V
CÉSAR FRANCK
When we turn from the brilliant Parisian we have been studying to that obscure and saintly man, César Franck, the only French contemporary of Saint-Saëns who is worthy to be ranked with him as a great composer, we can hardly believe ourselves in the same country or epoch. It is as if we were suddenly transported from modern Paris into some mediæval monastery, to which the noise of the world never penetrates, where nothing breaks the silence save the songs of worship and the deep note of the organ. In the presence of this devout mystic the sounds of cities and peoples fade away, and we are alone with the soul and God. We have passed from the noonday glare of the intellect, in which objects stand forth sharp and hard, into the soft cathedral twilight of religious emotion; and putting aside our ordinary thoughts we commune for a time with deeper intuitions. Or, again, it is like closing a volume of Taine and taking up Maeterlinck. From the streets and the drawing-room we pass into the cloister, where dwell no longer men and things, but all the intangible presences of thought and feeling. We close our eyes on the pageant of experience, to reopen them in the dim inner light of introspection, where, if we may believe the mystics, they will behold a truer reality. The temperament of Franck is thus at the opposite pole from that prehensile Gallic temperament so well exemplified in Saint-Saëns, and we should find the juxtaposition of the two men as the greatest French composers of their time highly perplexing did we not remember that, in spite of his almost lifelong residence in Paris, César Franck was by birth and blood, like Maeterlinck, with whom he has so much in common, a Belgian. Exactly how much the peculiar characters of these men were inherited from their race it is of course impossible to say; but any one who has seen the placid faces of the Belgian peasants, with their calm, almost bovine look of contentment, must recognize there a trait that needs only the power of articulation to produce a natural religion of feeling, or mysticism, like that of César Franck and Maeterlinck. It was the same sort of self-sufficient serenity, the antithesis of Saint-Saëns's busy worldliness, that determined the course of Franck's life, so obscure, so uneventful, so dominated by high spiritual purpose.
César-Auguste Franck (it was an inapt name for so pacific a being) was born in 1822, at Liége, Belgium. There he made his first musical studies, but went to Paris at fifteen to study in the Conservatory. Though without the precocity of «le petit Saint-Saëns,» he must have been a solid musician at sixteen, for in a test that took place in July, 1838, he transposed a piece at sight down a third, playing it «avec un brio remarquable,» and was awarded the first grand prize of honor at his graduation in 1842. Foregoing the career of a concert pianist, which his father wished him to pursue, «repudiating with horror and disgust,» as one of his biographers has it, «the brilliant noise-making that people long mistook for music,» he turned for a livelihood to that laborious work of teaching which he pursued all the rest of his life with patient fidelity.
He seems to have been an almost ideal teacher, long-suffering with the dull pupils, painstaking and generous with the able ones, provoking enthusiasm in all by his contagious love for art and his receptivity to ideas. In a degree that is rare even among the best teachers, he combined endurance and vivacity. Giving, all his life, from eight to ten lessons a day, many of them, even after he had made his reputation, in girls' boarding-schools and pensions of the usual wearisome sort, he yet retained vitality to impart to the best minds of the present generation of French composers. Though after teaching all day, often not returning home until supper-time, he would in the evening give correspondence lessons to pupils in the provinces, and though even the Sundays were filled with his duties as organist and choirmaster, still he often found time to assemble his favorite pupils, and to discuss with them, as if with perfect equals, their exercises and his own works. One of these pupils, M. Vincent d'Indy, has described how «père Franck,» as they called him, would play them his choral compositions, singing all the vocal parts in «a terrible voice;» and how he would sit at the piano, fixing with troubled gaze some offending passage in an exercise, murmuring anxiously, «Je n'aime pas ... Je n'aime pas,» until perhaps it grew to seem permissible, and with his bright smile he could cry a «J'aime!» Thanks to his earnest desire to appreciate whatever was good, controlled as it was by a severely classical taste, he could make his students good workmen and stern critics without paralyzing their individual genius. He was thorough without being rigid, and respected learners as much as he revered the masters. Naturally, the learners, in their turn, felt for their «Pater seraphicus,» as they named him, an almost filial affection. Emmanuel Chabrier, speaking over Franck's grave, in Montrouge Cemetery, voiced the feelings of them all when he said that this was not merely an admirable artist, but «the dear regretted master, the most gentle, modest, and wise. He was the model, he was the example.»
