There is nothing non-exclusive but the All; my end is communion with Being through the whole of Being.» Now, whatever may be the merits of this point of view, it obviously involves a certain degree of artistic failure. The mystic cannot be entirely successful in art. For art depends on organization in definite forms, and the mystic rejects all particular forms as finite. «Reality, the present, the irreparable, the necessary,» writes Amiel, «repel and even terrify me.... The life of thought alone seems to me to have enough elasticity and immensity, to be free enough from the irreparable; practical life makes me afraid.» Accordingly, men of this temperament are defeated in their search for beauty by an unconquerable shyness of all its incarnations. They fear that in defining their fancy they will vulgarize it. It is their fate to long for an all-inclusive form in a world where forms are mutually exclusive, to strive to utter truth in one great word, when even the shortest sentence must occupy time. Amiel himself is a pathetic example of the mystic's destiny in art. Haunted all his life by the vision of infinite beauty, the conception of absolute truth, he could never bring himself to accept the limitations of all human performance, and his talent was almost as unproductive as it was exalted. He never could embody his aspirations. Tantalizing him with the suggestion of supernal beauties, they resisted all his efforts to come up with and embrace them, because he denied himself the use of those definite forms in which alone, however inadequately, ideals can be realized. In many respects César Franck is the analogue in music of Amiel in literature. That vague richness of his emotional tone, which like a dark background of night is constantly lighted up by meteoric outbursts of passion, is strangely like the somber moralizings and speculations, in the «Journal Intime,» among which Amiel's cries of spiritual pain, doubt, and longing stand out with such sudden, poignant pathos. Franck has in common with Amiel the mystic's longing for ideal satisfactions, and the mystic's distrust of all finite means of attaining them. He, too, is «afraid» of the forms of practical life, of the conventional devices of musical structure and the types evolved by tradition. He avoids always the obvious, the natural even, and gropes toward some unattainable ideal of expression. So great is his distrust of the understood, the accepted, the usual and intelligible, that he is always leaving the beaten track and roaming afield after some novel and untamed beauty. It will be worth while to get to closer quarters with this tendency, and to see exactly how it operates.