heavy sense of a
mission, he either revels in making beautiful--though never supremely
beautiful--tunes for their own sake, or he actually expresses with
beauty and considerable fidelity certain definite emotions. Had he
written nothing but such small things--songs, piano pieces,
Allegrettos like that in the D symphony--his position might be a
degree lower in the estimation of dull Academics who don't count, but
he would be accepted at something like his true value by the whole
world, and the whole world would be the better for oftener hearing
many lovely things. But merely to be a singer of wonderful songs was
not sufficient for Brahms: he wanted to be a great poet, a new
Beethoven. It was a legitimate ambition. The kind of music Brahms
really loved was the kind of which Beethoven's is the most splendid
example; and he wanted to create more of the same kind. He doubtless
thought he could; in his early days Robert Schumann predicted that he
would; and in his later days his intimate friend Hanslick and a small
herd of followers asserted that he did. He was run as the prophet of
the classical school with all the force of all who hated Wagner and
had not brains enough to understand either Brahms' or Wagner's music;
he became the god of all the musical dullards in Europe; and it is
small wonder that he took himself with immense seriousness. A little
more intelligence, ever so little more, would have shown him that,
despite the noise of those who perhaps admired him less than they
dreaded Wagner, he was not the man they said he was. He had not a
great matter to utter; what he had he could not utter in the classical
form; yet he tried to write in classical form. If ever a musician was
born a happy, careless romanticist, that musician was Brahms--he was
even a romanticist in the narrower sense, inasmuch as he was fond
rather of the gloomy, mysterious, and dismal than of sunlight and the
blue sky; and whenever his imagination warmed he straightway began
breaking the bonds in which he had endeavoured to work. But that
miserable article of Schumann--deplorable gush that has been
tolerated, nay, admired, only because it is Schumann's--the evil
influence of the pseudo-classicism of Mendelssohn and his followers,
the preposterous over-praise of Hanslick,--these things drove Brahms
into the mistake never made by the really able men. Wilkes denied that
he ever was a Wilksite; Wagner certainly never was a Wagnerite; there
are people w