Still, the future was with Cesar Franck as it has been with few artists. The timeliness of his art was almost miraculous. Without a doubt, during the years of his labor, the French were most ready for a musical renaissance. The defeat of 1870 had, after all, braced the nation, summoned its dormant energies. It had not been severe enough to destroy, and only fierce enough to force folk to shake off the torpor that had lain upon them during the two previous regimes. People began to work again, bellies were somewhat emptier and heads somewhat fuller than they had been under Louis-Philippe and Louis-Napoleon. Above all, the vapid and superficial life of the Second Empire was ended. People were more sober and inward and realistic than they had been. There was an unusual activity in all the arts. Painting, fiction, poetry, sculpture had or were having new births. A single creative spark was sure to set the very recalcitrant musicians ablaze. Vast talents such as those of Bizet and Chabrier were making themselves felt. But given a single powerful and constructive influence, a single classic expression of the French musical feeling, and a score of gifted musicians were ready to spring into life. And that example was set by Franck. For, Belgian in part though his music indubitably is, Belgian of Antwerp and Brussels as well as of Liege and the Walloon country, Flemish almost in its broad and gorgeous passages, it is what the work of the superficially Parisian Saint-Saens never attains to being. It is representative of the great classical tradition of France, deeply expressive of the French spirit. It must have been some profound kinship with the neighboring people, deeper even than that he bore his own countrymen, that sent the youth Franck from Liege to Paris, held him fast in the city all his long and obscure life, and made him flourish in the alien soil. For his music has traits that are common to the representative French artists and have come to identify the French genius. Once again, one caught sight in the music of the French clarity and orderliness, logicality and conciseness. Once again there were great, sonorous edifices in the grand style temperate in tone. The very diffidence that makes it so difficult for the race to express itself with ease in music was expressed in this work. Moreover, along with the silveriness of Rameau, the simple solidity of French prose, and some of the old jollity of the medieval French artists, is in the music of Franck. Old modes revive in it, old peasant rhythms beat the ground once more.