"O that so many pitchers of rough clay
Should prosper and the porcelain break in two!"




THE MUSIC-MAKER

CHAPTER III

HIS ART AND ITS METHODS


Among those music-makers of to-day who are both pre-eminent and
representative the note of sincere romance is infrequently sounded.
The fact must be obvious to the most casual observer of musical art in
its contemporary development. The significant work of the most
considerable musicians of our time--of Strauss, Debussy, Loeffler,
d'Indy--has few essentially romantic characteristics. It is necessary
to distinguish between that fatuous Romanticism of which Mr. Ernest
Newman has given an unequalled definition: the Romanticism which
expended itself in the fabrication of a pasteboard world of "gloomy
forests, enchanted castles, impossible maidens, and the obsolete
profession of magic," and that other and imperishable Spirit of
Romance whose infrequent embodiment in modern music I have remarked.
_That_ is a romance in no wise divorced from reality--is, in fact, but
reality diviningly perceived; if it uses the old Romanticistic
properties, it uses them not because of any inherent validity which
they possess, but because they may at times be made to serve as