cerity, hoping by sitting down frequently on a Knabe keyboard, to elicit therefrom an accidental, if bizarre, beauty?
The charge of insincerity, at least, may be quickly disposed of. There is a possibility, of course, that Ornstein, the priest at the Eucharist of formal harmony, is the chief mocker at the ceremony of its suffering and death. A spectator to the astounding success of the cubist-vorticist movement several years ago, he may indeed have put his brain in his cheek, concluding that apparent madness was the best public policy. That possibility is only a possibility. Picasso and Matisse may have been charlatans; their work, however, if designed to scoff, has remained unwittingly to make men pray. They are judged, and justly judged, by their paintings and not by any undiscoverable, in petto attitudes. And Ornstein, like all other men under aesthetic suspicion, dcserves an equal benefit of the doubt.
But the other charge—that he apes if elaborates the anarchies of Schoenberg and Scriabine—opens up a legitimate examination not only of the defects of the defendant but of the tendencies and limitations of all post-impressionistic music. That Ornstein stands in the middle rather than at the beginning of the path of contemporary harmonic licence has already been stated. And Scriabine was more than his pioneer in mere daring: in inspiration he was emphatically his superior. Ornstein neither has composed, nor seems likely to compose, anything in imaginative magnitude equal to the Russian Alexander's Ninth Piano Sonata or his Poëme d'Extase. Ornstein's diabolism is indisputable; his divinity is seriously to be questioned. On his own confession he never alters a note after it is down on paper; and while such methods of composition might interest Herr Freud, they are scarcely conducive to the development of artistic genius. Under such circumstances it is hardly surprising that if he has outstripped the feet of his forerunners he has, so far, failed to catch up with their brains or their souls.
Then why waste more time on him? Simply because he represents, for the moment, a distinct movement in musical art which, starting some twenty years ago and still on its way, may ultimately reach gigantic ends. Ornstein himself is unlikely to come even within hearing of so Brobdingnagian a country as that which Moussorgsky vaguely imagined and toward which Scriabine, more recently, seemed to be stretching appetent but unsolaced hands. It
