eople,
deeper even than that he bore his own countrymen, that sent the youth
Franck from Liege to Paris, held him fast in the city all his long and
obscure life, and made him flourish in the alien soil. For his music has
traits that are common to the representative French artists and have
come to identify the French genius. Once again, one caught sight in the
music of the French clarity and orderliness, logicality and conciseness.
Once again there were great, sonorous edifices in the grand style
temperate in tone. The very diffidence that makes it so difficult for
the race to express itself with ease in music was expressed in this
work. Moreover, along with the silveriness of Rameau, the simple
solidity of French prose, and some of the old jollity of the medieval
French artists, is in the music of Franck. Old modes revive in it, old
peasant rhythms beat the ground once more.

But, chiefest of all, it expressed the people described in the section
of "Jean-Christophe" significantly entitled "Dans la Maison." It
expressed the essential France hidden by the glare of the Third
Republic. The music of Cesar Franck is the music of the people driven
into themselves by the conditions of modern life. It is the music of the
fine ones who stand hesitant on the threshold of the world, and have
incessantly to struggle for the power to act, for faith and hope. It is
the music of those who in the midst of millions feel themselves forsaken
and alone and powerless, and in whose obscure and laborious existence
Franck himself shared. It is a thing turned away from the market-place,
full of the quiet of the inner chamber. Through so much of Franck one
feels the steady glow of the lamp in the warm room. With its songs of
loneliness and doubt and ruth, its self-communings and vigils and
prayers, its struggle for the sunlight of perfect confidence and
healthiness and zest, it might come directly out of the lives of a
half-dozen of the eminent persons whom France produced during the
closing years of the nineteenth century. Romain Rolland himself is of
this sort. It was for these people, self-distrustful, disillusioned,
doubtful, that Charles Peguy wrote, bidding them remember the divine
origin of the life and the institutions that seemed so false to them,
bidding them remember that the Republic itself was the result of a
mystical impulse in the human heart, that the dead of a race live on in
the bodies of the breathing, and that the members of a