nturies, 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_).]

From a purely musical point of view there is some resemblance between M.
Saint-Saens and Mendelssohn. In both of them we find the same
intellectual restraint, the same balance preserved among the
heterogeneous elements of their work. These elements are not common to
both of them, because the time, the country, and the surroundings in
which they lived are not the same; and there is also a great difference
in their characters. Mendelssohn is more ingenuous and religious; M.
Saint-Saens is more of a dilettante and more sensuous. They are not so
much kindred spirits by their science as good company by a common purity
of taste, a sense of rhythm, and a genius for method, which gave all
they wrote a neo-classic character.

As for the things that directly influenced M. Saint-Saens, they are so
numerous that it would be difficult and rather bold of me to pretend to
be able to pick them out. His remarkable capacity for assimilation has
often moved him to write in the style of Wagner or Berlioz, of Haendel or
Rameau, of Lulli or Charpentier, or even of some English harpsichord or
clavichord player of the sixteenth century, like William Byrd--whose
airs are introduced quite naturally in the music of _Henry VIII_; but we
must remember that these are deliberate imitations, the amusements of a
virtuoso, about which M. Saint-Saens never deceives himself. His memory
serves him as he pleases, but he is never troubled by it.

As far as one can judge, M. Saint-Saens' musical ideas are infused with
the spirit of the great classics belonging to the end of the eighteenth
century--far more, whatever people may say, with the spirit