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. 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.

At

His two volumes of critical essays, "Harmonie et Mélodie" and "Portraits * 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

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 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 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 contem- . plate 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 lifeblood 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 wellplanned 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 emphasize 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 that 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 Etudes, 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, wellconstructed 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.