Ravel and Debussy are of one lineage. They both issue from what is deeply, graciously temperate in the genius of France. Across the span of centuries, they touch hands with the men who first expressed that silver temperance in tone, with Claude Le Jeune, with Rameau and Couperin and the other clavecinists. Undiverted by the changes of revolutionary times, they continue, in forms conditioned by the modern feeling for color, for tonal complexity, for supple and undulant rhythm, the high tradition of the elder music.

Claude Le Jeune wrote motets; the eighteenth-century masters wrote gavottes and rigadoons, forlanas and chaconnes, expressed themselves in courtly dances and other set and severe forms. Ravel and Debussy compose in more liberal and naturalistic fashion. And yet, the genius that animates all this music is single. It is as though all these artists, born so many hundred years apart from each other, had contemplated the pageant of their respective times from the same point of view. It is as though they faced the problems of composition with essentially the same attitudes, with the same demands and reservations. The new music, like the old, is the work of men above all reverent of the art of life itself. It is the work of men of the sort who crave primarily in all conduct restraint, and who insist on poise and good sense. They regard all things humanly, and bring their regard for the social values to the making of their art. Indeed, the reaction of Debussy from Wagnerism was chiefly the reaction of a profoundly socialized and aristocratic sensibility outraged by over-emphasis and unrestraint. The men of whom he is typical throughout the ages never forget the world and its decencies and its demands. And yet they do not eschew the large, the grave, the poignant. The range of human passions is present in their music, too, even though many of them have not had gigantic powers, or entertained emotions as grand and intense as the world-consuming, world-annihilating mysticism of a Bach, for instance. But it is shadowed forth more than stated. If many of them have been deeply melancholy, they have nevertheless taken counsel with themselves, and have said, with Baudelaire:

All expression is made in low, aristocratic tone, in grisaille. Most often it achieves itself through a silvery grace. It is normal for these men to be profound through grace, to be amusing and yet artistically upright. It is normal for them to articulate nicely. High in their consciousness there flame always the commandments of clarity, of delicacy, of precision. Indeed, so repeatedly have temperaments of this character appeared in France, not only in her music, but also in her letters and other arts, from the time of the PlÉiade, to that of Charles Louis Philippe and AndrÉ Gide and Henri de Regnier, that it is difficult not to hold theirs the centrally, essentially French tradition, and not to see in men like Rabelais only the Frank, and in men like Berlioz only the atavism to Gallo-Roman times.

But it is not only the spirit of French classicism that Ravel and Debussy inherit. In one respect their art is the continuation of the music that came to a climax in the works of Haydn and Mozart. It is subtle and intimate, and restores to the auditor the great creative rÔle assigned to him by so much of the music before Beethoven. The music of Haydn and Mozart defers to its hearer. It seeks deliberately to enlist his activity. It relies for its significance largely upon his contribution. The music itself carries only a portion of the composer's intention. It carries only enough to ignite and set functioning the auditor's imagination. To that person is reserved the pleasure of fathoming the intention, of completing the idea adumbrated by the composer. For Haydn and Mozart did not desire that the listener assume a completely passive attitude. They had too great a love and respect of their fellows. They were eager to secure their collaboration, had confidence that they could comprehend all that the music intimated, regarded them as equals in the business of creation. But the music written since their time has forced upon the hearer a more and more passive rÔle. The composers arrogated to themselves, to varying extents, the greater part of the activity; insisted upon giving all, of doing the larger share of the labor. The old intimacy was lost; with Wagner the intellectual game of the leit-motif system was substituted for the creative exercise. The art of Ravel and Debussy returns to the earlier strategy. It makes the largest effort to excite the creative imagination, that force which William Blake identified with the Saviour Himself. It strives continually to lure it into the most energetic participation. And because Ravel and Debussy have this incitement steadily in view, their music is a music of few strokes, comparable indeed to the pictural art of Japan which it so often recalls. It is the music of suggestion, of sudden kindlings, brief starts and lines, small forms. It never insists. It only pricks. It instigates, begins, leaves off, and then continues, rousing to action the hearer's innate need of an aim and an order and meaning in things. Its subtle gestures, its brief, sharp, delicate phrases, its quintessentiality, are like the thrusting open of doors into the interiors of the conscience, the opening of windows on long vistas, are like the breaking of light upon obscured memories and buried emotions. They are like the unsealing of springs long sealed, suffering them to flow again in the night. And for a glowing instant, they transform the auditor from a passive receiver into an artist.

