VIII
Those who feel the beauty and recognise the important novelty of the music of "Pelléas et Mélisande" will for some time to come find it difficult to speak of it appreciatively without an appearance of extravagance. One owns, in trying to appraise it, to a compunction similar to that expressed by one of the wisest of modern critics, when, after applauding some notable poetry, he whimsically reminded himself that he "must guard against too great appreciation," and "must mix in a little depreciation," to show that he had "read attentively, critically, authoritatively." Well, there is no doubt a very definite risk in praising too warmly a masterpiece which has the effrontery to intrude itself upon contemporary observation, and upon a critical function which has but just compassed the abundantly painful task of adjusting its views to the masterpieces of the immediate past. I am quite aware that such praise of Debussy's lyric-drama as is spoken here will seem to many preposterous, or at best excessive. I am also aware that the mistaking of geese for swans is a delusion which afflicts generation after generation of over-confident critics, to the entertainment of subsequent generations and the inextinguishable delight of the Comic Muse—which, as Mr. Meredith has pointed out, watches not more vigilantly over sentimentalism than over every kind of excess. Yet I am willing to assert deliberately, and with a perfectly clear sense of all that the words denote and imply, that the score of "Pelléas" is richer in inner musical substance, in ideas that are at once new and valuable, than anything that has come out of modern music since Wagner wrote his final page a quarter of a century ago. The orchestral score is almost as long as that of "Tristan und Isolde"; yet in the course of its 409 pages there are scarcely half a dozen measures in which one cannot point out some touch of genius. The music is studded with felicities. One carries away from a survey of it a conviction of its almost continuous inspiration, of its profound originality. The score overflows with ideas, ideas that possess character and nobility, and that are often of deep and ravishing beauty—a beauty that takes captive both the spirit and the sense. It is difficult to think of more than a few scores in which the inspiration is so persistent and so fresh—in which there is so little that is cliché, perfunctory, derivative. Certainly, if one is thinking of music written for the stage, one has to go to the author of "Tristan" for anything comparable to it. It has been said that in this music Debussy is not always at his best, and the comment is justified. There are passages, most of them to be found in the interludes connecting the earlier scenes (which, it is well known, were extended to meet a mechanical exigency), wherein the fine and rare gold of his thought is intermixed with the dross of alien ideas. And it is equally true that the vast and wellnigh inescapable shadow of Wagner's genius impinges at moments upon the score: thus we hear "Parsifal" in the first interlude, "Parsifal" and "Siegfried" in the interlude following the scene at the fountain—the scene wherein Mélisande's ring is lost. But the fact is mentioned here only that it may be dismissed. The voice of Debussy speaks constantly out of this music, even when it momentarily takes the timbre of another; and none other, since the superlative voice of Wagner himself was stilled, has spoken with so potent and magical a blend of tenderness and passion, with so rare yet limpid a beauty, with an accent so touching and so underived.
The nature of Debussy's harmony, and the emphasis which is laid upon its remarkable quality by his appreciators, have provoked the assertion that the score of "Pelléas" is devoid of melody, or at least that it is weak in melodic invention. Of course the whole matter rests upon what one means by "melody." The comment is a perfect exemplification of that critical method which consists in measuring new forms of expression by the standards of the past, instead of seeking to learn whether they do not themselves establish new standards by which alone they are to be appraised. The method has been applied to every innovator in the records of art, and it is probably futile to cry out against it, or to assert its stupidity. The music of "Pelléas" is rich in melody. It does not, as we have seen, reside in the voice-parts, for there Debussy, for reasons which have already been discussed, has deliberately and wisely avoided formal melodic contours. It is to be found in the orchestra—an orchestra which, while it depends in an unexampled degree upon a predominantly harmonic mode of expression, is at the same time very far from being devoid of melodic effect. But the melody is Debussy's melody—it is fatuous to expect to find in this score the melodic forms which have been made familiar to us by the practice of his predecessors,—men who themselves were made to bear the primeval accusation of melodic barrenness. Debussy's melodic idiom is his own, and it often baffles impatient or inhospitable ears by reason of its seeming indefiniteness, its apparently wayward movement, and because of the shifting and mercurial basis of harmony upon which it is imposed. It would be easy to instance page after page in the score where the melodic expression is, for those who are open to its address, of instant and irresistible effect: as the greater part of the scene by the fountain, in the second act; the whole of the tower scene—an outpouring of rapturous lyric beauty which, again, sends one to the loveliest pages of "Tristan" for a comparison; the affecting interview between Mélisande and the benign and infinitely wise Arkël, in the fourth act; the calamitous love scene in the park; and almost the whole of the last act. If Debussy had written nothing else than the entrancing music to which he has set the ecstatic apostrophe of Pelléas to his beloved's hair, he would have established an indisputable claim to a melodic gift of an exquisite and original kind. It has been said that he is "incapable of writing sustained melody"; and though just how extended a melodic line must be in order to merit the epithet "sustained" is not quite clear, it would seem that in this particular scene, at all events, Debussy may be said to have compassed even "sustained" melody; for the melodic line—varied, sensitive, and plastic though it is—is here of almost unbroken continuity.
