Musical Portraits Part 3

The ma.s.s of the people does not demand it, has never demanded it as insistently as do Germans and Russians, and as did the ma.s.s of Italians during the Renaissance, the ma.s.s of English before the Revolution.

Something of a prejudice against its own musical impulse must exist in the race. For though France has a very definite musical feeling, a thing that varies little with the pa.s.sing centuries and makes for the surprising similarities between the work of Claude Le Jeune in the sixteenth century, Rameau in the eighteenth and Debussy in the twentieth, she has, during her thousand years of culture, and while producing a flood of ill.u.s.trious authors, and painters and sculptors, borne not more than four or five composers of indisputably first rank.

Germany in the course of two centuries produced at least eight or nine; Russia three within the last fifty years. In France centuries elapse between the appearance of a Josquin des Pres in the fifteenth century, a Rameau in the eighteenth, a Debussy in the early twentieth. And whenever the French have been given a musical art of their own, whenever a composer comparable to the Goujons and Montaignes, the Renoirs and the Baudelaires has made his appearance among them, they generally have been swift to turn from him and to prefer to him not only foreigners, which would not necessarily be bad, but oftentimes the least respectable of musicians. The triumph of Rameau was of the briefest. Scarcely had his magnificent lyric tragedies established themselves when the _Guerre des bouffons_ broke out, and popular taste, under the direction of Jean Jacques Rousseau and the other Encyclopedists, discovered the light Italian music of the day more "natural" and infinitely preferable to the severe and n.o.ble forms of the greatest of French composers. The appearance of Gluck gave Rameau's work a veritable _coup de grace_, and banished the master from the operatic stage. And for a century and a quarter, French music, particularly the music of the theater, was completely unfaithful to the racial spirit. During the greater part of the nineteenth century, Rossini and Meyerbeer dominated the operatic world. The native operatic composers, Auber and Boieldieu, Adam and Halevy, combined the slacknesses of both without achieving anything at all comparable to their flashy brilliance. As far as the accent of their music went, they floated cheerfully somewhere between Germany and Italy.

And when something recognizably indigenous did put in its appearance in the operas of Thomas and Gounod, it did but the veriest lip-service to the racial genius, and was a thing that walked lightly, dexterously, warily, and roused no sleeping dogs.

What the cause of this diffidence is, what sort of rigidity it betokens, one can only guess. But of its presence there can be no doubt. Were there nothing else to demonstrate it, the survival among the French of an inst.i.tution named M. Camille Saint-Saens would amply do so. For the work of this extraordinary personality, or, more correctly, impersonality, who for twenty-five years of the Third Republic dominated the musical situation in his country, got himself acclaimed everywhere, not only in Paris, but also in Berlin, the modern French master, and to-day at the ripe age of one hundred and forty still persists in writing string-quartets with the same frigid cla.s.sicism that distinguished his first efforts, is obviously a compromise resulting from the conflict of two equally strong impulses--that of making music and that of fending off musical expression. For years this man has been going through all the gestures of the most serious sort of composition without adding one iota to musical art. For years he has been writing music apparently logical, clear, well-formed. His opus-numbers mount well toward two hundred. He has written symphonies, concertos for piano and violin, operas, cantatas, symphonic poems, suites, ballades, fantasies, caprices. He has written large numbers of each. He has written "impressions" of Naples, of Algiers, of the Canary Islands, of every portion of the globe he has visited. But despite all this apparent activity, M. Saint-Saens has really succeeded in effecting nothing at all. His compositions are pretty well outside the picture of musical art. To-day they are already older than Mendelssohn's, of which pale art they seem an even paler reflection. Mendelssohn, too, was a person inwardly at war with himself, and perhaps Saint-Saens may be another example of the same conflict. Still, the latter has achieved a sort of waxy coldness from which the amiable Felix was after all saved. Elegant, finished, smooth, cla.s.sicizing, the music of M. Camille Saint-Saens leaves us in the completest of objectivity. We are touched and moved not at all by it. Something, we vaguely perceive, is supposed to be taking place beneath our eyes. Faint frosty lights pa.s.s across the orchestra.

This, we guess, is supposed to be an inward and musing pa.s.sage. This is a finale, this a dramatic climax. But we are no more than languidly pleased with the cleverness and urbanity of the orchestration, the pleasant shapeliness of certain melodies, the neatness of composition.

