may come the confusion, of one who says that Emerson carries him
high, but then leaves him always at THAT height--no higher--a
confusion, mistaking a latent exultation for an ascetic reserve.
The rules of Thorough Bass can be applied to his scale of flight
no more than they can to the planetary system. Jadassohn, if
Emerson were literally a composer, could no more analyze his
harmony than a guide-to-Boston could. A microscope might show
that he uses chords of the 9th, 1lth, or the 99th, but a lens far
different tells us they are used with different aims from those
of Debussy. Emerson is definite in that his art is based on
something stronger than the amusing or at its best the beguiling
of a few mortals. If he uses a sensuous chord, it is not for
sensual ears. His harmonies may float, if the wind blows in that
direction, through a voluptuous atmosphere, but he has not
Debussy's fondness for trying to blow a sensuous atmosphere from
his own voluptuous cheeks. And so he is an ascetic! There is a
distance between jowl and soul--and it is not measured by the
fraction of an inch between Concord and Paris. On the other hand,
if one thinks that his harmony contains no dramatic chords,
because no theatrical sound is heard, let him listen to the
finale of "Success," or of "Spiritual Laws," or to some of the
poems, "Brahma" or "Sursum Corda," for example. Of a truth his
Codas often seem to crystallize in a dramatic, though serene and
sustained way, the truths of his subject--they become more active
and intense, but quieter and deeper.

Then there comes along another set of cataloguers. They put him
down as a "classicist," or a romanticist, or an eclectic. Because
a prophet is a child of romanticism--because revelation is
classic, because eclecticism quotes from eclectic Hindu