stinguishes his music and sets it over against
this other that is so hard of edge and thin of substance. Over it there
plays a light and luminous tenderness, an almost naive and reticent and
virginal quality. The music of "Psyche" is executed with the lightest
of musical brushes. It is as sweet and lucent and gracious as a fresco
of Raphael's. The lightest, the silkiest of veils floats in the section
marked "Le Sommeil de Psyche"; the gentlest of zephyrs carries the
maiden to her lord. Small wonder that devout commentators have
discovered in this music, so uncorporeal and diaphanous, a Christian
intention, and pretend that in Franck's mind Psyche was the believing
soul and Eros the divine lover! Tenderness, seraphic sweetness were the
man's characteristic, permeating everything he touched. Few composers,
certainly, have invented music more divinely sweet than that of the
third movement of the quartet, more ecstatic and luminous than the ideas
scattered all through his work, that seem like records of some moment
when the heavens opened over his head and the empyrean resounded with
the hallelujahs of the angelic host. And, certainly, no composer, Mozart
alone excepted, has discovered such naively and innocently joyous themes
as those that fill the close of the sonata and the symphonic variations
with delicious vernal sunshine.

The career of one fated to serve the art of music in the Paris of
Franck's lifetime, and to wait thirty years for the flowering of his
genius, was of necessity obscure and sad. The

"yeux menteurs, l'hypocrisie
Des serrements de mains,
La masque d'amitie cachant la jalousie,
Les pales lendemains

De ces jours de triomphe"...

of which M. Saint-Saens in his little volume of verse complains somewhat
pompously, were unknown to Cesar Franck. For this man, even in the years
of his prime, there were only the humiliations, the disappointments that
are the lot of uncomprehended genius. He had rich pupils, among them the
Vicomte Vincent d'Indy, but not one of them seems to have come forward
to help him, to secure him greater time for composition, to save him
from wasting his precious days in instructing a few amateurs. All his
life, until the very last of his seventy years, Cesar Franck was obliged
to arise every morning at five o'clock in order to have a couple of
hours in which to be free to compose before the waxing day obliged him
to begin trotting from