raction
that some of our musicians are beginning to feel for the art of
civilisations that are quite opposed to those of the West. Slowly and
quietly the spirit of the Far East is insinuating itself into European
music.]

For several years the leader of the young school, M. Claude Debussy,
has, in his writings in the _Revue Blanche_ and _Gil Blas_, attacked
Wagnerian art. His personality is very French--capricious, poetic, and
_spirituelle_, full of lively intelligence, heedless, independent,
scattering new ideas, giving vent to paradoxical caprice, criticising
the opinions of centuries with the teasing impertinence of a little
street boy, attacking great heroes of music like Gluck, Wagner, and
Beethoven, upholding only Bach, Mozart, and Weber, and loudly professing
his preference for the old French masters of the eighteenth century. But
in spite of this he is bringing back to French music its true nature and
its forgotten ideals--its clearness, its elegant simplicity, its
naturalness, and especially its grace and plastic beauty. He wishes
music to free itself from all literary and philosophic pretensions,
which have burdened German music in the nineteenth century (and perhaps
have always done so); he wishes music to get away from the rhetoric
which has been handed down to us through the centuries, from its heavy
construction and precise orderliness, from its harmonic and rhythmic
formulas, and the exercises of oratorical embroidery. He wishes that
all about it shall be painting and poetry; that it shall explain its
true feeling in a clear and direct way; and that melody, harmony, and
rhythm shall develop broadly along the lines of inner laws, and not
after the pretended laws of some intellectual arrangement. And he
himself preaches by example in his _Pelleas et Melisande_, and breaks
with all the principles of the Bayreuth drama, and gives us the model of
the new art of his dreams. And on all sides discerning and well-informed
critics, such as M. Pierre Lalo of _Le Temps_, M. Louis Laloy of the
_Revue Musicale_ and the _Mercure Musicale_, and M. Marnold of _Le
Mercure de France_, have championed his doctrines and his art. Even the
_Schola Cantorum_, whose eclectic and archaic spirit is very different
from that of Debussy, seemed at first to be drawn into the same current
of thought; and this school which had so helped to propagate the foreign
influences of the past, did not seem to be quite insensible to the
nationali