Lack of emotion, then, is the serious defect of this master. And in a musician it is in truth serious. Emotion is the life blood of the musical organism; without it all the members may be shapely, well ordered, highly finished, but all will be cold and lifeless. So it is with much of this clever craftsman's work. Too often there is graceful melody, arresting harmony, ingenious rhythm, but none of the passion needed to fuse and transfigure them. Impassioned vocal utterance, the song element in music, is seldom heard from Saint-Saëns. In the classic works he manipulates, in the exotic pieces he depicts; nowhere does he speak. But to speak, to voice deep feeling directly, though with the restraint necessary to plastic beauty, is the aim and the justification of music. Complex as the art has become in our day, the essence of it is still, as it ever must be, emotional expression; and though modern composers sing broader songs than the first musicians, and sing them on instruments rather than with the voice, they must equally sing, and their song must proceed from their hearts if it is to touch the hearts of others. Hence Saint-Saëns, when compared with a man of passionate earnestness like César Franck, or Schumann, or Wagner, inevitably seems superficial. Pieces like his B-minor Violin Concerto, with its elaborate classical machinery, its well-planned contrasts and brilliant effects, and the vast Symphony in C-minor, in which the theme undergoes such wonderfully skillful manipulation, seem so little the expression of a personal impulse that we catch ourselves wondering why he wrote them. Elsewhere, to be sure, as in the Andante of the 'Cello Sonata, his very virtuosity achieves such noble effects that we forget the hand-made quality of the work. But it is seldom indeed that, subordinating workmanship entirely, he gives us a genuine song of feeling, such as the second theme of the Finale in this Sonata. The lift and impetus of this beautiful theme emphasizes by contrast the emotional emptiness of the ingenious web that surrounds it.
While, however, we may with propriety recognize the lack of personal ardor in Saint-Saëns that reduces the song element in his music to a minimum, it would be a sad mistake to exaggerate the limitation or to forget that from another and perhaps an equally valid point of view he is a great musician. However he may fall short as a melodist, he is a past-master of rhythm and harmony, spheres in which feeling counts for less, logic for more. His harmonic style is eminently lucid. To him a chord is part of an organism, not a bit of color or a phase of feeling. A series of chords has for him all the tendency, the direction, and the self-fulfillment of a sentence of words; to omit or to change one would be like striking out a predicate or an object--the sentence would not parse. He uses most those chords which point in a definite direction, which carry in themselves, so to speak, the indication for their fulfillment--the dominant and secondary sevenths, and suspensions of triads. He avoids the vague and the ambiguous. And although he is a lover of novel harmonic effects, and an ingenious inventor of them, the novelty is always a new form, not a new formlessness. His modulation, too, is of an extreme clarity: he never falls into a new key, so to speak, as Dvořák does; he proceeds thither.