icate china shivering into
a thousand luminous fragments. In the welter of tonalities that
bruised each other as they passed and repassed, in the preliminary
grip of enharmonics that almost made the ears bleed, the eyes water,
the scalp to freeze, I could not get a central grip on myself. It was
new music (or new exquisitely horrible sounds) with a vengeance. The
very ecstasy of the hideous! I say "exquisitely horrible," for pain
can be at once exquisite and horrible; consider toothache and its
first cousin, neuralgia. And the border-land between pain and pleasure
is a territory hitherto unexplored by musical composers. Wagner
suggests poetic anguish; Schoenberg not only arouses the image of
anguish, but he brings it home to his auditory in the most subjective
way. You suffer the anguish with the fictitious character in the
poem. Your nerves--and remember the porches of the ears are the
gateways to the brain and ganglionic centres--are literally pinched
and scraped.

I wondered that morning if I were not in a nervous condition. I looked
about me in the sparsely filled hall. People didn't wriggle; perhaps
their souls wriggled. They neither smiled nor wept. Yet on the wharf
of hell the lost souls disembarked and wept and lamented. What was the
matter with my own ego? My conscience reported a clean bill of health,
I had gone to bed early the previous night wishing to prepare for the
ordeal. Evidently I was out of condition (critics are like
prize-fighters, they must keep in constant training else they go
"stale"). Or was the music to blame? Schoenberg is, I said to myself,
the crudest of all composers, for he mingles with his music sharp
daggers at white heat, with which he pares away tiny slices of his
victim's flesh. Anon he twists the knife in the fresh wound and you
receive another horrible thrill, all the time wondering over the fate
of the Lunar Pierrot and--hold on! Here's the first clew. If this new
music is so distractingly atrocious what right has a listener to
bother about Pierrot? What's Pierrot to him or he to Pierrot? Perhaps
Schoenberg had caught his fish in the musical net he used, and what
more did he want, or what more could his listeners expect?--for to be
hooked or netted by the stronger volition of an artist is the object
of all the seven arts.

How does Schoenberg do it? How does he pull off the trick? It is not a
question to be lightly answered. In the first place the personality of
the listener i