Chapter VIII: Epilogue: the Meaning of Music 203 (3)

At a concert given in Paris in 1846 appeared a new prodigy, a boy pianist, «le petit Saint-Saëns,» as the «Gazette Musicale» announced him, who, only ten and a half years old, played Händel, Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart, «without notes, with no effort, giving his phrases with clearness, elegance, and even expression in the midst of the powerful effects of a numerous orchestra using all its resources.» This, the first public appearance of Saint-Saëns, was by no means his first musical exploit. We read that he began the study of the piano with his great-aunt at the age of three, when already his sense of tone was so keen that he would press down with his left hand the slender fingers of the right until they became strong enough to satisfy his exacting requirements; that at five he composed little waltzes; that at ten he played fugues by Bach, a concerto of Hummel, and Beethoven's C-minor Concerto; and that he could tell the notes of all the clock-chimes in the house, and once remarked that a person in the next room was «walking in trochees.» By the time he was seventeen he had earned wide reputation as a pianist, had taken prizes for organ-playing at the conservatory, and had written an ode for chorus, solo, and orchestra, and a symphony. Thus early did he lay the foundations of that skill which in the early seventies, when at Wagner's house he played on the piano the «Siegfried» score, won from von Bülow the remark that, with the exception of Wagner and Liszt, he was the greatest musician living.

The surprising energy and versatility shown at the opening of Saint-Saëns's career have proved, in the course of time, to be the salient traits of his typically Gallic nature. He is, to a remarkable degree, the complete Frenchman. He has all the intellectual vivacity, all the nervous force, the quick wit and worldly polish, even the physical swarthiness and the dry keenness of visage, that we associate with his countrymen. M. Georges Servières, in his «La Musique Française Moderne,» gives the following excellent description: «Saint-Saëns is of short stature. His head is extremely original, the features characteristic; a great brow, wide and open, where, between the eyebrows, the energy and the tenacity of the man reveal themselves; hair habitually cut short, and brownish beard turning gray; a nose like an eagle's beak, underlined by two deeply marked wrinkles starting from the nostrils, eyes a little prominent, very mobile, very expressive. The familiars of his Mondays, those who knew the artist before injured health and family sorrows had darkened his character, remember that there was about him then a keen animation, a diabolic mischievousness, a railing irony, and an agility in leaping in talk from one subject to another with a sprightliness of fancy that equaled the mobility of his features, which were animated at one and the same moment by the most contrary expressions; and I could cite as instances of his gay humor many funny anecdotes that he loved to tell, adjusting on his nose the while, with both hands, in a way peculiar to him, his eye-glasses, behind which his eyes sparkled with malice.» Some examples of this railing irony of Saint-Saëns are preserved. There is, for instance, a story of an ambitious woman at one of his «Mondays,» who fairly browbeat him into accompanying her two daughters in a duet. After enduring as long as he could the torture of their timeless and tuneless performance, he turned to the mother with, «_Which_ of your daughters, madam, do you wish me to accompany?» A man of his wit naturally found himself at home in Paris society, and counted among his friends for years such people as the Princess Pauline Metternich, Mme. Viardot-Garcia, and Meissonier, Tourgenieff, and Dumas. A story told in the «Figaro,» of how at Madame Garcia's, where he often played both the organ and the piano, he would pass from improvising «masterly pages» in the contrapuntal style to waltzes for the young people to dance by, illustrates in little that peculiar combination of distinction and gayety, characteristic of Paris, which is the native air of Saint-Saëns.

But this adept metropolitan is also an inveterate nomad. Not content with traveling all over Europe in his virtuoso tours, he has long had the habit of wintering in outlandish places like the Canary Islands. Often he leaves home without announcing to any one his departure, or even giving friends his addresses; sometimes without knowing himself where he will go. The spectacle of distant lands and alien races has for him an inexhaustible fascination. In writing of his experiences in England, where he went in 1893 to receive the doctor's degree from Cambridge, he dwells with gusto on the procession of dignitaries, at the head of which, he says, «marched the King of Bahonagar, in a gold turban sparkling with fabulous gems, a necklace of diamonds at his throat.» «Dare I avow,» he adds, «that, as an enemy of the banalities and the dull tones of our modern garments, I was enchanted with the adventure?» And in his charming little essay, «Une Traversée de Bretagne,» the same enthusiasm throws about his oboe-playing ship-captain the glamour of romance. On his first trip to the Canaries, made incognito, he is said to have offered himself as a substitute to sing a tenor part in «Le Trouvère,» and to have come near appearing in this incongruous rôle. When his grand opera, «Ascanio,» was produced at Paris, he scandalized his friends and the public by being absent from the first performance. Diligent inquiry, and even the efforts of the diplomatic agents of the Government, failed to discover his whereabouts, and it was actually rumored that he had died in Ceylon, on his way to Japan. But all the while he was happily basking in the sun at Palma, scribbling verses. Finally his fondness for astronomy is well known, and he is said to have a private observatory in some «ultimate island.» There is much about this picturesque Frenchman that reminds one of the heroes of Jules Verne's romances.

