"TRISTAN"

Tristan towers like a mountain above all other love poems, as Wagner above all other artists of his century. It is the outcome of a sublime conception, though the work as a whole is far from perfect. Of perfect works there is none where Wagner is concerned. The effort necessary for the creation of them was too great to be long sustained; for a single work might means years of toil. And the tense emotions of a whole drama cannot be expressed by a series of sudden inspirations put into form the moment they are conceived. Long and arduous labour is necessary. These giants, fashioned like Michelangelo's, these concentrated tempests of heroic force and decadent complexity, are not arrested, like the work of a sculptor or painter, in one moment of their action; they live and go on living in endless detail of sensation. To expect sustained inspiration is to expect what is not human. Genius may reveal what is divine; it may call up and catch a glimpse of die Mütter, but it cannot always breathe in the exhausted air of this world. So will must sometimes take the place of inspiration; though the will is uncertain and often stumbles in its task. That is why we encounter things that jar and jolt in the greatest works—they are the marks of human weakness. Well, perhaps there is less weakness in Tristan than in Wagner's other dramas—Götterdämmerung, for instance—for nowhere else is the effort of his genius more strenuous or its flight more dizzy. Wagner himself knew it well. His letters show the despair of a soul wrestling with its familiar spirit, which it clutches and holds, only to lose again. And we seem to hear cries of pain, and feel his anger and despair.

This is something more than a burst of modesty.No one had more pride than Michelangelo or Wagner; but both felt the defects of their work like a sharp wound. And although those defects do not prevent their works from being the glory of the human spirit, they are there just the same.

But while admitting that Tristan is a symphony that is not suitable for representation, one also recognises its blemishes and, above all, its unevenness. The orchestration in the first act is often rather thin, and the plot lacks solidity. There are gaps and unaccountable holes, and melodious lines left suspended in space. From beginning to end, lyrical bursts of melody are broken by declamations, or, what is worse, by dissertations. Frenzied whirlwinds of passion stop suddenly to give place to recitatives of explanation or argument. And although these recitatives are nearly always a great relief, although these metaphysical reveries have a character of barbarous cunning that one relishes, yet the superior beauty of the movements of pure poetry, emotion, and music is so evident, that this musical and philosophical drama serves to give one a distaste for philosophy and drama and everything else that cramps and confines music.

The work suffers everywhere from a lack of balance. It is an almost inevitable defect, arising from its very grandeur. A mediocre work may quite easily be perfect of its kind; but it is rarely that a work lofty aim attains perfection. A landscape of little dells and smiling meadows is brought more readily into pleasing harmony than a landscape of dazzling Alps, torrents, glaciers, and tempests; for the heights may sometimes overwhelm the picture and spoil the effect. And so it is with certain great pages of Tristan. We may take for example the verses which tell of excruciating expectation—in the second act, Isolde's expectation on the night filled with desire; and, in the third act,Tristan's expectation, as he lies wounded and delirious, waiting for the vessel that brings Isolde and death—or we may take the Prelude, that expression of eternal desire that is like a restless sea for ever moaning and beating itself upon the shore.

The quality that touches me most deeply in Tristan is the evidence of honesty and sincerity in a man who was treated by his enemies as a charlatan that used superficial and grossly material means to arrest and amaze the public eye. What drama is more sober or more disdainful of exterior effect than Tristan? Its restraint is almost carried to excess. Wagner rejected any picturesque episode in it that was irrelevant to his subject. The man who carried all Nature in his imagination, who at his will made the storms of the Walküre rage, or the soft light of Good Friday shine, would not even depict a bit of the sea round the vessel in the first act. Believe me, that must have been a sacrifice, though he wished it so. It pleased him to enclose this terrible drama within the four walls of a chamber of tragedy. There are hardly any choruses; there is nothing to distract one's attention from the mystery of human souls; there are only two real parts—those of the lovers; and if there is a third, it belongs to Destiny, into whose hands the victims are delivered. What a fine seriousness there is in this love play. Its passion remains sombre and stern; there is no laughter in it, only a belief which is almost religious, more religious perhaps in its sincerity than that of Parsifal.

