One four-square movement is
set atop another. There is no weakening, no slackening, no drop. One can
put one's hand around these brown-gold blocks. And at the same time,
this organizing power makes to live a dusky sensuality, a velvety
richness of texture, a sultriness and wetness that sets us amid the
bronzed glowing wood-carvings of Africans, the dark sunsets of Ceylon,
the pagodas in which the Chinaman sits and sings of his felicity, his
family, his garden. The lyric blue of Chinese art, the tropical forests
with their horrid heat and dense growths and cruel animal life, the
Polynesian seas of azure tulle, the spice-laden breezes, chant here. The
monotony, the melancholy, the bitterness of the East, things that had
hitherto sounded only from the darkly shining zither of the Arabs, or
from the deathly gongs and tam-tams of the Mongolians, speak through
Western instruments. It is as though something had been brought out from
a steaming Burmese swamp and exposed to the terrible beat of a New York
thoroughfare, and that out of that transplantation a matter utterly new
and sad and strange, favoring both father and mother, and yet of a
character distinctly individual, had been created.
For no composer was better fitted by nature to receive the stimulus of
the onrushing East.
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