It has been necessary to dwell at some length on Franck's life and character because they throw so much light on his music. To an unusual degree it is the expression of himself, full of his peculiar contemplative emotion. The harmonic background is rich, somber, and vague, like the prevailing mood of a religious devotee; from it constantly emerge phrases of song, phrases of the most poignant aspiration, like passions in a dream, voicing those intense yet elusive feelings which irradiate none but introspective minds. They are like the cries of human lovers in a world of silence and mystery, or, better, they are the cries of a finite soul that yearns for God and finds him not. One feels always in Franck's music the tragedy of the finite and the infinite. Those groping, shifting harmonies, above which the pathetic fragments of melody constantly sound for a moment, somehow irresistibly suggest the great unknown universe in which men's little lives are acted. All is vague save the momentary feature, and that presses on towards a fulfillment that perpetually eludes it. All shifts and passes, save only that never-ceasing mood of aspiration, that restless striving of the fragment for completion. Spiritual unrest is the characteristic quality of this music--the unrest of a spirit pure and ardent but forever unsatisfied. Now, it is perhaps not too fantastic to find in the mingled vagueness and poignancy of this music the proper artistic expression of mysticism. So _must_ a mystic express himself. For it is characteristic of the mystical temperament to yearn for ideal satisfactions, but to find none in finite forms. Mysticism, in fact, is one of the ways of solving, or perhaps we should say of ignoring, that primal and protean mystery of human life, the conflict between ideal needs and actual facts. Realism meets it by denying the needs and exalting the facts; idealism attempts to mold the real into conformity with the ideal, of course with very partial success. The mystic, too earnest to follow the realistic method, too impatient to endure the plodding progress of idealism, cuts the Gordian knot by discarding the actual altogether. He pronounces it too inelastic, too constricting, and dispenses with it. He hugs the ideal to his heart, but can see no virtue in the real. Actualities, objects, events, and forms which to the idealist are precious if only partial expressions of spiritual values, are to him wholly recalcitrant, wholly external and illusory. The really precious thing, he says, is something transcendent, something remote, something that cannot transpire in events or body itself in forms, because it is infinite and complete, while these are finite, broken, and limited. Henri-Frédéric Amiel, a man peculiarly dominated by this way of viewing things, wrote in his Journal, «Nothing finite is true, is interesting, is worthy to fix my attention. All that is particular is exclusive, and all that is exclusive repels me.