But as I was listening to it the other evening I could not help thinking: Ah, Wagner, you will one day go too, and join Gluck and Bach and Monteverde and Palestrina and all the great souls whose names still live among men, but whose thoughts are only felt by a handful of the initiated, who try in vain to revive the past. You, also, are already of the past, though you were the steady light of our youth, the strong source of life and death, of desire and renouncement, whence we drew our moral force and our power of resistance against the world. And the world, ever greedy for new sensations, goes on its way amid the unceasing ebb and flow of its desires. Already its thoughts have changed, and new musicians are making new songs for the future. But it is the voice of a century of tempest that passes with you.

CAMILLE SAINT-SAËNS

Later on, he achieved success by a long and painful struggle, in which he had to fight against the kind of stupid criticism that condemned him "to listen to one of Beethoven's symphonies as a penance likely to give him the most excruciating torture."[111] And yet after this, and after his admission to the Academy, after Henry VIII and the Symphonie avec orgue, he still remained aloof from praise or blame, and judged his triumphs with sad severity:

M. Saint-Saëns has now grown old, and his fame has spread abroad, but he has not capitulated. Not many years ago he wrote to a German journalist: "I take very little notice of either praise or censure, not because I have an exalted idea of my own merits (which would be foolish), but because in doing my work, and fulfilling the function of my nature, as an apple-tree grows apples, I have no need to trouble myself with other people's views."[113]

The significance of M. Saint-Saëns in art is a double one, for one must judge him from the inside as well as the outside of France. He stands for something exceptional in French music, something which was almost unique until just lately: that is, a great classical spirit and a fine breadth of musical culture—German culture, we must say, since the foundation of all modern art rests on the German classics. French music of the nineteenth century is rich in clever artists, imaginative writers of melody, and skilful dramatists; but it is poor in true musicians, and in good and solid workmanship. Apart from two or three splendid exceptions, our composers have too much the character of gifted amateurs who compose music as a pastime, and regard it, not as a special form of thought, but as a sort of dress for literary ideas. Our musical education is superficial: it may be got for a few years, in a formal way, at a Conservatoire, but it is not within reach of all; the child does not breathe music as, in a way, he breathes the atmosphere of literature and oratory; and although nearly everyone in France has an instinctive feeling for beautiful writing, only a very few people care for beautiful music. From this arise the common faults and failings in our music. It has remained a luxurious art; it has not become, like German music, the poetical expression of the people's thought.

To bring this about we should need a combination of conditions that are very rare in France; though such conditions went to the making of Camille Saint-Saëns. He had not only remarkable natural talent, but came of a family of ardent musicians, who devoted themselves to his education. At five years of age he was nourished on the orchestral score of Don Juan;[114] as a little boy

he "measured himself against Beethoven and Mozart" by playing in a public concert; at sixteen years of age he wrote his Première Symphonie. As he grew older he soaked himself in the music of Bach and Händel, and was able to compose at will after the manner of Rossini, Verdi, Schumann, and Wagner.[116] He has written excellent music in all styles—the Grecian style, and that of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. His compositions are of every kind: masses, grand operas, light operas, cantatas, symphonies, symphonic poems; music for the orchestra, the organ, the piano, the voice, and chamber music. He is the learned editor of Gluck and Rameau; and is thus not only an artist, but an artist who can talk about his art. He is an unusual figure in France—one would have thought rather to find his home in Germany.

