erlioz,
and that only in a day germane to him and among the men his kin could he
assume the stature rightfully his, and live.

For we exist to-day in a time of barbarian inroads. We are beholding the
old European continent of music swarmed over by Asiatic hordes, Scyths
and Mongols and Medes and Persians, all the savage musical tribes. Once
more the old arbitrary barrier between the continents is disappearing,
and the classic traits of the West are being mingled with those of the
subtle, sensuous, spiritual East. It is as if the art of music, with its
new scales, its new harmonies, its new coloring, its new rhythmical
life, were being revolutionized, as if it were returning to its
beginnings. It is as if some of the original impulse to make music were
reawakening. And so, through this confusion, Berlioz has suddenly flamed
with significance. For he himself was the rankest of barbarians. A work
like the "Requiem" has no antecedents. It conforms to no accepted
canon, seems to obey no logic other than that of the rude and powerful
mind that cast it forth. For the man who could write music so crude, so
sheerly strong, so hurtling, music innocent of past or tradition, the
world must indeed have been in the first day of its creation. For such a
one forms must indeed have had their pristine and undulled edge and
undiminished bulk, must have insisted themselves sharply and
compellingly. The music has all the uncouthness of a direct and
unquestioning response to such a vision. Little wonder that it was
unacceptable to a silver and romantic epoch. The romanticists had
aspired to paint vast canvases, too. But the vastness of their canvases
had remained a thing of intention, a thing of large and pretentious
decoration. Berlioz's music was both too rude and too stupendous for
their tastes. And, in truth, to us as well, who have felt the great
cubical masses of the moderns and have heard the barbarian tread, the
sense of beauty that demanded the giant blocks of the "Requiem" music
seems still a little a strange and monstrous thing. It seems indeed an
atavism, a return to modes of feeling that created the monuments of
other ages, of barbarous and forgotten times. Well did Berlioz term his
work "Babylonian and Ninevitish"! Certainly it is like nothing so much
as the cruel and ponderous bulks, the sheer, vast tombs and ramparts and
terraces of Khorsabad and Nimroud, bare and oppressive under the sun of
Assyria. Berlioz must have harbore