folk are one. The
mysticism and Catholicism of Paul Claudel, the revulsion from the
scepticism of Renan and Anatole France that has become so general in
recent French thought, the traditionalism, nay, the intellectual
reaction, of the latest France, are all foreshadowed and outlined in the
music of Cesar Franck. He must have pulsed with the very heart of his
adopted country.

Confronted with such a piece of expression, with such a modern standard,
the new generation could not but respond with all its forces, and throng
out of the aperture made in the Chinese Wall. And after Franck there
followed a generation of French musicians such as the world has not seen
since the days of the clavecinists. Within ten years, from one of the
most moribund, Paris had become the most important and vivid of musical
centers. Something that had been wanting in the air of Paris a long
while had swept largely into it again. The musical imagination had been
freed. After Franck it was impossible for a French musician not to have
the courage to express himself in his own idiom, to dare develop the
forms peculiarly French, to break with the foreign German and Italian
standards that had oppressed the national genius so long. For this man
had done so. And with the Debussys and Magnards and Ravels, the d'Indys
and Dukas and Schmitts, the Chaussons and Ropartz's and the Milhauds
that followed immediately on Cesar Franck, an institution like the
Societe Nationale de Musique came to have a meaning. Once again, French
music was.

Debussy

Debussy's music is our own. All artistic forms lie dormant in the soul,
and there is no work of art actually foreign to us, nor can such a one
appear, in all the future ages of the world. But the music of Debussy is
proper to us, in our day, as is no other, and might stand before all
time our symbol. For it lived in us before it was born, and after birth
returned upon us like a release. Even at a first encounter the style of
"Pelleas" was mysteriously familiar. It made us feel that we had always
needed such rhythms, such luminous chords, such limpid phrases, that we
perhaps had even heard them, sounding faintly, in our imaginations. The
music seemed as old as our sense of selfhood. It seemed but the
exquisite recognition of certain intense and troubling and appeasing
moments that we had already encountered. It seemed fashioned out of
certain ineluctable, mysterious experiences that had budded, ineffably
s