first expressed that silver
temperance in tone, with Claude Le Jeune, with Rameau and Couperin and
the other clavecinists. Undiverted by the changes of revolutionary
times, they continue, in forms conditioned by the modern feeling for
color, for tonal complexity, for supple and undulant rhythm, the high
tradition of the elder music.

Claude Le Jeune wrote motets; the eighteenth-century masters wrote
gavottes and rigadoons, forlanas and chaconnes, expressed themselves in
courtly dances and other set and severe forms. Ravel and Debussy compose
in more liberal and naturalistic fashion. And yet, the genius that
animates all this music is single. It is as though all these artists,
born so many hundred years apart from each other, had contemplated the
pageant of their respective times from the same point of view. It is as
though they faced the problems of composition with essentially the same
attitudes, with the same demands and reservations. The new music, like
the old, is the work of men above all reverent of the art of life
itself. It is the work of men of the sort who crave primarily in all
conduct restraint, and who insist on poise and good sense. They regard
all things humanly, and bring their regard for the social values to the
making of their art. Indeed, the reaction of Debussy from Wagnerism was
chiefly the reaction of a profoundly socialized and aristocratic
sensibility outraged by over-emphasis and unrestraint. The men of whom
he is typical throughout the ages never forget the world and its
decencies and its demands. And yet they do not eschew the large, the
grave, the poignant. The range of human passions is present in their
music, too, even though many of them have not had gigantic powers, or
entertained emotions as grand and intense as the world-consuming,
world-annihilating mysticism of a Bach, for instance. But it is shadowed
forth more than stated. If many of them have been deeply melancholy,
they have nevertheless taken counsel with themselves, and have said,
with Baudelaire:

"Sois sage, o ma douleur, et tiens-toi plus tranquille."

All expression is made in low, aristocratic tone, in grisaille. Most
often it achieves itself through a silvery grace. It is normal for these
men to be profound through grace, to be amusing and yet artistically
upright. It is normal for them to articulate nicely. High in their
consciousness there flame always the commandments of clarity, of
delicacy, of precision.