As for Debussy’s harmonic language, his originality does not consist, as some of his foolish admirers have said, in the invention of new chords, but in the new use he makes of them.  A man is not a great artist because he makes use of unresolved sevenths and ninths, consecutive major thirds and ninths, and harmonic progressions based on a scale of whole tones; one is only an artist when one makes them say something.  And it is not on account of the peculiarities of Debussy’s style—­of which one may find isolated examples in great composers before him, in Chopin, Liszt, Chabrier, and Richard Strauss—­but because with Debussy these peculiarities are an expression of his personality, and because Pelleas et Melisande, “the land of ninths,” has a poetic atmosphere which is like no other musical drama ever written.

Lastly, the orchestration is purposely restrained, light, and divided, for Debussy has a fine disdain for those orgies of sound to which Wagner’s art has accustomed us; it is as sober and polished as a fine classic phrase of the latter part of the seventeenth century. Ne quid nimis ("Nothing superfluous”) is the artist’s motto.  Instead of amalgamating the timbres to get a massive effect, he disengages their separate personalities, as it were, and delicately blends them without changing their individual nature.  Like the impressionist painters of to-day, he paints with primary colours, but with a delicate moderation that rejects anything harsh as if it were something unseemly.

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I have given more than enough reasons to account for the success of Pelleas et Melisande and the place that its admirers give it in the history of opera.  There is every reason to believe that the composer has not been as acutely conscious of his musico-dramatic reform as his disciples have been.  The reform with him has a more instinctive character; and that is what gives it its strength.  It responds to an unconscious yet profound need of the French spirit.  I would even venture to say that the historical importance of Debussy’s work is greater than its artistic value.  His personality is not without faults, and the gravest are perhaps negative faults—­the absence of certain qualities, and even of the strong and extravagant faults which made the heroes of the art world, like Beethoven and Wagner.  His voluptuous nature is at once changeable and precise; and his dreams are as clear and delicate as the art of a poet of the Pleiades in the sixteenth century, or of a Japanese painter.  But among all his gifts he has a quality which I have not found so evident in any other musician—­except perhaps Mozart; and this quality is a genius for good taste.  Debussy has it in excess, so that he almost sacrifices the other elements of art to it, until the passionate force of his music, even its very life, seems to be impoverished.  But one must not deceive oneself; that impoverishment is only apparent, and