style: it is a remote and inexplicable beauty, a beauty shot through
with mystery and strangeness, baffling, incalculable. It is unexpected
and subtle in accent, wayward and fantastic in rhythm. Harmonically it
obeys no known law--consonances, dissonances, are interfused, blended,
re-echoed, juxtaposed, without the smallest regard for the rules of
tonal relationship established by long tradition. It recognizes no
boundaries whatsoever between the different keys; there is constant flux
and change, and the same tonality is seldom maintained beyond a single
beat of the measure. There are key-signatures, but they strike one as
having been put in place as a mere yielding to what M. Debussy doubtless
regards indulgently as an amiable and harmless prejudice. His melodic
schemes suggest no known model--they conform to patterns which
intertwine and melt and are suddenly and surprisingly transformed; they
are without punctuation, uncadenced, irregular, unpredictable,
indescribably sensitive and supple. There is a marked indifference to
the possibilities of contrapuntal effect, a dependence upon a method
fundamentally homophonic rather than polyphonic--this music is a rich
and shimmering texture of blended chord-groups, rather than a pattern of
interlaced melodic strands. One cannot but note the manner in which it
abhors and shuns the easily achieved, the facile, the expected. Its
colors and designs are rare and far-sought and most heedfully contrived;
its eloquence is never unrestrained; and this hatred of the obvious is
as plainly sincere as it is passionate and uncompromising; it is not the
fastidiousness of a _précieux_, but of an extravagantly scrupulous and
austerely exacting artist.

Here, then, is as anomalous an aesthetic product as one could well
imagine. In a day when magnitude of plan and vividness of color,
rhetorical emphasis and dynamic brilliancy, are the ideals which
preëminently sway our tonal architects, emerges this reticent, half-lit,