lacknesses of both without achieving anything at
all comparable to their flashy brilliance. As far as the accent of their
music went, they floated cheerfully somewhere between Germany and Italy.
And when something recognizably indigenous did put in its appearance in
the operas of Thomas and Gounod, it did but the veriest lip-service to
the racial genius, and was a thing that walked lightly, dexterously,
warily, and roused no sleeping dogs.

What the cause of this diffidence is, what sort of rigidity it betokens,
one can only guess. But of its presence there can be no doubt. Were
there nothing else to demonstrate it, the survival among the French of
an institution named M. Camille Saint-Saens would amply do so. For the
work of this extraordinary personality, or, more correctly,
impersonality, who for twenty-five years of the Third Republic dominated
the musical situation in his country, got himself acclaimed everywhere,
not only in Paris, but also in Berlin, the modern French master, and
to-day at the ripe age of one hundred and forty still persists in
writing string-quartets with the same frigid classicism that
distinguished his first efforts, is obviously a compromise resulting
from the conflict of two equally strong impulses--that of making music
and that of fending off musical expression. For years this man has been
going through all the gestures of the most serious sort of composition
without adding one iota to musical art. For years he has been writing
music apparently logical, clear, well-formed. His opus-numbers mount
well toward two hundred. He has written symphonies, concertos for piano
and violin, operas, cantatas, symphonic poems, suites, ballades,
fantasies, caprices. He has written large numbers of each. He has
written "impressions" of Naples, of Algiers, of the Canary Islands, of
every portion of the globe he has visited. But despite all this apparent
activity, M. Saint-Saens has really succeeded in effecting nothing at
all. His compositions are pretty well outside the picture of musical
art. To-day they are already older than Mendelssohn's, of which pale art
they seem an even paler reflection. Mendelssohn, too, was a person
inwardly at war with himself, and perhaps Saint-Saens may be another
example of the same conflict. Still, the latter has achieved a sort of
waxy coldness from which the amiable Felix was after all saved. Elegant,
finished, smooth, classicizing, the music of M. Camille Saint-Saens
leave