In Germany, however, they make no mistake about him. There, the name of Camille Saint-Saëns stands for the French classical spirit, and is thought worthiest to represent us in music from the time of Berlioz until the appearance of the young school of César Franck—though Franck himself is as yet little known in Germany. M. Saint-Saëns possesses, indeed, some of the best qualities of a French artist, and among them the most important quality of all—perfect clearness of conception. It is remarkable how little this learned artist is bothered by his learning, and how free he is from all pedantry. Pedantry is the plague of German art, and the greatest men have not escaped it. I am not speaking of Brahms, who was ravaged with it, but of delightful geniuses like Schumann, or of powerful ones like Bach. "This unnatural art wearies one like the sanctimonious salon of some little provincial town; it stifles one, it is enough to kill one."[117] "Saint-Saëns is not a pedant," wrote Gounod; "he has remained too much of a child and become too clever for that." Besides, he has always been too much of a Frenchman.

Sometimes Saint-Saëns reminds me of one of our eighteenth-century writers. Not a writer of the Encyclopédie, nor one of Rousseau's camp, but rather of Voltaire's school. He has a clearness of thought, an elegance and precision of expression, and a quality of mind that make his music "not only noble, but very noble, as coming of a fine race and distinguished family."[118]

He has also excellent discernment, of an unemotional kind; and he is "calm in spirit, restrained in imagination, and keeps his self-control even in the midst of the most disturbing emotions."[119] This discernment is the enemy of anything approaching obscurity of thought or mysticism; and its outcome was that curious book, Problèmes et Mystères—a misleading title, for the spirit of reason reigns there and makes an appeal to young people to protect "the light of a menaced world" against "the mists of the North, Scandinavian gods, Indian divinities, Catholic miracles, Lourdes, spiritualism, occultism, and obscurantism."[120]

His love and need of liberty is also of the eighteenth century. One may say that liberty is his only passion. "I am passionately fond of liberty," he wrote.[121]

And he has proved it by the absolute fearlessness of his judgments on art; for not only has he reasoned soundly against Wagner, but dared to criticise the weaknesses of Gluck and Mozart, the errors of Weber and Berlioz, and the accepted opinions about Gounod; and this classicist, who was nourished on Bach, goes so far as to say: "The performance of works by Bach and Händel to-day is an idle amusement," and that those who wish to revive their art are like "people who would live in an old mansion that has been uninhabited for centuries."[122] He went even further; he criticised his own work and contradicted his own opinions. His love of liberty made him form, at different periods, different opinions of the same work. He thought that people had a right to change their opinions, as sometimes they deceived themselves. It seemed to him better boldly to admit an error than to be the slave of consistency. And this same feeling showed itself in other matters besides art: in ethics, as is shown by some verses which he addressed to a young friend, urging him not to be bound by a too rigid austerity:

and in metaphysics also, where he judges religions, faith, and the Gospels with a quiet freedom of thought, seeking in Nature alone the basis of morals and society.

His thoughts are unfettered and full of love for humanity and a sense of the responsibility of the individual. He called Beethoven "the greatest, the only really great artist," because he upheld the idea of universal brotherhood. His mind is so comprehensive that he has written books on philosophy, on the theatre, on classical painting,[124] as well as scientific essays,[125] volumes of verse, and even plays.[126]

He has been able to take up all sorts of things, I will not say with equal skill, but with discernment and undeniable ability. He shows a type of mind rare among artists and, above all, among musicians. The two principles that he enunciates and himself follows out are: "Keep free from all exaggeration" and "Preserve the soundness of your mind's health."[127] They are certainly not the principles of a Beethoven or a Wagner, and it would be rather difficult to find a noted musician of the last century who had applied them. They tell us, without need of comment, what is distinctive about M. Saint-Saëns, and what is defective in him. He is not troubled by any sort of passion. Nothing disturbs the clearness of his reason. "He has no prejudices; he takes no side"[128]—one might add, not even his own, since he is not afraid to change his views—"he does not pose as a reformer of anything"; he is altogether independent, perhaps almost too much so. He seems sometimes as if he did not know what to do with his liberty. Goethe would have said, I think, that he needed a little more of the devil in him.

