thing I commence something fresh"). Compose is
scarcely the word to use: he never composed in the ordinary sense of
the word; he extemporised on paper. Even when he re-wrote a song, it
meant little more than that, dissatisfied with his treatment of a
theme, he tried again. He never built as, for instance, Bach and
Beethoven built, carefully working out this detail, lengthening this
portion, shearing away that, evolving part from part so that in the
end the whole composition became a complete organism. There is none of
the logic in his work that we find in the works of the tip-top men,
none of the perfect finish; but, on the contrary, a very considerable
degree of looseness, if not of actual incoherence, and many marks of
the tool and a good deal of the scaffolding. But, in spite of it all,
the greatness of many of his movements seems to me indisputable. In a
notice of "The Valkyrie," Mr. Hichens once very happily spoke of the
"earth-bigness" of some of the music, and this is the bigness I find
in Schubert at his best and strongest. When he depicts the workings of
nature--the wind roaring through the woods, the storm above the
convent roof, the flash of the lightning, the thunderbolt--he does not
accomplish it with the wonderful point and accuracy of Weber, nor with
the ethereal delicacy of Purcell, but with a breadth, a sympathy with
the passion of nature, that no other composer save Wagner has ever
attained to. He views natural phenomena through a human temperament,
and so infuses human emotion into natural phenomena, as Wagner does in
"The Valkyrie" and "Siegfried." The rapidly repeated note, now rising
to a roar and now falling to a subdued murmur, in "The Erl-king" was
an entirely new thing in music; and in "The Wanderer" piano fantasia,
the working-out of the Unfinished symphony, and even in some of the
chamber music, he invented things as fresh and as astounding. And when
he is simply expressing himself, as at the beginning of the
Unfinished, and in the first and last movements of the big C symphony,
he often does it on the same large scale. The second subject of the C
symphony finale, with its four thumps, seems to me to become in its
development, and especially in the coda, all but as stupendous an
expression of terror as the music in the last scene of "Don Giovanni,"
where Leporello describes the statue knocking at the door. In short,
when I remember Schubert's grandest passages, and the unspeakable
tenderness o