In the end, the man bores us thoroughly. He has invented a new musical ennui. It is that of being invariably pretty and impersonal and insignificant.

Do you know the "Phaeton" of Saint-Saens? Oh, never think that this little symphonic poem recounts the history of brilliant youth and its sun-chariot, the runaway steeds and the bleeding shattered frame! The "Phaeton" of whom Saint-Saens sings is not the arrogant son of Phoebus. Whatever the composer may protest, it is the low, open-wheeled carriage that he is describing. He shows it to us coursing through the Bois de Boulogne on a bright spring morning. The new varnish of the charming vehicle gleams smartly, the light, rubber-tired wheels revolve swiftly, the silver-shod harnesses glisten in the sunny air.

But, alas, the ponies are frightened by something, doubtlessly the red dress of a singer of the Opera Comique. There is a runaway, and before the steeds can be reined the phaeton is upset. No one is hurt, and in a few minutes the equipage is restored. Nevertheless, the composer cannot control in himself a few sighs for the new coat of varnish now so rudely scratched.

Franck was of another temper. The impulse that drove him to make music was not so weak and pliable. It could not be barbered and dapperly dressed and taught to conduct a clouded cane elegantly in the _rue de la Paix_ or the _allee des Acacias_. It was too hot and wild and shy a thing, too pa.s.sionately set in its course, too homesick for the white fulgurant heights of Heaven to negate itself at the behest of French society and conform to what the academicians declared to be "la vielle tradition francaise." Franck was too much an artist in the spirit of La Fontaine and Germaine Pillon and Poussin and the others who formed that tradition, and who would be a.s.sailed in its name fiercely were they to reappear to-day. Moreover, he was of the race of musicians who come to make music largely to free themselves of besetting demons, of the sinister brood of doubts and fears and woes, and win their way back again into the bosom of G.o.d. He was the simple, heart-whole believer, the poor little man lost in the shambles, shaken and wounded by the "terrible doubt of appearances" and by the cruelty of things, yearning to cry his despair and loneliness and grief to the ears of the G.o.d of his childhood, and battling through long vigils for trust and belief and reconciliation. Again and again his music re-echoes the cry, "I will not let Thee go unless Thou bless me." Of modern composers Bruckner alone had affair so steadily with the heights, and Franck is the gentler, sweeter, tenderer of the two. He set himself, quite in the fas.h.i.+on of the composers of the dying renaissance, to write an hundred hymns to the Virgin. He sought in his piano compositions to recapture the lofty, spiritual tone, the religious communion that informed the works of Bach.

Only once, in the "Variations Symphoniques," is he brilliant and virtuosic, and then, with what disarming navete and joyousness!

Oftentimes it is the gray and lonely air of the organ-loft at St.

Clothilde, the church where he played so many melancholy years, that breathes through his work. Alone with his instrument and the clouded skies, he pours out his sadness, his bitterness, strives for resignation. Or, his music is a bridge from the turmoiled present to some rarer, larger, better plane. In symphony and quartet, in sonata and oratorio, he attains it. The h.e.l.lish brood is scattered; the great bells of faith swing bravely out once more; the world is full of Sabbath suns.h.i.+ne and pied with simple field-flowers. And he goes forth through it released and blessed and joyous, and light and glad of heart.

How furious a battle the man had to wage to bring such a musical sense to fruition in the Paris of Ambroise Thomas and Gounod and Ma.s.senet may be gauged from the fact that the compositions that a.s.sure Franck his position were almost all produced during the last ten years of his life, after his fifty-eighth year had been pa.s.sed. For thirty years the man had to struggle with his medium and his environment before he was even able to do his genius justice. Indeed, up to the year 1850, he produced little of importance at all. The trios recall Meyerbeer; the cantata "Ruth," with which this his first period of composition closes, has a sweetness of the sort afterward identified with the name of Ma.s.senet.

The works of the second period, which ends around 1875 with the re-editing of the recently composed oratorio "Redemption," reveal him still in search of power and a personal manner. No doubt a great improvement over the works of the first period is visible. From this time there date the seraphic "Panis angelicus," and the n.o.ble and delicate "Prelude, fugue and variation" for harmonium and piano. But it was only with the composition of his oratorio "Les Beat.i.tudes,"

completed in 1879, that Franck's great period commences. The man had finally been formed. And, in swift succession, there came from his worktable the series of compositions, the "Prelude, chorale et fugue"

for piano, the sonata, the symphonic poem "Psyche," the symphony, the quartet and the three chorales for organ that fully disclose his genius.