When he is at home, Saint-Saëns carries on a many-sided activity of which composition is hardly more than half. For one thing, he is indefatigable in his efforts to improve public taste. In 1864 he gave in a series of concerts all the concertos of Mozart; in 1878, such is the catholicity of his taste, he organized concerts to produce Liszt's Symphonic Poems. He has done much for musical bibliography by his careful editions of Gluck, Rameau, and others. In 1871 he took active measures to better the opportunities of young native composers. At that time, as he puts it, «the name of a composer at once French and living, upon a programme, had the property to put everybody to flight.» The great improvement that has taken place since then is due largely to him and his brother-workers of the National Society of Music.

His two volumes of critical essays, «Harmonie et Mélodie» and «Portraits et Souvenirs,» are marked by soundness of principle, broad eclecticism of taste, and a pungent, epigrammatic style. In general temper he is classical without being pedantic; that is to say, he has no superstitious awe for rules, but a profound reverence for law. The licenses of modern technique and the mental vagueness of which they are the reflection find in him a formidable foe. The thrust he gives, in the preface of «Portraits et Souvenirs,» to those amateurs who are «annoyed or disdainful if the instruments of the orchestra do not run in all directions, like poisoned rats,» is typical of his attitude and method. He is a master of innuendo and delicate sarcasm, which he always employs, however, to protect art against affectation and ignorance. In dealing with the theory that music depends for its effect on physical pleasure, he speaks derisively of the solo voice which one can «savor at one's leisure, like a sherbet.» He says of those orchestral conductors and choirmasters who always complain of difficulties that they «love above all their little habits and the calm of their existence.» Among these sparkling sentences one comes frequently also upon pieces of wisdom, sometimes expressed with rare dignity, as when he writes, «There is in music something which traverses the ear as a door, the reason as a vestibule, and which goes yet further.» A writer so highly gifted with both raillery and eloquence might do mischief were he narrow or intolerant. That Saint-Saëns is neither can be seen from a mere enumeration of some of his subjects, chosen almost at random: there are essays on The Oratorios of Bach and Händel, Jacques Offenbach, Liszt, Poetry and Music, The Nibelungen Ring and the Performances at Bayreuth, Don Giovanni, A Defense of Opéra-Comique, The Multiple Resonance of Bells, and The Wagnerian Illusion.

These titles indicate a wide enough range of interest, but Saint-Saëns is furthermore a writer on subjects entirely unconnected with music. His devotion to philosophy has prompted him to publish a volume called «Problèmes et Mystères;» an antiquarian interest has found expression in his «Note sur les décors de Théâtre dans l'antiquité romaine;» and he has printed a volume of poems under the title «Rimes familières.» Finally, a comedy in one act called «La Crampe des écrivains» (a disease from which he appears never to have suffered) has been successfully produced at Paris.

As a composer, Saint-Saëns impresses the student first of all by his excessive, his almost inordinate, cleverness. It is not seemly for a human being to be so clever; there is something necromantic about it. Look at the opening of the G-minor Piano Concerto and see a modern Frenchman writing like the great Bach. See, in the «Danse Macabre,» Berlioz and Johann Strauss amalgamated. Listen to the rich effects of tone in the 'Cello Sonata in C minor. Study the thematic transformations and the contrapuntal style of the Symphony in the same key. Admire the lightness, the cobweb iridescence, of the «Rouet d'Omphale.» The author of these works is obviously a man of great intellectual skill and versatility.

Looking more closely, one observes a duality of style, for the moment puzzling, which properly understood only emphasizes the peculiarity of his artistic impulse. His compositions are of two well-marked varieties which at first seem to have little in common. To begin with, all those cast in the conventional symphonic mold--the three symphonies, the eight concertos, three for violin and five for piano, and most of the chamber-music--are severely, at times almost aridly, classical in conception and execution. They are «absolute music» of the most unequivocal sort. They depend for their effect on clear form, well-calculated symmetry, traditional though interesting melodic and harmonic treatment; their themes are of the family of Haydn and Mozart; their structure is that perfected by Beethoven; their orchestration is skillful but unobtrusive, a transparent medium rather than a rich material garment. In a word, they are very pure examples in music of a type of art--the French classic or pseudo-classic type--which gains little from richness of material or variety of suggestion, which depends for its appeal on clarity and symmetry of form and on clean workmanship in style. But, in addition to these conventional works, Saint-Saëns has produced a whole museum of exotics, in which his aim is to delineate passions, peoples, and places. There are the four Symphonic Poems, for example, the «Rouet d'Omphale,» «Phaéton,» the «Danse Macabre,» and «La Jeunesse d'Hercule,» in which he assumes the rôle of story-teller. In the «Nuit à Lisbonne,» the «Jota Aragonese,» and the «Rapsodie d'Auvergne,» he makes a tour in southern Europe; in the «Suite Algerienne» he portrays the deserts about Algiers, and in his opus 89 he gives us a fantasy of odd rhythms and outlandish tonalities supposed to introduce us to Africa. Nothing could seem, at the first blush, more diametrically opposite to the pseudo-classic works than these exotics, which among their academic brothers recall the King of Bahonagar at Cambridge. Yet both kinds, after all, when one looks more closely, are products of the widely questing intelligence, whose interests are dramatic rather than personal. They have this in common, that neither is of primarily emotional origin, that both are expressions of a mind objective and alertly observant. The difference between them is that in the one case this observation takes for object the purely musical world of tones, and in the other nature's world of persons, nations, races, and climates. But whether he is seeking a piquant rhythm or a curious turn of harmony, or sketching his impression of Spain or Egypt, Saint-Saëns is always the onlooker, the man of the world, never the mystic who contemplates in his own heart the forces that underlie the universe.

