The line between the Master and the Radical may often seem vague. For,
the former has his Promethean strokes, all unpremeditated, compelled by
the inner sequence,--as when Beethoven strikes the prophetic drum in the
grim Scherzo of the Fifth Symphony; or in the Eroica when the horn
sounds sheer ahead, out of line with the sustaining chorus; or when Bach
leaps to his harmonic heights in organ fantasy and toccata; or Mozart
sings his exquisite clashes in the G Minor Symphony.
As the true poet begins by absorption of the art that he finds, his
early utterance will be imitative. His ultimate goal is not the
strikingly new but the eternally true. It is a question less of men than
of a point of view.
It seems sometimes that in art as in politics two parties are needed,
one balancing the weaknesses of the other. As certain epochs are
overburdened by the spirit of a past poet, so others are marred by the
opposite excess, by a kind of neo-mania. The latter comes naturally as
reaction from the former. Between them the poet holds the balance of
clear vision.
When Peri overthrew the trammels of counterpoint, in a dream of Hellenic
revival of drama, he could not hope to write a master-work. Destructive
rebellion cannot be blended with constructive beauty. An antidote is of
necessity not nourishment. Others may follow the path-breaker and slowly
reclaim the best of old tradition from the new soil. The strange part of
this rebellion is that it is always marked by the quality of stereotype
which it seeks to avoid.
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