one may call his middle period, when a whiff of the perfumed sentiment
of Massenet blew disturbingly across his usually sincere and poetic
pages. But for traces of Liszt, or Berlioz, or Brahms, one will search
fruitlessly. That he does not, to-day, touch hands at any point with his
brother musicians of the elder school in France--with such, for example,
as the excellent and brilliant and superbly unimaginative
Saint-Saëns--goes almost without saying. With Vincent d'Indy, a musician
of wholly antipodal qualities, he disputes the place of honor among the
elect of the "younger" school (whose members are not so young as they
are painted); and he is the worshiped idol of still younger Frenchmen
who envy, depreciate, and industriously imitate his fascinating and
dangerously luring art. He has traveled far on the path of his
particular destiny; not since Wagner has any modern music-maker
perfected a style so saturated with personality--there are far fewer
derivations in his art than in the art of Strauss, through whose scores
pace the ghosts of certain of the greater dead. All that Wagner could
teach him of the potency of dissonance, of structural freedom and
elasticity, of harmonic daring, Debussy eagerly learned and applied, as
a foundation, to his own intricately reasoned though spontaneous art;
yet Wagner would have gasped alike at the novelty and the exquisite art
of _Pelléas et Mélisande_, of the _Nocturnes_, even of the comparatively
early _Prélude à l'Après-midi d'un Faune_; for this is music of a kind
which may, indeed, have been dreamed of, but which certainly had never
found its way upon paper, before Debussy quietly recorded it in his
scores.

What is the secret principle of his method?--if one can call that a
"method" which is, in effect, nothing if not airily unmethodical, and
that principle "secret" which is neither recondite nor perplexing. It is
simply that Debussy, instead of depending upon the strictly limited