He wishes that
all about it shall be painting and poetry; that it shall explain its
true feeling in a clear and direct way; and that melody, harmony, and
rhythm shall develop broadly along the lines of inner laws, and not
after the pretended laws of some intellectual arrangement. And he
himself preaches by example in his _Pelleas et Melisande_, and breaks
with all the principles of the Bayreuth drama, and gives us the model of
the new art of his dreams. And on all sides discerning and well-informed
critics, such as M. Pierre Lalo of _Le Temps_, M. Louis Laloy of the
_Revue Musicale_ and the _Mercure Musicale_, and M. Marnold of _Le
Mercure de France_, have championed his doctrines and his art. Even the
_Schola Cantorum_, whose eclectic and archaic spirit is very different
from that of Debussy, seemed at first to be drawn into the same current
of thought; and this school which had so helped to propagate the foreign
influences of the past, did not seem to be quite insensible to the
nationalistic preoccupation of the last few years. So the _Schola_
devoted itself more and more--as was moreover its right and duty--to the
French music of the past, and filled its concert programmes with French
works of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries--with Marc Antoine
Charpentier, Du Mont, Leclair, Clerambault, Couperin, and the French
primitive composers for the organ, the harpsichord, and the violin; and
with the works of dramatic composers, especially of the great Rameau,
who, after a period of complete oblivion, suddenly benefited by this
excessive reaction, to the detriment of Gluck, whom the young critics,
following M.
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