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.
The intelligence that fashioned the music of Debussy was one completely
aware, conscious of itself, flooded with light in its most secret
places, set four-square in the whirling universe. Few artists have been
as sure of their intention as Debussy always was. The man could fix with
precision the most elusive emotions, could describe the sensations that
flow on the borderland of consciousness, vaguely, and that most of us
cannot grasp for very dizziness. He could write music as impalpable as
that of the middle section of "Iberia," in which the very silence of the
night, the caresses of the breeze, seem to have taken musical flesh.
Before the body of his work, so clear and lucid in its definition, so
perfect in its organization, one thinks perforce of a world created out
of the flying chaos beneath him by a god. We are given to know precisely
of what stuff the soul of Debussy was made, what its pilgrimages were,
in what adventure it sought itself out. We know precisely wherein it saw
reflected its visage, in "water stilled at even," in the angry gleam of
sunset on wet leaves, in wild and headlong gipsy rhythms, in moonfire,
shimmering stuffs and flashing spray, in the garish lights and odors of
the Peninsula, in rain fallen upon flowering parterres, in the
melancholy march of clouds, the golden pomp and ritual of the church,
the pools and gardens and pavilions reared for its delight by the
delicate Chinese soul, in earth's thousand scents and shells and colors.
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