render us oblivious of the sight of Falstaffian sopranos and rotund tenors, and all those lamentable increases to which the singer's flesh is peculiarly heir. But this is impossible with the Frenchman Debussy. He has grown up too close to the best traditions of the oldest schools of the dramatic art. His characters must look and act, as well as chant their rôles.

It may be stated unreservedly though, that the closely woven, delicate filigree web of Debussy's workmanship in his music-drama cannot support a wide arena. The performances at Covent Garden were given with a nicety and care most unwonted in the frugal procedure of that institution. But Covent Garden was big enough to engulf Debussy, just as His Majesty's Theatre was small enough miserably to cramp the massive, rockhewn substance of Ethel Smyth's opera The Wreckers. Pelléas et Mélisande at His Majesty's and The Wreckers at Covent Garden, on the other hand, would have provided better evidence of the artistic perspicacity of the respective managers concerned; and would, moreover, have enabled inquiringly interested audiences to judge and appreciate each work in its proper proportions and values.

Music, as we are beginning to understand it in the present age, reveals itself more and more clearly as the one distinctive art medium shared by the cosmopolitan civilizations of our era that older races lacked. But art, like history, after all can never be any thing else than a mirror reflecting the changelessness of life and death against the ceaseless shifting of environment. The trio of classic Greek tragedians would be quick to perceive in Maeterlinck's play certain parts of a legacy inherited directly from themselves. Debussy's music would have to afford them wholly curious and novel sensations. We can picture

them listening with puzzled, inquisitive, but ever quickening comprehension and pleasure. It is even not beyond credence to imagine a serious colloquy across the centuries between these three. tle that choruses, messengers, gods in -and out-of the machine, what not, might well be summarily ejected from their dramatic appurtenances, since our modern orchestra is there to color as well as to frame their picture. And how gorgeously beautiful the Greek language would sound chanted in Debussy's monodies against a twentiethcentury orchestral background! Whether either Eschylus or Sophocles or Euripides would definitely elect M. Debussy to supply his special needs, donne à penser.3

They might finally set

Maeterlinck would doubtless proffer strenuous advice in the negative. For his own plays M. Maeterlinck does not approve of musical settings of any kind. But more especially has he vetoed Debussy's treatment. He dismisses Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande as "a thing entirely foreign to him." Nevertheless there is a peculiar quality in Maeterlinck's art which to a musician irresistibly evokes the expedience and cogency of a musical setting. This quality has been felt by both Mr. Bernard Shaw and Mr. Ernest Newman, two critics equally keen in the study of verbal euphony and musical fitness.

skeleton, the scaffolding, of an emotional effect. They read almost like a libretto, without its music.

But it is one thing to deepen and emphasize the effect of what Mr. Shaw further delineates as "fragile word-music," and another to catch the pulsebeat and slow onward sweep of a tragedy. Subdued, slight, vague as may be Maeterlinck's outlines, and whatever other defects his play may possess, his Pelléas et Mélisande must be acknowledged to sound the true tragic chord.

Beethoven told us several times what tragedy can mean in music. Schumann has done so in his Faust; Wagner in Tristan; Verdi in Othello. Has Debussy caught the beat of it in Pelléas et Mélisande? In view of the immense delight that this miraculous score of his can never fail to afford one's purely musical sense, the query comes with all diffidence. From his opening bars the glamor of his orchestra is upon us. He makes us, too, forget footlights and all the artifices of scenic stage appliances. We are with him in the silence and mystery, the glimmer and dimness, of the forest. He echoes the melancholy cadence of the sea. He catches the fleeting beauty of the clouds. All of this, the innermost spirit of his own art, happens by a fortuitous coincidence to be also the Maeterlinckian landscape in its every touch. Debussy has given it to us repeatedly. It is there in the symphonic poems of La Mer or Nuages, as well as in those delightful pianoforte pieces and songs of his.

As to the Electra of Sophocles-in the performances at the Court Theatre a fortnight ago the author would scarcely have failed to appreciate the slight but most pregnant touches sup

4 "Musical Studies," Ernest Newman, John Lane London 1905. In his considerations of Maeterlinck and music, Mr. Newman seems oddly enough still to have been unacquainted with Debussy, since he makes no mention of him, drawing his deductions chiefly from an hypothesis of presumable Wagnerian modes of handling.

plied by Mr. Granville Bantock's music. Here was something quite apart from the thin, droning dulness which more than one British composer has tried to foist upon Greek tragedy. Sophocles, as we all know, was a past-master at the psychology of the tenacious woman with a grievance. In Electra he gives her full tongue. The type lives on. In the present day Sophocles would write a new Electra. He would call it Mrs. Pankhurst, with chorus. Mr. Granville Bantock would be commissioned for music, and would, it is to be hoped, be given free latitude to double his orchestra, quadruple his chorus and intersperse his melodrame plenteously.

