The range of ideas, like the dynamic range, is limited. Yet there is magic in his music, the magic of evocation. Not to describe, but to evoke, in effortless imagery, is the quintessence of his art. He is a painter of cameos and aquarelles. Never does he carve from the big block; an exquisite miniaturist, he does not handle a bold brush, nor boast the epical sweep of his predecessors; Berlioz for one. But he is more intimate, he is the poet of crepuscular moods. The sadness of tender, bruised souls is in his pages. Of virility there is little trace, it is music of the distaff, and seldom sounds the masculine ring of crossed swords. Chopin, too, had his nocturnal moments, but he also wrote the A flat Polonaise, with its heroic defiance of a Poland crushed yet never conquered; with its motto: “Jescze Polska nie zginiela!”
Long before his death this French master was critically ranged. Lawrence Gilman, the most sympathetic of his commentators, is also the fairest. To his essays I go for delectation. It would be rash to say that Debussy had achieved his artistic apogee; he may have had surprises in store, but it is safe to conclude that Pelléas and Mélisande is his masterpiece, that the dewy freshness of L’Après Midi d’un Faune would never have been recaptured. The symphonic suite, Printemps, the Nocturnes, La Mer, and Images, at once reveal the strength and limitations of Debussy, who was not a builder of the “lofty rhyme,” though he is a creator of complex rhythms; not a cerebral composer—like Vincent d’Indy, for example—but an emotional one; not a master of linear design, but a colorist; a poet, not an architect. His vision is authentic. He knew that the core of reality is poetry; he lived not at the circumference but the hub of things. He loathed the academic. He is the antipodes of Saint-Saëns. He gave us a novel nuance in music, as did Maeterlinck in literature. (Think of Interior with its motive—again Poe—the fear of fear!) Debussy is a composer of nuance, of half-hinted murmurings of “the silent thunder afloat in the leaves,” of the rutilant faun with his metaphysical xenomania, of music overheard, and of mirrored dreams. Little wonder he sought to interpret in his weaving tones Baudelaire and Verlaine, Mallarmé and Maeterlinck. He was affiliated to that choir of sensitive and unhappy souls, of which Maurice Maeterlinck is the solitary survivor. A poet himself, Claude Achille Debussy, even if he had never written a bar of music.
One summer evening in 1903 I was introduced to him at a café on the Boulevard des Italiens. Debussy spoke a few polite words when I told him that I belonged to the critical chain-gang. He had written much musical criticism, chiefly memorable for its unsympathetic attitude toward Schubert and Wagner, not because of reasons chauvinistic, but doubtless the result of a natural reaction against the principal educative forces in his life. At least once in his career an artist curses his artistic progenitors. Wagner must have hated Weber because of his borrowings from him, and I am quite sure Chopin despised Hummel; internal evidence may be collated in the Pole’s wide departure from the academic patterns of Hummel’s passage-work. However, Debussy never went so far as his friend Jean Marnold, who in the Mercure de France concludes a comparative study of Pelléas and Tristan in these words: “Le pathos de Tristan vient trop tard; si tard, qu’il semble aujourd’hui, à sa place adéquate en notre Opéra toulousain.” Yet if Tristan came so late, how is it that there is so much of its music in Pelléas? a fact that Philip Hale doubts. There’s the score. Who steals my idea steals trash; ’tis something, nothing; ’twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands; but he that filches from me my style robs me of that which not enriches him and makes me poor indeed! (This is reorchestrated to suit the simile.) Tristan always seems to be waiting in the wings when Pelléas is played, awaiting his cue to enter. It never fails to be given by Debussy.
Later I asked Maurice Maeterlinck his opinion of Debussy’s music to Pelléas and Mélisande. It was an imprudent question, for Lucienne Bréval had captured the rôle of Mélisande, not Georgette Leblanc. Maeterlinck is a polite man, and his answer was guarded; nevertheless, his dislike of the music pierced his phrases. To him it was evident that his play needed no tonal embellishment, that it was more poetic, more dramatic, without the Debussy frame. He is quite right. And yet the spiritual collaboration of poet and musician is irresistible. And in the garden of the gods there is only one Mélisande. Some little dramas, like little books, have their destiny. The composer of Pelléas and Mélisande suffered from the nostalgia of the ideal, suffered from homesickness for his patrie psychique, the land of fantasy and evanescent visions. The world will not willingly forget him.
