yet it spoke without emphasis:  indirectly, flexibly, with fluid and unpredictable expression.  It was eloquent beyond denial, yet its reticence, its economy of gesture, were extreme—­were, indeed, the very negation of emphasis.  Is it strange that such music—­hesitant, evasive, dream-filled, strangely ecstatic, with its wistful and twilight loveliness, its blended subtlety and simplicity—­should have been as difficult to trace to any definite source as it was, for the general, immensely astonishing and unexpected?  There was nothing like it to be found in Wagner, or in his more conspicuous and triumphant successors—­in, so to speak, the direct and royal line.  Richard Strauss was, clearly, not writing in that manner; nor were the brother musicians of Debussy in his own France; nor, quite as obviously, were the Russians.  The immediate effect of its strangeness and newness was, of course, to direct the attention of the larger world of music, within Paris and without, to the artistic personality and the previous attainments of the man who had surprisingly put forth such incommensurable music.

Achille[1] Claude Debussy was born at St. Germain-en-Laye (Seine-et-Oise), France, August 22, 1862.  He was still a youth when he entered the Paris Conservatory, where he studied harmony under Lavignac, composition under Guiraud, and piano playing with Marmontel.  He was only fourteen when he won the first medal for solfege, and fifteen when he won the second pianoforte prize.

[1] He no longer uses the first of these given names.

In 1884, when he was in his twenty-second year, his cantata, l’Enfant prodigue, won for him the Prix de Rome by a majority of twenty-two out of twenty-eight votes—­it is said to have been the unanimous opinion of the jury that the score was “one of the most interesting that had been heard at the Institut for years.”  While at the Villa Medicis he composed, in 1887, his Printemps for chorus and orchestra, and, in the following year, his setting of Rossetti’s “Blessed Damozel,” of which the authorities at the Conservatory saw fit to disapprove because of certain liberties which Debussy even then was taking with established and revered traditions.  He performed his military service upon his return from Rome; and there is a tradition told, as bearing upon his love of recondite sonorities, to the effect that while at Evreux he delighted in the harmonic clash caused by the simultaneous sounding of the trumpet call for the extinguishing of lights and the sustained vibrations of some neighboring convent bells.  From this time forward his output was persistent and moderately copious.  To the year 1888 belong, in addition to La Demoiselle Elue, the remarkably individual “Ariettes,"[2] six settings for voice and piano of poems by Verlaine.  To 1889-1890 belong the Fantaisie for piano and orchestra and the striking “Cinq Poemes de Baudelaire” (Le Balcon, Harmonie