a clear personality, quite apart from a prevailing modern spirit. A
certain charm of settled melancholy seems to inhere in his wonted style.
A mystic is Franck in his dominant moods, with a special sense and power
for subtle harmonic process, ever groping in a spiritual discontent with
defined tonality.

A glance at the detail of his art discloses Franck as one of the main
harmonists of his age, with Wagner and Grieg. Only, his harmonic manner
was blended if not balanced by a stronger, sounder counterpoint than
either of the others. But with all the originality of his style we
cannot escape a sense of the stereotype, that indeed inheres in all
music that depends mainly on an harmonic process. His harmonic ideas,
that often seem inconsequential, in the main merely surprise rather than
move or please. The enharmonic principle is almost too predominant,--an
element that ought never to be more than occasional. For it is founded
not upon ideal, natural harmony, but upon a conventional compromise, an
expedient compelled by the limitation of instruments. This over-stress
appears far stronger in the music of Franck's followers, above all in
their frequent use of the whole tone "scale" which can have no other
_rationale_ than a violent extension of the enharmonic principle.[A]
With a certain quality of kaleidoscope, there is besides (in the
harmonic manner of César Franck) an infinitesimal kind of progress in
smallest steps. It is a dangerous form of ingenuity, to which the
French are perhaps most prone,--an originality mainly in details.

[Footnote A: Absolute harmony would count many more than the semitones
of which our music takes cognizance. For purpose of convenience on the
keyboard the semitonal raising of one note is merged in the lowering of
the next higher degree in the scale. However charming for occasional
surprise may be such a substitution, a continuous, pervading use cannot