... "How all this difference can be
'Twixt tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee!"
But there is the redeeming vein of lyric melody with a bold fantasy of mischievous humor and a true climax of a clear poetic design. One reason seems sometimes alone to justify this new license, this new French revolution: the deliverance from a stupid slavery of rules,—if we would only get the spirit of them without the inadequate letter. Better, of course, the rules than a fatal chaos. But there is here in the bold flight of these harmonies, soaring as though on some hidden straight path, a truly Promethean utterance.
It is significant, in the problem of future music, that of the symphonies based upon recent French ideas, the most subtly conceived and designed should have been written in America.
I.—In pale tint of harmony sways the impersonal phrase that begins with a descending tone. We may
remember[82] how first with the symphony came a clear sense of tonal residence. It was like the age in painting when figures no longer hung in the gray air, when they were given a resting-place, with trees and a temple.
Here we find just the opposite flight from clear tonality, as if painting took to a Japanese manner, sans aught of locality. Where an easy half-step leads gently somewhere, a whole tone sings instead. Nothing obvious may stand.
It marks, in its reaction, the excessive stress of tonality and of simple colors of harmony. The basic sense of residence is not abandoned; there is merely a bolder search for new tints, a farther straying from the landmarks.
Soon our timid tune is joined by a more expressive line that rises in ardent reaches to a sudden tumult, with a fiery strain of trumpets where we catch a glimpse of the triplet figure. After a dulcet lullaby
