The other man has a greater sensuousness, completeness,
inventiveness perhaps. But Ravel is full of a lyricism, a piercingness,
a passionateness, that much of the music of Debussy successive to
"Pelleas" wants. We understand Ravel's music, in the famous phrase of
Beethoven, as speech "vom Herz--zu Herzen."
And we turn to it gratefully, as we turn to all art full of the "sense
of tears in mortal things," and into which the pulse of human life has
passed directly. For there are times when he is close to the bourne of
life, when his art is immediately the orifice of the dark, flowering,
germinating region where lie lodged the dynamics of the human soul.
There are times when it taps vasty regions. There are times when Ravel
has but to touch a note, and we unclose; when he has but to let an
instrument sing a certain phrase, and things which lie buried deep in
the heart rise out of the dark, like the nymph in his piano-poem,
dripping with stars. The music of "Daphnis," from the very moment of the
introduction with its softly unfolding chords, its far, glamorous
fanfares, its human throats swollen with songs, seems to thrust open
doors into the unplumbed caverns of the soul, and summon forth the stuff
to shape the dream. Little song written since Weber set his horns
a-breathing, or Brahms transmuted the witchery of the German forest into
tone, is more romantic.
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