h city, the hideous present, for some vestige, some message from
its homeland; finding, some sundown, in the ineffable glamour of rose
and mauve and blue through granite piles, "le souvenir avec le
crepuscule." He, too, one would guess, has dreamt of selling his soul to
the devil, and called upon him, ah, how many terrible nights, to
appear; and has sought a refuge from the world in Catholic mysticism and
ecstasy. Had it been given him to realize himself in music, we should
undoubtedly have had a body of work that would have been the veritable
milestones of the route traversed by the entire movement. Would not the
"Pagan Poem" have been the musical equivalent of the mystic and
sorrowful sensuality of Verlaine? Would not the two rhapsodies "L'Etang"
and "La Cornemuse" have transmuted to music the macabre and sinister
note of so much symbolist poetry? Would we not have had in "La
Villanelle du Diable" an equivalent for the black mass and "La-bas"; in
"Hora mystica" an equivalent for "En route"; in "Music for Four Stringed
Instruments" a musical "Sagesse"? Does not Charles Martin Loeffler, who,
after writing "A Pagan Poem," makes a retreat in a Benedictine
monastery, and who, at home in Medford, Massachusetts, teaches the
choristers to sing Gregorian chants, recall Joris Karl Huysmans, the
"oblat" of La Trappe?

To a limited extent, of course, he has succeeded in fixing the color of
the symbolist movement in music. Some of his richer, dreamier songs,
some of his finer bits of polishing, his rarer drops of essence, are
indeed the musical counterpart of the goldsmith's work, the preciosity,
of a Gustave Kahn or a Stuart Merrill. But a musical Huysmans, for
instance, it was never in his power to become. For he has never
possessed the creative heat, the fluency, the vein, the felicity, the
power necessary to the task of upbuilding out of the tones of
instruments anything as flamboyant and magnificent as the novelist's
black and red edifices. He has never been vivid and ingenuous and
spontaneous enough a musician even to develop a personal idiom. He has
always been hampered and bound. His earlier compositions, the quintet,
the orchestral "Les Vieillees de l'Ukraine" and "La bonne chanson," for
instance, are distinctly derivative and uncharacteristic in style. The
idiom is derived in part from Faure, in part from Wagner and other of
the romanticists. The string quintet has even been dubbed "A Musical
'Trip Around the World in Ei