His most characteristic mental trait seems to be a languid melancholy, which has its source in a rather bitter feeling of the futility of life;[129] and this is accompanied by fits of weariness which are not altogether healthy, followed by capricious moods and nervous gaiety, and a freakish liking for burlesque and mimicry. It is his eager, restless spirit that makes him rush about the world writing Breton and Auvergnian rhapsodies, Persian songs, Algerian suites, Portuguese barcarolles, Danish, Russian, or Arabian caprices, souvenirs of Italy, African fantasias, and Egyptian concertos; and, in the same way, he roams through the ages, writing Greek tragedies, dance music of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and preludes and fugues of the eighteenth. But in all these exotic and archaic reflections of times and countries through which his fancy wanders, one recognises the gay, intelligent countenance of a Frenchman on his travels, who idly follows his inclinations, and does not trouble to enter very deeply into the spirit of the people he meets, but gleans all he can, and then reproduces it with a French complexion—after the manner of Montaigne in Italy, who compared Verona to Poitiers, and Padua to Bordeaux, and who, when he was in Florence, paid much less attention to Michelangelo than to "a very strangely shaped sheep, and an animal the size of a large mastiff, shaped like a cat and striped with black and white, which they called a tiger."

From a purely musical point of view there is some resemblance between M. Saint-Saëns and Mendelssohn. In both of them we find the same intellectual restraint, the same balance preserved among the heterogeneous elements of their work. These elements are not common to both of them, because the time, the country, and the surroundings in which they lived are not the same; and there is also a great difference in their characters. Mendelssohn is more ingenuous and religious; M. Saint-Saëns is more of a dilettante and more sensuous. They are not so much kindred spirits by their science as good company by a common purity of taste, a sense of rhythm, and a genius for method, which gave all they wrote a neo-classic character.

As far as one can judge, M. Saint-Saëns' musical ideas are infused with the spirit of the great classics belonging to the end of the eighteenth century—far more, whatever people may say, with the spirit of Beethoven, Haydn, and Mozart, than with the spirit of Bach. Schumann's seductiveness also left its mark upon him, and he has felt the influence of Gounod, Bizet, and Wagner. But a stronger influence was that of Berlioz, his friend and master,[130] and, above all, that of Liszt. We must stop at this last name.

M. Saint-Saëns has good reason for liking Liszt, for Liszt was also a lover of freedom, and had shaken off traditions and pedantry, and scorned German routine; and he liked him, too, because his music was a reaction from the stiff school of Brahms.[131] He was enthusiastic about Liszt's work, and was one of the earliest and most ardent champions of that new music of which Liszt was the leading spirit—of that "programme" music which Wagner's triumph seemed to have nipped in the bud, but which has suddenly and gloriously burst into life again in the works of Richard Strauss. "Liszt is one of the great composers of our time," wrote M. Saint-Saëns; "he has dared more than either Weber, or Mendelssohn, or Schubert, or Schumann. He has created the symphonic poem. He is the deliverer of instrumental music.... He has proclaimed the reign of free music."[132] This was not said impulsively in a moment of enthusiasm; M. Saint-Saëns has always held this opinion. All his life he has remained faithful to his admiration of Liszt—since 1858, when he dedicated a Veni Creator to "the Abbé Liszt," until 1886, when, a few months after Liszt's death, he dedicated his masterpiece, the Symphonic avec orgue, "To the memory of Franz Liszt."[133]

"People have not hesitated to scoff at what they call my weakness for Liszt's works. But even if the feelings of affection and gratitude that he inspired in me did come like a prism and interpose themselves between my eyes and his face, I do not see anything greatly to be regretted in it.[134] I had not yet felt the charm of his personal fascination, I had neither heard nor seen him, and I did not owe him anything at all, when my interest was gripped in reading his first symphonic poems; and when later they pointed the way which was to lead to La Danse macabre, Le Rouet d'Omphale, and other works of the same nature, I am sure that my judgment was not biassed by any prejudice in his favour, and that I alone was responsible for what I did."[135]

