but destroy the essential beauty of harmony and the clear sense of
tonality; moreover it is mechanical in process, devoid of poetic fancy,
purely chaotic in effect. There is ever a danger of confusing the novel
in art with new beauty.]

And yet we must praise in the French master a wonderful workmanship and
a profound sincerity of sentiment. He shows probably the highest point
to which a style that is mainly harmonic may rise. But when he employs
his broader mastery of tonal architecture, he attains a rare height of
lofty feeling, with reaches of true dramatic passion.

The effect, to be sure, of his special manner is somewhat to dilute the
temper of his art, and to depress the humor. It is thus that the
pervading melancholy almost compels the absence of a "slow movement" in
his symphony. And so we feel in all his larger works for instruments a
suddenness of recoil in the Finale.

One can see in Franck, in analogy with his German contemporaries, an
etherealized kind of "Tristan and Isolde,"--a "Paolo and Francesca" in a
world of shades. Compared with his followers the quality of stereotype
in Franck is merely general; there is no excessive use of one device.

A baffling element in viewing the art of Franck is his remoteness of
spirit, the strangeness of his temper. He lacked the joyous spring that
is a dominant note in the classic period. Nor on the other hand did his
music breathe the pessimism and naturalism that came with the last
rebound of Romantic reaction. Rather was his vein one of high spiritual
absorption--not so much in recoil, as merely apart from the world in a
kind of pious seclusion. Perhaps his main point of view was the
church-organ. He seems a religious prophet in a non-religious age. With