ho ask whether Christ was ever a Christian. But Brahms
became more and more a devoted Brahmsite; he accepted himself as the
guardian of the great classical tradition (which never existed); and
he wrote more and more dull music. It is idle to tell me he is austere
when my inner consciousness tells me he is merely barren, and idler
to ask me feel beauty when my ears report no beauty to me. He had no
original emotion or thought: whenever his music is good it will be
found that he has derived the emotion from a poem, or else that there
is no emotion but only very fine decorative work. In most of his
bigger works--the symphonies, the German Requiem, the Serious songs he
wrote in his later days--he sacrificed the beauty he might have
attained to the expression of emotions he never felt; he assumed the
pose and manner of a master telling us great things, and talked like a
pompous duffer. An exception must be made: one emotion Brahms had felt
and did communicate. It was his tragedy that he had no original
emotion, no rich inner life, but lived through the days on the merely
prosaic plane; and he seems to have felt that this was his tragedy.
Anyhow, the one original emotion he brought into music is a curious
mournful dissatisfaction with life and with death. The only piece of
his I know in which the feeling is intolerably poignant, seems to cut
like a knife, is his setting of that sad song of Goethe's about the
evening wind dashing the vine leaves and the raindrops against the
window pane; and in this song, as also in the movement in one of the
quartets evolved from the song, the mournfulness becomes absolutely
pitiable despair. Brahms was not cast in the big mould, and he spent a
good deal of his later time in pitying himself. It is curious that
one of his last works was the batch of Serious songs, which consist of
dismal meditations on the darkness and dirt of the grave and
feebly-felt hopes that there is something better on the other side.
That does not strike one as in the vein of the big men.

Much of Brahms' music is bad and ugly music, dead music; it is a
counterfeit and not the true and perfect image of life indeed; and it
should be buried or cremated at the earliest opportunity. But much of
it is wonderfully beautiful--almost but never quite as beautiful as
the great men at their best. There are passages in the Tragic overture
that any composer might be proud to have written. If the opening of
the D symphony is thin, un