For we exist to-day in a time of barbarian inroads. We are beholding the old European continent of music swarmed over by Asiatic hordes, Scyths and Mongols and Medes and Persians, all the savage musical tribes. Once more the old arbitrary barrier between the continents is disappearing, and the classic traits of the West are being mingled with those of the subtle, sensuous, spiritual East. It is as if the art of music, with its new scales, its new harmonies, its new coloring, its new rhythmical life, were being revolutionized, as if it were returning to its beginnings. It is as if some of the original impulse to make music were reawakening. And so, through this confusion, Berlioz has suddenly flamed with significance. For he himself was the rankest of barbarians. A work like the "Requiem" has no antecedents. It conforms to no accepted canon, seems to obey no logic other than that of the rude and powerful mind that cast it forth. For the man who could write music so crude, so sheerly strong, so hurtling, music innocent of past or tradition, the world must indeed have been in the first day of its creation. For such a one forms must indeed have had their pristine and undulled edge and undiminished bulk, must have insisted themselves sharply and compellingly. The music has all the uncouthness of a direct and unquestioning response to such a vision. Little wonder that it was unacceptable to a silver and romantic epoch. The romanticists had aspired to paint vast canvases, too. But the vastness of their canvases had remained a thing of intention, a thing of large and pretentious decoration. Berlioz's music was both too rude and too stupendous for their tastes. And, in truth, to us as well, who have felt the great cubical masses of the moderns and have heard the barbarian tread, the sense of beauty that demanded the giant blocks of the "Requiem" music seems still a little a strange and monstrous thing. It seems indeed an atavism, a return to modes of feeling that created the monuments of other ages, of barbarous and forgotten times. Well did Berlioz term his work "Babylonian and Ninevitish"! Certainly it is like nothing so much as the cruel and ponderous bulks, the sheer, vast tombs and ramparts and terraces of Khorsabad and Nimroud, bare and oppressive under the sun of Assyria. Berlioz must have harbored some elemental demand for form inherent in the human mind but buried and forgotten until it woke to life in him again. For there is a truly primitive and savage power in the imagination that could heap such piles of music, revel in the shattering fury of trumpets, upbuild choragic pyramids. Here, before Strawinsky and Ornstein, before Moussorgsky, even, was a music barbarous and radical and revolutionary, a music beside which so much of modern music dwindles.