The last two series of _Préludes_ show us his art yet more finely polished and concentrated. In general these twenty-four pieces are shorter and more concise than the _Estampes_ and the _Images_, certainly than the representative pieces in them--_Pagodes_, _Les jardins_, and _Reflets dans l’eau_. Most of them, moreover, are in his suggestive rather than his explicit manner. He accomplishes his end with a few strokes, and usually in a short space. The placing of the titles at the end rather than at the beginning of the pieces is an interesting point, too; for one cannot believe that such a finished artist as Debussy shows himself in these pieces to be would have sent his work before the public without a consciousness of the significance of such an arrangement. He does not, as it were, announce to his auditors his purpose, saying, imagine now this sound which you are about to hear as representing in music a picture of gardens through a steadily falling rain. He rather draws a line here upon his canvas and adds a point of color there, all in a moment, and then, having shown you first this strange beauty of combinations, says at the end you may now imagine a meaning in the west wind, a church sunk beneath the surface of the sea, a tribute to Mr. Pickwick, dead leaves, or what not in the way of exquisite and incomplete ideas. Many of these postscripts are significantly vague: _Voiles_, _Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l’air du soir_, _Des pas sur la neige_ (Alkan called a piece of his _Neige et lave_), _La terrasse des audiences du clair de lune_, etc. Yet, however vague the subject or the suggestion, there is a sort of epigrammatic clearness in the music. The rhythms are especially lithe and endlessly varied, the phrase-building concise yet never commonplace. There is a glitter of wit in nearly all, an unfailing sense of light and proportion. This, not the strange harmonies nor the imagery, seems to us the quality of his music that is typically French. There is infinite grace and subtlety; sensuousness in color, too, though it is spiritualized; but there is little that is sentimental.