And there is much besides that Ravel and Debussy have in common. They have each been profoundly influenced by Russian music, "Daphnis et ChloÉ" showing the influence of Borodin, "PellÉas et MÉlisande" that of Moussorgsky. Both have made wide discoveries in the field of harmony. Both have felt the power of outlying and exotic modes. Both have been profoundly impressed by the artistic currents of the Paris about them. Both, like so many other French musicians, have been kindled by the bright colors of Spain, Ravel in his orchestral Rhapsody, in his one-act opera "L'Heure espagnol" and in the piano-piece in the collection "Miroirs" entitled "Alborada del Graciozo," Debussy in "IbÉria" and in some of his preludes. Indeed, a parallelism exists throughout their respective works. Debussy writes "Homage À Rameau"; Ravel "Le Tombeau de Couperin." Debussy writes "Le Martyre de Saint-SÉbastien"; Ravel projects an oratorio, "Saint-FranÇois d'Assise." Ravel writes the "Ondine" of the collection entitled "Gaspard de la nuit"; Debussy follows it with the "Ondine" of his second volume of preludes. Both, during the same year, conceive and execute the idea of setting to music the lyrics of MallarmÉ entitled "Soupir" and "Placet futile." Nevertheless, this fact constitutes Ravel in no wise the imitator of Debussy. His work is by no means, as some of our critics have made haste to insist, a counterfeit of his elder's. Did the music of Ravel not demonstrate that he possesses a sensibility quite distinct from Debussy's, in some respects less fine, delicious, lucent, in others perhaps even more deeply engaging; did it not represent a distinct development from Debussy's art in a direction quite its own, one might with justice speak of a discipleship. But in the light of Ravel's actual accomplishment, of his large and original and attractive gift, of the magistral craftsmanship that has shown itself in so many musical forms, from the song and the sonatine to the string-quartet and the orchestral poem, of the talent that has revealed itself increasingly from year to year, and that not even the war and the experience of the trenches has driven underground, the parallelism is to be regarded as necessitated by the spiritual kinship of the men, and by their contemporaneity.

And, certainly, nothing so much reveals Ravel the peer of Debussy as the fact that he has succeeded so beautifully in manifesting what is peculiar to him. For he is by ten years Debussy's junior, and were he less positive an individuality, less original a temperament, less fully the genius, he could never have realized himself. There would have descended upon him the blight that has fallen upon so many of the younger Parisian composers less determinate than he and like himself made of one stuff with Debussy. He, too, would have permitted the art of the older and well-established man to impose upon him. He, too, would have betrayed his own cause in attempting to model himself upon the other man. But Debussy has not swerved nor hampered Ravel any more than has his master, Gabriel FaurÉ. He is too sturdily set in his own direction. From the very commencement of his career, from the time when he wrote the soft and hesitating and nevertheless already very personal "Pavane pour une Infante dÉfunte," he has maintained himself proudly against his great collateral, just as he has maintained himself against what is false and epicene in the artistic example of FaurÉ. Within their common limits, he has realized himself as essentially as Debussy has done. Their music is the new and double blossoming of the classical French tradition. From the common ground, they stretch out each in a different direction, and form the greater contrast to each other because of all they have in common.

The intelligence that fashioned the music of Debussy was one completely aware, conscious of itself, flooded with light in its most secret places, set four-square in the whirling universe. Few artists have been as sure of their intention as Debussy always was. The man could fix with precision the most elusive emotions, could describe the sensations that flow on the borderland of consciousness, vaguely, and that most of us cannot grasp for very dizziness. He could write music as impalpable as that of the middle section of "IbÉria," in which the very silence of the night, the caresses of the breeze, seem to have taken musical flesh. Before the body of his work, so clear and lucid in its definition, so perfect in its organization, one thinks perforce of a world created out of the flying chaos beneath him by a god. We are given to know precisely of what stuff the soul of Debussy was made, what its pilgrimages were, in what adventure it sought itself out. We know precisely wherein it saw reflected its visage, in "water stilled at even," in the angry gleam of sunset on wet leaves, in wild and headlong gipsy rhythms, in moonfire, shimmering stuffs and flashing spray, in the garish lights and odors of the Peninsula, in rain fallen upon flowering parterres, in the melancholy march of clouds, the golden pomp and ritual of the church, the pools and gardens and pavilions reared for its delight by the delicate Chinese soul, in earth's thousand scents and shells and colors. For Debussy has set these adventures before us in their fullness. Before he spoke, he had dwelt with his experiences till he had plumbed them fully, till he had seen into and around and behind them clearly. And so we perceive them in their essences, in their eternal aspects. The designs are the very curve of the ecstasy. They are sheerly delimited. The notes appear to bud one out of the other, to follow each other out of the sheerest necessity, to have an original timbre, to fix a matter never known before, that can never live again. Every moment in a representative composition of Debussy's is logical and yet new. Few artists have more faultlessly said what they set out to say.