In his exquisite music to the love scenes between Mélisande and Pelléas again he probes right inside the rapture and youth, and yet the austere fervor and purity and reverence, of the Maeterlinck conception. Nor has any more beautiful child-study in music ever been penned than his portrayal of Yniold. One only begins first really to be forced to hesitate when it comes to Debussy's psychology of the old king, Arkel.

Je suis très vieux et cependant n'ai pas encore vu clair, un instant, en moimême; comment voulez-vous que je juge ce que d'autres ont fait? Je ne suis pas loin du tombeau et je ne parviens pas à me juger moi-même. . . . On se trompe toujours lorsqu'on ne ferme pas les yeux pour pardonner, ou pour mieux regarder en soi-même. nous semble étrange; et voilà tout. Cela nous semble étrange, parceque nous ne voyons jamais que l'envers des destinées l'envers même de la L'âme humaine est . . L'âme hu

nôtre.

très silencieuse. maine aime à s'en aller seule elle souffre timidement

Cela

elle souffre si Mais la tristesse mais la tristesse de tout ce que l'on voit. . oh! oh! oh! Si

j'étais Dieu j'aurais pitié du cœur des hommes.

Here, unless the composer can give the whole heart-grip of the chastened philosophy of this rare old age, its sweetly tender tolerance, its pitiful groping to fathom the wherefore of things, Maeterlinck is fully justified in his imperative demand for absolute silence. Again, too, one has to hesitate before Debussy's Golaud, "homme comme les autres," whom Maeterlinck, if we read aright, will have fullblooded, a man in the prime of his physical energy, prosaic and unimaginative, if we will, but emphatically straightforward, honest and kindly, ti!l he is caught in the meshes and toils of the agony and torment of his own sexual jealousy and suspicion.

And then there is that last moment of all in the play when to the peace and rest of death follows the sharp, tragic reaction of the claim and call of life. Mélisande's new-born child is in the cradle beside the death bed. The old King takes it in his arms.

Venez: il ne faut pas que l'enfant reste dans cette chambre. . Il faut qu'il vive, maintenant, à sa place. . . C'est au tour de la pauvre petite.

A musician can linger happily over the gentle report, the contented calm of the harmonies of the death-dirge that softly closes Debussy's score. Decidedly this is not Maeterlinck's last chord. For Maeterlinck there is no finality of repose. Life has once more issued out of death. The muffled march and tread of tragedy has begun again. For the hour the step may be light as a child's. But it is inexorable. "Mais la tristesse

mais la tristesse de tout ce que l'on voit!... oh! oh! oh!"

No criticism is worth as much as the The Nineteenth Century and After.

value of the scrap of metal that indites it, unless it be an attempt in one's impression of an artist's work to tell the truth, neither more nor less; and this naturally all the more where occasion occurs to deal with one of the most sensitive of poet-musicians. Between Debussy and Maeterlinck, then, one has to confess it, there seem to exist here and there several discords too sharp and unblendable even for Debussy's magic manipulations of dissonance. Or rather the musician has been at pains, unconsciously or from the sheer inclination of instinct, to soften and veil and shroud in a haze a psychology already too prone to veil and hide itself. In the revelation of his own most individual attribute Debussy has fallen upon a paradox. He emphasizes the accent of Maeterlinck's crucial element of weakness. It were presumptuous and precipitate, though, to limit judgment at this stage. Debussy, be it observed, continues to hover round the very fabric and substance of tragedy. During the last three or four years he has been engaged in the composition of an orchestral scene, King Lear. This score is at present in course of publication. The thought of Debussy as an exponent of the most essentially relentless and remorseless of the Shakespearean tragedies may give rise to dubious apprehension. Yet who can tell? It may so chance that in the strength and stamina of Shakespeare he has found just the meed and measure of support that he craves. King Lear belonged to England first before it became the world's heritage. It is to be hoped therefore that to English listeners M. Debussy will vouchsafe the earliest opportunities of hearing and studying his

score.

A. E. Keeton.

CHAPTER III.

MY LANDLADY'S CHAMBER. Whilst these happenings had befallen the men in the dark back-garden of the Griffin, how had it fared with Sue?

