if their equilibrium must be a little upset, we should prefer that poetry was not the loser, as its utterance is more conscious and rational.  That was Gluck’s aim; and because he realised it so well he gained a reputation among the French public which nothing will destroy.  Debussy’s strength lies in the methods by which he has approached this ideal of musical temperateness and disinterestedness, and in the way he has placed his genius as a composer at the service of the drama.  He has never sought to dominate Maeterlinck’s poem, or to swallow it up in a torrent of music; he has made it so much a part of himself that at the present time no Frenchman is able to think of a passage in the play without Debussy’s music singing at the same time within him.

But apart from all these reasons that make the work important in the history of opera, there are purely musical reasons for its success, which are of deeper significance still.[200] Pelleas et Melisande has brought about a reform in the dramatic music of France.  This reform is concerned with several things, and, first of all, with recitative.

[Footnote 200:  That is for musicians.  But I am convinced that with the mass of the public the other reasons have more weight—­as is always the case.]

In France we have never had—­apart from a few attempts in opera-comique—­a recitative that exactly expressed our natural speech.  Lully and Rameau took for their model the high-flown declamation of the tragedy stage of their time.  And French opera for the past twenty years has chosen a more dangerous model still—­the declamation of Wagner, with its vocal leaps and its resounding and heavy accentuation.  Nothing could be more displeasing in French.  All people of taste suffered from it, though they did not admit it.  At this time, Antoine, Gemier, and Guitry were making theatrical declamation more natural, and this made the exaggerated declamation of the French opera appear more ridiculous and more archaic still.  And so a reform in recitative was inevitable.  Jean-Jacques Rousseau had foreseen it in the very direction in which Debussy[201] has accomplished it.  He showed in his Lettre sur la musique francaise that there was no connection between the inflections of French speech, “whose accents are so harmonious and simple,” and “the shrill and noisy intonations” of the recitative of French opera.  And he concluded by saying that the kind of recitative that would best suit us should “wander between little intervals, and neither raise nor lower the voice very much; and should have little sustained sound, no noise, and no cries of any description—­nothing, indeed, that resembled singing, and little inequality in the duration or value of the notes, or in their intervals.”  This is the very definition of Debussy’s recitative.

[Footnote 201:  We must also note that during the first half of the seventeenth century people of taste objected to the very theatrical declamation of French opera.  “Our singers believe,” wrote Mersenne, in 1636, “that the exclamations and emphasis used by the Italians in singing savour too much of tragedies and comedies, and so they do not wish to employ them.”]