[3] The following year, he published his first essay of art criticism, Les Arts de la vie et le règne de la laideur at Paul Ollendorff [fr], a rather reactionary essay that denounced impressionism, the realistic or naturalist drifts of painting, and which was more on the side of William Morris, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and John Ruskin, and in which he affirmed that "it is the spirit of anarchism that reigns in France in the artistic movement... a need for destruction, a sort of delirium that wants to abolish everything that exists.

He wrote for catalogs of the Bing gallery and the Maison moderne, defended Albert Besnard, Felix Borchardt [fr], Auguste Rodin, Edmond Aman-Jean, Edgar Chahine, etc.

He thus evoked this "bankruptcy of modern decorative art" in France, for a production he considered to be elitist, not having been able to show a real agreement between artists and manufacturers, unlike, according to him, the English or German achievements.

From 1891, he wanted to become a playwright with Lawn-tennis, a one-act play created at the Théâtre Antoine, and then in 1893 he wrote with Paul Adam Automne, a three-act drama, which was banned by censorship on 3 February, and which gave rise to a stormy session in the Chamber of Deputies on 6 March 1893 with the intervention of Maurice Barrès: The latter, deputy of Nancy, then opposed the interior minister Charles Dupuy, who asked to remove from the text everything that recalled the fusillade du Brûlé [fr] at La Ricamarie: in 1869, in the coalfield of Saint-Etienne, where the troops fired on the strikers.

Composed in 1913, as a short piece for solo flute after Psyché,[7] a dramatic poem in three acts by Gabriel Mourey, Syrinx, the fruit of this friendship, remains the only composition of Debussy that was completed in the framework of their many projects.