Occidental modes of feeling,
showed that it was a thing arising deep in the being. Something that had
long lain inert had been reborn at the contact in Western men. A part of
personality that had lain dead had of a sudden been suffused with blood
and warmth; light played over a hemisphere of the mind long dark. The
very hand that drew, the very mouth that matched words, the very body
that beat and curved and swayed in movement, were Western and Eastern at
the same time. It was no longer the Greek conception of form that
prevailed on the banks of the Seine, or wherever art was produced. Art
was become again, what the Orientals had always known it to be,
significant form. It was as though Persia had been born again in Henri
Matisse, for instance. A sense of design and color the like of which
had hitherto been manifest only in the vases and bloomy carpets of
Teheran dictated his exquisite patterns. Hokusai and Outamaro got in
Vincent Van Gogh a brother. The sultry atmosphere and animal richness of
Hindoo art reappeared in Gauguin's wood-cuts. One has but to go to any
really modern art, whether produced in Paris or in Munich or in New
York, to see again the subtle browns and silvers and vermilions, the
delicate sensuous touch, the infinitely various patterns, the forms that
carry with them the earth from Arabia to Japan.

As in the plastic arts, so in poetry. The imagists, Ezra Pound in
particular, were Chinese long before they discovered Cathay in the works
of Ernest Fennellosa. And in music, certainly, the East is on us; has
been on us since the Russian five began their careers and expressed
their own half-European, half-Mongol, natures. The stream has commenced
setting since the Arabian Nights, the Persian odalisques, the Tartar
tribesmen became music. And the Chinese sensibility of Scriabine, the
Oriental chromatics of the later Rimsky-Korsakoff, the sinuous scales
and voluptuous colors and silken textures of Debussy, the shrill
fantastic Japanese idiom of Strawinsky, have shown us the fusion was
near.

But in the music of no composer is it as plainly evident as it is in
that of Ernest Bloch. In a work like this composer's suite for viola
and piano, one has a sense of a completeness of fusion such as no other
gives. Here, the West has advanced furthest east, the East furthest
west. Two things are balanced in the work, two things developed through
a score of centuries by two uncommunicating regions. The organizing
pow