Here we have, then, one of those fundamental harmonic forms which are in music what idioms or phrases are in language. It is striking how sedulously César Franck, distrustful of the definite, the conventional, avoids them. Compared with the work of a keen rationalist like Saint-Saëns, his music is curiously incoherent, curiously loose-knit, groping, and indeterminate. His pages are studded with departures and evasions; he delights in going some other way than we expect, or in writing chords that do not give us even any basis of expectation. Consecutive octaves and fifths, so terrible to lovers of cogency and sequence, are an especial feature of his harmony, giving it that curious lapsing effect so characteristic and indescribable. His entire tone-mass has a trick of sliding bodily up or down, which disconcerts, even while it fascinates, one who is accustomed to harmonic stability. The student need only play over the opening of the Symphony or the first page of the String Quartet to feel that here is a man who treats traditions debonairly, and who thus suggests novel beauties without defining them. Equally irresponsible is he in his treatment of another sort of harmonic form which is intrinsically even more definite than the clusters of consonant chords like the «Amen.» When there is a dissonant tone in the first chord, a tone which, having slight justification for being, presses urgently toward a neighboring tone in the next chord, into which it is said to «resolve,» then the cluster, as a whole, is even more determinate. The dissonance introduces a tension that must be relieved in one definite way. It involves its own resolution just as unstable equilibrium in a body involves its falling in the direction of the greatest pull. The alien tone in the chord is got rid of by the path of least resistance; it is a foreign element that must be discharged. So potent is this tendency of dissonant tones to resolve that it is one of the chief means of vitalizing the entire musical fabric. Unless music constantly got out of harmony with itself it would no more progress than a man would walk unless before each step he lost his balance. It would stagnate. Consider, for example, the last phrase of that highly vitalized tune, «The Man that Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo.» No one could attribute stagnation to this phrase, whatever other faults he might find in it; and its impetus is largely due to the vigor with which it lands on the dissonant chord next before the last, and the consequent pull of this chord into the last. Try to conceive of ending without that last chord, that resolution in which the foreign element is discharged and all comes to rest. It is told of Mendelssohn that he rushed down-stairs in his night clothes early one morning to resolve a dominant seventh chord (such as we have on the syllable «Car») which some waggish friend struck and left uncompleted. Mendelssohn was of course unusually sensitive to harmonic law, but it