indistinguishable,
musical form, and with it musical beauty, is lost; and the performance
becomes a mere victory over musical difficulties. And this quickening
of the time is exactly what should not have taken place. Our orchestras
have increased in size and in volume of sound since the days of Mozart
and Beethoven. As larger bodies, therefore, their movement should be a
little slower to produce the effect which the great composers had in
mind. But in our rage for brilliancy we have hastened the movement; as
if we should make an elephant gallop like a horse. Moreover we have
fallen into the fatal error of making the finish, if not the difficulty
of execution, superior to the presentation of beauty in form and in
expression.

This condition of musical taste has been accompanied or followed--we
cannot surely say as effect from cause--by a withering of the creative
musical faculty in all its fairest, highest branches. After Weber's
death, which deprived the world of the only musician who promised to be
worthy to follow Beethoven, came Schubert and Mendelssohn, neither of
them very strong men; the latter decidedly weak, and deficient in
creative faculty; the former far more fertile and original. Since their
time there has been a blank in the annals of music of the higher kind.
The creative faculty seems to be dead. It is not so; for nature is
exhaustless, and in his due time the new composer will come. But new
conceptions of beautiful musical forms are unknown to the present
generation--indeed, were so to the foregoing. There is Schumann; but
Schumann is only the strongest and best of the non-creative composers.
He writes very elegantly, with harmonies unexceptionable and pleasing;
his taste is generally exquisite; his handling of his themes masterly.
But to what great end? None. He could not create a melody; and his
harmony is plainly contrived, not conceived. All of Schumann's music
that I ever heard, from symphony down to piano-forte music, is not
worth Beethoven's Sonata in C sharp minor, or Mozart's quartet in C.[7]
They have a certain sort of beauty and charm while you are hearing
them, but you don't hanker after them; passages from them don't come to
you when you are alone with troubled thoughts, and comfort you, hearten
you, and build you up, as the remembered strains of Handel, Mozart, and
Beethoven do. Simply, they are without real melody: they have only a
well manufactured imitation of melody. Such enjoyment as t