Loeffler is affiliated in temper, if not
exactly in achievement, with the brilliant band of belated romanticists
who adopted as their device the sonnet of Verlaine's beginning.
"Je suis l'empire a la fin de la decadence."
One finds in him almost typically the sensibility to the essences and
colors rather more than to the spectacle, the movement, the adventure of
things. The nervous delicacy, the widowhood of the spirit, the horror of
the times, the mystic paganism, the homesickness for a tranquil and
sequestered and soft-colored land "where shepherds still pipe to their
flocks, and nun-like processions of clouds float over bluish hills and
fathomless age-old lakes" are eminently present in him. He is in almost
heroic degree the spirit forever searching blindly through the loud and
garish city, the hideous present, for some vestige, some message from
its homeland; finding, some sundown, in the ineffable glamour of rose
and mauve and blue through granite piles, "le souvenir avec le
crepuscule." He, too, one would guess, has dreamt of selling his soul to
the devil, and called upon him, ah, how many terrible nights, to
appear; and has sought a refuge from the world in Catholic mysticism and
ecstasy. Had it been given him to realize himself in music, we should
undoubtedly have had a body of work that would have been the veritable
milestones of the route traversed by the entire movement.
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