That of Strawinsky is nervous and ironic and
violent. The one man issued from an unbroken tradition, was produced by
generations and generations of gentlemen. The other is one of those
beings who seem to have been called into existence solely by the modern
way of life, by express trains and ocean greyhounds, by the shrinkage of
continents and the vibration of the twentieth-century world. But the
chief difference, the difference that made "Le Sacre du printemps"
almost antithetical to "Pelleas et Melisande," is essentially the
divergence between two cardinal manners of apprehending life. Debussy,
on the one hand, seems to be of the sort of men in whom the center of
conscience is, figuratively, sunken; one of those who have within
themselves some immobility that makes the people and the things about
them appear fleeting and unreal. For such, the world is a far distant
thing, lying out on the rims of consciousness, delicate and impermanent
as sunset hues or the lights and gestures of the dream. The music of
Debussy is the magistral and classic picture of this distant and
glamorous procession, this illusory and fantastical and transparent
show, this thing that changes from moment to moment and is never twice
the same, and flows away from us so quickly.
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