aversed vast distances and
explored titanic heights and abysmal depths. And yet, for all the glare,
the earth was darker. The light was miasmic only. The life of man seemed
as ever a brief and sad and simple thing, the stretching of impotent
hands, unable to grasp and hold; the interlacing of shadows; the
unclosing, a moment before nightfall, of exquisite and fragile blossoms.
The sense of the infirmity of life, the consciousness that it had no
more than the signification of a dream with passing lights, or halting
steps in the snow, or an old half-forgotten story, had mixed a deep
wistfulness and melancholy into the very glamour of the globe, and
become heavier itself for all the sweetness of earth. And Debussy has
fixed the two in their confusion.

He has permeated music completely with his impressionistic sensibility.
His style is an image of this our pointillistically feeling era. With
him impressionism achieves a perfect musical form. Structurally, the
music of Debussy is a fabric of exquisite and poignant moments, each
full and complete in itself. His wholes exist entirely in their parts,
in their atoms. If his phrases, rhythms, lyric impulses, do contribute
to the formation of a single thing, they yet are extraordinarily
independent and significant in themselves. No chord, no theme, is
subordinate. Each one exists for the sake of its own beauty, occupies
the universe for an instant, then merges and disappears. The harmonies
are not, as in other compositions, preparations. They are apparently an
end in themselves, flow in space, and then change hue, as a shimmering
stuff changes. For all its golden earthiness, the style of Debussy is
the most liquid and impalpable of musical styles. It is forever gliding,
gleaming, melting; crystallizing for an instant in some savory phrase,
then moving quiveringly onward. It is well-nigh edgeless. It seems to
flow through our perceptions as water flows through fingers. The
iridescent bubbles that float upon it burst if we but touch them. It is
forever suggesting water--fountains and pools, the glistening spray and
heaving bosom of the sea. Or, it shadows forth the formless breath of
the breeze, of the storm, of perfumes, or the play of sun and moon. His
orchestration invariably produces all that is cloudy and diaphanous in
each instrument. He makes music with flakes of light, with bright motes
of pigment. His palette glows with the sweet, limpid tints of a Monet or
a Pissaro or a