But, chiefest of all, it expressed the people described in the section of "Jean-Christophe" significantly entitled "Dans la Maison." It expressed the essential France hidden by the glare of the Third Republic. The music of César 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 Péguy wrote, bidding them remember the divine origin of the life and the institutions 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 César 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 César Franck, an institution like the Société 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 "Pelléas" 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 fashioned 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 cluster 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 classical 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 passes 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 shells—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 titanic 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 passing 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 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.