One summer evening in 1903 I was introduced to him at a café on the Boulevard des Italiens. Debussy spoke a few polite words when I told him that I belonged to the critical chain-gang. He had written much musical criticism, chiefly memorable for its unsympathetic attitude toward Schubert and Wagner, not because of reasons chauvinistic, but doubtless the result of a natural reaction against the principal educative forces in his life. At least once in his career an artist curses his artistic progenitors. Wagner must have hated Weber because of his borrowings from him, and I am quite sure Chopin despised Hummel; internal evidence may be collated in the Pole’s wide departure from the academic patterns of Hummel’s passage-work. However, Debussy never went so far as his friend Jean Marnold, who in the Mercure de France concludes a comparative study of Pelléas and Tristan in these words: “Le pathos de Tristan vient trop tard; si tard, qu’il semble aujourd’hui, à sa place adéquate en notre Opéra toulousain.” Yet if Tristan came so late, how is it that there is so much of its music in Pelléas? a fact that Philip Hale doubts. There’s the score. Who steals my idea steals trash; ’tis something, nothing; ’twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands; but he that filches from me my style robs me of that which not enriches him and makes me poor indeed! (This is reorchestrated to suit the simile.) Tristan always seems to be waiting in the wings when Pelléas is played, awaiting his cue to enter. It never fails to be given by Debussy. Later I asked Maurice Maeterlinck his opinion of Debussy’s music to Pelléas and Mélisande. It was an imprudent question, for Lucienne Bréval had captured the rôle of Mélisande, not Georgette Leblanc. Maeterlinck is a polite man, and his answer was guarded; nevertheless, his dislike of the music pierced his phrases. To him it was evident that his play needed no tonal embellishment, that it was more poetic, more dramatic, without the Debussy frame. He is quite right. And yet the spiritual collaboration of poet and musician is irresistible. And in the garden of the gods there is only one Mélisande. Some little dramas, like little books, have their destiny. The composer of Pelléas and Mélisande suffered from the nostalgia of the ideal, suffered from homesickness for his patrie psychique, the land of fantasy and evanescent visions. The world will not willingly forget him. VI THE ARTISTIC TEMPERAMENT