There is scarcely another example in all musical history of so long r.e.t.a.r.ded a flowering.

And it was a music almost the ant.i.thesis of Saint-Saens' that finally disclosed itself through Franck. In it everything is felt and necessary and expressive. It is unadorned. None of the light musical frosting that conceals the poverty and vulgarity of so many of the other's ideas is to be found here. The designs themselves are n.o.ble and significant. Franck possessed a rare gift of sensing exactly what was to his purpose. He had the artistic courage necessary to suppressing everything superfluous and insignificant. His music says something with each note, and when it has no more to say, is silent. He is concise and direct. The Symphony, for instance, is an unbroken curve, an orderly progression by gentle and scarcely perceptible stages from the darkness of an aching, gnawing introduction into the clarity of a healthy, exuberant close. And whereas Saint-Saens' style is over-smooth and glacial, a sort of musical counterpart of the sculpture of a Canova or a Thorwaldsen, Franck's is subtle, mottled, rich, full of the play of light and shadow. The chromatic style that Wagner has developed in "Tristan" and in "Parsifal"

is built upon and further developed into a style almost characterized by its rich and subtle and incessant modulations. Old and mixed modes make their appearance in it. The thematic material is originally turned, oftentimes broad and churchly and magnificent; the movement of the Franckian themes being a distinct invention. The harmony is full and varied and brilliant. But it is pre-eminently the seraphic sweetness of Franck's style that distinguishes his music and sets it over against this other that is so hard of edge and thin of substance. Over it there plays a light and luminous tenderness, an almost nave and reticent and virginal quality. The music of "Psyche" is executed with the lightest of musical brushes. It is as sweet and lucent and gracious as a fresco of Raphael's. The lightest, the silkiest of veils floats in the section marked "Le Sommeil de Psyche"; the gentlest of zephyrs carries the maiden to her lord. Small wonder that devout commentators have discovered in this music, so uncorporeal and diaphanous, a Christian intention, and pretend that in Franck's mind Psyche was the believing soul and Eros the divine lover! Tenderness, seraphic sweetness were the man's characteristic, permeating everything he touched. Few composers, certainly, have invented music more divinely sweet than that of the third movement of the quartet, more ecstatic and luminous than the ideas scattered all through his work, that seem like records of some moment when the heavens opened over his head and the empyrean resounded with the hallelujahs of the angelic host. And, certainly, no composer, Mozart alone excepted, has discovered such navely and innocently joyous themes as those that fill the close of the sonata and the symphonic variations with delicious vernal suns.h.i.+ne.

The career of one fated to serve the art of music in the Paris of Franck's lifetime, and to wait thirty years for the flowering of his genius, was of necessity obscure and sad. The

"yeux menteurs, l'hypocrisie Des serrements de mains, La masque d'amitie cachant la jalousie, Les pales lendemains

De ces jours de triomphe"...

of which M. Saint-Saens in his little volume of verse complains somewhat pompously, were unknown to Cesar Franck. For this man, even in the years of his prime, there were only the humiliations, the disappointments that are the lot of uncomprehended genius. He had rich pupils, among them the Vicomte Vincent d'Indy, but not one of them seems to have come forward to help him, to secure him greater time for composition, to save him from wasting his precious days in instructing a few amateurs. All his life, until the very last of his seventy years, Cesar Franck was obliged to arise every morning at five o'clock in order to have a couple of hours in which to be free to compose before the waxing day obliged him to begin trotting from one end of Paris to the other giving lessons.

During his lifetime he had to content himself with half-prepared performances of his works, had to resign himself to having composers of operettas preferred to him when chairs at the _Conservatoire_ became vacant, to receiving practically no recognition from a government pretending with hue and cry to protect and encourage the arts. Had it not been for the fervor and faithfulness with which Ysaye labored to spread his renown, practically cramming down the throats of an unwilling public the violin sonata and the quartet, the man would not have known any success at all even during the very last years of his career. As it was, his reputation spread only after he was dead. Then, of course, the inevitable monument was erected to him.