In its total aspect as a dramatic commentary the score provokes wonder at its precision and flexibility. The manner in which each scene is individualised, differentiated and set apart from every other scene, is of a vividness and fidelity beyond praise. For every changing aspect of the play, for its every emotional phase, the composer has discovered the exact and illuminating equivalent. The eloquence of this music is seldom abated; it is as pervasive as it is extreme. One would not be far wrong, probably, in finding this music-drama's chief and final claim to the highest excellence in its triumphant character as an expressional achievement; in this it ranks with the supreme things in music. There are in the score innumerable passages which one is tempted to adduce as particular instances of ideally fit and beautiful expression. It is probably unnecessary to allege the quality of such examples as the scene by the fountain, the perilous encounter at the tower window, the final tryst in the park, or the interlude which accompanies the change of scene from the castle vaults to the sunlit terrace above the sea—music that has an entrancing radiance and perfume, through which blows "all the air of all the sea"—these things will be rightly valued by every observer of liberal comprehension and sensitive discernment: to name them is to praise them. But there are other triumphs of expression in the score whose quality is not so immediately to be perceived. I do not speak of the countless felicities of structural and external detail: felicities which will repay close and protracted study. I am thinking of remoter, less obvious felicities: of the grave beauty of the passage in which Geneviève reads to the King the letter of Golaud to his brother Pelléas[1]; of the extraordinary final measures of the first act, after Mélisande's question: "Oh! ... pourquoi partez-vous?"; of the delicious effect which is heard in the orchestra at Pelléas' words, in the scene at the fountain, "... le soleil n'entre jamais"; of the exquisite setting of Golaud's exclamation of delight over the beauty of Mélisande's hands; of the entire grotto scene,—a passage of superb imaginative fervour,—with its indescribably poetic ending (the fragment of a descending scale given out in imitation by two flutes and a harp); of the passage in the tower scene where the two solo violins in octaves sing the ravishing phrase that accompanies the "Regarde, regarde, j'embrasse tes cheveux ..." of the enraptured Pelléas; of the piercing effect of the Mélisande theme where it is combined with that of Pelléas in the interlude which follows the scene at the tower window; of the passage preceding the entrance of Mélisande and Arkël in the fourth act, where Mélisande's theme is heard in augmentation; of the passage in the transitional music following the misusing of Mélisande by Golaud where her theme is played by the oboe above an interchanging phrase in the horns—a diminuendo of inexpressible poignancy; of the impassioned soliloquy of Pelléas preparatory to the nocturnal meeting in the park; of the theme which is played by the horns and 'cellos as he invites Mélisande to come out of the moonlight into the shadow of the trees; of the exquisite phrase given out by the strings and a solo horn as he asks her if she knows why he wished her to meet him; of the interplay of "ninth" chords which is heard, in the final act, when Arkël asks Mélisande if she is cold, and the mysterious majesty of the passage which immediately follows, as Mélisande says that she wishes the window to remain open until the sun has sunk into the sea; of, indeed, the whole of the incomparable music of Mélisande's death; and finally, of that scene wherein the genius of the musician and musical dramatist is, as I think, most characteristically exerted: the curiously potent and haunting scene in which Pelléas and Mélisande, with Geneviève, watch the departure of the ship from the port and speak of the approaching storm. Here Debussy, in setting the simple yet elliptical speeches of the two tragedians, has written music which is of marvellously subtle eloquence in its suggestion of the atmosphere of impending disaster, of vague foreboding and oppressive mystery, which rests upon the scene. The penetrating "On s'embarquerait sans le savoir et l'on ne reviendrait plus" of Pelléas, sung over a lingering series of descending chords of the ninth; the strange, receding song of the departing sailors; the passage in triplets which is heard when Pelléas speaks of the beacon light shining dimly through the mist; the veiled and sinister phrase in thirds on the muted horns which follows the dying-away of the sailors' call: these are salient moments in a masterly piece of psychological and (there is no other word for it) subliminal delineation.
Whatever Debussy may in the future accomplish—and it is not unlikely that he may transcend this score in adventurousness and novelty of style—will not imperil the unique distinction, the unique value, of "Pelléas et Mélisande." It has had, it has been truly said, no predecessor, no forerunner; and there is nothing in the musical art that is now contemporary with it which in the remotest degree resembles it in impulse or character. That, as an example of the ideal welding of drama and music, it will exert a formative or suggestive influence, it is not now possible to say; but that its extraordinary importance as a work of art will compel an ever-widening appreciation, seems, to many, certain and indisputable. Thinking of this score, Debussy might justly say, with Coventry Patmore: "I have respected posterity."