tractive gift, of the
magistral craftsmanship that has shown itself in so many musical forms,
from the song and the sonatine to the string-quartet and the orchestral
poem, of the talent that has revealed itself increasingly from year to
year, and that not even the war and the experience of the trenches has
driven underground, the parallelism is to be regarded as necessitated by
the spiritual kinship of the men, and by their contemporaneity.

And, certainly, nothing so much reveals Ravel the peer of Debussy as the
fact that he has succeeded so beautifully in manifesting what is
peculiar to him. For he is by ten years Debussy's junior, and were he
less positive an individuality, less original a temperament, less fully
the genius, he could never have realized himself. There would have
descended upon him the blight that has fallen upon so many of the
younger Parisian composers less determinate than he and like himself
made of one stuff with Debussy. He, too, would have permitted the art of
the older and well-established man to impose upon him. He, too, would
have betrayed his own cause in attempting to model himself upon the
other man. But Debussy has not swerved nor hampered Ravel any more than
has his master, Gabriel Faure. He is too sturdily set in his own
direction. From the very commencement of his career, from the time when
he wrote the soft and hesitating and nevertheless already very personal
"Pavane pour une Infante defunte," he has maintained himself proudly
against his great collateral, just as he has maintained himself against
what is false and epicene in the artistic example of Faure. Within their
common limits, he has realized himself as essentially as Debussy has
done. Their music is the new and double blossoming of the classical
French tradition. From the common ground, they stretch out each in a
different direction, and form the greater contrast to each other because
of all they have in common.

The intelligence that fashioned the music of Debussy was one completely
aware, conscious of itself, flooded with light in its most secret
places, set four-square in the whirling universe. Few artists have been
as sure of their intention as Debussy always was. The man could fix with
precision the most elusive emotions, could describe the sensations that
flow on the borderland of consciousness, vaguely, and that most of us
cannot grasp for very dizziness. He could write music as impalpable as
that of the middle secti