delicately structured, subtly accented music; which is incorrigibly
unrhetorical; which never declaims or insists: an art alembicated,
static, severely restrained--for even when it is most harmonically
untrammeled, most rhythmically fantastic, one is aware of a quietly
inexorable logic, an uncompromising ideal of form, underlying its
seemingly unregulated processes. It is the product of a temperament
unique in music, though familiar enough in the modern expression of the
other arts. Debussy is of that clan who have uncompromisingly "turned
their longing after the wind and wave of the mind." He is, as I have
elsewhere written, of the order of those poets and dreamers who
persistently heed, and seek to continue in their art, not the echoes of
passional and adventurous experience, but the vibrations of the spirit
beneath. He is of the brotherhood of those mystical explorers, of
peculiarly modern temper, who are perhaps most essentially represented
in the plays and poetry and philosophies of Mr. Yeats and M.
Maeterlinck: those who dwell--it has before been said--"upon the
confines of a crepuscular world whose every phase is full of subtle
portent, and who are convinced (in the phrase of M. Maeterlinck himself)
'that there are in man many regions more fertile, more profound, and
more interesting than those of his reason or his intelligence.'" It is
an order of temperament for which the things of the marginal world of
the mind are of transcendent consequence--that world which is
perpetually haunted, for those mystics who are also the slaves of
beauty, by remote illusions and disquieting enchantments: where it is
not dreams, but the reflections of dreams, that obsess; where passion is
less the desire of life than of the shadow of life. It is a world of
images and refractions, of visions and presentiments, a world which
swims in dim and opalescent mists--where gestures are adored and every
footfall is charged with indescribable intimations; where, "even in the
swaying of a hand or the dropping of unbound hair, there is less