" For he
came with some of the light and careless and arrogant tread, the
intellectual sparkling, the superb gesture and port, of the musician of
the new race. The man who composed such music, one knew, had been born
on some sort of human height, in some cooler, brighter atmosphere than
that of the crowded valleys. For in this music there beat a faster
pulse, moved a lighter, fierier, prouder body, sounded a more ironic and
disdainful laughter, breathed a rarer air than had beat and moved and
sounded and breathed in music. It made drunken with pleasant sound, with
full rich harmonies, with exuberant dance and waltz movements. It seemed
to adumbrate the arrival of a new sort of men, men of saner, sounder,
more athletic souls and more robust and cool intelligences, a generation
that was vitally satisfied, was less torn and belabored by the
inexpressible longings of the romantic world, a generation very much at
home on the globe. For it had none of the restless, sick desire of
Wagner, none of his excessive pathos, his heaviness and stiff grandeur.
It had come down off its buskins, was more easy, witty, diverting,
exciting, popular and yet cerebral. Though it was obviously the speech
of a complicated, modern man, self-conscious, sophisticated, nervous,
product of a society perhaps not quite as free and Nietzschean as it
deemed itself, but yet cultivated and illuminated and refined, it
nevertheless seemed exuberantly sound.
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