Strong testimony from the man himself to the truth of this view is indirectly afforded by his essay on Liszt, an essay which is furthermore noteworthy as containing in half a dozen sentences the essential truths of that vexed question of programme-music. He is, to begin with, as assertive as we should expect of the necessity, in all music, of absolute beauty. «Is the music itself,» he says, «good or bad? All is there. Whether or no it has a programme, it will not be, for that, better or worse.» Thus far speaks the author of the symphonies, the concertos, and the chamber-works. The composer of the symphonic poems and the geographical pieces continues: «But how much greater is the charm when to the purely musical pleasure is added that of the imagination coursing without hesitation over a determined path.... All the faculties of the soul are put in play at once, and toward the same end. I can see well what art gains from this, I cannot see what it loses.» Here speaks, recognizably enough, the Frenchman. In that phrase about «the imagination coursing without hesitation over a determined path» stands clearly revealed the dramatic point of view characteristic of French art, which is always devoted to the spectacle of life rather than to the elemental passions which underlie it. The satisfactions Saint-Saëns finds in music are those of the formal musical sense and of «the imagination coursing a determined path;» of the emotional satisfaction which music gives so generously he has nothing to say. To take another instance, how admirably logical and how adequate to the composition, which for all its picturesque grace leaves one cold, is the «programme» he appends to the «Rouet d'Omphale.» «The subject of this symphonic poem,» he writes, «is feminine seduction, the triumph of weakness over strength. The spinning-wheel is but a pretext, chosen solely with a view to the rhythm and the general effect of the piece. Those interested in the study of details will see at page 19, Hercules groaning under the bonds he cannot break, and at page 32 Omphale laughing at the vain efforts of the hero.» Both programme and piece are the creations of a keen intelligence which records its observations with accuracy and skill, but makes no personal revelation, cares not to contemplate itself, and is moved by no deep and perhaps vague, but nevertheless creative, emotion.

Lack of emotion, then, is the serious defect of this master. And in a musician it is in truth serious. Emotion is the life blood of the musical organism; without it all the members may be shapely, well ordered, highly finished, but all will be cold and lifeless. So it is with much of this clever craftsman's work. Too often there is graceful melody, arresting harmony, ingenious rhythm, but none of the passion needed to fuse and transfigure them. Impassioned vocal utterance, the song element in music, is seldom heard from Saint-Saëns. In the classic works he manipulates, in the exotic pieces he depicts; nowhere does he speak. But to speak, to voice deep feeling directly, though with the restraint necessary to plastic beauty, is the aim and the justification of music. Complex as the art has become in our day, the essence of it is still, as it ever must be, emotional expression; and though modern composers sing broader songs than the first musicians, and sing them on instruments rather than with the voice, they must equally sing, and their song must proceed from their hearts if it is to touch the hearts of others. Hence Saint-Saëns, when compared with a man of passionate earnestness like César Franck, or Schumann, or Wagner, inevitably seems superficial. Pieces like his B-minor Violin Concerto, with its elaborate classical machinery, its well-planned contrasts and brilliant effects, and the vast Symphony in C-minor, in which the theme undergoes such wonderfully skillful manipulation, seem so little the expression of a personal impulse that we catch ourselves wondering why he wrote them. Elsewhere, to be sure, as in the Andante of the 'Cello Sonata, his very virtuosity achieves such noble effects that we forget the hand-made quality of the work. But it is seldom indeed that, subordinating workmanship entirely, he gives us a genuine song of feeling, such as the second theme of the Finale in this Sonata. The lift and impetus of this beautiful theme emphasizes by contrast the emotional emptiness of the ingenious web that surrounds it.

While, however, we may with propriety recognize the lack of personal ardor in Saint-Saëns that reduces the song element in his music to a minimum, it would be a sad mistake to exaggerate the limitation or to forget that from another and perhaps an equally valid point of view he is a great musician. However he may fall short as a melodist, he is a past-master of rhythm and harmony, spheres in which feeling counts for less, logic for more. His harmonic style is eminently lucid. To him a chord is part of an organism, not a bit of color or a phase of feeling. A series of chords has for him all the tendency, the direction, and the self-fulfillment of a sentence of words; to omit or to change one would be like striking out a predicate or an object--the sentence would not parse. He uses most those chords which point in a definite direction, which carry in themselves, so to speak, the indication for their fulfillment--the dominant and secondary sevenths, and suspensions of triads. He avoids the vague and the ambiguous. And although he is a lover of novel harmonic effects, and an ingenious inventor of them, the novelty is always a new form, not a new formlessness. His modulation, too, is of an extreme clarity: he never falls into a new key, so to speak, as Dvořák does; he proceeds thither.

