a tranquil and sequestered and soft-colored land "where shepherds still pipe to their flocks, and nun-like processions of clouds float over bluish hills and fathomless age-old lakes" are eminently present in him. He is in almost heroic degree the spirit forever searching blindly through the loud and garish 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'Étang" and "La cornemuse" have transmuted to music the macabre and sinister note of so much symbolist poetry? Should we not have had in "La Villanelle du Diable" an equivalent for the black mass and "Là bas"; in "Hora Mystica" an equivalent for "En route"; in the "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 so 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 first quartet, the orchestral "Les viellées de
