on of the new body of man is manifest. Through Debussy,
music had liquified, become opalescent and impalpable and fluent. It had
become, because of his sense, his generation's sense, of the infirmity
of things, a sort of symbol of the eternal flux, the eternal
momentariness. It had come to body forth all that merges and changes and
disappears, to mirror the incessant departures and evanescences of life,
to shape itself upon the infinitely subtle play of light, the restless,
heaving, foaming surface of the sea, the impalpable racks of perfume,
upon gusts of wind and fading sounds, upon all the ephemeral wonder of
the world. But through Strawinsky, there has come to be a music
stylistically well-nigh the reverse of that of the impressionists.
Through him, music has become again cubical, lapidary, massive,
mechanistic. Scintillation is gone out of it. The delicate, sinuous
melodic line, the glamorous sheeny harmonies, are gone out of it. The
elegance of Debussy, the golden sensuality, the quiet, classic touch,
are flown. Instead, there are come to be great, weighty, metallic
masses, molten piles and sheets of steel and iron, shining adamantine
bulks. Contours are become grim, severe, angular. Melodies are sharp,
rigid, asymmetrical. Chords are uncouth, square clusters of notes, stout
and solid as the pillars that support roofs, heavy as the thuds of
triphammers. Above all, there is rhythm, rhythm rectangular and sheer
and emphatic, rhythm that lunges and beats and reiterates and dances
with all the steely perfect tirelessness of the machine, shoots out and
draws back, shoots upward and shoots down, with the inhuman motion of
titanic arms of steel. Indeed, the change is as radical, as complete, as
though in the midst of moonlit noble gardens a giant machine had arisen
swiftly from the ground and inundated the night with electrical glare
and set its metal thews and organs and joints relentlessly whirring,
relentlessly functioning.

And yet, the two styles, Debussy's and Strawinsky's, are related.
Indeed, they are complementary. They are the reactions to the same
stimulus of two fundamentally different types of mind. No doubt, between
the two men there exist differences besides those of their general
fashions of thinking. The temper of Debussy was profoundly sensuous and
aristocratic and contained. That of Strawinsky is nervous and ironic and
violent. The one man issued from an unbroken tradition, was produced by
generations