What the cause of this diffidence is, what sort of rigidity it betokens, one can only guess. But of its presence there can be no doubt. Were there nothing else to demonstrate it, the survival among the French of an institution named M. Camille Saint-Saens would amply do so. For the work of this extraordinary personality, or, more correctly, impersonality, who for twenty-five years of the Third Republic dominated the musical situation in his country, got himself acclaimed everywhere, not only in Paris, but also in Berlin, the modern French master, and to-day at the ripe age of one hundred and forty still persists in writing string-quartets with the same frigid classicism that distinguished his first efforts, is obviously a compromise resulting from the conflict of two equally strong impulses--that of making music and that of fending off musical expression. For years this man has been going through all the gestures of the most serious sort of composition without adding one iota to musical art. For years he has been writing music apparently logical, clear, well-formed. His opus-numbers mount well toward two hundred. He has written symphonies, concertos for piano and violin, operas, cantatas, symphonic poems, suites, ballades, fantasies, caprices. He has written large numbers of each. He has written "impressions" of Naples, of Algiers, of the Canary Islands, of every portion of the globe he has visited. But despite all this apparent activity, M. Saint-Saens has really succeeded in effecting nothing at all. His compositions are pretty well outside the picture of musical art. To-day they are already older than Mendelssohn's, of which pale art they seem an even paler reflection. Mendelssohn, too, was a person inwardly at war with himself, and perhaps Saint-Saens may be another example of the same conflict. Still, the latter has achieved a sort of waxy coldness from which the amiable Felix was after all saved. Elegant, finished, smooth, classicizing, the music of M. Camille Saint-Saens leaves us in the completest of objectivity. We are touched and moved not at all by it. Something, we vaguely perceive, is supposed to be taking place beneath our eyes. Faint frosty lights pass across the orchestra. This, we guess, is supposed to be an inward and musing passage. This is a finale, this a dramatic climax. But we are no more than languidly pleased with the cleverness and urbanity of the orchestration, the pleasant shapeliness of certain melodies, the neatness of composition. In the end, the man bores us thoroughly. He has invented a new musical ennui. It is that of being invariably pretty and impersonal and insignificant.