eting enchantments: where it is
not dreams, but the reflections of dreams, that obsess; where passion is
less the desire of life than of the shadow of life. It is a world of
images and refractions, of visions and presentiments, a world which
swims in dim and opalescent mists--where gestures are adored and every
footfall is charged with indescribable intimations; where, "even in the
swaying of a hand or the dropping of unbound hair, there is less
suggestion of individual action than of a divinity living within,
shaping an elaborate beauty in a dream for its own delight." It is, for
those who inhabit it, a world as exclusively preoccupying and authentic
as it is, for those who do not, incredible and inaccessible. The reports
of it, intense and gleaming as they may be, which are contained in the
art of such of its inhabitants as Debussy, are, admittedly, little
likely to conciliate the unbeliever. This is music which it is hopeless
to attempt to justify or promote. It persuades, or it does not; one is
attuned to it, or one is not. For those who do savor and value it, it is
reasonable only to attempt some such notation of its qualities as is
offered here.

Debussy's ancestry is not easily traced. Wagner, whom he has amused
himself by decrying in the course of his critical excursions, shaped
certain aspects of his style. In some of the early songs one realizes
quite clearly his indebtedness to the score of _Tristan_; yet in these
very songs--say the _Harmonie du Soir_ and _La Mort des Amants_
(composed in 1889-1890)--there are amazingly individual pages: pages
which even to-day sound ultra-modern. And when one recalls that at the
time these songs were written the score of _Parsifal_ had been off
Wagner's desk for only seven years, that Richard Strauss was putting
forth such tentative things as his _Don Juan_ and _Tod und Verklaerung_,
that the "revolutionary" Max Reger was a boy of sixteen, and that
Debussy himself was not yet thirty, one is in a position forcibly to
realize the early growth and the genuineness of his independence.
Adolphe Jullien, the veteran French critic, discerns in his earlier
writing the influence of such Russians as Borodine, Rimsky-Korsakoff,
and Mussorgsky--a discovery which one finds some difficulty in
crediting. Later, Debussy was undoubtedly affected, in a slight degree,
by Cesar Franck; and there were moments--happily infrequent--during what
one may call his middle period, when a whiff of the pe