ghty Days.'" Nor is the idiom of his later
and more representative period primarily and originally any more
characteristic. It never seems to surge quite wholly and cleanly and
fairly. The chasing to which it has evidently been subjected cannot
quite conceal its descent. The setting of "La Cloche felee" of
Baudelaire, for instance, is curiously Germanic and heavy, for all the
subtlety and filigree of the voice and the accompanying piano and viola.
It is a fairly flat waltz movement that in "A Pagan Poem" is chosen to
represent the sublunary aspect of Virgil's genius. And "Hora mystica"
and "Music for Four Stringed Instruments," which have a certain
stylistic unity, nevertheless reveal the composer hampered by the
Gregorian and scholastic idiom which he has sought to assimilate.

Nor has he ever had the power to express and objectify himself
completely, and achieve vital form. In performance, most of his works
shrink and dwindle. The central and sustaining structure, the cathedral
which is behind every living composition and manifests itself through
it, is in these pieces so vague and attenuated that it fades into the
background of the concert-hall, is like gray upon gray. The gems and
gold thread and filigree with which this work is sewn tarnish in the
gloom. Something is there, we perceive, something that moves and sways
and rises and ebbs fitfully in the dim light. But it is a wraithlike
thing, and undulates and falls before our eyes like flames that have
neither redness nor heat. Even the terrible bagpipe of the second
rhapsody for oboe; even the caldron of the "Pagan Poem," that
transcription of the most sensual and impassioned of Virgil's eclogues,
with its mystic, dissonant trumpets; even the blasphemies of "La
Villanelle du Diable," and the sundown fires that beat through the close
of "Hora mystica" are curiously bloodless and ghostly and unsubstantial.
Pages of sustained music occur rarely enough in his music. The lofty,
almost metaphysical, first few periods, the severe and pathetic second
movement of the "Music for Four Stringed Instruments"; certain songs
like "Le Son du cor," that have atmosphere and a delicate poetry, are
distinctly exceptional in this body of work. What chiefly lives in it
are certain poignant phrases, certain eloquent bars, a glowing, winey
bit of color here, a velvety phrase for the oboe or the clarinet, a
sharp, brassy, pricking horn-call, a dreamy, wandering melody for the
voice there.