" is watered Brahms and watered Strauss. And there
are phrases in his tone-poem that comme