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successful. With the naïve simplicity of The Creation^[1] and for the thundering, God-fearing music of The Messiah I have more sympathy, and of all heavenly music I do not believe better exists than the Dance of the Angels in Wolf-Ferrari's Vita Nuova. There is a test for great art, and you may apply it equally to Paul Verlaine or to Shakespeare, in that it treats of the sublime with simplicity and of the simple with sublimity. This minuet, scored for harps, piano, and kettledrums, bringing to mind a divine fresco of pre-Raphaelite angels, of daisy-speckled green fields, of deep blue skies reflected in lakes of still deeper blue, circled by ilexes and cypresses, is indeed celestial in its simplicity, as poignant a simplicity as that of one of the poems of Sagesse. It suggests the simple faith of its composer and it begets faith in its listeners. There is gnosis in this music. Gluck, too, knew the secret; Gluck, above all others, knew the secret, but Gluck was inspired by the pagan heaven of the Greeks, a more æsthetic idealization than the heaven of the Christians. In all opera I cannot recall a more simple, a more touchingly serene page, than the music of the scene of the Elysian Fields in Orfeo. The first and unbelievably lovely dance

1. Haydn told Griesinger, his biographer, that in one of the oldest of his symphonies the ruling idea was how God spoke with a hardened sinner, and begged him to mend his ways, but without making any impression!