Quote from Daniel Gregory Mason's From Grieg to Brahms (1903):

An antithesis of artistic product and of personal character exists in a peculiar degree between Camille Saint-Saëns and César Franck, the two greatest composers France has produced since Bizet. Each of these men is great by virtue of qualities somewhat wanting in the other. The one is clever, worldly, learned - and a little superficial; the other, profound, religious, of singularly pure and exalted spirit, is yet emotional to the verge of abnormality. And so with their music; that of Saint-Saëns is energetic, lucid, consummately wrought, while Franck's, more moving and more subtle, is so surcharged with feeling as to become vague and inarticulate.

Would this criticism of Franck, at least in a volume as scholarly as Mason's, have ever been made of Chopin? Or is this another instance where, as in the case with Mendelssohn, a composer's perceived conservatism (in view of certain trends) renders him more vulnerable to critics?