VI
THE ARTISTIC TEMPERAMENT
It was twenty minutes to Eternity on a sunny morning in Gotham. The breakfast room was large, airy, and the view of upper Manhattan from the various windows gave one a joyous sense of our quotidian life, its variety and spaciousness. Central Park, a square of dazzling emerald, the erect golden synagogue on the avenue, the silver hubs of the wheels on passing carriages across the East Drive, were pictures for eyes properly attuned. The four eyes, however, in this particular apartment, were busily engaged in devouring, not the dainty breakfast spread before them—eyes eat, too—but the morning newspapers. On the walls were framed photographs. She as Juliet. He as Tristan. She as Isolde. He as Faust. She, Carmen. He, Siegfried. A versatile pair. Theirs had been a marriage prompted by love. A magnificent, a devastating passion had amalgamated their destinies—Paul Bourget would have said “sublimes.” They still loved despite the poignant promiscuity of matrimony, although married nearly a year. They also loved others. And in the morning hours they hated one another with the holy hatred engendered by perfect sympathy. And they were so consumedly happy that they couldn’t stay indoors for a day. It is easy to love fervidly; it is hard to hate intelligently. On one point, however, this wonderful soprano and glorious tenor were united—they despised musical criticism, even when it was unfavorable. Banishing Mildred, the pretty English maid—she was too pretty about six in the evening, so He noticed—to the bedroom, they read the newspapers undisturbed. They read aloud, and occasionally as a duet. She freely embroidered her commentaries. He embellished his with indignant outbursts.
“Dearest, hear this. What a beautiful notice from Spoggs. I appreciate it all the more because he was once épris of that Garden woman. I honestly believe the man is truly in love with me.” “Pooh! Sweetheart, a music-critic has only ink and ice-water in his veins. Spoggs is in love with his hifalutin’ phrases. All the rest is cannonading canaries. If he saw you in the right key he would never speak of your second-act Isolde. That’s just where you fall down, darling. Whereas my third-act Tristan—” “Dear old boy. How you do run on. Always jealous when his poor little wifie is praised.” “I jealous? Of—you!” Longa pausa! Suddenly she exclaims: “Oh, you poor man! Did you read what he said of your make-up last night? I hate that man now. He is so unjust—to you; though he does admire me. Why, what’s the matter, baby? Where are you going? Your coffee is cold—” He storms out of the room, stumbling over Mildred on her knees near the door, either praying or polishing the keyhole with her lustrous eyelashes. Familiarity may breed contempt, but contiguity breeds, tout simple.
It really happened. In this instance I have transposed the key to opera. The true story deals with a well-known actress and her first husband, also her leading man. Two prima donnas under one roof. She read him to his death with unfavorable criticisms. I know of a more curious case. He was an idealist of an idealism so lofty that he often stumbled over the stars, enmeshed himself in constellations and took the sun for footstool. Her eyes, young as yesterday, were like an Irish sea-green mountain lake; at dusk, a sombre pool, profound at dawn as a sun-misted emerald. He painted. She sang. He painted her portrait. Then he painted other women’s portraits. Each portrait he painted was the portrait of his wife. She was beautiful. At first society was amused, flattered, and finally resented the unsought compliment. Time drove the enamored couple asunder. They were too happy. She married again, happily. He remarried. I saw the last portrait he had painted of his second wife, a lovely creature. As in a pictorial palimpsest the features of his first wife showed in the new text; the expression of her eyes peeped through the other woman’s eyes. A veritable obsession this, comparable to the exquisite and melancholy tale of Georges Rodenbach and the dear dead woman of Bruges-la-Morte.
What is the artistic temperament—so-called? Years ago I wrote to great lengths of “The Artist and His Wife,” quoting ancient saws and modern instances to fatten my argument that artistic people are, in private life, very much like others; if anything, more human. I proved, by a string of names beginning with the Robert Brownings and the Robert Schumanns, that artists may marry or mix without fear of sudden death, cross words, bad cookery, rocky behavior, or diminution of their artistic powers. “There are no women of genius,” said that crosspatch celibate, Edmond de Goncourt; “the only women of genius are men.” A half-truth and a whole lie. Artistic men are as “catty” as the “cattiest” women. But why dwell only upon the incompatibility of artists? Doesn’t Mr. Worldly Wiseman sometimes weary of his stout spouse? Why does the iceman in the adjacent alley beat the skinny mother of his children? Or why does a woman who never heard of Nora Helmer, Hedda Gabler, or Anna Karenina leave her husband, her family, not for the love of a cheap histrion, but because she thinks she can achieve fame as a “movie” actress? Is it not the call of the exotic, the far-away and unfamiliar? A woman can’t live alone on stone without the bread of life at intervals. The echoes of wanderlust are heard in the houses of bankers, tailors, policemen, politicians, as well as in the studies of artists, poets, and musicians.