ad and sweet, from out our lives, and had made us new, and set us
apart, and that now, at the music's breath, at a half-whispered note, at
the unclosing of a rhythm, the flowering of a cluster of tones out of
the warm still darkness, were arisen again in the fullness of their
stature and become ours entirely.

For Debussy is of all musicians the one amongst us most fully. He is
here, in our midst, in the world of the city. There is about him none of
the unworldliness, the aloofness, the superhumanity that distances so
many of the other composers from us. We need not imagine him in exotic
singing robes, nor in classical garments, nor in any strange and
outmoded and picturesque attire, to recognize in him the poet. He is the
modern poet just because the modern civilian garb is so naturally his.
He is the normal man, living our own manner of life. We seem to know him
as we know ourselves. His experiences are but our own, intensified by
his poet's gift. Or, if they are not already ours, they will become so.
He seems almost ourselves as he passes through the city twilight, intent
upon some errand upon which we, too, have gone, journeying a road which
we ourselves have traveled. We know the room in which he lives, the
windows from which he gazes, the moments which come upon him there in
the silence of the lamp. For he has captured in his music what is
distinguished in the age's delight and tragedy. All the fine sensuality,
all the Eastern pleasure in the infinite daintiness and warmth of
nature, all the sudden, joyous discovery of color and touch that made
men feel as though neither had been known before, are contained in it.
It, too, is full of images of the "earth of the liquid and slumbering
trees," the "earth of departed sunset," the "earth of the vitreous pour
of the full moon just tinged with blue." It is full of material
loveliness, plies itself to innumerable dainty shells--to the somnolence
of the Southern night, to the hieratic gesture of temple dancers, to the
fall of lamplight into the dark, to the fantastic gush of fireworks, to
the romance of old mirrors and faded brocades and Saxony clocks, to the
green young panoply of spring. And just as it gives again the age's
consciousness of the delicious robe of earth, so, too, it gives again
its sense of weariness and powerlessness and oppression. The nineteenth
century had been loud with blare and rumors and the vibration of
colossal movements, and man had apparently tr