But even more striking than the clearness of his harmony is the trenchant perspicuity of his rhythm. The sense of rhythm is perhaps the prime criterion of intellectuality in a composer. For just as determinations of accent and measure, such as occur in the dances of the most primeval savages, were undoubtedly the earliest means of formulating the cries and wails of emotion which underlie all musical expression, so throughout musical history rhythm has been the chief formative or rationalizing agent, and a vivid sense of it has always characterized the more intellectual musicians. The dreamers and the sentimentalists are never fastidious of accent; it is the clear, active minds who delight in precise meter. Quite inevitable to a man of Saint-Saëns's temperament, then, is the instinct for strong, various and subtle rhythms that his compositions reveal at every page. One discerns it in his fondness for pizzicato effects and for the percussion instruments, both of which emphasize the accent. And his devotion to the piano, which he uses more in combination with other instruments than almost any other composer, is doubtless due to the fact that it compensates for its lack of sustained tone by a special incisiveness of attack. Another significant peculiarity is the short groups of repeated notes that occur so often in his writings as to be a mannerism. They are found, for example, in the fourth of his Variations on a Theme of Beethoven, opus 35, in the «scherzando» section of «Africa,» at the opening of the Trio, opus 92, in the accompaniment of the well-known air from «Samson et Dalila,» «Mon cœur s'ouvre à ta voix,» and in the third of the Six Études, opus 52. The effect of this device, which throws a strong emphasis on the first of the reiterated notes, is a peculiar rhythmic salience. Again, on the principle that minor irregularities in a regular plan bring out all the more clearly the larger orderliness, Saint-Saëns loves to alternate groups of four notes with groups of three, or three with two, and to displace his accent entirely by syncopation, which, when properly handled, deepens the ideal stress by setting the actual in competition with it.

In all these and countless other ways are revealed the accuracy and virtuosity of intellect that distinguish this brilliant Frenchman. Clearness of form is, on the whole, so much rarer in modern music than wealth of meaning, that the art in our day has peculiar need of such workers. Their office is to make us remember, in our welter of emotion, the perennial delightfulness of order and control. They are the apologists of reason, without which feeling, however noble, must become futile, inarticulate. In their precise, well-constructed works we find a relief from the dissipating effects of mere passion. We breathe there a serene, if a somewhat rarefied, atmosphere. Of this classic lucidity Saint-Saëns is a great master. However dry he may sometimes be, he is never turgid; however superficial his thought, it is never vague; he offers us his artistic sweets never in the form of syrup--he refines and crystallizes them. If, then, we of a race emotionally profounder and mentally more diffuse find his music sometimes empty for all its skill, we must not for that reason underrate the service he does for music by insisting on articulateness in feeling, logic in development, and punctilious finesse in workmanship.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE.--Saint-Saëns's best orchestral works are
arranged not only for four hands, but for two players at two pianos, a
combination of which he is extremely fond. It is interesting to play
in this way the four symphonic poems, «La Rouet d'Omphale,» «Phaéton,»
the «Danse Macabre,» and «La Jeunesse d'Hercule.» The five Piano
Concertos are also excellent. The symphonies are rather dry. Of the
chamber-music, the 'Cello Sonata, op. 32, and the Violin Sonatas, op.
75 and 102, are particularly good. The piano music is less original,
being for the most part pseudo-classic in conception and style. Thus
the Suite, op. 90, is like a suite of Bach's with the sincerity taken
out. On the whole the Six Études, op. 52, and the Album of six pieces,
op. 72, are better worth study. The former contains two able fugues,
the latter an odd «Carillon» in 7-4 time and an attractive «Valse.»
There is charm in «Les Cloches du Soir,» op. 85, and also in a
well-known melody, without opus-number, called «Le Cygne.» Saint-Saëns
has little power as a song-writer; those who wish to realize this for
themselves, may purchase the Schirmer Album of fifteen of his songs.
To his numerous operas no reference is made in the present essay, the
subject of which is his contribution to pure music.

V
CÉSAR FRANCK

V
CÉSAR FRANCK

When we turn from the brilliant Parisian we have been studying to that obscure and saintly man, César Franck, the only French contemporary of Saint-Saëns who is worthy to be ranked with him as a great composer, we can hardly believe ourselves in the same country or epoch. It is as if we were suddenly transported from modern Paris into some mediæval monastery, to which the noise of the world never penetrates, where nothing breaks the silence save the songs of worship and the deep note of the organ. In the presence of this devout mystic the sounds of cities and peoples fade away, and we are alone with the soul and God. We have passed from the noonday glare of the intellect, in which objects stand forth sharp and hard, into the soft cathedral twilight of religious emotion; and putting aside our ordinary thoughts we commune for a time with deeper intuitions. Or, again, it is like closing a volume of Taine and taking up Maeterlinck. From the streets and the drawing-room we pass into the cloister, where dwell no longer men and things, but all the intangible presences of thought and feeling. We close our eyes on the pageant of experience, to reopen them in the dim inner light of introspection, where, if we may believe the mystics, they will behold a truer reality. The temperament of Franck is thus at the opposite pole from that prehensile Gallic temperament so well exemplified in Saint-Saëns, and we should find the juxtaposition of the two men as the greatest French composers of their time highly perplexing did we not remember that, in spite of his almost lifelong residence in Paris, César Franck was by birth and blood, like Maeterlinck, with whom he has so much in common, a Belgian. Exactly how much the peculiar characters of these men were inherited from their race it is of course impossible to say; but any one who has seen the placid faces of the Belgian peasants, with their calm, almost bovine look of contentment, must recognize there a trait that needs only the power of articulation to produce a natural religion of feeling, or mysticism, like that of César Franck and Maeterlinck. It was the same sort of self-sufficient serenity, the antithesis of Saint-Saëns's busy worldliness, that determined the course of Franck's life, so obscure, so uneventful, so dominated by high spiritual purpose.