Ravel is by no means as perfect an artist. He has not the clear self-consciousness, the perfect recognition of limits. His music has not the absolute completeness of Debussy's. It is not that he is not a marvelous craftsman, greatly at ease in his medium. It is that Ravel dares, and dares continually; seeks passionately to bring his entire body into play; aspires to plenitude of utterance, to sheerness and rigidity of form. Ravel always goes directly through the center. But compare his "Rapsodie espagnol" with Debussy's "IbÉria" to perceive how direct he is. Debussy gives the circumambient atmosphere, Ravel the inner form. Between him and Debussy there is the difference between the apollonian and the dionysiac, between the smooth, level, contained, perfect, and the darker, more turbulent, passionate, and instinctive. For Ravel has been vouchsafed a high grace. He has been permitted to remain, in all his manhood, the child that once we all were. In him the powerful and spontaneous flow of emotion from out the depths of being has never been dammed. He can still speak from the fullness of his heart, cry his sorrows piercingly, produce himself completely. Gracious and urbane as his music is, proper to the world of modern things and modern adventures and modern people, there is still a gray, piercing lyrical note in it that is almost primitive, and reflects the childlike singleness and intensity of the animating spirit. The man who shaped not only the deliberately infantine "Ma MÈre l'Oye," but also things as quiveringly simple and expressive and songful as "Oiseaux tristes," as "Sainte," as "Le Gibet," or the "Sonatine," as the passacaglia of the Trio or the vocal interlude in "Daphnis et ChloÉ," has a pureness of feeling that we have lost. And it is this crying, passionate tone, this directness of expression, this largeness of effort, even in tiny forms and limited scope, that, more than his polyphonic style or any other of the easily recognizable earmarks of his art, distinguishes his work from Debussy's. The other man has a greater sensuousness, completeness, inventiveness perhaps. But Ravel is full of a lyricism, a piercingness, a passionateness, that much of the music of Debussy successive to "PellÉas" wants. We understand Ravel's music, in the famous phrase of Beethoven, as speech "vom Herz—zu Herzen."

And we turn to it gratefully, as we turn to all art full of the "sense of tears in mortal things," and into which the pulse of human life has passed directly. For there are times when he is close to the bourne of life, when his art is immediately the orifice of the dark, flowering, germinating region where lie lodged the dynamics of the human soul. There are times when it taps vasty regions. There are times when Ravel has but to touch a note, and we unclose; when he has but to let an instrument sing a certain phrase, and things which lie buried deep in the heart rise out of the dark, like the nymph in his piano-poem, dripping with stars. The music of "Daphnis," from the very moment of the introduction with its softly unfolding chords, its far, glamorous fanfares, its human throats swollen with songs, seems to thrust open doors into the unplumbed caverns of the soul, and summon forth the stuff to shape the dream. Little song written since Weber set his horns a-breathing, or Brahms transmuted the witchery of the German forest into tone, is more romantic. Over it might be set the invocation of Heine:

Like the passage that ushers in the last marvelous scene of his great ballet, it seems to waken us from the unreal world to the real, and show us the face of the earth, and the overarching blue once more.

And Ravel is at once more traditional and more progressive a composer than Debussy. One feels the past most strongly in him. Debussy, with his thoroughly impressionistic style, is more the time. No doubt there is a certain almost Hebraic melancholy and sharp lyricism in Ravel's music which gives some color to the rumor that he is Jewish. And yet, for all that, one feels Rameau become modern in his sober, gray, dainty structures, in the dryness of his black. In "Le Tombeau de Couperin," Ravel is the old clavecinist become contemporary of Scriabine and Strawinsky, the old clavecinist who had seen the projectiles fall at Verdun and lost a dozen friends in the trenches. He finds it easy, as in some of his recent songs, to achieve the folktone. If it is true that he is a Jew, then his traditionalism is but one more brilliant instance of the power of France to adopt the children of alien races and make them more intensely her own than some of her proper offspring. In no other instance, however, not in that of Lully nor in that of Franck, has the transfusion of blood been so successful. Ravel is in no wise treacherous to himself. There must be something in the character of the French nation that makes of every Jew, if not a son, yet the happiest and most faithful of stepchildren.

