[Footnote 125:  Lecture on the Phenomena of Mirages, given to the Astronomical Society of France in 1905.]

[Footnote 126:  C. Saint-Saens, La Crampe des Ecrivains, a comedy in one act, 1892.]

He has been able to take up all sorts of things, I will not say with equal skill, but with discernment and undeniable ability.  He shows a type of mind rare among artists and, above all, among musicians.  The two principles that he enunciates and himself follows out are:  “Keep free from all exaggeration” and “Preserve the soundness of your mind’s health."[127] They are certainly not the principles of a Beethoven or a Wagner, and it would be rather difficult to find a noted musician of the last century who had applied them.  They tell us, without need of comment, what is distinctive about M. Saint-Saens, and what is defective in him.  He is not troubled by any sort of passion.  Nothing disturbs the clearness of his reason.  “He has no prejudices; he takes no side"[128]—­one might add, not even his own, since he is not afraid to change his views—­“he does not pose as a reformer of anything”; he is altogether independent, perhaps almost too much so.  He seems sometimes as if he did not know what to do with his liberty.  Goethe would have said, I think, that he needed a little more of the devil in him.

[Footnote 127:  Harmonie et Melodie.]

[Footnote 128:  Charles Gounod, Memoires d’un Artiste.]

His most characteristic mental trait seems to be a languid melancholy, which has its source in a rather bitter feeling of the futility of life;[129] and this is accompanied by fits of weariness which are not altogether healthy, followed by capricious moods and nervous gaiety, and a freakish liking for burlesque and mimicry.  It is his eager, restless spirit that makes him rush about the world writing Breton and Auvergnian rhapsodies, Persian songs, Algerian suites, Portuguese barcarolles, Danish, Russian, or Arabian caprices, souvenirs of Italy, African fantasias, and Egyptian concertos; and, in the same way, he roams through the ages, writing Greek tragedies, dance music of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and preludes and fugues of the eighteenth.  But in all these exotic and archaic reflections of times and countries through which his fancy wanders, one recognises the gay, intelligent countenance of a Frenchman on his travels, who idly follows his inclinations, and does not trouble to enter very deeply into the spirit of the people he meets, but gleans all he can, and then reproduces it with a French complexion—­after the manner of Montaigne in Italy, who compared Verona to Poitiers, and Padua to Bordeaux, and who, when he was in Florence, paid much less attention to Michelangelo than to “a very strangely shaped sheep, and an animal the size of a large mastiff, shaped like a cat and striped with black and white, which they called a tiger.”

[Footnote 129:  Les Heures; Mors; Modestie (Rimes familieres).]