Still, the future was with Cesar Franck as it has been with few artists.

The timeliness of his art was almost miraculous. Without a doubt, during the years of his labor, the French were most ready for a musical renaissance. The defeat of 1870 had, after all, braced the nation, summoned its dormant energies. It had not been severe enough to destroy, and only fierce enough to force folk to shake off the torpor that had lain upon them during the two previous regimes. People began to work again, bellies were somewhat emptier and heads somewhat fuller than they had been under Louis-Philippe and Louis-Napoleon. Above all, the vapid and superficial life of the Second Empire was ended. People were more sober and inward and realistic than they had been. There was an unusual activity in all the arts. Painting, fiction, poetry, sculpture had or were having new births. A single creative spark was sure to set the very recalcitrant musicians ablaze. Vast talents such as those of Bizet and Chabrier were making themselves felt. But given a single powerful and constructive influence, a single cla.s.sic expression of the French musical feeling, and a score of gifted musicians were ready to spring into life. And that example was set by Franck. For, Belgian in part though his music indubitably is, Belgian of Antwerp and Brussels as well as of Liege and the Walloon country, Flemish almost in its broad and gorgeous pa.s.sages, it is what the work of the superficially Parisian Saint-Saens never attains to being. It is representative of the great cla.s.sical tradition of France, deeply expressive of the French spirit.

It must have been some profound kins.h.i.+p with the neighboring people, deeper even than that he bore his own countrymen, that sent the youth Franck from Liege to Paris, held him fast in the city all his long and obscure life, and made him flourish in the alien soil. For his music has traits that are common to the representative French artists and have come to identify the French genius. Once again, one caught sight in the music of the French clarity and orderliness, logicality and conciseness.

Once again there were great, sonorous edifices in the grand style temperate in tone. The very diffidence that makes it so difficult for the race to express itself with ease in music was expressed in this work. Moreover, along with the silveriness of Rameau, the simple solidity of French prose, and some of the old jollity of the medieval French artists, is in the music of Franck. Old modes revive in it, old peasant rhythms beat the ground once more.

But, chiefest of all, it expressed the people described in the section of "Jean-Christophe" significantly ent.i.tled "Dans la Maison." It expressed the essential France hidden by the glare of the Third Republic. The music of Cesar Franck is the music of the people driven into themselves by the conditions of modern life. It is the music of the fine ones who stand hesitant on the threshold of the world, and have incessantly to struggle for the power to act, for faith and hope. It is the music of those who in the midst of millions feel themselves forsaken and alone and powerless, and in whose obscure and laborious existence Franck himself shared. It is a thing turned away from the market-place, full of the quiet of the inner chamber. Through so much of Franck one feels the steady glow of the lamp in the warm room. With its songs of loneliness and doubt and ruth, its self-communings and vigils and prayers, its struggle for the sunlight of perfect confidence and healthiness and zest, it might come directly out of the lives of a half-dozen of the eminent persons whom France produced during the closing years of the nineteenth century. Romain Rolland himself is of this sort. It was for these people, self-distrustful, disillusioned, doubtful, that Charles Peguy wrote, bidding them remember the divine origin of the life and the inst.i.tutions that seemed so false to them, bidding them remember that the Republic itself was the result of a mystical impulse in the human heart, that the dead of a race live on in the bodies of the breathing, and that the members of a folk are one. The mysticism and Catholicism of Paul Claudel, the revulsion from the scepticism of Renan and Anatole France that has become so general in recent French thought, the traditionalism, nay, the intellectual reaction, of the latest France, are all foreshadowed and outlined in the music of Cesar Franck. He must have pulsed with the very heart of his adopted country.

Confronted with such a piece of expression, with such a modern standard, the new generation could not but respond with all its forces, and throng out of the aperture made in the Chinese Wall. And after Franck there followed a generation of French musicians such as the world has not seen since the days of the clavecinists. Within ten years, from one of the most moribund, Paris had become the most important and vivid of musical centers. Something that had been wanting in the air of Paris a long while had swept largely into it again. The musical imagination had been freed. After Franck it was impossible for a French musician not to have the courage to express himself in his own idiom, to dare develop the forms peculiarly French, to break with the foreign German and Italian standards that had oppressed the national genius so long. For this man had done so. And with the Debussys and Magnards and Ravels, the d'Indys and Dukas and Schmitts, the Chaussons and Ropartz's and the Milhauds that followed immediately on Cesar Franck, an inst.i.tution like the Societe Nationale de Musique came to have a meaning. Once again, French music was.

