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For it is blood-brother to the wind and the silence, to the lowering cliffs and the spray, to the harsh crying of sea-birds and the breath of the fog, and, set amid them, would wax, and take new strength from the strengths of its kin. Air blows through the music of Sibelius, quickens even the slightest of his compositions.
But Sibelius has written music innocent of roof and inclosure, music proper indeed to the vasty open, the Finnish heaven under which it grew. And could we but carry it out into the northern day, we would find it undiminished, vivid with all its life.
It doesn't seem altogether like real music to me. It fails to get hold of me, just as I fail to get hold of it." "Yet you like MacDowell," I challenged. "Y. . . es," she admitted grudgingly. "His New England Idylls and Fireside Tales. And I like that Finnish man's stuff, Sibelius, too, although it seems to me too soft, too richly soft, too beautiful, if you know what I mean. It seems to cloy."
The same may be said of Ludwig Thuille and also of the Neo-Belgian group. Sibelius, the Finn, is a composer with a marked temperament. Among the English Delius shows strongest. He is more personal and more original than Elgar. Not one of these can tie the shoe-strings of Peter Cornelius, the composer of short masterpieces, The Barber of Bagdad the original, not the bedevilled version of Mottl.
The hall, when the old servant had admitted him, once again seemed to enfold him in its darkness and heavy air with an almost active purpose. It breathed with an actual sound, almost with a melody . . . the "Valse Triste" of Sibelius, a favourite with Olva, seemed to him now to be humming its thin spiral note amongst the skins and Chinese weapons that covered the walls.
The orchestral compositions of Sibelius seem to have passed over black torrents and desolate moorlands, through pallid sunlight and grim primeval forests, and become drenched with them. The instrumentation is all wet grays and blacks, relieved only by bits of brightness wan and elusive as the northern summer, frostily green as the polar lights.
No doubt every creative artist passes through a period of submission to alien faiths. But in Sibelius there appear to exist two distinct personalities, the one strong and independent, the other timid and uninventive, who dominate him alternately. Even some of the music contemporaneous with the magnificent Fourth Symphony is curiously ineffectual and pointless.
And because Sibelius is so fundamentally man as combat with the North has made him, only vision of his native earth could bring him rich self-consciousness. For his individuality is but the shape of soul given his race by its century-long adjustment. It is the North that has given him his profound experience. Its rhythms have distinguished him. Its color, and the color of his spirit, are twin.
And Sibelius, bowed over his music-paper, must have felt the dream stir within him, must have felt incarnate within himself, however incompletely, that mysterious image, and so proceeded with his work everlastingly assured that all he actually accomplished woke from out of the heart of the people, and responded to its immemorial need. Out of such an impulse his art has come.
All through their conversation he was still conscious in the dim rustle that any breeze made in the room of that thin melody that Sibelius once heard. . . . "I hope that Mrs. Craven is not seriously ill? "No. It is one of her headaches. Her nerves are very easily upset. There was a thunder-storm last night. . . . She has never been strong since father died." "You will tell her how sorry I am."
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