It is the music of the
fine ones who stand hesitant on the threshold of the world, and have
incessantly to struggle for the power to act, for faith and hope. It is
the music of those who in the midst of millions feel themselves forsaken
and alone and powerless, and in whose obscure and laborious existence
Franck himself shared. It is a thing turned away from the market-place,
full of the quiet of the inner chamber. Through so much of Franck one
feels the steady glow of the lamp in the warm room. With its songs of
loneliness and doubt and ruth, its self-communings and vigils and
prayers, its struggle for the sunlight of perfect confidence and
healthiness and zest, it might come directly out of the lives of a
half-dozen of the eminent persons whom France produced during the
closing years of the nineteenth century. Romain Rolland himself is of
this sort. It was for these people, self-distrustful, disillusioned,
doubtful, that Charles Peguy wrote, bidding them remember the divine
origin of the life and the institutions that seemed so false to them,
bidding them remember that the Republic itself was the result of a
mystical impulse in the human heart, that the dead of a race live on in
the bodies of the breathing, and that the members of a folk are one.
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