Whatever is to be learnt from Reger, it is not the meaning of classical art-forms. And much is to be learnt from Reger. His texture is inevitably thick, for its systematic completeness vetoes the suggestiveness of the highest art. But it is astonishingly sonorous, and its numerous notes are the fewest and most ef fective for its ponderous purpose. Every instrument is treated according to its natural technique; and while the player who claims that he can read Reger at sight is probably mendacious, he will enjoy his instrument the better for playing Reger well. The fundamental reality of Reger is that he is not only a sincere artist hut a consummate rhetorician. But this age must be very ill-informed as to the foundations of music if it elects Reger as its Brahms.
There is at present no Brahms; the 2oth century must enlarge its musical experience before another renascence of classical form can either be expected or recognized when it comes. It might be as likely to come from Russia as anywhere; the gigantic geniality of Glazunov is still with us, active in the composition of brilliant classical and symphonic polyphony, and generously stimulating to younger composers; and the efforts of young artists to find out things for themselves may lead to something more fundamental than revolt against academicism or than the still narrower academicisms that young revolutionaries are apt to set up among themselves.
Scriabin's later harmonic system has been touched upon in the article HARMONY, Section X. At this point we may sum up the lessons of three harmonic (evolutions distributed over five cen turies of musical history in the generalization that whenever a composer becomes permanently pre-occupied with harmonic ideas his power of composition is in great danger of paralysis. The reason for this lies deeper than the nature of music itself. Similar tendencies in literature reduce the power of sentence-building to that of the first 011endorfian exercises. Scriabin's Chopinesque but stiff style of composition was fortunately well mastered by him before he doomed himself to discover that the harping on any chord however strange and novel in the long run only produces the effect of a sophisticated dominant seventh. Before his style receded into its theosophical fastnesses Scriabin had achieved in his fifth sonata and in his orchestral Poeme d'Extase (both inspired by a literary poem from his own pen) works of powerful impulse that could not have been written on earlier harmonic and rhythmic resources.
The chances of producing permanently living work are heavily weighted against the composer who confines his art to things which he alone can understand. The Russian Ballet gives abundant vital occasion for music as long as it deals intelligently with drama, fairy-tale, fable and life; and the young Stravinsky found in it inspiration for music that remains intelligible apart from the spectacle. In Petrouchka he still produces rhythms and tones that enhance the moods of a fascinating pantomime ; but the concert goers who profess to enjoy it without ever seeing the ballet show themselves to be of the tribe who will gaze "as ducks that die in tempests" at anything they are told to admire.
Self-deception and dry-rot set in when the designers as well as the composers of the ballet retire into the arbitrary kingdom of abstractions which they call symbolic and which common sense calls nonsense. Opinions will never unite as to where the line should be drawn; but the loth century will differ from all other periods of human history if a large percentage of its most precious nonsense does not vanish into the limbo of mere nonsense before its generation becomes middle-aged.
The art of Debussy made its mark without any such artifices. Some aspects of it are discussed in HARMONY, Section X ; but Debussy would have indignantly repudiated the resolving of his whole-tone scale as a six-part polyphonic chord, though he himself cannot resist the impulse to resolve it on to a pentatonic scale which is itself constructable as a chord. Debussy's propagandists believed him to be more closely confined to his special system than was the case. Eclecticism was always breaking in without any damage to the aesthetic coherence of the style. It is probable that Debussy's art, discreetly anthologized will remain vital when the work of the more voluminous and hard-headed Ravel will have become no more distinguishable from an echo than Sterndale Bennett is from the echo of Mendelssohn. Independent origin does not settle such questions. Cyril Scott has been called the English Debussy, but he began to form his style before Debussy was known.
One of the eternal questions in aesthetics is the proportion of means to ends. The World War has tragically dictated to all artists a preference of the study of reduced rather than of increased resources; yet performances, on the scale of the Handel Festi vals in the Crystal Palace, at London continue, though the music for organizations of even half that size has never yet been composed. Here, then, is material for a real and stren uous aesthetic discipline ; and the zeal of Mengelberg has created in Holland a great vogue for the vast works in which Mahler, while writing for existing conditions, sets himself the task of pioneer-work in the aesthetic and technical principles of music designed for i,000 performers and upwards. Taste is of secondary importance in such an enterprise, and Mahler is likely to be underrated in countries where naïve sentimentality and boyish grandiosity encounter the inhibitions of a musical culture that thinks itself wiser. Mahler was one of the greatest orchestral and opera conductors that ever lived. On the total value of his corn positions tastes may agree to differ, but this century has seen no more strenuous idealist. The main stream of music still flows within the Wagner-Strauss limits and seldom requires 15o instru mental players. Arnold Schonberg's "Gurrelieder" (a large song-cycle for chorus and soli, the great success of which is held to be a hindrance to the spread of his later and more revolutionary gospel) requires an extraordinary orchestra; but the polyphony that requires 5o staves for its notation implies detail rather than mass.