Debussy, when he wrote this delectable and adorable music (_Rondes de Printemps_), sent his spirit into the woods and fields, through gardens and orchards and petal-showered lanes, and upon the moors and hills; he trod the brown soil of the earth, but he also looked long up into the green branches and the warm, gusty sky of May, and savored the fragrant winds. Is it not enchanting? But when you are treated to such nectar on nearly every page, you sigh for the elegant, reserved Romain Rolland, who expresses his enthusiasm for Debussy in a cooler, yet by no means less convincing, way. Aside from this purely external characteristic the book contains very interesting remarks on the treatment of natural elements and phenomena by various composers. The invention of new instruments, the development of the art of orchestration, and general new conceptions of our age, have drawn a sharp line of distinction between the old and the new interpretations of nature in music. While the old composers (among the old the author places not only Hayden and Beethoven, but also Wagner and Grieg) approached Nature either as a subject to be faithfully rendered, or as a provocator of direct emotional reactions in themselves, to the new composers (Debussy, d’Indy, Loeffler, MacDowell) Nature “is a miraculous harp, an instrument of unlimited range and inexhaustible responsiveness, upon which the performer may improvise at his pleasure,” to quote the inimitable original. The classification is rather hazardous; the importance of Loeffler is greatly exaggerated, but as a purely subjective view the work of Mr. Gilman is interesting. K. A Pasteurized “Man and Superman” _The Raft_, by Coningsby Dawson. [Henry Holt and Company, New York.] _The Raft_ is based on the same idea as Shaw’s—_minus_ moral shocks, mental exhilaration, and the Superman. The theory is served as strong drink in the one, as good boy’s tea in the other. The same idea receives such different treatment that the person who would pronounce _Man and Superman_ a “corrupt play” might speak of _The Raft_, as a beautiful story, provided a few courageous truths which it was necessary for the author to state in order to refute, could be forgiven. It is a harmless compromise between the belief that no literature has a right to exist that is not suitable for a girl in her teens, and the conviction that men and women must face life as it is. In _The Raft_, we read this figurative suggestion of the theory: