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 "Pelléas" 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 sad 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 traversed vast distances and explored titanic heights and abysmal depths. And yet, for all the glare, the earth was darker. The light was miasmic only. The life of man seemed as ever a brief and sad and simple thing, the stretching of impotent hands, unable to grasp and hold; the interlacing of shadows; the unclosing, a moment before nightfall, of exquisite and fragile blossoms. The sense of the infirmity of life, the consciousness that it had no more than the signification of a dream with passing lights, or halting steps in the snow, or an old half-forgotten story, had mixed a deep wistfulness and melancholy into the very glamour of the globe, and become heavier itself for all the sweetness of earth. And Debussy has fixed the two in their confusion.