Debussy

Debussy's music is our own. All artistic forms lie dormant in the soul, and there is no work of art actually foreign to us, nor can such a one appear, in all the future ages of the world. But the music of Debussy is proper to us, in our day, as is no other, and might stand before all time our symbol. For it lived in us before it was born, and after birth returned upon us like a release. Even at a first encounter the style of "Pelleas" was mysteriously familiar. It made us feel that we had always needed such rhythms, such luminous chords, such limpid phrases, that we perhaps had even heard them, sounding faintly, in our imaginations. The music seemed as old as our sense of selfhood. It seemed but the exquisite recognition of certain intense and troubling and appeasing moments that we had already encountered. It seemed fas.h.i.+oned out of certain ineluctable, mysterious experiences that had budded, ineffably sad and sweet, from out our lives, and had made us new, and set us apart, and that now, at the music's breath, at a half-whispered note, at the unclosing of a rhythm, the flowering of a cl.u.s.ter of tones out of the warm still darkness, were arisen again in the fullness of their stature and become ours entirely.

For Debussy is of all musicians the one amongst us most fully. He is here, in our midst, in the world of the city. There is about him none of the unworldliness, the aloofness, the superhumanity that distances so many of the other composers from us. We need not imagine him in exotic singing robes, nor in cla.s.sical garments, nor in any strange and outmoded and picturesque attire, to recognize in him the poet. He is the modern poet just because the modern civilian garb is so naturally his.

He is the normal man, living our own manner of life. We seem to know him as we know ourselves. His experiences are but our own, intensified by his poet's gift. Or, if they are not already ours, they will become so.

He seems almost ourselves as he pa.s.ses through the city twilight, intent upon some errand upon which we, too, have gone, journeying a road which we ourselves have traveled. We know the room in which he lives, the windows from which he gazes, the moments which come upon him there in the silence of the lamp. For he has captured in his music what is distinguished in the age's delight and tragedy. All the fine sensuality, all the Eastern pleasure in the infinite daintiness and warmth of nature, all the sudden, joyous discovery of color and touch that made men feel as though neither had been known before, are contained in it.

It, too, is full of images of the "earth of the liquid and slumbering trees," the "earth of departed sunset," the "earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon just tinged with blue." It is full of material loveliness, plies itself to innumerable dainty sh.e.l.ls--to the somnolence of the Southern night, to the hieratic gesture of temple dancers, to the fall of lamplight into the dark, to the fantastic gush of fireworks, to the romance of old mirrors and faded brocades and Saxony clocks, to the green young panoply of spring. And just as it gives again the age's consciousness of the delicious robe of earth, so, too, it gives again its sense of weariness and powerlessness and oppression. The nineteenth century had been loud with blare and rumors and the vibration of colossal movements, and man had apparently traversed vast distances and explored t.i.tanic heights and abysmal depths. And yet, for all the glare, the earth was darker. The light was miasmic only. The life of man seemed as ever a brief and sad and simple thing, the stretching of impotent hands, unable to grasp and hold; the interlacing of shadows; the unclosing, a moment before nightfall, of exquisite and fragile blossoms.

The sense of the infirmity of life, the consciousness that it had no more than the signification of a dream with pa.s.sing lights, or halting steps in the snow, or an old half-forgotten story, had mixed a deep wistfulness and melancholy into the very glamour of the globe, and become heavier itself for all the sweetness of earth. And Debussy has fixed the two in their confusion.

He has permeated music completely with his impressionistic sensibility.