And as one feels the past more strongly in Ravel, so, too, one finds him in certain respects even more revolutionary than Debussy. For while the power of the latter flagged in the making of strangely MacDowellesque preludes, or in the composition of such ghosts as "Gigues" and "Jeux" and "Karma," Ravel has continued increasingly in power, has developed his art until he has come to be one of the leaders of the musical evolution. If there is a single modern composition which can be compared to "Petruchka" for its picture of mass-movement, its pungent naturalism, it is the "Feria" of the "Rapsodie espagnol." If there is a single modern orchestral work that can be compared to either of the two great ballets of Strawinsky for rhythmical vitality, it is "Daphnis et ChloÉ," with its flaming dionysiac pulses, its "pipes and timbrels," its wild ecstasy. The same delicate clockwork mechanism characterizes "L'Heure espagnol," his opera bouffe, that characterizes "Petruchka" and "Le Rossignol." A piano-poem like "Scarbo" rouses the full might of the piano, and seems to bridge the way to the music of Leo Ornstein and the age of steel. And Ravel has some of the squareness, the sheerness and rigidity for which the ultra-modern are striving. The liquescence of Debussy has given away again to something more metallic, more solid and unflowing. There is a sort of new stiffness in this music. And in the field of harmony Ravel is steadily building upon Debussy. His chords grow sharper and more biting; in "Le Tombeau de Couperin" and the minuet on the name of Haydn there is a harmonic daring and subtlety and even bitterness that is beyond anything attained by Debussy, placing the composer with the Strawinskys and the Schoenbergs and the Ornsteins and all the other barbarians.

And then his ironic humor, as well, distinguishes him from Debussy. The humor of the latter was, after all, light and whimsical. That of Ravel, on the other hand, is extremely bitter. No doubt, the "icy" Ravel, the artist "À qui l'absence de sensibilitÉ fait encore une personalitÉ," as one of the quirites termed him, never existed save in the minds of those unable to comprehend his reticence and delicacy and essentiality. Nevertheless, besides his lyrical, dreamy, romantic temper, he has a very unsentimental vein, occurring no doubt, as in Heine, as a sort of corrective, a sort of compensation, for the pervading sensibleness. And so we find the tender poet of the "Sonatine" and the string-quartet and "Miroirs" writing the witty and mordant music of "L'Heure espagnol"; setting the bitter little "Histoires naturelles" of Jules Renard for chant, writing in "Valses nobles et sentimentales" a slightly ironical and disillusioned if smiling and graceful and delicate commentary to the season of love, projecting a music-drama on the subject of Don Quixote. Over his waltzes Ravel maliciously sets a quotation from Henri de Regnier: "Le plaisir dÉlicieux et toujours nouveau d'une occupation inutile." With Casella, he writes a musical "A la maniÈre de," parodying Wagner, d'Indy, Chabrier, Strauss and others most wittily. Something of Eric Satie, the clown of music, exists in him, too. And probably nothing makes him so inexplicable and irritating to his audiences as his ironic streak. People are willing to forgive an artist all, save only irony.

What the future holds for Maurice Ravel is known only to the three norns. But, unless some unforeseen accident occur and interrupt his career, it can only hold the most brilliant rewards. The man seems surely bound for splendid shores. He is only in the forty-fifth year of his life, and though his genius was already fresh and subtle in the Quartet, written as early as 1903, it has grown beautifully in power during the last two decades. The continued exploration of musical means has given his personality increasingly free play, and has unbound him. The gesture of the hand has grown swifter and more commanding. The instruments have become more obedient. He has matured, become virile and even magistral. The war has not softened him. He speaks as intimately as ever in "Le Tombeau de Couperin." Already one can see in him one of the most delightful and original musical geniuses that have been nourished by the teeming soil of France. It is possible that the future will refer to him in even more enthusiastic tone.