The name is absent

Debussy: The Preludes 161
were largely predetermined by certain fundamental ways
of thinking and feeling characteristic of the epoch in which
they lived, and in which such outwardly contrasting forms
of art as the brutal and naturalistic novels of Zola and the
delicate, impressionistic poetry of a Verlaine both took
their source.

In “Monsieur Croche anti-dilletante”,¹ Debussy has oc-
casion to speak of Karl Maria von Weber and suggests that
he, Weber, was perhaps the first among musicians to be
“troubled by the relationship which must exist between the
manifold soul of nature and the soul of a human being”.
It would be difficult to state more concisely an idea which,
though not new—in France it has been, in one form or
another, a source of inspiration to writers ever since
the days of Rousseau and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre—was
a central notion of the symbolists’ Weltanschauung and a
prime factor in Debussy’s own personal attitude toward the
world of nature. Your English poet, Byron, in a stanza
which Liszt inscribed on the fly-leaf of his “Bells of
Geneva”, has suggested the same thought from a slightly
different angle :

“I live not in myself, but I become
Portion of that around me; and to me
High mountains are a feeling.”

(Childe Harold III, 72)

But the lines which are usually quoted in this connection
and in which the idea is accompanied by the specifically sym-
bolist note of mystery and of sensuous revery, are these
verses of Baudelaire :

¹The title of the volume in which Debussy published some of the critical
articles which he wrote for the Revue Blanche and Gil Blas, in 1901 and
1903, respectively. In these essays, quite bristling with irony and paradox,
he affirms, as one might expect him to do, his predilection for works of
taste and refinement, for such men as Mozart, Couperin, Rameau, Watteau
and Racine.

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