His style is an image of this our pointillistically feeling era. With him impressionism achieves a perfect musical form. Structurally, the music of Debussy is a fabric of exquisite and poignant moments, each full and complete in itself. His wholes exist entirely in their parts, in their atoms. If his phrases, rhythms, lyric impulses, do contribute to the formation of a single thing, they yet are extraordinarily independent and significant in themselves. No chord, no theme, is subordinate. Each one exists for the sake of its own beauty, occupies the universe for an instant, then merges and disappears. The harmonies are not, as in other compositions, preparations. They are apparently an end in themselves, flow in s.p.a.ce, and then change hue, as a s.h.i.+mmering stuff changes. For all its golden earthiness, the style of Debussy is the most liquid and impalpable of musical styles. It is forever gliding, gleaming, melting; crystallizing for an instant in some savory phrase, then moving quiveringly onward. It is well-nigh edgeless. It seems to flow through our perceptions as water flows through fingers. The iridescent bubbles that float upon it burst if we but touch them. It is forever suggesting water--fountains and pools, the glistening spray and heaving bosom of the sea. Or, it shadows forth the formless breath of the breeze, of the storm, of perfumes, or the play of sun and moon. His orchestration invariably produces all that is cloudy and diaphanous in each instrument. He makes music with flakes of light, with bright motes of pigment. His palette glows with the sweet, limpid tints of a Monet or a p.i.s.saro or a Renoir. His orchestra sparkles with iridescent fires, with divided tones, with delicate violets and argents and shades of rose. The sound of the piano, usually but the ringing of flat colored stones, at his touch becomes fluid, velvety and dense, takes on the properties of satins and liqueurs. The pedal washes new tint after new tint over the keyboard. "Reflets dans l'eau" has the quality of sheeny blue satin, of cloud pictures tumbling in gliding water. Blue fades to green and fades back again to blue in the middle section of "Homage a Rameau." Bright, cold moonlight slips through "Et la lune descend sur le temple que fut"; ruddy sparks glitter in "Mouvement" with its Petruchka-like joy; the piano is liquid and luminous and aromatic in "Cloches a travers les feuilles."

Yet there is no uncertainty, no mistiness in his form, as there is in that of some of the other impressionists. His music is cla.s.sically firm, cla.s.sically precise and knit. His lyrical, s.h.i.+mmering structures are perfectly fas.h.i.+oned. The line never hesitates, never becomes lost nor involved. It proceeds directly, clearly, pa.s.sing through jewels and clots of color, and fusing them into the ma.s.s. The trajectory never breaks. The music is always full of its proper weight and timbre. It can be said quite without exaggeration that his best work omits nothing, neglects nothing, that every component element is justly treated. His little pieces occupy a s.p.a.ce as completely as the most ma.s.sive and grand of compositions. A composition like "Nuages," the first of the three nocturnes for orchestra, while taking but five minutes in performance, outweighs any number of compositions that last an hour. "L'Apres-midi d'un faune" is inspired and new, marvelously, at every measure. The three little pieces that comprise the first set of "Images" for piano will probably outlast half of what Liszt has written for the instrument.

"Pelleas" will some day be studied for its miraculous invention, its cla.s.sical moderation and balance and truth, for its pure diction and economical orchestration, quite as the scores of Gluck are studied to-day.

For Debussy is, of all the artists who have made music in our time, the most perfect. Other musicians, perhaps even some of the contemporary, may exhibit a greater heroism, a greater staying power and indefatigability. Nevertheless, in his sphere he is every inch as perfect a workman as the greatest. Within his limits he was as pure a craftsman as the great John Sebastian in his. The difference between the two is the difference of their ages and races, not the difference of their artistry. For few composers can match with their own Debussy's perfection of taste, his fineness of sensibility, his poetic rapture and profound awareness of beauty. Few have been more graciously rounded and balanced than he, have been, like him, so fine that nothing which they could do could be tasteless and insignificant and without grace.

Few musicians have been more nicely sensible of their gift, better acquainted with themselves, surer of the character and limitations of their genius. Few have been as perseverantly essential, have managed to sustain their emotion and invention so steadily at a height. The music of Debussy is full of purest, most delicate poesy. Perhaps only Bach and Moussorgsky have as invariably found phrases as pithy and inclusive and final as those with which "Pelleas" is strewn, phrases that with a few simple notes epitomize profound and exquisite emotions, and are indeed the word. There are moments in Debussy's work when each note opens a prospect. There are moments when the music of "Pelleas," the fine fluid line of sound, the melodic moments that merge and pa.s.s and vanish into one another, become the gleaming rims that circ.u.mscribe vast darkling forms. There are portions of the drama that are like the moments of human intercourse when single syllables unseal deep reservoirs. The tenderness manifest here is scarcely to be duplicated in musical art.

And tenderness, after all, is the most intense of all emotions.

