The name is absent

Contemporary Music       139

dogmatic, and, for this reason, of all the greater value to
other musicians. Debussy held him in the highest esteem.
Influences such as his are as fertile soil, propitious to the
growth of rare flowers, wherein the individual conscious-
ness, the indispensable seed, nourished in better surround-
ings thus provided, may still unfold according to its own
essential nature, national, racial, or individual.

As often as not, the national consciousness is the creative
artist’s original source of inspiration. For example, the
objectivity and clarity of design exhibited by our earliest
composers furnished a rich heritage to our incomparable
C. A. Debussy, the most phenomenal genius in the history
of French music. Does this mean to say that Debussy was
only an imitator? Certainly not! Again, is the symbolism of
Debussy, his so-called impressionism, at variance with the
Gallic spirit? Quite the contrary, because beneath the fine
and delicate Iacework of atmospheric surface, one may
easily discover a refined precision of design, characteris-
tically French. His genius was obviously one of great indi-
viduality, creating its own laws, constantly in evolution,
expressing itself freely, yet always faithful to French tra-
dition. For Debu>ssy, the musician and the man, I have had
profound admiration, but by nature I am different from
Debussy, and while I consider that Debussy may not have
been altogether alien to my personal inheritance, I should
identify also with the earlier phase of my evolution Gabriel
Fauré, Emmanuel Chabrier, and Eric Satie. The æsthetie
of Edgar Allan Poe, your great American, has been of sin-
gular importance to me, and also the immaterial poetry of
Mallarmé—unbounded visions, yet precise in design, en-
closed in a mystery of sombre abstractions—an art where
all the elements are so intimately bound up together that
one cannot analyze, but only sense, its effect. Nevertheless

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