And his music with its viking
blows and wild, crying accents, its harsh and uncouth speech, sets us
without circumstance in that sunken world, sets us in the very midst of
the stark men and grave, savage women for whom the sagas were made, so
that we can see them in all their hurtling strength and rank barbarity,
can well-nigh touch them with the fingers of our hands. 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 so he turns toward it as to a mirror. Like
that of the hero of his tone-poem, his life is a long journey toward
Finland. Contact with Finnish earth gives him back into his own hands.
It is the North, the wind and the moorland and the sea, that gathers the
fragments of his broken soul, and makes him whole again.
It was with the sanction of a people that Sibelius came to his task. For
centuries before his birth the race that bore him had lain prone upon
its inclement coasts. But now a new vigor was germinating within it.
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