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Nineteenth Century Musical Renaissance in France 15

in November 1871. The Opera Comique included in the
x872 repertory Bizet's Djamileh, Saint-Sains' first opera,
La Princesse Jaune, and Massenet's Don Cdsar de Bazan and
the conductor Pasdeloup followed suit, admitting to his
programmes works by Gounod, Saint-Saens, Lalo, Castillon
and Bizet.
It would be quite wrong to suppose that under the motto
Ars Gallica Saint-Saens and his friends understood any-
thing like the conscious return to an older French musical
tradition such as was advocated later by Debussy. Ars
Gallica meant music by French composers-which was all
that it could mean in 1871, when it was impossible to speak
of a French style without meaning either Auber or some-
thing which only musical archeology could disinter. What
was to happen during the next 25-30 years was the gradual
instinctive return to an individual French style, which was
only afterwards discovered to correspond in many ways
with the instinctive French approach to music in earlier
centuries.
The meeting of Saint-Sains with Liszt has already been
mentioned. It was Liszt's example that inspired the four
symphonic poems which-with the 'cello concerto, the
fourth piano concerto and Samson and Delilah-formed
Saint-Saens' main output during the 187os. Le Rouet
d'Omphale, Phaeton, La Danse Macabre and La Jeunesse
d'Hercule represent the first French reaction to the newly
proclaimed ideal of the fertilisation of music by poetry-
the first, that is to say, outside Berlioz whose solution, like
everything else about him, was idiosyncratic.
Illustration: 'Phaeton,' by Saint-Sa'ns.
Liszt followed Saint-Saens' career with interest and
sympathy. It was his other admiration of the 186os-C.sar
Franck-whose star now rose, belatedly.
Franck was not a Frenchman, but a Belgian. In 1871 he
was nearly fifty and very nearly unknown; but in the last
twenty years of his life-he died in 189o--he emerges as
a major influence in French musical life. It was said
by Charles Bordes,who was one of them, that Franck's reputa-
tion was created by his pupils-that brilliant band of young
men who, starting with Henri Duparc in I868, gradually
gathered round the naif and already middle-aged organist
and found in his single-hearted idealism and lack of all
worldly ambition a welcome change from the routine and
place-seeking of the official musical world. Certainly the

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