George Moore has remarked that we never speak of Shakespeare or Hugo or Flaubert as the authors of any particular work. Simply to utter their names suffices. I give the illustrations haphazard. Any great artist will do. From Claude Debussy we never ask of what he is the composer. Pelléas and Mélisande is his monument; rather, Mélisande and Pelléas; as, in the case of Isolde and Tristan, it is the woman who is protagonist. Is it because in creating characters of our mother’s sex that the Eternal Masculine is projected across the feminine soul? Or, is woman the genuine, the aboriginal force, that we unwittingly obey, all the while calling her “little woman”? (condescendingly, of course). Oh, what a joke of almost cosmical proportions it would be if the latter supposition be the truer one! But mere male mortals may always console themselves with the ineluctable fact that it is man who has endowed woman with a vital figure in the arts. He has created Ophelia and Gretchen, Beatrice and Francesca, the Milo Venus, the Winged Victory and Isolde, Lady Macbeth and Emma Bovary, Carmen and Mélisande. Honors, then, are even. Even if models existed in nature, the art of man it was that shaped them and breathed life into their clay. But Mélisande is the protagonist in the drama. The music to Maurice Maeterlinck’s strangely haunting play is so wedded to the moods and situations that as absolute music it is unthinkable. And these moods are usually “con sordino.” Despite his musicianship, Debussy is obviously a “literary” composer; his brain had first to be excited by a dramatic situation, a beautiful bouquet of verse, an episode in fiction, or the contemplation of a picture. Why demand if the initial impulse be the Monna Lisa or a quatrain by Verlaine? A composer who can interpret in tone the recondite moods of Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarmé, or the dramatic prose-poem of Maeterlinck, need not have been daunted by criticism; in sooth, it is the angle of critical incidence that must be shifted to adapt itself to the new optique. Pelléas and Mélisande is a study in musical decomposition; the phrase is decomposed, rhythms are dislocated, the harmonic structure melts and resolves itself into air. His themes are developed in opposition to the old laws of musical syntax. But what have laws in common with genius? Once assimilated, they may be broken as were broken the stone tablets by the mighty iconoclast, Moses. Besides, every law has its holiday. In the Debussyan idiom there seems to be no normal sequence. I say seems, for much water has gone under the bridge since his appearance, and compared with Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Ornstein, and Prokofieff he is a conservative; in another decade he may be called a reactionary. Life is brief and art is swift.