nce with all his proper rhythmic
ardor and then suddenly degenerate. There are moments when his harmonic
sense, generally keen and true, abandons him completely. And even works
like the "Finlandia" and "Karelia" overtures, for all their generosity
of intention, for all their suggestion of peasant voices lifted in song,
disappoint because of the substitution of a popular lyricism, a certain
easy sweetness, for the high poetry one might have anticipated.

And yet, one has but to turn to the symphonies of Sibelius to encounter
music of another intensity, and gauge the richness of response that, at
times, it is given him to make. It is as if the very dignity and
grandeur of the medium itself sets him free. Just as the form of the
concerto seems to have given his sense of the violin a play apparently
denied it by the smaller mediums, so these larger orchestral forms seem
to have liberated his imagination, his orchestral genius, and made him
poet of his folk indeed. His personal quality, spread more thinly in his
songs and tone-poems, is essentialized and developed in these other
works. The symphonies themselves are in a sense the stages of the
essentialization. In the first of them his language emerges, to an
extent imparting its unmistakable coloration to a matter perhaps not
entirely distinguished. There is a looseness and lushness, a romanticism
and balladry, in the work, that is not quite characteristic. Still, the
honesty, the grimness and savagery and lack of sensuality, are
Sibelius's own. The adagio is steeped in his proper pathos, the pathos
of brief, bland summers, of light that falls for a moment, gentle and
mellow, and then dies away. Something like a memory of a girl sitting
amid the simple flowers in the white northern sunshine haunts the last
few measures. The crying, bold finale is full of the tragedy of northern
nature. And in the Second Symphony the independence is complete. The
orchestra is handled individually, sparingly, and with perfect point.
Often the instruments sound singly, or by twos and threes. What had been
but half realized in the earlier work is distinct and important in this.
It is as if Sibelius had come upon himself, and so been able to rid his
work of all superfluity and indecision. And, curiously, through speaking
his own language in all its homeliness and peasant flavor, he seems to
have moved more closely to his land. The work, his "pastoral" symphony,
for all its absolute and formal cha