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gradation of the image of some person in the brain. Some are vexed and divided against themselves; lyric flight in the heart and on the 'cello, self-mockery in the mind. There are moods of boredom and enervation, moods of blasphemy and fear. There are states that are almost hallucinatory; images that start in the brain and begin to frighten the beholder, images of the rape of forbidden things. Rhythms commence that will not let be and pursue with their insistent patter. Panics start; over imaginary things. Then crystal dreams interpose; momentary feelings of union with the All; kisses of the moon and the unseen world; moods of reconciliation and return to the dreams of youth.

It is not by chance that Pierrot Lunaire contains the daintiest and most capricious of Schoenberg's ideas. The figure of the languid clown of the unconscious gave Schoenberg a post about which he could sling the most delicate of his tendrils. In itself, it is a symbol of his helpless state. To be sure, the twenty-one poems upon which this melodrama is erected, even in the original French of Albert Giraud, are romantic decoration; stuff of 1840. Black masses, drops of blood on the lips of sick women, wounds like red and open eyes, moons like Turkish scimitars on satin swarthy pillows; were they ever anything but bad taste? And Otto Erich Hartleben, the translator, has not improved upon his original. With his faithful stein in one hand, he sat and put heavy words for light. It is a pity Schoenberg could not have done something with Laforgue. Nevertheless, even the bad poetry had been useful to him. He could scarce, it seems, have gotten as full an expression without the instrumentality of the voice. For the singer, neither actually speaking, nor singing, save very occasionally, and adumbrating tones in a speaking voice, achieves the effect of something languorous, pallid, epicene even. The voice, so tender and weak, is the shadow of the rose. It is curiously in-between. And the music carries Giraud's poor stuff where it had no wings to go. Schoenberg, at least, has made a vital form of the mysterious stirrings and rumblings of the subconscious. He gives sick apprehension and panicky states; not amateurish caricatures of them. This music is indeed the creature shaken by moods that come upon him strange and ineluctable as hailstones on summer fields, and fill him with almost incommunicable dread and bliss. It touches like a rose-petal; and there is a spark of drunk-