César-Auguste Franck (it was an inapt name for so pacific a being) was born in 1822, at Liége, Belgium. There he made his first musical studies, but went to Paris at fifteen to study in the Conservatory. Though without the precocity of «le petit Saint-Saëns,» he must have been a solid musician at sixteen, for in a test that took place in July, 1838, he transposed a piece at sight down a third, playing it «avec un brio remarquable,» and was awarded the first grand prize of honor at his graduation in 1842. Foregoing the career of a concert pianist, which his father wished him to pursue, «repudiating with horror and disgust,» as one of his biographers has it, «the brilliant noise-making that people long mistook for music,» he turned for a livelihood to that laborious work of teaching which he pursued all the rest of his life with patient fidelity.

He seems to have been an almost ideal teacher, long-suffering with the dull pupils, painstaking and generous with the able ones, provoking enthusiasm in all by his contagious love for art and his receptivity to ideas. In a degree that is rare even among the best teachers, he combined endurance and vivacity. Giving, all his life, from eight to ten lessons a day, many of them, even after he had made his reputation, in girls' boarding-schools and _pensions_ of the usual wearisome sort, he yet retained vitality to impart to the best minds of the present generation of French composers. Though after teaching all day, often not returning home until supper-time, he would in the evening give correspondence lessons to pupils in the provinces, and though even the Sundays were filled with his duties as organist and choirmaster, still he often found time to assemble his favorite pupils, and to discuss with them, as if with perfect equals, their exercises and his own works. One of these pupils, M. Vincent d'Indy, has described how «père Franck,» as they called him, would play them his choral compositions, singing all the vocal parts in «a terrible voice;» and how he would sit at the piano, fixing with troubled gaze some offending passage in an exercise, murmuring anxiously, «Je n'aime pas ... Je n'aime pas,» until perhaps it grew to seem permissible, and with his bright smile he could cry a «J'aime!» Thanks to his earnest desire to appreciate whatever was good, controlled as it was by a severely classical taste, he could make his students good workmen and stern critics without paralyzing their individual genius. He was thorough without being rigid, and respected learners as much as he revered the masters. Naturally, the learners, in their turn, felt for their «Pater seraphicus,» as they named him, an almost filial affection. Emmanuel Chabrier, speaking over Franck's grave, in Montrouge Cemetery, voiced the feelings of them all when he said that this was not merely an admirable artist, but «the dear regretted master, the most gentle, modest, and wise. He was the model, he was the example.»

For thirty-two years, that is to say, from 1858 until his death, Franck was organist of the Église Ste. Clotilde, where his playing must have been an endless inspiration to all who heard him, though his modesty kept him personally inconspicuous. One likes to think of this quiet, devout musician, animated by the purest religious enthusiasm, advancing year by year in mastery of his art, producing without ostentation works of a novel and radical beauty. Few of his listeners could have conceived that one so benignant and courteous, but so easily forgotten, was making himself a force that modern music could not forget. They, who saw only the husk of the man, could not guess what treasures of humanity and genius it concealed. M. d'Indy well describes the two aspects. «Any one,» he says, «who had encountered this being in the street, with his coat too large, his trousers too short, his grimacing and preoccupied face framed in his somewhat gray whiskers, would not have believed in the transformation that took place when, at the piano, he explained and commented on some beautiful work of art, or when, at the organ, he put forth his inspired improvisations. Then the music enveloped him like an aureole; then one could not fail to be struck by the conscious will expressed in the mouth and chin, by the almost superhuman knowledge in his glance; then only would one observe the nearly perfect likeness of his large forehead to that of Beethoven.» And M. Derepas has the following paragraph in the same tenor: «It was there, before the keyboards, his agile and powerful feet upon the pedals, that it was necessary to see César Franck. His beautiful head with its finely developed brow crowned with naturally curling hair, his profound and contemplative expression, his features marked without exaggeration, his full, well-cut mouth breathing health, ... all wearing the aureole of genius and of faith--it was like a vision of another age in strong contrast with the turbulences of the day.» If one is sometimes sorry that Franck had to spend so much time teaching, one cannot, in the face of such descriptions as these, regret the hours he passed in the Église Ste. Clotilde. Its atmosphere was native to his genius, which was not only religious, but even ecclesiastical. In hearing his «musique cathédralesque,» as Saint-Saëns well called it, one can almost see the pillars and arches, the pure candle-flames and the bowed peasants at prayer.

It was in the spare moments of this full life that Franck found time to write his extraordinary music. Every morning, winter and summer, rising at six, he set aside two hours for what he expressively called «his own work.» Then, after breakfast, came the day's teaching, in the course of which he would jot down ideas that occurred to him, recording perhaps eight measures, and turning again to the pupil. In the evenings, when there were not correspondence-lessons to write, or rehearsals, he often got out his manuscripts once more; and his short summer vacations were given entirely to composition. All the more remarkable is this indomitability when we remember that he lacked not only the stimulus of public success, but for a long while even the impetus of having definitely succeeded in his own eyes, so new were his ideas and so difficult the technique they required. Very few composers have matured so late. Though he wrote in his youth some trios, and later a Mass, his first really individual work, «Ruth,» was written when he was nearly fifty; «Les Éolides,» his earliest orchestral composition, was produced in 1877, when he was fifty-five; «Les Beatitudes,» in some respects his masterpiece, was not finished until 1880, though begun more than ten years before; and all his most characteristic work in pure music, as, for example, the Prelude, Choral, and Fugue and the Prelude, Aria, and Finale for piano, the three wonderful Chorals for organ, the Violin Sonata, the Quartet, the Quintet, and the Symphony, date from the last decade of his life. In a day when every harmony-student itches to give the world a symphony, it is hard to admire too much the artistic self-respect that kept Franck a nonentity for years, to make him at last a master.

