The delicacy and yet the sharpness with which he has reproduced qualities in outlandish music must be noticed. In earlier music he gave proof of his insight into the essentials of other systems of music than the French, or the German which has been considered the international. The _Suite Bergamasque_ has a local color. There is Oriental stuff in _Pagodes_, Spanish and Moorish in _La soirée dans Grenade_, Egyptian in _Et la lune_. Traces of Greek or of ecclesiastical modes are abundant. Here, in the _Préludes_ all this and more too has he caught. Greece in _Danseuses de Delphes_, Italy in _Les collines d’Anacapri_, the old church in _La cathédrale_, Spain in _La puerta del Vino_, cake-walks in _General Lavine_, England in _Pickwick_, and Egypt in _Canope_. There seems a touch of the North, too, in the exquisite little pieces, _La fille aux cheveux de lin_. In this way alone Debussy has rejuvenated music, doing more than others had done. Finally, it would be hard to find more essence of comedy and wit in music than one finds in Debussy’s _Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum_ in the ‘Children’s Corner,’ with its ludicrous play on the erstwhile sacred formulas of technical study. This alone should place him among the wits of a century. The _Sérénade interrompue_ and ‘Puck’s Dance’ are both full of mockery. Then there is the eccentric General Lavine, and, perhaps most laughable of all, the merry homage to Pickwick, made up of ‘God Save the King’ and a jig in the English style. No one can say what the future of his music will be, nor how it will be related to the general development in music by students a hundred years hence. Yet it is certain that it recommends itself to pianists at present because it has expanded the technique of the instrument. It is made up in part of effects which, as we have said, if they are not new in principle, are newly applied and expanded. He has developed resources in the instrument which had not before been more than suggested. His pieces bring into striking prominence the qualities of after-sound and sympathetic vibrations or overtones in the piano, which are as much its possession and as uniquely so as the bell-like qualities it had before been chiefly called upon to produce. Therefore though his accomplishments in harmony and form, in the possibilities of music in general, may be regarded with a changed eye in the years to come, and though he may even some day appear in many ways reactionary, because he has once more associated music with ideas and weakened the independence of its life; yet as far as the pianoforte is concerned he is the greatest innovator since Chopin and Liszt. VI