For thirty-two years, that is to say, from 1858 until his death, Franck was organist of the Église Ste. Clotilde, where his playing must have been an endless inspiration to all who heard him, though his modesty kept him personally inconspicuous. One likes to think of this quiet, devout musician, animated by the purest religious enthusiasm, advancing year by year in mastery of his art, producing without ostentation works of a novel and radical beauty. Few of his listeners could have conceived that one so benignant and courteous, but so easily forgotten, was making himself a force that modern music could not forget. They, who saw only the husk of the man, could not guess what treasures of humanity and genius it concealed. M. d'Indy well describes the two aspects. «Any one,» he says, «who had encountered this being in the street, with his coat too large, his trousers too short, his grimacing and preoccupied face framed in his somewhat gray whiskers, would not have believed in the transformation that took place when, at the piano, he explained and commented on some beautiful work of art, or when, at the organ, he put forth his inspired improvisations. Then the music enveloped him like an aureole; then one could not fail to be struck by the conscious will expressed in the mouth and chin, by the almost superhuman knowledge in his glance; then only would one observe the nearly perfect likeness of his large forehead to that of Beethoven.» And M. Derepas has the following paragraph in the same tenor: «It was there, before the keyboards, his agile and powerful feet upon the pedals, that it was necessary to see César Franck. His beautiful head with its finely developed brow crowned with naturally curling hair, his profound and contemplative expression, his features marked without exaggeration, his full, well-cut mouth breathing health, ... all wearing the aureole of genius and of faith—it was like a vision of another age in strong contrast with the turbulences of the day.» If one is sometimes sorry that Franck had to spend so much time teaching, one cannot, in the face of such descriptions as these, regret the hours he passed in the Église Ste. Clotilde. Its atmosphere was native to his genius, which was not only religious, but even ecclesiastical. In hearing his «musique cathédralesque,» as Saint-Saëns well called it, one can almost see the pillars and arches, the pure candle-flames and the bowed peasants at prayer.
It was in the spare moments of this full life that Franck found time to write his extraordinary music. Every morning, winter and summer, rising at six, he set aside two hours for what he expressively called «his own work.» Then, after breakfast, came the day's teaching, in the course of which he would jot down ideas that occurred to him, recording perhaps eight measures, and turning again to the pupil. In the evenings, when there were not correspondence-lessons to write, or rehearsals, he often got out his manuscripts once more; and his short summer vacations were given entirely to composition. All the more remarkable is this indomitability when we remember that he lacked not only the stimulus of public success, but for a long while even the impetus of having definitely succeeded in his own eyes, so new were his ideas and so difficult the technique they required. Very few composers have matured so late. Though he wrote in his youth some trios, and later a Mass, his first really individual work, «Ruth,» was written when he was nearly fifty; «Les Éolides,» his earliest orchestral composition, was produced in 1877, when he was fifty-five; «Les Beatitudes,» in some respects his masterpiece, was not finished until 1880, though begun more than ten years before; and all his most characteristic work in pure music, as, for example, the Prelude, Choral, and Fugue and the Prelude, Aria, and Finale for piano, the three wonderful Chorals for organ, the Violin Sonata, the Quartet, the Quintet, and the Symphony, date from the last decade of his life. In a day when every harmony-student itches to give the world a symphony, it is hard to admire too much the artistic self-respect that kept Franck a nonentity for years, to make him at last a master.
Meanwhile, of course, he had to endure neglect. Probably most of his acquaintances shared the impression put into words by a Paris publisher to whom M. Servières offered an essay about him. «Oh, monsieur,» cried this gentleman, «I remember César Franck perfectly. A man who was always in a hurry, always soberly dressed in black, and who wore his trousers too short!... Organist at Sainte Clotilde. It seems that he was a great musician, little known to the public.» Rather harder to explain is the lack of appreciation which in 1880 led those in power at the Conservatory, where Franck was already organ professor, to give the chair of composition then left vacant, not to him, but to Léo Delibes, the writer of ballet-music. But perhaps the most pathetic result of the general indifference to Franck was that his masterpiece could never be given a complete performance during his lifetime. «Les Beatitudes» was first given entire in 1893, three years after his death. When he received the Legion of Honor in 1886, he said sorrowfully to a friend, «Yes, my friend, they honor me—as a Professor.» That is the one repining word of his that is recorded.
It would, however, be a mistake to suppose that Franck's fellow-men noticed nothing but his short trousers, or that in his high artistic effort he was entirely without sympathy. Few men have been more fortunate in their friends. The love and veneration of his many pupils, and of such men as Chabrier, Pierné, and Fauré, made an atmosphere in which his heart expanded and his ambition grew. One of this group of admirers tells how they would surround him on his return to Paris in the autumn, to ask what he had done, what he had to show. «Vous verrez, repondait-il»—the French alone can render the endearing vanity and naïveté of his reply—«vous verrez, repondait-il en prenant un air mysterieux, vous verrez; je crois que vous serez content.... J'ai beaucoup travaillé et bien travaillé.» It was a similarly frank and guileless self-satisfaction that made him apparently unaware of the coldness of his audiences, who were generally puzzled or bored. Happy, as M. d'Indy records, in having given his friends the pleasure of hearing him play his own compositions, in spite of the scanty applause he never failed to bow profoundly. Thus untroubled by the indifference of the crowd, surrounded by a few men who gave him their warm and discriminating admiration, and inspired by a genius peculiarly exalted and disinterested, bent on beauty alone, and superior to petty jealousies, César Franck lived his quiet, fruitful, and happy life. He died at Paris in 1890. The last anecdote we have of him tells of his finding strength, four days before his death, to praise the «Samson et Dalila» of Saint-Saëns, then running at the Théâtre Lyrique. «I see him yet,» says M. Arthur Coquard, «turning towards me his poor suffering face to say vivaciously and even joyfully, in the vibrant tones that his friends know, 'tres beau, tres beau.'» The words, expressing that pure love of art which animated his whole career, lodge in the mind of one who studies it, together with those other words of his, which none ever had a better right to use, «J'ai beaucoup travaillé et bien travaillé.»