Meanwhile, of course, he had to endure neglect. Probably most of his acquaintances shared the impression put into words by a Paris publisher to whom M. Servières offered an essay about him. «Oh, monsieur,» cried this gentleman, «I remember César Franck perfectly. A man who was always in a hurry, always soberly dressed in black, and who wore his trousers too short!... Organist at Sainte Clotilde. It seems that he was a great musician, little known to the public.» Rather harder to explain is the lack of appreciation which in 1880 led those in power at the Conservatory, where Franck was already organ professor, to give the chair of composition then left vacant, not to him, but to Léo Delibes, the writer of ballet-music. But perhaps the most pathetic result of the general indifference to Franck was that his masterpiece could never be given a complete performance during his lifetime. «Les Beatitudes» was first given entire in 1893, three years after his death. When he received the Legion of Honor in 1886, he said sorrowfully to a friend, «Yes, my friend, they honor me--as a Professor.» That is the one repining word of his that is recorded.

It would, however, be a mistake to suppose that Franck's fellow-men noticed nothing but his short trousers, or that in his high artistic effort he was entirely without sympathy. Few men have been more fortunate in their friends. The love and veneration of his many pupils, and of such men as Chabrier, Pierné, and Fauré, made an atmosphere in which his heart expanded and his ambition grew. One of this group of admirers tells how they would surround him on his return to Paris in the autumn, to ask what he had done, what he had to show. «Vous verrez, repondait-il»--the French alone can render the endearing vanity and _naïveté_ of his reply--«vous verrez, repondait-il en prenant un air mysterieux, vous verrez; je crois que vous serez content.... J'ai beaucoup travaillé et bien travaillé.» It was a similarly frank and guileless self-satisfaction that made him apparently unaware of the coldness of his audiences, who were generally puzzled or bored. Happy, as M. d'Indy records, in having given his friends the pleasure of hearing him play his own compositions, in spite of the scanty applause he never failed to bow profoundly. Thus untroubled by the indifference of the crowd, surrounded by a few men who gave him their warm and discriminating admiration, and inspired by a genius peculiarly exalted and disinterested, bent on beauty alone, and superior to petty jealousies, César Franck lived his quiet, fruitful, and happy life. He died at Paris in 1890. The last anecdote we have of him tells of his finding strength, four days before his death, to praise the «Samson et Dalila» of Saint-Saëns, then running at the Théâtre Lyrique. «I see him yet,» says M. Arthur Coquard, «turning towards me his poor suffering face to say vivaciously and even joyfully, in the vibrant tones that his friends know, 'très beau, très beau.'» The words, expressing that pure love of art which animated his whole career, lodge in the mind of one who studies it, together with those other words of his, which none ever had a better right to use, «J'ai beaucoup travaillé et bien travaillé.»

It has been necessary to dwell at some length on Franck's life and character because they throw so much light on his music. To an unusual degree it is the expression of himself, full of his peculiar contemplative emotion. The harmonic background is rich, somber, and vague, like the prevailing mood of a religious devotee; from it constantly emerge phrases of song, phrases of the most poignant aspiration, like passions in a dream, voicing those intense yet elusive feelings which irradiate none but introspective minds. They are like the cries of human lovers in a world of silence and mystery, or, better, they are the cries of a finite soul that yearns for God and finds him not. One feels always in Franck's music the tragedy of the finite and the infinite. Those groping, shifting harmonies, above which the pathetic fragments of melody constantly sound for a moment, somehow irresistibly suggest the great unknown universe in which men's little lives are acted. All is vague save the momentary feature, and that presses on towards a fulfillment that perpetually eludes it. All shifts and passes, save only that never-ceasing mood of aspiration, that restless striving of the fragment for completion. Spiritual unrest is the characteristic quality of this music--the unrest of a spirit pure and ardent but forever unsatisfied.

Now, it is perhaps not too fantastic to find in the mingled vagueness and poignancy of this music the proper artistic expression of mysticism. So _must_ a mystic express himself. For it is characteristic of the mystical temperament to yearn for ideal satisfactions, but to find none in finite forms. Mysticism, in fact, is one of the ways of solving, or perhaps we should say of ignoring, that primal and protean mystery of human life, the conflict between ideal needs and actual facts. Realism meets it by denying the needs and exalting the facts; idealism attempts to mold the real into conformity with the ideal, of course with very partial success. The mystic, too earnest to follow the realistic method, too impatient to endure the plodding progress of idealism, cuts the Gordian knot by discarding the actual altogether. He pronounces it too inelastic, too constricting, and dispenses with it. He hugs the ideal to his heart, but can see no virtue in the real. Actualities, objects, events, and forms which to the idealist are precious if only partial expressions of spiritual values, are to him wholly recalcitrant, wholly external and illusory. The really precious thing, he says, is something transcendent, something remote, something that cannot transpire in events or body itself in forms, because it is infinite and complete, while these are finite, broken, and limited. Henri-Frédéric Amiel, a man peculiarly dominated by this way of viewing things, wrote in his Journal, «Nothing finite is true, is interesting, is worthy to fix my attention. All that is particular is exclusive, and all that is exclusive repels me. There is nothing non-exclusive but the All; my end is communion with Being through the whole of Being.» Now, whatever may be the merits of this point of view, it obviously involves a certain degree of artistic failure. The mystic cannot be entirely successful in art. For art depends on organization in definite forms, and the mystic rejects all particular forms as finite. «Reality, the present, the irreparable, the necessary,» writes Amiel, «repel and even terrify me.... The life of thought alone seems to me to have enough elasticity and immensity, to be free enough from the irreparable; practical life makes me afraid.» Accordingly, men of this temperament are defeated in their search for beauty by an unconquerable shyness of all its incarnations. They fear that in defining their fancy they will vulgarize it. It is their fate to long for an all-inclusive form in a world where forms are mutually exclusive, to strive to utter truth in one great word, when even the shortest sentence must occupy time. Amiel himself is a pathetic example of the mystic's destiny in art. Haunted all his life by the vision of infinite beauty, the conception of absolute truth, he could never bring himself to accept the limitations of all human performance, and his talent was almost as unproductive as it was exalted. He never could embody his aspirations. Tantalizing him with the suggestion of supernal beauties, they resisted all his efforts to come up with and embrace them, because he denied himself the use of those definite forms in which alone, however inadequately, ideals can be realized.

