agner, with
its vocal leaps and its resounding and heavy accentuation. Nothing could
be more displeasing in French. All people of taste suffered from it,
though they did not admit it. At this time, Antoine, Gemier, and Guitry
were making theatrical declamation more natural, and this made the
exaggerated declamation of the French opera appear more ridiculous and
more archaic still. And so a reform in recitative was inevitable.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau had foreseen it in the very direction in which
Debussy[201] has accomplished it. He showed in his _Lettre sur la
musique francaise_ that there was no connection between the inflections
of French speech, "whose accents are so harmonious and simple," and "the
shrill and noisy intonations" of the recitative of French opera. And he
concluded by saying that the kind of recitative that would best suit us
should "wander between little intervals, and neither raise nor lower the
voice very much; and should have little sustained sound, no noise, and
no cries of any description--nothing, indeed, that resembled singing,
and little inequality in the duration or value of the notes, or in their
intervals." This is the very definition of Debussy's recitative.

[Footnote 201: We must also note that during the first half of the
seventeenth century people of taste objected to the very theatrical
declamation of French opera. "Our singers believe," wrote Mersenne, in
1636, "that the exclamations and emphasis used by the Italians in
singing savour too much of tragedies and comedies, and so they do not
wish to employ them."]

The symphonic fabric of _Pelleas et Melisande_ differs just as widely
from Wagner's dramas. With Wagner it is a living thing that springs from
one great root, a system of interlaced phrases whose powerful growth
puts out branches in every direction, like an oak. Or, to take another
simile, it is like a painting, which though it has not been executed at
a single sitting, yet gives us that impression; and, in spite of the
retouching and altering to which it has been subjected, still has the
effect of a compact whole, of an indestructible amalgam, from which
nothing can be detached. Debussy's system, on the contrary, is, so to
speak, a sort of classic impressionism--an impressionism that is
refined, harmonious, and calm; that moves along in musical pictures,
each of which corresponds to a subtle and fleeting moment of the soul's
life; and the painting is done by clever little str