Blanche. Two years later he held the same position on Gil Blas. In 1903 he went to London to write his impressions of Wagner's Tetralogy for this paper. Passages from his reviews have become bywords. Witness the following: "How insufferable these people in helmets and wild-beast skins become by the time the fourth evening comes round. Remember that at each and every appearance they are accompanied by their damned leit-motive. There are some who even sing it themselves. It is as if a harmless lunatic were to present you with his visiting card while he declaimed lyrically what was inscribed thereon." This was one of the earliest pricks in the weaknesses of the Wagner bubble. Here is more Debussy iconoclasm: he calls Gluck a "pedant," Bach "that worthy man," Beethoven "a deaf old man," Berlioz "a monster," César Franck "a Belgian," Massenet "our most notorious master." Of the songs of Schubert he says, "They are inoffensive; they have the odour of bureau drawers of provincial old maids, ends of faded ribbon, flowers for ever faded and dried, out of date photographs! Only they repeat the same effect for interminable stanzas and at the end of the third one wonders if one could not set to music our national Paul Delmet." "One stumbles on Mendelssohn" in Schumann's Faust; Grieg's music gives Debussy "the charming and
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