In many respects César Franck is the analogue in music of Amiel in literature. That vague richness of his emotional tone, which like a dark background of night is constantly lighted up by meteoric outbursts of passion, is strangely like the somber moralizings and speculations, in the «Journal Intime,» among which Amiel's cries of spiritual pain, doubt, and longing stand out with such sudden, poignant pathos. Franck has in common with Amiel the mystic's longing for ideal satisfactions, and the mystic's distrust of all finite means of attaining them. He, too, is «afraid» of the forms of practical life, of the conventional devices of musical structure and the types evolved by tradition. He avoids always the obvious, the natural even, and gropes toward some unattainable ideal of expression. So great is his distrust of the understood, the accepted, the usual and intelligible, that he is always leaving the beaten track and roaming afield after some novel and untamed beauty. It will be worth while to get to closer quarters with this tendency, and to see exactly how it operates.

It is hard to make those unacquainted with musical technique understand how much of fixity there is in the musical idiom, how definite are the types of musical form, how potent the requisitions of musical syntax. Yet, without a sense of this fixity in the material, it is impossible to estimate justly those impulses and motives which may lead a composer to violate usages and to disappoint expectations. In the matter of harmony, for instance, there are certain types of procedure, certain progressions and sequences of chords, that are as stable and uniform as the types of animal or vegetable form. A horse, a dog, or a man is not a more definite organism than the two chords in the «Amen» of a hymn tune. This group or cluster of two chords, linked together by a common tone held over from one to the other, yet made distinct by progression of the other voices, is typical of a kind of harmonic form that long usage has established as part of our mental furniture. We are used to thinking of chords thus welded by a common tone, and we demand this sort of coherence in our harmonic progressions, just as we demand that a horse's body shall be furnished with a horse's legs, or that a transitive verb shall have an object. To be sure, this particular sort of cluster, in which both chords are, as we say, consonant, is somewhat less determinate than another sort which we shall describe presently, because, since all the tones of the first chord are equally important, any one may be selected as the link, and there will be consequently some latitude in the choice of the second chord, which completes the group. But within these limits this sort of harmonic type is definite and fixed, and that it is deeply ingrained in our mode of thought is proved by our horror of «consecutive octaves» and «fifths,» those bugbears of harmony students, which are bad chiefly because they are not compatible with the retention of a common linking tone between the two members of the group.

Here we have, then, one of those fundamental harmonic forms which are in music what idioms or phrases are in language. It is striking how sedulously César Franck, distrustful of the definite, the conventional, avoids them. Compared with the work of a keen rationalist like Saint-Saëns, his music is curiously incoherent, curiously loose-knit, groping, and indeterminate. His pages are studded with departures and evasions; he delights in going some other way than we expect, or in writing chords that do not give us even any basis of expectation. Consecutive octaves and fifths, so terrible to lovers of cogency and sequence, are an especial feature of his harmony, giving it that curious lapsing effect so characteristic and indescribable. His entire tone-mass has a trick of sliding bodily up or down, which disconcerts, even while it fascinates, one who is accustomed to harmonic stability. The student need only play over the opening of the Symphony or the first page of the String Quartet to feel that here is a man who treats traditions debonairly, and who thus suggests novel beauties without defining them.

Equally irresponsible is he in his treatment of another sort of harmonic form which is intrinsically even more definite than the clusters of consonant chords like the «Amen.» When there is a dissonant tone in the first chord, a tone which, having slight justification for being, presses urgently toward a neighboring tone in the next chord, into which it is said to «resolve,» then the cluster, as a whole, is even more determinate. The dissonance introduces a tension that must be relieved in one definite way. It involves its own resolution just as unstable equilibrium in a body involves its falling in the direction of the greatest pull. The alien tone in the chord is got rid of by the path of least resistance; it is a foreign element that must be discharged. So potent is this tendency of dissonant tones to resolve that it is one of the chief means of vitalizing the entire musical fabric. Unless music constantly got out of harmony with itself it would no more progress than a man would walk unless before each step he lost his balance. It would stagnate. Consider, for example, the last phrase of that highly vitalized tune, «The Man that Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo.» No one could attribute stagnation to this phrase, whatever other faults he might find in it; and its impetus is largely due to the vigor with which it lands on the dissonant chord next before the last, and the consequent pull of this chord into the last. Try to conceive of ending without that last chord, that resolution in which the foreign element is discharged and all comes to rest. It is told of Mendelssohn that he rushed down-stairs in his night clothes early one morning to resolve a dominant seventh chord (such as we have on the syllable «Car») which some waggish friend struck and left uncompleted. Mendelssohn was of course unusually sensitive to harmonic law, but it is not too much to draw from this incident the conclusion that a chord which can get a man out of bed in the morning to resolve it must pretty potently suggest resolution. Dissonant chords, in fact, are anything but inert elements in the chemistry of harmonic composition. They have strong affinities and combine powerfully.