This influence seems to me to explain some of M. Saint-Saëns' work. Not only is this influence evident in his symphonic poems—some of his best work—but it is to be found in his suites for orchestra, his fantasias, and his rhapsodies, where the descriptive and narrative element is strong. "Music should charm unaided," said M. Saint-Saëns; "but its effect is much finer when we use our imagination and let it flow in some particular channel, thus imaging the music. It is then that all the faculties of the soul are brought into play for the same end. What art gains from this is not greater beauty, but a wider field for its scope—that is, a greater variety of form and a larger liberty."[136]

And so we find that M. Saint-Saëns has taken part in the vigorous attempt of modern German symphony writers to bring into music some of the power of the other arts: poetry, painting, philosophy, romance, drama—the whole of life. But what a gulf divides them and him! A gulf made up, not only of diversities of style, but of the difference between two races and two worlds. Beside the frenzied outpourings of Richard Strauss, who flounders uncertainly between mud and debris and genius, the Latin art of Saint-Saëns rises up calm and ironical. His delicacy of touch, his careful moderation, his happy grace, "which enters the soul by a thousand little paths,"[137] bring with them the pleasures of beautiful speech and honest thought; and we cannot but feel their charm. Compared with the restless and troubled art of to-day, his music strikes us by its calm, its tranquil harmonies, its velvety modulations, its crystal clearness, its smooth and flowing style, and an elegance that cannot be put into words. Even his classic coldness does us good by its reaction against the exaggerations, sincere as they are, of the new school. At times one feels oneself carriedback to Mendelssohn, even to Spontini and the school of Gluck. One seems to be travelling in a country that one knows and loves; and yet in M. Saint-Saëns' works one does not find any direct resemblance to the works of other composers; for with no one are reminiscences rarer than with this master who carries all the old masters in his mind—it is his spirit that is akin to theirs. And that is the secret of his personality and his value to us; he brings to our artistic unrest a little of the light and sweetness of other times. His compositions are like fragments of another world.

"From time to time," he said, in speaking of Don Giovanni, "in the sacred earth of Hellene we find a fragment, an arm, the debris of a torso, scratched and damaged by the ravages of time; it is only the shadow of the god that the sculptor's chisel once created; but the charm is somehow still there, the sublime style is radiant in spite of everything."[138]

And so with this music. It is sometimes a little pale, a little too restrained; but in a phrase, in a few harmonies, there will shine out a clear vision of the past.

VINCENT D'INDY

So writes M. Vincent d'Indy.

After such an expression of opinion one imagines that a critic ought to feel some embarrassment in writing about M. Vincent d'Indy. And I myself ought to be the more concerned in the matter, for in the number of the review where the above was written the only other opinions expressed with equal conviction belonged to the author of this book. There is only one thing to be done—to copy M. d'Indy's example; for that forsworn enemy of criticism is himself a keen critic.

M. d'Indy is not a man hedged in by the boundaries of his art; his mind is open and well fertilised. Musicians nowadays are no longer entirely absorbed in their notes, but let their minds go out to other interests. And it is not one of the least interesting phenomena of French music to-day that gives us these learned and thoughtful composers, who are conscious of what they create, and bring to their art a keen critical faculty, like that of M. Saint-Saëns, M. Dukas, or M. d'Indy. From M. d'Indy we have had scholarly editions of Rameau, Destouches, and Salomon de Rossi. Even in the middle of rehearsals of L'Étranger at Brussels he was working at a reconstruction of Monteverde's Orfeo. He has published selections of folk-songs with critical notes, essays on Beethoven's predecessors, a history of Musical Composition, and debates and lectures. This fine intellectual culture is not, however, the most remarkable of M. d'Indy's characteristics, though it may have been the most remarked. Other musicians share this culture with him; and his real distinction lies in his moral and almost religious qualities, and it is this side of him that gives him an unusual interest for us among other contemporary artists.