A thousand years of culture live in this fineness. In these perfect gestures, in this grace, this certainty of choice, this justice of values, this simple, profound, delicate language, there live on thirty generations of gentlefolk. Thirty generations of cavaliers and dames who developed the arts of life in the mild and fruitful valleys of "the pleasant land of France" speak here. The gentle sunlight and gentle shadow, the mild winters and mild summers of the Ile de France, the plentiful fruits of the earth, the excitement of the vine, contributed to making this being beautifully balanced, reserved, refined. The instruction and cultivation of the cla.s.sic and French poets and thinkers, Virgil and Racine and Marivaux, Catullus and Montaigne and Chateaubriand, the chambers of the Hotel de Rambouillet, the gardens and galleries of Versailles, the immense drawing-room of eighteenth-century Paris, helped form this spirit. In all this man's music one catches sight of the long foreground, the long cycles of preparation. In every one of his works, from the most imposing to the least, from the "String Quartet" and "Pelleas" to the gracile, lissome little waltz, "Le plus que lent," there is manifest the Latin genius nurtured and molded and developed by the fertile, tranquil soil of France.

And in his art, the G.o.ds of cla.s.sical antiquity live again. Debussy is much more than merely the sensuous Frenchman. He is the man in whom the old Pagan voluptuousness, the old untroubled delight in the body, warred against so long by the black brood of monks and transformed by them during centuries into demoniacal and h.e.l.lish forms, is free and pure and sweet once more. They once were nymphs and naiads and G.o.ddesses, the "Quartet" and "L'Apres-midi d'un faune" and "Sirenes."

They once wandered through the glades of Ionia and Sicily, and gladdened men with their golden sensuality, and bewitched them with the thought of "the breast of the nymph in the brake." For they are full of the wonder and sweetness of the flesh, of flesh tasted deliciously and enjoyed not in closed rooms, behind secret doors and under the shameful pall of the night, but out in the warm, sunny open, amid gra.s.ses and scents and the buzzing of insects, the waving of branches, the wandering of clouds. The Quartet is alive, quivering with light, and with joyous animality. It moves like a young fawn; spins the gayest, most silken, most golden of spider webs; fills one with the delights of taste and smell and sight and touch. In the most glimmering, floating of poems, "L'Apres-midi d'un faune," there is caught magically by the climbing, chromatic flute, the drowsy pizzicati of the strings, and the languorous sighing of the horns, the atmosphere of the daydream, the sleepy warmth of the sunshot herbage, the divine apparition, the white wonder of arms and b.r.e.a.s.t.s and thighs. The Lento movement of "Iberia" is like some drowsy, disheveled gipsy. Even "La plus que lent" is full of the goodness of the flesh, is like some slender young girl with unclosing bosom. And in "Sirenes,"

something like the eternal divinity, the eternal beauty of woman's body, is celebrated. It is as though on the rising, falling, rising, sinking tides of the poem, on the waves of the glamorous feminine voices, on the aphrodisiac swell of the sea, the white Anadyomene herself, with her galaxy of tritons and naiads, approached earth's sh.o.r.es once more.

If any musical task is to be considered as having been accomplished, it is that of Debussy. For he wrote the one book that every great artist writes. He established a style irrefragably, made musical impressionism as legitimate a thing as any of the great styles. That he had more to make than that one contribution is doubtful. His art underwent no radical changes. His style was mature already in the Quartet and in "Proses lyriques," and had its climax in "Pelleas," its orchestral deployment in "Nocturnes" and "La Mer" and "Iberia," its pianistic expression in the two volumes of "Images" for pianoforte. Whatever the refinement of the incidental music to "Le Martyre de Saint-Sebastien,"

Debussy never really transgressed the limits set for him by his first great works. And so, even if his long illness caused the deterioration, the hardening, the formularization, so evident in his most recent work, the sonatas, the "Epigrammes," "En blanc et noir," and the "Berceuse heroque," and deprived us of much delightful art, neither it nor his death actually robbed us of some radical development which we might reasonably have expected. The chief that he had to give he had given.

What his age had demanded of him, an art that it might hold far from the glare and tumult, an art into which it could retreat, an art which could compensate it for a life become too cruel and demanding, he had produced. He had essentially fulfilled himself.

