[Footnote 157:  Through a break in the clouds, revealing Celestial joy shining above the deeps.]

And so Franck seems to me to differ from M. d’Indy in that he has not the latter’s urgent desire for clearness.

* * * * *

Clearness is the distinguishing quality of M. d’Indy’s mind.  There are no shadows about him.  His ideas and his art are as clear as the look that gives so much youth to his face.  For him to examine, to arrange, to classify, to combine, is a necessity.  No one is more French in spirit.  He has sometimes been taxed with Wagnerism, and it is true that he has felt Wagner’s influence very strongly.  But even when this influence is most apparent it is only superficial:  his true spirit is remote from Wagner’s.  You may find in Fervaal a few trees like those in Siegfried’s forest; but the forest itself is not the same; broad avenues have been cut in it, and daylight fills the caverns of the Niebelungs.

This love of clearness is the ruling factor of M. d’Indy’s artistic nature.  And this is the more remarkable, for his nature is far from being a simple one.  By his wide musical education and his constant thirst for knowledge he has acquired a very varied and almost contradictory learning.  It must be remembered that M. d’Indy is a musician familiar with the music of other countries and other times; all kinds of musical forms are floating in his mind; and he seems sometimes to hesitate between them.  He has arranged these forms into three principal classes, which seem to him to be models of musical art:  the decorative art of the singers of plain-song, the architectural art of Palestrina and his followers, and the expressive art of the great Italians of the seventeenth century.[158] But in doing this is not his eclecticism trying to reconcile arts that are naturally disunited?  Again, we must remember that M. d’Indy has had direct or indirect contact with some of the greatest musical personalities of our time:  with Wagner, Liszt, Brahms, and Cesar Franck.

[Footnote 158:  Tribune de Saint-Gervais November, 1900.]

And he has been readily attracted by them; for he is not one of those egotistic geniuses whose thoughts are fixed on his own interests, nor has he one of those carnivorous minds that sees nothing, looks for nothing, and relishes nothing, unless it may be afterwards useful to it.  His sympathies are readily with others, he is happy in giving homage to their greatness, and quick to appreciate their charm.  He speaks somewhere of the “irresistible need of transformation” that every artist feels.[159] But in order to escape being overwhelmed by conflicting elements and interests, one should have great force of feeling or will, in order to be able to eliminate what is not necessary, and choose out and transform what is.  M. d’Indy eliminates hardly anything; he makes use of it.  In his music he exercises the qualities of an army general:  understanding of his purpose and the patience to attain it, a perfect knowledge of the means at his disposal, the spirit of order, and command over his work and himself.  Despite the variety of the materials he employs, the whole is always clear.  One might almost reproach him with being too clear; he seems to simplify too much.