No; it was the director of the Schola Cantorum, addressing the students in an inaugural speech, or giving them a lecture on Composition.[140]

We must consider a little this singular book, where a living science and a Gothic spirit are closely intermingled (I use the word "Gothic" in its best sense; I know it is the highest praise one can give M. d'Indy). This work has not received the attention it deserves. It is a record of the spirit of contemporary art; and if it stands rather apart from other writings, it should not be allowed to pass unnoticed on that account.

In this book, Faith is shown to be everything—the beginning and the end. We learn how it fans the flame of genius, nourishes thought, directs work, and governs even the modulations and the style of a musician. There is a passage in it that one would think was of the thirteenth century; it is curious, but not without dignity:

This book seems to be of the Middle Ages by reason of a sort of scholastic spirit of abstraction and classification.

And again its mediaeval spirit is shown by an extraordinary symbolism, which discovers in everything (as far as I understand it) the imprint of divine mysteries, and the mark of God in Three Persons in such things as the beating of the heart and ternary rhythms—"an admirable application of the principle of the Unity of the Trinity"![143]

From these remote times comes also M. d'Indy's method of writing history, not by tracing facts back to laws, but by deducing, on the contrary, facts from certain great general ideas, which have once been admitted, but not proved by frequent recurrence, such as: "The origin of art is in religion"[144]—a fact which is anything but certain. From this reasoning it follows that folk-songs are derived from Gregorian chants, and not the Gregorian chants from the folk-songs—as I would sooner believe. The history of art may thus become a sort of history of the world in moral achievement. One could divide it into two parts: the world before the coming of Pride, and after it.

"Subdued by the Christian faith, that formidable enemy of man, Pride, rarely showed itself in the soul of an artist in the Middle Ages. But with the weakening of religious belief, with the spirit of the Reformation applying itself almost at the same time to every branch of human learning, we see Pride reappear, and watch its veritable Renaissance."[145]

Finally, this Gothic spirit shows itself—in a less original way, it is true—in M. d'Indy's religious antipathies, which, in spite of the author's goodness of heart and great personal tolerance, constantly break out against the two faiths that are rivals to his own; and to them he attributes all the faults of art and all the vices of humanity. Each has its offence. Protestantism is made responsible for the extremes of individualism;[146] and Judaism, for the absurdities of its customs and the weakness of its moral sense.[147] I do not know which of the two is the more soundly belaboured; the second has the privilege of being so, not only in writing, but in pictures.[148] The worst of it is, these antipathies are apt to spoil the fairness of M. d'Indy's artistic judgment. It goes without saying that the Jewish musicians are treated with scant consideration; and even the great Protestant musicians, giants in their art, do not escape rebuke. If Goudimel is mentioned, it is because he was Palestrina's master, and his achievement of "turning the Calvinist psalms into chorales" is dismissed as being of little importance.[149]

Händel's oratorios are spoken of as "chilling, and, frankly speaking, tedious."[150] Bach himself escapes with this qualification: "If he is great, it is not because of, but in spite of the dogmatic and parching spirit of the Reformation."[151]

I will not try to play the part of judge; for a man is sufficiently judged by his own writings. And, after all, it is rather interesting to meet people who are sincere and not afraid to speak their minds. I will admit that I rather enjoy—a little perversely, perhaps—some of these extreme opinions, where the writer's personality stands strongly revealed.

So the old Gothic spirit still lives among us, and informs the mind of one of our best-known artists, and also, without doubt, the minds of hundreds of those who listen to him and admire him. M. Louis Laloy has shown the persistence of certain forms of plain-song in M. Debussy's Pelléas; and in a dim sense of far-away kinship he finds the cause of the mysterious charm that such music holds for some of us.[152] This learned paradox is possible. Why not? The mixtures of race and the vicissitudes of history have given us so full and complex a soul that we may very well find its beginnings there, if it pleases us—or the beginnings of quite other things. Of beginnings there is no end; the choice is quite embarrassing, and I imagine one's inclination has as much to do with the matter as one's temperament.

