, and tingle of his strange orchestra;
the riotous image of Russian peasants leaping and hopping in their
country dances, which his dance measures call up before one; those sweet
solid harmonies in which (if I may quote the voluptuous phrase of a
woman) one sets one's teeth as into nougat; all this is like a very
material kind of pleasure, in which the senses for a moment forget the
soul. For a moment only, for is it not the soul, a kind of discontented
crying out against pleasure and pain, which comes back distressingly
into this after all pathetic music? All modern music is pathetic;
discontent (so much idealism as that!) has come into all modern music,
that it may be sharpened and disturbed enough to fix our attention. And
Tschaikowsky speaks straight to the nerves, with that touch of
unmanliness which is another characteristic of modern art. There is a
vehement and mighty sorrow in the Passion Music of Bach, by the side of
which the grief of Tschaikowsky is like the whimpering of a child. He is
unconscious of reticence, unconscious of self-control. He is unhappy,
and he weeps floods of tears, beats his breast, curses the daylight; he
sees only the misery of the moment, and he sees the misery of the moment
as a thing endless and overwhelming. The child who has broken his toy
can realise nothing in the future but a passionate regret for the toy.

In Tschaikowsky there is none of the quieting of thought. The only
healing for our nerves lies in abstract thought, and he can never get
far enough from his nerves to look calmly at his own discontent. All
those wild, broken rhythms, rushing this way and that, are letting out
his secret all the time: "I am unhappy, and I know not why I am unhappy;
I want, but I know not what I want." In the most passionate and the most
questioning music of Wagner there is always air; Tschaikowsky is
suffocating. It is himself that he pities so much, and not himself
because he shares in the general sorrow of the world. To Tristan and
Isolde the whole universe is an exultant and martyred sharer in their
love; they know only the absolute. Even suffering does not bring
nobility to Tschaikowsky.

To pass from Wagner to Tschaikowsky, from "Parsifal" to the Pathetic
Symphony, is like passing from a church in which priests are offering
mass to a hut in which peasants are quarrelling, dancing, and making
love. Tschaikowsky has both force and sincerity, but it is the force and
sincerity of a ferocious