the
sinister brood of doubts and fears and woes, and win their way back
again into the bosom of God. He was the simple, heart-whole believer,
the poor little man lost in the shambles, shaken and wounded by the
"terrible doubt of appearances" and by the cruelty of things, yearning
to cry his despair and loneliness and grief to the ears of the God of
his childhood, and battling through long vigils for trust and belief and
reconciliation. Again and again his music re-echoes the cry, "I will not
let Thee go unless Thou bless me." Of modern composers Bruckner alone
had affair so steadily with the heights, and Franck is the gentler,
sweeter, tenderer of the two. He set himself, quite in the fashion of
the composers of the dying renaissance, to write an hundred hymns to the
Virgin. He sought in his piano compositions to recapture the lofty,
spiritual tone, the religious communion that informed the works of Bach.
Only once, in the "Variations Symphoniques," is he brilliant and
virtuosic, and then, with what disarming naivete and joyousness!
Oftentimes it is the gray and lonely air of the organ-loft at St.
Clothilde, the church where he played so many melancholy years, that
breathes through his work. Alone with his instrument and the clouded
skies, he pours out his sadness, his bitterness, strives for
resignation. Or, his music is a bridge from the turmoiled present to
some rarer, larger, better plane. In symphony and quartet, in sonata and
oratorio, he attains it. The hellish brood is scattered; the great bells
of faith swing bravely out once more; the world is full of Sabbath
sunshine and pied with simple field-flowers. And he goes forth through
it released and blessed and joyous, and light and glad of heart.

How furious a battle the man had to wage to bring such a musical sense
to fruition in the Paris of Ambroise Thomas and Gounod and Massenet may
be gauged from the fact that the compositions that assure Franck his
position were almost all produced during the last ten years of his life,
after his fifty-eighth year had been passed. For thirty years the man
had to struggle with his medium and his environment before he was even
able to do his genius justice. Indeed, up to the year 1850, he produced
little of importance at all. The trios recall Meyerbeer; the cantata
"Ruth," with which this his first period of composition closes, has a
sweetness of the sort afterward identified with the name of Massenet.
The works of the second