and generations of gentlemen. The other is one of those
beings who seem to have been called into existence solely by the modern
way of life, by express trains and ocean greyhounds, by the shrinkage of
continents and the vibration of the twentieth-century world. But the
chief difference, the difference that made "Le Sacre du printemps"
almost antithetical to "Pelleas et Melisande," is essentially the
divergence between two cardinal manners of apprehending life. Debussy,
on the one hand, seems to be of the sort of men in whom the center of
conscience is, figuratively, sunken; one of those who have within
themselves some immobility that makes the people and the things about
them appear fleeting and unreal. For such, the world is a far distant
thing, lying out on the rims of consciousness, delicate and impermanent
as sunset hues or the lights and gestures of the dream. The music of
Debussy is the magistral and classic picture of this distant and
glamorous procession, this illusory and fantastical and transparent
show, this thing that changes from moment to moment and is never twice
the same, and flows away from us so quickly. But Strawinsky, on the
other hand, is in the very midst of the thing so distant from the other
man. For him, the material world is very real, sharp, immediate. He
loves it, enjoys it, is excited by its many forms. He is vividly
responsive to its traffic. Things make an immediate and biting
impression on him, stimulate in him pleasure and pain. He feels their
edge and knows it hard, feels their weight and knows it heavy, feels
their motion in all its violence. There is in Strawinsky an almost
frenetic delight in the processes that go on about him. He goes through
the crowded thoroughfares, through cluttered places, through factories,
hotels, wharves, sits in railway trains, and the glare and tumult and
pulsation, the engines and locomotives and cranes, the whole mad
phantasmagoria of the modern city, evoke images in him, inflame him to
reproduce them in all their weight and gianthood and mass, their
blackness and luridness and power. The most vulgar things and events
excite him. The traffic, the restlessness of crowds, the noise of
vehicles, of the clatter of horses on the asphalt, of human cries and
calls sounding above the street-bass, a couple of organ grinders trying
to outplay each other, a brass band coming down the avenue, the thunder
of a railway train hurling itself over leagues of steel, the sir