massive enough to adapt itself to the monstrous organization which he never had in view. Conversely, that wonderful 16th- century monument, Tallis's 4o-part motet, which remains unsurpassed for genuine complexity combined with rhetorical force, would probably prove more convincing with fewer re- hearsals on 40 single voices than on a choir of 400 which could after all only give 10 voices to a part.)
The life work of Max Reger presents a strange study of ar- tistic vitality working on methods the reverse of vitalizing. At first sight his productivity seems enormous; and since Orlando di Lasso in the i6th century we have had no other conspicuous instance of a composer who seems always able to sit down before a pile of blank music paper with a blank mind and work himself up into genuine inspiration by sheer interest in the weaving of rich musical texture. To the present young generation of German musicians Reger is the last of the classics; but there are few things in music less classical than Reger's art forms, rigidly orthodox though they seem. They are the direct result of extraordinary docility in the pupil of the most systematic musical scholar of recent times, and anyone who has groaned in spirit at the sight of one of Hugo Riemann's editions of a piece of classical music may easily recognize in Reger the traces of his teaching. Every external feature of the classical art forms is present without any trace of the classical reasons for it. Every- thing has been worked out from one detail to the next, without any first principles to account for the whole procedure. A facile contrapuntist, Reger writes untold numbers of fugues, all on one mechanical plan, mostly with some combination of subjects, but never a combination between subjects sufficiently contrasted to give it point. His instrumental works are for the most part cast in sonata forms; except for the incessantly modulating and chromatic style, the whole collection of works contains neither an unorthodox procedure nor the slightest reason for its orthodox procedures. Bach wrote great works for unaccompanied violin, and Reger does likewise. But he shows no sense of the principle that Bach's unaccompanied melody is its own bass; Reger's melodies cry loudly and ambiguously for harmonic support. You might as well cut out with scissors a full-face portrait of a judge in his wig and expect it to be recognizable as a silhouette. Whatever is to be learnt from Reger, it is not the meaning of classical art forms. And much is to be learnt from Reger. His texture is inevitably thick, for his rigidly systematic completeness vetoes any of that suggestive- ness which is one of the secrets of the greatest art. But it is astonishingly sonorous, and, in its heavy literal-minded way, effects its purpose in the fewest possible notes, numerous though they be. Every instrument is profoundly studied and developed on the basis of its natural technique; and while the player who claims that he can read Regar at sight is probably mendacious, he will enjoy his instrument all the better for playing Reger well. Nor is this the only or the most important non-egotistic reality in Reger's work. The reality of Reger is that he is a consummate and impassioned rhetorician. His unreal art forms hinder and help him no more and no less than the alphabetical acrostic hindered and helped the poet of the Lamentations of Jeremiah. He extemporizes on paper, and is profoundly attentive to the nature of his instruments and to whatever text he is setting in his vocal music. In the history of art there can be no more conspicuous example of the difference between analytical theory and the practical conditions of creative work.
The only things that matter to the composer and to his posterity are the things that help or hinder him in creating his works. Posterity will not inquire whether Sebastian Bach, Granville Bantock, Richard Strauss, Busoni whosoever you will were reactionaries or revolutionaries, whether they followed classical forms, misunderstood them or abolished them. Nor will posterity pay any attention to the questions we so often ask as to whether such and such a composer's work had led to further develop- ments or hindered them. This is a totally different question from that which is often confused with it, the question whether certain principles (such as a revolutionary but disciplinarian theory of harmony) do or do not interfere with a composer's
capacity to write coherent and fluent works. Thus, when it is argued that Wagnerism was the cause of much mental paral- ysis among later musicians, the crushingly sufficient answer is that Wagnerism did not prevent Wagner himself from producing works that are among the most enormous achievements in all the records of music; and that the effect of such achievements on the sane musician is to enlarge his ideas of the range of his art. He is not obliged to cover that whole range himself; and the musician who, not being Wagner or Strauss, dooms himself to failure by working on their huge scale with inadequate resources, does not thereby show that his artistic balance would lead him to better success on a smaller scale. All great art may be accused of " leading to a blind alley " inasmuch as its achieve- ments are always individual and unique. Yet every achieve- ment that lives (and many live, like the works of Domenico Scarlatti and Couperin, that cannot well be called great) is a source of inspiration to right-minded artists. It is not a matter of taste; nor need it be an incitement to handle any particular art form or to imitate the style that has inspired the artist with Correggio's conviction " Anch'io son pittore! " It would be difficult, for instance, to name any composer whose style shows the influence of Granville Bantock; just as it is difficult to trace in his style, otherwise than by merely technical measure- ments, the influence of Strauss and of the schematic purity and brilliance of Russian orchestration. Yet there is probably nowhere in Europe a more radiant source of musical health. It is easiest for young composers to feel the stimulus of one who, like Bantock, has always been a keen upholder of the most modern music; nor is it anything but a healthy sign of the times that those who still find their interest in classical resources must plough a lonely furrow. They may contentedly do so, like Sebastian Bach, if like him they also maintain a hopeful interest in the present and future of the new movements which they do not feel drawn to imitate in their own work.
Another striking example of artistic vitality commands atten- tion in the work of Gustav Hoist, an English composer whose interest in oriental subjects is (like Bantock's) no whim for chinoiseries but a true expression of the nostalgia of the West. In every direction his work is masterly, independent, and in- disputably real. Savitri is an oriental opera written with the slenderest of instrumental resources and with much singing that is not only unaccompanied but unharmonized. Hoist has also produced beautiful songs for the strange combination of a solo voice accompanied only by a violin. At the other end of the scale we have his orchestral work The Planets, in which he shows his full musical freedom. Probably the work in which his design most accurately and tersely fills its space is his setting of the sublime ancient Byzantine Hymn of Jesus. Here the music seems indistinguishable from the text; and its primitive and drastic harmonic logic, which technically could not have been written before the time of Debussy and Ravel, is no more suggestive of the fashions of to-day, or of any day, than the awe-inspiring Eucharistic text which reverberates through it. No modern music is more utterly unsuggestive of outward and technical resemblance to the classics, and none rests on deeper foundations of musical scholarship.
Among the most significant signs of life in English music we must mention Rutland Boughton's remarkable musical festivals at Glastonbury, where (until interrupted by the World War) he produced English opera on a small scale, ranging from Purcell to his own and other contemporary works.
It is easy to ask what effect the World War has produced on music. The wisest answer is evasive. Few, if any, of the works written avowedly to commemorate the war can possibly succeed in meaning what they say or saying what they mean. And of the losses to music, who shall discriminate between the talents that had been given time just to reveal their promise and those that were cut off yet sooner? What now of Russia, where in 1921 world-famous composers were living in starvation without even paper to write on? If any musical work is destined to impress posterity as a noble expression and reaction of the World War, the choice, strange as it may seem, might most desirably fall on
