choristers to sing Gregorian chants, recall Joris Karl Huysmans, the "oblat" of La Trappe? To a limited extent, of course, he has succeeded in fixing the color of the symbolist movement in music. Some of his richer, dreamier songs, some of his finer bits of polishing, his rarer drops of essence, are indeed the musical counterpart of the goldsmith's work, the preciosity, of a Gustave Kahn or a Stuart Merrill. But a musical Huysmans, for instance, it was never in his power to become. For he has never possessed the creative heat, the fluency, the vein, the felicity, the power necessary to the task of upbuilding out of the tones of instruments anything as flamboyant and magnificent as the novelist's black and red edifices. He has never been vivid and ingenuous and spontaneous enough a musician even to develop a personal idiom. He has always been hampered and bound. His earlier compositions, the quintet, the orchestral "Les Vieillees de l'Ukraine" and "La bonne chanson," for instance, are distinctly derivative and uncharacteristic in style. The idiom is derived in part from Faure, in part from Wagner and other of the romanticists. The string quintet has even been dubbed "A Musical 'Trip Around the World in Eighty Days.'" Nor is the idiom of his later and more representative period primarily and originally any more characteristic. It never seems to surge quite wholly and cleanly and fairly. The chasing to which it has evidently been subjected cannot quite conceal its descent. The setting of "La Cloche felee" of Baudelaire, for instance, is curiously Germanic and heavy, for all the subtlety and filigree of the voice and the accompanying piano and viola. It is a fairly flat waltz movement that in "A Pagan Poem" is chosen to represent the sublunary aspect of Virgil's genius. And "Hora mystica" and "Music for Four Stringed Instruments," which have a certain stylistic unity, nevertheless reveal the composer hampered by the Gregorian and scholastic idiom which he has sought to assimilate.