However that may be, M. d'Indy hails from the Middle Ages, and not from antiquity (which does not exist for him[153]), or from the Renaissance, which he confounds with the Reformation (though the two sisters are enemies) in order to crush it the better.[154] "Let us take for models," he says, "the fine workers in art of the Middle Ages."[155]

In this return to the Gothic spirit, in this awakening of faith, there is a name—a modern one this time—that they are fond of quoting at the Schola; it is that of César Franck, under whose direction the little Conservatoire in the Rue Saint-Jacques was placed. And indeed they could quote no better name than that of this simple-hearted man. Nearly all who came into contact with him felt his irresistible charm—a charm that has perhaps a great deal to do with the influence that his works still have on French music to-day. None has felt Franck's power, both morally and musically, more than M. Vincent d'Indy; and none holds a more profound reverence for the man whose pupil he was for so long.

The first time I saw M. d'Indy was at a concert of the Société nationale, in the Salle Pleyel, in 1888. They were playing several of Franck's works; among others, for the first time, his admirable Thème, fugue, et variation, for the harmonium and pianoforte, a composition in which the spirit of Bach is mingled with a quite modern tenderness. Franck was conducting, and M. d'Indy was at the pianoforte. I shall always remember his reverential manner towards the old musician, and how careful he was to follow his directions; one would have said he was a diligent and obedient pupil. It was a touching homage from one who had already proved himself a master by works like Le Chant de la cloche, Wallenstein, La Symphonie sur un thème montagnard, and who was perhaps at that time better known and more popular than César Franck himself. Since then twenty years have passed, and I still see M. d'Indy as I saw him that evening; and, whatever may happen in the future, his memory for me will be always associated with that of the grand old artist, presiding with his fatherly smile over the little gathering of the faithful.

Of all the characteristics of Franck's fine moral nature, the most remarkable was his religious faith. It must have astonished the artists of his time, who were even more destitute of such a thing than they are now. It made itself felt in some of his followers, especially in those who were near the master's heart, as M. d'Indy was. The religious thought of the latter reflects in some degree the thought of his master; though the shape of that thought may have undergone unconscious alteration. I do not know if Franck altogether fits the conception people have of him to-day. I do not want to introduce personal memories of him here. I knew him well enough to love him, and to catch a glimpse of the beauty and sincerity of his soul; but I did not know him well enough to discover the secrets of his mind. Those who had the happiness of being his intimate friends seem always to represent him as a mystic who shut himself away from the spirit of his time. I hope at some future date one of his friends will publish some of the conversations that he had with him, of which I have heard. But this man who had so strong a faith was also very independent. In his religion he had no doubts: it was the mainspring of his life; though faith with him was much more a matter of feeling than a matter of doctrine. But all was feeling with Franck, and reason made little appeal to him. His religious faith did not disturb his mind, for he did not measure men and their works by its rules; and he would have been incapable of putting together a history of art according to the Bible. This great Catholic had at times a very pagan soul; and he could enjoy without a qualm the musical dilettantism of Renan and the sonorous nihilism of Leconte de Lisle. There were no limits to his vast sympathies. He did not attempt to criticise the thing he loved—understanding was already in his heart. Perhaps he was right; and perhaps there was more trouble in the depths of his heart than the valiant serenity of its surface would lead us to believe.

His faith too.... I know how dangerous it is to interpret a musician's feelings by his music; but how can we do otherwise when we are told by Franck's followers that the expression of the soul is the only end and aim of music? Do we find his faith, as expressed through his music always full of peace and calm?[156] I ask those who love that music because they find some of their own sadness reflected there. Who has not felt the secret tragedies that some of his musical passages enfold—those short, characteristically abrupt phrases which seem to rise in supplication to God, and often fall back in sadness and in tears? It is not all light in that soul; but the light that is there does not affect us less because it shines from afar,