Yet César Franck is inclined either to ignore these tendencies or to shift them into unexpected and circuitous channels. The dissonant chords, though they occur often in his work, seldom take their normal course. They are led into new dissonances, diverted to alien keys, subjected to ingenious modifications, and in all ways wrested from the realm of the obvious. Towards the end of the Introduction to the first movement of the String Quartet, for instance, the student will find dominant sevenths most interestingly unfaithful to their family tradition, and effecting modulation through distant keys. Similar treatment will be found on almost any page in this Quartet, in the Quintet, the Symphony, and the piano works. Thus, Franck not only goes counter to the less determinate harmonic types in which both chords are consonant, but he loves to disappoint our expectations when they are strongly established by dissonances. Nothing is more characteristic of him than the formal indefiniteness of his harmony. Full as it is of delicious and unwonted beauties, it lacks accurate organization, clarity and solidity of chord sequence. It is a web of shifting tones, without obvious interrelationship and inevitable progression.

When we turn to Franck's treatment of meter and rhythm, we get some new side-lights on the way his mysticism affects his music. He is, in the first place, noticeably lacking in that vigor of pulse, that strong accentuation, which is the delight of active temperaments. He sings constantly, almost never dances. After a while the intensity of the song-like phrases, so packed with emotion, becomes cloying, and we long for a little of the headlong, thoughtless progress of Grieg and Dvořák. We need the relaxation of muscular activity. It would be a relief to stop feeling for a moment and be borne along on a wave of perfectly unemotional «passage-work.» But Franck never relieves himself and his hearer by passages of brisk motion in which the interest is entirely active; he is, so to speak, a very sedentary composer. And so the rare beauties that stud the page lose something by being set so thickly. The richness of Franck's emotional impulse is a disadvantage to his metrical structure. The same thing, again, is true of his rhythm or phraseology. We saw in the Introduction how elementary metrical groups--measures--were built up into phrases and tunes, and how the strongest synthetic minds got the greatest variety and breadth of phrase. Now Franck's phrasing, like Grieg's, is of the primitive kind that reveals lack of mental concentration, inability to build up wide and complex forms. Draw a line across his staff at every breathing-point, and your lines will fall pretty regularly after the measures whose numbers are multiples of four. Try the same thing with Beethoven, and there will be no telling where the lines will come, so varied is the phraseology. In comparison, Franck's themes seem hardly more than bundles of motifs, loosely tied together. And of course this effect is unfortunately reinforced by the peculiarities of his harmony. How could a theme hold itself together in such a kaleidoscope? How could it sustain itself on such a tonal quicksand? Thus his tunes, rich as they are in single phrases of poignant beauty, seldom develop much breadth. They start out well, but soon lose themselves in the web or fall into poorly welded segments. In the larger structural arrangement of his material as well as in his primary metrical order he falls short of the perfect organization of more powerful minds.

Franck illustrates, then, in many ways, in his erratic treatment of harmony, in his metrical monotony, and in his «shortness of breath,» the mystic's failure to master form. And yet, so beautiful are his effects, so arresting is his personality, one feels instinctively that there is in him something which destructive criticism cannot assail. The very inarticulateness of the mystic is, in fact, a sort of eloquence, perhaps all the more persuasive because it hints at beauties rather than defines them. However beyond his reach his aspirations may be, so long as they are genuine and ardent he will have his unique artistic message. His work will gain a pathetic appeal from the very fact that it suggests feelings it cannot embody, and his inarticulateness may even open up ways to new modes of utterance by reminding men that there are truths other than those their formulas so smugly stereotype. Thus a writer like Amiel, ineffective as he seems from one point of view, is not without his liberalizing influence in literature. In the same way, César Franck, the mystic among musicians, thanks to his profound insight and emotion, combined though they be with the characteristic shortcomings of the seer, will widen the scope of future musical technique and expression.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE.--The Prelude, Choral, and Fugue for Piano are
to be had in the Collection Litolff. The Prelude, Aria, and Finale
are published by J. Hamelle, Paris. These are the only piano pieces
of Franck that are easily obtainable. The house of Hamelle also
issues a four-hand arrangement of the Symphony, and Durand, of Paris,
publishes a four-hand arrangement of the three masterly Chorals for
organ, as well as the original edition of these, and of two sets of
organ pieces, one of six and the other of three. The «Beatitudes»
has been reprinted, with English words, by G. Schirmer. A few of
Franck's songs, particularly «La Procession,» «Panis Angelicus,» and
«Le Mariage des Roses,» will be found in the portfolios of most large
music dealers.

VI
PETER ILYITCH TSCHAÏKOWSKY

VI
PETER ILYITCH TSCHAÏKOWSKY