Having made what supper she could, the girl had besought her hostess to show her to her room; but the woman, her hands full-for the trade of the house grew brisker as the evening drew in-had given her guest in charge of a chamber-maid as full-handed as herself, with two extra rooms to make ready at a moment's notice, and little inclined to waste time upon a young miss whose travelling outfit and youth gave small promise of a vail. Hence poor little Sue Travis, turned adrift in a strange house, was feeling somewhat forlorn. When her guide wished her a good-night, bobbed and withdrew, she turned herself about in a flutter of dismay. What she had expected her bed and her room to be like upon this, the first night that she could remember lying from home, she could not have said, but for certain they were not to have been such as these. Each might be good in its way, but the way was not her way; the room and its plenishing were not hers-that attic and curtained alcove, homely and safe, to which her whole girl-life of nightly undressings and lyings-down had accustomed her. The door filled her with misgivings: she could not fasten it, for her hostess and future bedfellow was still below; yet some one might come in; daunting thought! What, again, if the house should take fire? Such things did happen. She recalled a catastrophe in Chester, seen from an upper casement, the rolling cloud of illumined smoke, the glare upon the

sky, the breakdown of the pumps, the roar of the crowd when the roof-tree fell. Should this befall she were lost, for she knew herself incapable of finding her way to the street by the tortuous stairs and creaking dark corridors by which she had been led to this room.

All things considered, it seemed best to sit, dressed as she was, and to await events. 'Twas chilly, rain whispered without, a pipe gurgled; she found her cloak, wrapped it about her, drew up her feet, yawned, and slept.

And whilst she sleeps I must be telling you more of Sue, of Sue as she was at the outset of her adventure, a girl of the simplest, wholly inexperienced in the amazingly new great world upon which she was thrown; a young swallow not more so, tossed from its warm, cosy nest in the chimney, upon the rollicking winds and widespread landscape dotted with distant spires and encircled by blue horizons and unimaginable distances. So Sue; but 'twas the hand of death that had broken up the nest that had sheltered her eighteen years of life.

What was she like? (I have attempted one rude sketch, a mere catalogue of features; let me essay another, a general effect.) Was she a beauty?

Yes, Sue was a beauty in the sense that at her coming women used their eyes and took their breath slowly for a moment, whilst all men's glances followed her going.

And she had arrived so unexpectedly. But a year since there had faced you a big coltish child, angular and loose-jointed, freshly homely, gifted with a shy, lithe ungainliness, white-skinned, maybe, and clear-eyed,

and with the sweetest of breaths, but all uncoordinate and incomplete: and now hey! what subtle essence of womanliness had stolen down, and from whence? (out of dim past of multitudinous mother-ancestresses?) and fulfilled her with the nameless grace that many women miss in part or wholly, and with which some again are too plentifully dowered for their own well-being and the happiness of mankind.

There it was, however, in Sue's case, that marvellous gift, the white magic of charm, and its recipient as cleanly unconscious of its presence as a running stream of its music. She had never seen herself reflected in a lad's eyes, nor found herself unexpectedly and delightfully lovely in her mirror (a shard of scratched and cloudy glass in which in her kittenish moments the child would make amusing grimaces at herself).

And of the three or four whose friendship, or whose acquaintance, rounded off and closed in her maiden life, not one had discovered the miracle that was being worked under his eyes. The lily-bud at its tall, greengray stalk's end, was unfolding at last, unwelcomed, unwatched by the slowly dying aunt absorbed in the salvation of her soul, or by the vicar, her spiritual doctor, or by her physician, helpless from the first, using palliatives, verbal and other, jealously alive to the extent of his helpless ignorance. Nor had the metamorphosis been noticed by the elderly cook-housekeeper, devoted, overworked, who divided with Sue the necessary duties of the melancholy household.

Thus hedged about, thus employed, with hands and heart, full of small, daily, tender interests which were her life, the child had filled out to physical maturity, and spiritually to a gentle, unselfish devotion, both rarely beautiful.

Then, at a day's call, as it seemed to the watchers-for the end, how so long foretold, is ever unexpected-the spare, dry, yellow little aunt, the second mother, her eleven months' agony

Her

borne with a heroical patience, had arisen and gone forth into the unseen, and the whole scheme of Sue's life, as she understood it, came to an end; its framework snapped: its circumference, the shell that enclosed her, parted, and she was thrust forth upon a strange and wonderful world, for which there had been the slenderest of preparations. This was a final bereavement. Her mother, a paralytic invalid, had died two years before; this was that second shock of earthquake which brings to the ground what its forerunner dislocates; it left Sue homeless. Means she had none; she could never look back to a time when her mother and herself had not been guests. aunt's annuity had no more than kept things going towards the end; savings of earlier years had been applied to the demands of recurrent sickness. There was little left. The clothing of the dead woman, and the plenishing of the small house passed to the old servant in fulfilment of promises made years before Sue had crossed the threshold. A packet of family letters, a book or two, a miniature of the dead mother, and twenty pounds, were all that the girl faced the world with when she stepped forth from the house that had sheltered her young life into a winter's morning to seek her fortune; in her case an unknown aunt in London, who, having never taken any interest in her childhood, had at this juncture, in response to the dying appeal of a sister with whom she had quarrelled twenty years earlier, written offering house-room to the niece.

It was a four or five days' journey, which might run to a week, so much depended upon the weather and the roads. The thought of it caught the