Camille Saint-Saëns and César Franck illustrate strikingly another sort of partiality, a partiality often met with in a less noticeable degree. Each exemplifies only one of those contrasting phases of feeling which we saw to underlie Dance and Song, and which in the greatest composers are combined. Saint-Saëns' work, primarily expressive of active feeling, is strongly metrical, derives its chief interest and value from rhythmic qualities; Franck's, the product of a singularly contemplative and monastic nature, is monotonous in rhythm, but endlessly various in melodic and harmonic treatment. In the biographical essays the antithesis will be brought out more in detail. Here it is only necessary to suggest that, if these two French composers are somewhat wider in scope than Grieg or Dvořák, their curious limitations in temperament prevent them from doing all-inclusive and universal work.
With Tschaïkowsky and Brahms we come to men of a larger caliber. These two, different as they are--the Russian finding in music primarily a means of expression, the German valuing more its plastic beauty--are, nevertheless, the only two moderns who can be said to carry on worthily the torch of Bach and Beethoven. Both were men of sufficiently wide sympathy and scholarship to approach music with the utmost liberality, to get into contact with all its traditions and utilize all its technical resources. They write in that «grand style» which draws its elements from the widest sources, the style not of one man nor of one nation, but of the world. Again, they were men of complex temperament, capable of a great range of feeling both active and contemplative. Consequently the dance impulse and the song impulse are equally operative in their work, which has a richness and variety to be found in Bach and Beethoven, but not in Saint-Saëns or Franck. And though they were men of the deepest emotion, they had also the intellectual control over their work that made it not only expressive but beautiful. In a word, the range of their learning, the many-sidedness of their temperaments, their emotional profundity and their intellectual power, all conspired to make them the greatest musicians of their time.
