had been off Wagner’s desk for only seven years, that Richard Strauss was putting forth such tentative things as his Don Juan and Tod und Verklaerung, that the “revolutionary” Max Reger was a boy of sixteen, and that Debussy himself was not yet thirty, one is in a position forcibly to realize the early growth and the genuineness of his independence.  Adolphe Jullien, the veteran French critic, discerns in his earlier writing the influence of such Russians as Borodine, Rimsky-Korsakoff, and Mussorgsky—­a discovery which one finds some difficulty in crediting.  Later, Debussy was undoubtedly affected, in a slight degree, by Cesar Franck; and there were moments—­happily infrequent—­during what one may call his middle period, when a whiff of the perfumed sentiment of Massenet blew disturbingly across his usually sincere and poetic pages.  But for traces of Liszt, or Berlioz, or Brahms, one will search fruitlessly.  That he does not, to-day, touch hands at any point with his brother musicians of the elder school in France—­with such, for example, as the excellent and brilliant and superbly unimaginative Saint-Saens—­goes almost without saying.  With Vincent d’Indy, a musician of wholly antipodal qualities, he disputes the place of honor among the elect of the “younger” school (whose members are not so young as they are painted); and he is the worshiped idol of still younger Frenchmen who envy, depreciate, and industriously imitate his fascinating and dangerously luring art.  He has traveled far on the path of his particular destiny; not since Wagner has any modern music-maker perfected a style so saturated with personality—­there are far fewer derivations in his art than in the art of Strauss, through whose scores pace the ghosts of certain of the greater dead.  All that Wagner could teach him of the potency of dissonance, of structural freedom and elasticity, of harmonic daring, Debussy eagerly learned and applied, as a foundation, to his own intricately reasoned though spontaneous art; yet Wagner would have gasped alike at the novelty and the exquisite art of Pelleas et Melisande, of the Nocturnes, even of the comparatively early Prelude a l’Apres-midi d’un Faune; for this is music of a kind which may, indeed, have been dreamed of, but which certainly had never found its way upon paper, before Debussy quietly recorded it in his scores.

What is the secret principle of his method?—­if one can call that a “method” which is, in effect, nothing if not airily unmethodical, and that principle “secret” which is neither recondite nor perplexing.  It is simply that Debussy, instead of depending upon the strictly limited major and minor modes of the modern scale system, employs almost continuously, as the structural basis of his music, the mediaeval church modes, with their far greater latitude, freedom, and variety.  It is, to say the least, a novel procedure.  Other modern composers before Debussy had, of course, utilized