Genius has a right to be what it will—­to trample underfoot, if it wishes, taste and morals and the whole of society.  But when those who are not geniuses wish to do the same thing they only make themselves ridiculous and odious.  There have been too many monkey Wagners in France.  During the last ten or twenty years scarcely one French musician has escaped Wagner’s influence.  One understands only too well the revolt of the French mind, in the name of naturalness and good taste, against exaggerations and extremes of passion, whether sincere or not. Pelleas et Melisande came as a manifestation of this revolt.  It is an uncompromising reaction against over-emphasis and excess, and against anything that oversteps the limits of the imagination.  This distaste of exaggerated words and sentiments results in what is like a fear of showing the feelings at all, even when they are most deeply stirred.  With Debussy the passions almost whisper; and it is by the imperceptible vibrations of the melodic line that the love in the hearts of the unhappy couple is shown, by the timid “Oh, why are you going?” at the end of the first act, and the quiet “I love you, too,” in the last scene but one.  Think of the wild lamentations of the dying Ysolde, and then of the death of Melisande, without cries and without words.

From a scenic point of view, Pelleas et Melisande is also quite opposed to the Bayreuth ideal.  The vast proportions—­almost immoderate proportions—­of the Wagnerian drama, its compact structure and the intense concentration of mind which from beginning to end holds these enormous works and their ideology together, and which is often displayed at the expense of the action and even the emotions, are as far removed as they can be from the French love of clear, logical, and temperate action.  The little pictures of Pelleas et Melisande, small and sharply cut, each marking without stress a new stage in the evolution of the drama, are built up in quite a different way from those of the Wagnerian theatre.

And, as if he wished to accentuate this antagonism, the author of Pelleas et Melisande is now writing a Tristan, whose plot is taken from an old French poem, the text of which has been recently brought to light by M. Bedier.  In its calm and lofty strain it is a wonderful contrast to Wagner’s savage and pedantic, though sublime poem.

But it is especially by the manner in which they conceive the respective relationships of poetry and music to opera that the two composers differ.  With Wagner, music is the kernel of the opera, the glowing focus, the centre of attraction; it absorbs everything, and it stands absolutely first.  But that is not the French conception.  The musical stage, as we conceive it in France (if not what we actually possess), should present such a combination of the arts as go to make an harmonious whole.  We demand that an equal balance shall be kept between poetry and music; and