is
mighty shoulders; music, he believed, must be formal to be understood.
Illowski, in his many wanderings, pondered these things: saw Berlioz on
the trail, in his efforts to formulate a science of instrumental
timbres; saw Wagner captivated by the glow of the footlights; saw Liszt,
audacious Liszt, led by Wagner, and tribute laid upon his genius by the
Bayreuth man; saw Tschaikowsky struggling away from the temptations of
the music drama only to succumb to the symphonic poem--a new and vicious
version of that old pitfall, the symphony; saw Cesar Franck, the
Belgian mystic, narrowly graze the truth in some of his chamber music,
and then fall victim to the fascinations of the word; as if the word,
spoken or sung, were other than a clog to the free wings of imaginative
music! Illowski noted the struggles of these dreamers, noted Verdi
swallowed by the maelstrom of the theatre; noted Richard Strauss and his
hesitation at the final leap.

To the few in whom he confided, he admitted that Strauss had been his
forerunner, having upset the notion that music must be beautiful to be
music and seeing the real significance of the characteristic, the ugly.
Had Strauss developed courage or gone to the far East when
young--Illowski would shrug his high shoulders, gnaw his cigarette and
exclaim, "Who knows?"

Tolstoy was right after all, this sage, who under cover of fiction
preached the deadliest doctrines; doctrines that aimed at nothing less
than the disequilibration of existing social conditions. Tolstoy had
inveighed bitterly against all forms of artificial art. If the Moujik
did not understand Beethoven, then all the worse for Beethoven; great
art should have in it Mozart's sunny simplicities, without Mozart's
elaborate technical methods. This Illowski believed. To unite the
intimate soul-searching qualities of Chopin and exclude his alembicated
art; to sweep with torrential puissance the feelings of the common
people, whether Chinese or German, Esquimaux or French; to tell them
things, things found neither in books nor in pictures nor in stone,
neither above the earth nor in the waters below; to liberate them from
the tyranny of laws and beliefs and commandments; to preach the new
dispensation of Lingwood Evans--magnificent, brutal, and
blood-loving--ah! if Illowski could but discover this hidden
philosophers stone, this true Arcana of all wisdom, this emotional lever
of Archimedes, why then the whole world would be his: his p