the force of habit was very strong: and with a few exceptions their French
was Belgian, or still smacked faintly of Germany. It was quite natural,
therefore, that a German should be mistaken, and declare, with his usual
assurance, that it was very bad German, and meant nothing, since he could
make nothing of it.

Christophe was in exactly that case. The symphonies of the French seemed
to him to be abstract, dialectic, and musical themes were opposed and
superposed arithmetically in them: their combinations and permutations
might just as well have been expressed in figures or the letters of the
alphabet. One man would construct a symphony on the progressive development
of a sonorous formula which did not seem to be complete until the last page
of the last movement, so that for nine-tenths of the work it never advanced
beyond the grub stage of its existence. Another would erect variations on a
theme which was not stated until the end, so that the symphony gradually
descended from the complex to the simple. They were very clever toys. But a
man would need to be both very old and very young to be able to enjoy them.
They had cost their inventors untold effort. They took years to write a
fantasy. They worried their hair white in the search for new combinations
of chords--to express ...? No matter! New expressions. As the organ creates
the need, they say, so the expression must in the end create the idea: the
chief thing is that the expression should be novel. Novelty at all costs!
They had a morbid horror of anything that "had been said." The best of them
were paralyzed by it all. They seemed always to be keeping a fearful guard
on themselves, and crossing out what they had written, wondering: "Good
Lord! Where did I read that?" ... There are some musicians--especially in
Germany--who spend their time in piecing together other people's music. The
musicians of France were always looking out at every bar to see that they
had not included in their catalogues melodies that had already been used by
others, and erasing, erasing, changing the shape of the note until it was