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160 Lectures on Modem Music

my armor. Consequently, I presented to the master a well
forged mechanism whose every bolt had been tightened
with a wrench.

“To my great embarrassment, Debussy did not seem
to appreciate these scruples of a professional adjuster.
After giving his approval to the ideas which formed the
nucleus of my work and after appreciating the logic of
their sequence, he begged me, with ironic gentleness, to re-
move all the artifices of style which assured the solidity of
the construction, to loosen the pitiless bolts of every con-
junctive locution, to abandon the consequently!, the buts,
the fors and the Iiowevers which held things together like
so many rivets and mortises. He carefully cut what elec-
tricians call ‘the connections’. Wherever I had sought to
tie two propositions together, he intervened and, with a
delicate snap of his scissors, set the phrases afloat. Like
a master architect who selects and orders his materials so
well that he needs no cement for the construction of a vault,
Debussy isolated my arguments, gave them air and free-
dom. And when the task was finished, I could not but
recognize that all these ‘unharnessed’ phrases ran more
surely and quickly to their destination than the verbal train
whose carriages I had so conscientiously coupled together.”

This desire to conceal art by art, to suggest, imply and
insinuate rather than to state outright the hidden relation-
ships which guide the sequence of one’s ideas, is thoroughly
characteristic of Debussy’s music and is likewise a master
motive in the technique of symbolist and impressionist
poetry. There are other obvious points of contact between
Debussy and the symbolists and we can consider with profit,
for a few moments, the common aspects of their art. But
in so doing, however, we would do well to remember that
both the music of Debussy and the poetry of the symbolists

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