mmense drawing-room of eighteenth-century
Paris, helped form this spirit. In all this man's music one catches
sight of the long foreground, the long cycles of preparation. In every
one of his works, from the most imposing to the least, from the "String
Quartet" and "Pelleas" to the gracile, lissome little waltz, "Le plus
que lent," there is manifest the Latin genius nurtured and molded and
developed by the fertile, tranquil soil of France.

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. They once were nymphs and naiads and
goddesses, the "Quartet" and "L'Apres-midi d'un faune" and "Sirenes."
They once wandered through the glades of Ionia and Sicily, and gladdened
men with their golden sensuality, and bewitched them with the thought of
"the breast of the nymph in the brake." For they are full of the wonder
and sweetness of the flesh, of flesh tasted deliciously and enjoyed not
in closed rooms, behind secret doors and under the shameful pall of the
night, but out in the warm, sunny open, amid grasses and scents and the
buzzing of insects, the waving of branches, the wandering of clouds. The
Quartet is alive, quivering with light, and with joyous animality. It
moves like a young fawn; spins the gayest, most silken, most golden of
spider webs; fills one with the delights of taste and smell and sight
and touch. In the most glimmering, floating of poems, "L'Apres-midi d'un
faune," there is caught magically by the climbing, chromatic flute, the
drowsy pizzicati of the strings, and the languorous sighing of the
horns, the atmosphere of the daydream, the sleepy warmth of the sunshot
herbage, the divine apparition, the white wonder of arms and breasts and
thighs. The Lento movement of "Iberia" is like some drowsy, disheveled
gipsy. Even "La plus que lent" is full of the goodness of the flesh, is
like some slender young girl with unclosing bosom. And in "Sirenes,"
something like the eternal divinity, the eternal beauty of woman's body,
is celebrated. It is as though on the rising, falling, rising, sinking
tides of the poem, on the waves of the glamorous feminine voices, on the
aphrodisiac swell of the sea, the