of form, underlying its seemingly unregulated processes.  It is the product of a temperament unique in music, though familiar enough in the modern expression of the other arts.  Debussy is of that clan who have uncompromisingly “turned their longing after the wind and wave of the mind.”  He is, as I have elsewhere written, of the order of those poets and dreamers who persistently heed, and seek to continue in their art, not the echoes of passional and adventurous experience, but the vibrations of the spirit beneath.  He is of the brotherhood of those mystical explorers, of peculiarly modern temper, who are perhaps most essentially represented in the plays and poetry and philosophies of Mr. Yeats and M. Maeterlinck:  those who dwell—­it has before been said—­“upon the confines of a crepuscular world whose every phase is full of subtle portent, and who are convinced (in the phrase of M. Maeterlinck himself) ’that there are in man many regions more fertile, more profound, and more interesting than those of his reason or his intelligence.’” It is an order of temperament for which the things of the marginal world of the mind are of transcendent consequence—­that world which is perpetually haunted, for those mystics who are also the slaves of beauty, by remote illusions and disquieting enchantments:  where it is not dreams, but the reflections of dreams, that obsess; where passion is less the desire of life than of the shadow of life.  It is a world of images and refractions, of visions and presentiments, a world which swims in dim and opalescent mists—­where gestures are adored and every footfall is charged with indescribable intimations; where, “even in the swaying of a hand or the dropping of unbound hair, there is less suggestion of individual action than of a divinity living within, shaping an elaborate beauty in a dream for its own delight.”  It is, for those who inhabit it, a world as exclusively preoccupying and authentic as it is, for those who do not, incredible and inaccessible.  The reports of it, intense and gleaming as they may be, which are contained in the art of such of its inhabitants as Debussy, are, admittedly, little likely to conciliate the unbeliever.  This is music which it is hopeless to attempt to justify or promote.  It persuades, or it does not; one is attuned to it, or one is not.  For those who do savor and value it, it is reasonable only to attempt some such notation of its qualities as is offered here.

Debussy’s ancestry is not easily traced.  Wagner, whom he has amused himself by decrying in the course of his critical excursions, shaped certain aspects of his style.  In some of the early songs one realizes quite clearly his indebtedness to the score of Tristan; yet in these very songs—­say the Harmonie du Soir and La Mort des Amants (composed in 1889-1890)—­there are amazingly individual pages:  pages which even to-day sound ultra-modern.  And when one recalls that at the time these songs were written the score of Parsifal