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"Art must be hidden by art," said Rameau, long ago, and this is eminently true in Debussy's music. Debussy composed several works for the stage, one of which was "Martyrdom of Saint Sebastien," but his "Pélleas and Mélisande" is the one supreme achievement in the lyric drama.
Moussorgsky preceded Debussy in his use of whole-tone harmonies, and a contemporary of Debussy, and an equally gifted musician, Martin Loeffler, was experimenting before Debussy himself in a dark but delectable harmonic region.
And in his art, the gods of classical antiquity live again. Debussy is much more than merely the sensuous Frenchman. He is the man in whom the old Pagan voluptuousness, the old untroubled delight in the body, warred against so long by the black brood of monks and transformed by them during centuries into demoniacal and hellish forms, is free and pure and sweet once more.
She went to the piano, and she began the Debussy she had played that afternoon when I had first asked her to play I never can remember its name and when she had finished she stopped. "What made you play that now?" I asked. "I felt like it." "It wrenches my nerves. What makes you feel all unrestful and rebellious and defiant, Alathea, am I not keeping the bargain?" "Yes, of course."
On his next call there was a lively Ruth who invited him up to the library, read extracts from Stephen Leacock's Nonsense Novels; turned companionably serious, and told him how divided were her sympathies between her father the conscientiously worried employer and a group of strikers in his factory. She made coffee in a fantastic percolator, and played Débussy and ragtime.
He passed the competitive examination for admission to the Conservatory, and began the Autumn term as a pupil of Marmontel in piano and of Savard in theory and composition having for a fellow pupil, by the way, that most remarkable of contemporary music-makers, Claude Debussy, whom MacDowell described as having been, even then, a youth of erratic and non-conformist tendencies.
All this painstaking care, this overcoming of the technical difficulties of his art, is what gave him such complete command and freedom in using the medium of tone and harmony, in his unique manner. While at work in Paris, young Debussy made an occasional side trip to another country.
They acted upon him gently with their own bright pressure. He let them thrive according to their own relationships to himself. Nothing was forced in the mind and soul of Rex Slinkard. He was in quest of the modern rapture for permanent things such as is to be found in "L'après midi d'un Faun" of Mallarmé and Debussy for instance, in quest of those rare, whiter proportions of experience.
When I think of Redon I think of Shelley a little, "he is dusty with tumbling about among the stars," and I think somewhat, too, of some phrases in Debussy and his unearthly school of musicians, for if we are among those who admire sturdier things in art we can still love the fine gift of purity. And of all gifts Redon has that, certainly.
Considering it, the mind reeled under visions of the feasts of Elagabalus; and the subtle harmonies of Debussy mingled with the musty, fragrant romance of chests in which have been kept old clothes, ruffs, hose, doublets, of a forgotten generation, and the wan odour of lilies of the valley and the savour of Cheddar cheese.
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