ntally 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 _precieux_, 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
preeminently sway our tonal architects, emerges this reticent, half-lit,
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 disqui