The fact that Schoenberg has written a handbook of theory, explaining, after a fashion, his method of composition has misled some people. “Schoenberg is a learned musician,” writes Mr. Aldrich (“New York Times,” December 5, 1915), “and his music is built up by processes derived from methods handed down to the present by the learned of the past, however widely the results may depart from those hitherto accepted.... There results what he chooses to consider ‘harmony,’ the outcome of a deliberate system, about which he theorizes and _has written a book_” (the italics again are mine). Against this train of reasoning (further on in the same article it becomes evident that Mr. Aldrich is annoyed with Strawinsky because he has not done likewise) it is pleasant to place the following paragraph from Chorley’s “Modern German Music”: “Mozart, it will be recollected, totally and (for him) seriously, declined to criticize himself and confess his habits of composition. Many men have produced great works of art who have never cultivated æsthetic conversation: nay, more, who have shrunk with a secretly entertained dislike from those indefatigable persons whose fancy it is ‘to peep and botanize’ in every corner of faëry land. It cannot be said that the analytical spirit of the circle of Weimar, when Goethe was its master-spirit did any great things for Music.” Do not misunderstand Strawinsky’s silence (which has only been relative, after all). It is sometimes as well to compose as to theorize. Some of the great composers have let us see into their workshops (not that they have all consistently followed out their own theories) and others have not. In one pregnant paragraph Strawinsky has expressed himself (he is speaking of _The Nightingale_): “I want to suggest neither situations nor emotions, but simply to manifest, to express them. I think there is in what are called ‘impressionist’ methods” (“Mr. Strawinsky, on the other hand, is a musical impressionist from the start”: R. A. again) “a certain amount of hypocrisy, or at least a tendency towards vagueness and ambiguity. That I shun above all things, and that, perhaps, is the reason why my methods differ as much from those of the impressionists as they differ from academic conventional methods. Though I often find it extremely hard to do so, I always aim at straightforward expression in its simplest form. I have no use for ‘working-out’ in dramatic or lyric music. The one essential thing is to feel and to convey one’s feelings.”