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What brings Gautier especially to mind is the appearance within a few weeks of an amusing little volume entitled Le Romantisme et l'éditeur Renduel. Its chief value consists, no doubt, in what the author, M. Adolphe Jullien, has to say about Renduel. That noted publisher must have been a man of unusual gifts and unusual fortune.
And so the affair, like one of those medleys of our Irish melodies arranged by poor M. Jullien, starting with a martial air, breathing turf and thunder, fire and sword, went off imperceptibly into a pathetic and amorous strain. Father Roach, still officiating as internuncio, found the dowager less and less impracticable, and at length a treaty was happily concluded.
You might have all these things. Your house might be decorated like a Russian palace, blazing with the most brilliant lights and breathing the richest odours; you might have Jullien presiding over your orchestra, and a banquet worthy of the Romans.
The result was that at last he did accept it, and he entered upon its duties with all the vigor he could command. The concern was almost bankrupt, and to save it from utter ruin Barnum advanced large sums of money from his own purse. By this means and by various other efforts, such as the re-inauguration, the famous Jullien concerts, etc., here stored a semblance of prosperity.
People began to think that every important building on the island was destined to the flames. The hall where Jenny Lind had sung, where little Jullien with his magic bow had won laurels, and the larger Jullien enchanted the multitude; the hall which had echoed to the voice of Daniel Webster, which was redolent with memories of greatness, goodness and delight, was wrapped in the devouring element.
Debussy's ancestry is not easily traced. Wagner, whom he has amused himself by decrying in the course of his critical excursions, shaped certain aspects of his style. In some of the early songs one realizes quite clearly his indebtedness to the score of Tristan; yet in these very songs say the Harmonie du Soir and La Mort des Amants (composed in 1889-1890) there are amazingly individual pages: pages which even to-day sound ultra-modern. And when one recalls that at the time these songs were written the score of Parsifal had been off Wagner's desk for only seven years, that Richard Strauss was putting forth such tentative things as his Don Juan and Tod und Verklärung, that the "revolutionary" Max Reger was a boy of sixteen, and that Debussy himself was not yet thirty, one is in a position forcibly to realize the early growth and the genuineness of his independence. Adolphe Jullien, the veteran French critic, discerns in his earlier writing the influence of such Russians as Borodine, Rimsky-Korsakoff, and Mussorgsky a discovery which one finds some difficulty in crediting. Later, Debussy was undoubtedly affected, in a slight degree, by César Franck; and there were moments happily infrequent during what 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
Difficulties grow when we come to comedy that seeks to represent, however timidly, the life of real human beings. The bold dramatists who endeavour to represent a slice of life Jean Jullien invented the phrase find more difficulty in the beginning of their plays than the conventional writer: to bring them to anything like a full stop is a very rare achievement.
All this time I think me to take the sheep to Pierre Jullien in the meadow of Black Mountain. He is not much, that Pierre. If I tell him it is one gift from Le bon Dieu, that is explain enough for Pierre Jullien. Then I will be quit of the trouble of Filon Geraud. So, M'siu, would it have been, but for that dog Helène. That is Filon's she-dog that he raise from a pup.
But, meanwhile, if it were true, he dare not for his neck's sake go further in this matter. He may have suspected that it was not true. But he had no means of testing that suspicion. Marc Antoine, you see, was subtle. "Your father?" growled the Representative. "Who is your father?" "The Deputy Jullien." "What?" Carrier straightened himself, affecting an immense astonishment.
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