The fact that "Pelleas" is the most eloquent of all Debussy's works and his eternal sign does not, then, signify that he did not grow during the remainder of his life. A complex of determinants made of his music-drama the fullest expression of his genius, decreed that he should be living most completely at the moment he composed it. The very fact that in it Debussy was composing music for the theater made it certain that his artistic sense would produce itself at its mightiest in the work. For it entailed the statement of his opposition to Wagner. The fact that it was music conjoined with speech made it certain that Debussy, so full of the French cla.s.sical genius, would through contact with the spoken word, through study of its essential quality, be aided and compelled to a complete realization of a fundamentally French idiom. And then Maeterlinck's little play offered itself to his genius as a unique auxiliary. It, too, is full of the sense of the shadowiness of things that weighed upon Debussy, has not a little of the accent of the time.

This "vieille et triste legende de la foret" is alive with images, such as the old and somber castle inhabited by aging people and lying lost amid sunless forests, the rose that blooms in the shadow underneath Melisande's cas.e.m.e.nt, Melisande's hair that falls farther than her arms can reach, the black tarn that broods beneath the castle-vaults and breathes death, Golaud's anguished search for truth in the prattle of the child, that could not but call a profound response from Debussy's imagination. But, above all, it was the figure of Melisande herself that made him pour himself completely into the setting of the play. For that figure permitted Debussy to give himself completely in the creation of his ideal image. The music is all Melisande, all Debussy's love-woman.

It is she that the music reveals from the moment Melisande rises from among the rocks shrouded in the mystery of her golden hair. It is she the music limns from the very beginning of the work. The entire score is but what a man might feel toward a woman that was his, and yet, like all women, strange and mysterious and unknown to him. The music is like the stripping of some perfect flower, petal upon petal. There are moments when it is all that lies between two people, and is the fullness of their knowledge. It is the perfect sign of an experience.

And so, since Debussy's art could have no second climax, it was in the order of things that the works succeeding upon his masterpiece should be relatively less important. Nevertheless, the ensuing poems and songs and piano-pieces, with the exception of those written during those years when Debussy could have said with Rameau, his master, "From day to day my taste improves. But I have lost all my genius," are by little less perfect and astounding pieces of work. His music is like the peaks of a mountain range, of which one of the first and nearest is the highest, while the others appear scarcely less high. And they are some of the bluest, the loveliest, the most s.h.i.+ning that stretch through the region of modern music. It will be long before humankind has exhausted their beauty.

Ravel

Ravel and Debussy are of one lineage. They both issue from what is deeply, graciously temperate in the genius of France. Across the span of centuries, they touch hands with the men who first expressed that silver temperance in tone, with Claude Le Jeune, with Rameau and Couperin and the other clavecinists. Undiverted by the changes of revolutionary times, they continue, in forms conditioned by the modern feeling for color, for tonal complexity, for supple and undulant rhythm, the high tradition of the elder music.

Claude Le Jeune wrote motets; the eighteenth-century masters wrote gavottes and rigadoons, forlanas and chaconnes, expressed themselves in courtly dances and other set and severe forms. Ravel and Debussy compose in more liberal and naturalistic fas.h.i.+on. And yet, the genius that animates all this music is single. It is as though all these artists, born so many hundred years apart from each other, had contemplated the pageant of their respective times from the same point of view. It is as though they faced the problems of composition with essentially the same att.i.tudes, with the same demands and reservations. The new music, like the old, is the work of men above all reverent of the art of life itself. It is the work of men of the sort who crave primarily in all conduct restraint, and who insist on poise and good sense. They regard all things humanly, and bring their regard for the social values to the making of their art. Indeed, the reaction of Debussy from Wagnerism was chiefly the reaction of a profoundly socialized and aristocratic sensibility outraged by over-emphasis and unrestraint. The men of whom he is typical throughout the ages never forget the world and its decencies and its demands. And yet they do not eschew the large, the grave, the poignant. The range of human pa.s.sions is present in their music, too, even though many of them have not had gigantic powers, or entertained emotions as grand and intense as the world-consuming, world-annihilating mysticism of a Bach, for instance. But it is shadowed forth more than stated. If many of them have been deeply melancholy, they have nevertheless taken counsel with themselves, and have said, with Baudelaire:

"Sois sage, o ma douleur, et tiens-toi plus tranquille."