Chapter 8

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 space, and then change hue, as a shimmering 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 Pissaro 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 à 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 à 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 classically firm, classically precise and knit. His lyrical, shimmering structures are perfectly fashioned. The line never hesitates, never becomes lost nor involved. It proceeds directly, clearly, passing through jewels and clots of color, and fusing them into the mass. 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 space as completely as the most massive 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'Après-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. "Pelléas" will some day be studied for its miraculous invention, its classical 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 "Pelléas" 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 "Pelléas," the fine fluid line of sound, the melodic moments that merge and pass and vanish into one another, become the gleaming rims that circumscribe 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 classic and French poets and thinkers, Virgil and Racine and Marivaux, Catullus and Montaigne and Chateaubriand, the chambers of the Hôtel 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 "Pelléas" 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 gods of classical 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 hellish forms, is free and pure and sweet once more. They once were nymphs and naiads and goddesses, the "Quartet" and "L'Après-midi d'un faune" and "Sirènes." 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 grasses 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'Après-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 breasts and thighs. The Lento movement of "Ibéria" 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 "Sirènes," 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 shores 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 "Pelléas," its orchestral deployment in "Nocturnes" and "La Mer" and "Ibéria," its pianistic expression in the two volumes of "Images" for pianoforte. Whatever the refinement of the incidental music to "Le Martyre de Saint-Sébastien," 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 héroïque," 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 "Pelléas" 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 classical 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 légende de la forêt" 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 Mélisande's casement, Mélisande'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 Mélisande 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 Mélisande, all Debussy's love-woman. It is she that the music reveals from the moment Mélisande 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 shining 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 fashion. 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 attitudes, 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 passions 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, ô ma douleur, et tiens-toi plus tranquille."

All expression is made in low, aristocratic tone, in grisaille. Most often it achieves itself through a silvery grace. It is normal for these men to be profound through grace, to be amusing and yet artistically upright. It is normal for them to articulate nicely. High in their consciousness there flame always the commandments of clarity, of delicacy, of precision. Indeed, so repeatedly have temperaments of this character appeared in France, not only in her music, but also in her letters and other arts, from the time of the Pléiade, to that of Charles Louis Philippe and André Gide and Henri de Regnier, that it is difficult not to hold theirs the centrally, essentially French tradition, and not to see in men like Rabelais only the Frank, and in men like Berlioz only the atavism to Gallo-Roman times.

But it is not only the spirit of French classicism that Ravel and Debussy inherit. In one respect their art is the continuation of the music that came to a climax in the works of Haydn and Mozart. It is subtle and intimate, and restores to the auditor the great creative rôle assigned to him by so much of the music before Beethoven. The music of Haydn and Mozart defers to its hearer. It seeks deliberately to enlist his activity. It relies for its significance largely upon his contribution. The music itself carries only a portion of the composer's intention. It carries only enough to ignite and set functioning the auditor's imagination. To that person is reserved the pleasure of fathoming the intention, of completing the idea adumbrated by the composer. For Haydn and Mozart did not desire that the listener assume a completely passive attitude. They had too great a love and respect of their fellows. They were eager to secure their collaboration, had confidence that they could comprehend all that the music intimated, regarded them as equals in the business of creation. But the music written since their time has forced upon the hearer a more and more passive rôle. The composers arrogated to themselves, to varying extents, the greater part of the activity; insisted upon giving all, of doing the larger share of the labor. The old intimacy was lost; with Wagner the intellectual game of the _leit-motif_ system was substituted for the creative exercise. The art of Ravel and Debussy returns to the earlier strategy. It makes the largest effort to excite the creative imagination, that force which William Blake identified with the Saviour Himself. It strives continually to lure it into the most energetic participation. And because Ravel and Debussy have this incitement steadily in view, their music is a music of few strokes, comparable indeed to the pictural art of Japan which it so often recalls. It is the music of suggestion, of sudden kindlings, brief starts and lines, small forms. It never insists. It only pricks. It instigates, begins, leaves off, and then continues, rousing to action the hearer's innate need of an aim and an order and meaning in things. Its subtle gestures, its brief, sharp, delicate phrases, its quintessentiality, are like the thrusting open of doors into the interiors of the conscience, the opening of windows on long vistas, are like the breaking of light upon obscured memories and buried emotions. They are like the unsealing of springs long sealed, suffering them to flow again in the night. And for a glowing instant, they transform the auditor from a passive receiver into an artist.

And there is much besides that Ravel and Debussy have in common. They have each been profoundly influenced by Russian music, "Daphnis et Chloé" showing the influence of Borodin, "Pelléas et Mélisande" that of Moussorgsky. Both have made wide discoveries in the field of harmony. Both have felt the power of outlying and exotic modes. Both have been profoundly impressed by the artistic currents of the Paris about them. Both, like so many other French musicians, have been kindled by the bright colors of Spain, Ravel in his orchestral Rhapsody, in his one-act opera "L'Heure espagnol" and in the piano-piece in the collection "Miroirs" entitled "Alborada del Graciozo," Debussy in "Ibéria" and in some of his preludes. Indeed, a parallelism exists throughout their respective works. Debussy writes "Homage à Rameau"; Ravel "Le Tombeau de Couperin." Debussy writes "Le Martyre de Saint-Sébastien"; Ravel projects an oratorio, "Saint-François d'Assise." Ravel writes the "Ondine" of the collection entitled "Gaspard de la nuit"; Debussy follows it with the "Ondine" of his second volume of preludes. Both, during the same year, conceive and execute the idea of setting to music the lyrics of Mallarmé entitled "Soupir" and "Placet futile." Nevertheless, this fact constitutes Ravel in no wise the imitator of Debussy. His work is by no means, as some of our critics have made haste to insist, a counterfeit of his elder's. Did the music of Ravel not demonstrate that he possesses a sensibility quite distinct from Debussy's, in some respects less fine, delicious, lucent, in others perhaps even more deeply engaging; did it not represent a distinct development from Debussy's art in a direction quite its own, one might with justice speak of a discipleship. But in the light of Ravel's actual accomplishment, of his large and original and attractive gift, of the magistral craftsmanship that has shown itself in so many musical forms, from the song and the sonatine to the string-quartet and the orchestral poem, of the talent that has revealed itself increasingly from year to year, and that not even the war and the experience of the trenches has driven underground, the parallelism is to be regarded as necessitated by the spiritual kinship of the men, and by their contemporaneity.

And, certainly, nothing so much reveals Ravel the peer of Debussy as the fact that he has succeeded so beautifully in manifesting what is peculiar to him. For he is by ten years Debussy's junior, and were he less positive an individuality, less original a temperament, less fully the genius, he could never have realized himself. There would have descended upon him the blight that has fallen upon so many of the younger Parisian composers less determinate than he and like himself made of one stuff with Debussy. He, too, would have permitted the art of the older and well-established man to impose upon him. He, too, would have betrayed his own cause in attempting to model himself upon the other man. But Debussy has not swerved nor hampered Ravel any more than has his master, Gabriel Fauré. He is too sturdily set in his own direction. From the very commencement of his career, from the time when he wrote the soft and hesitating and nevertheless already very personal "Pavane pour une Infante défunte," he has maintained himself proudly against his great collateral, just as he has maintained himself against what is false and epicene in the artistic example of Fauré. Within their common limits, he has realized himself as essentially as Debussy has done. Their music is the new and double blossoming of the classical French tradition. From the common ground, they stretch out each in a different direction, and form the greater contrast to each other because of all they have in common.