scarcely too much to say that the
whole range of human emotion finds expression in noble lyrics that yield
to none in actual musical beauty. The four "Ernste Gesange," Brahms's
last composition, must be considered as his supreme achievement in
dignified utterance of noble thoughts in a style that perfectly fits
them. The choice of words for these as well as for the "Requiem" and
others of his serious works reveals a strong sense of the vanity and
emptiness of human life, but at least as strong a confidence in the
divine consolations.

It has been the misfortune of the musical world in Germany that every
prominent musician is ranged by critics and amateurs in one of two
hostile camps, and it was probably due in the main to the
misrepresentations of the followers of Wagner that the idea was so
generally held that Brahms was a man of narrow sympathies and hard, not
to say brutal manners. The latter impression was fostered, no doubt, by
the master's natural detestation of the methods by which the average
lionizer seeks to gain his object, and both alike are disproved in the
_Recollections_ of J.V. Widmann, an intimate friend for many years,
which throw a new light on the master, revealing him as a man of the
widest artistic sympathies, neither intolerant of excellence in a line
opposed to his own, nor weakly enthusiastic over mediocre productions by
composers whose views were in complete sympathy with him. His admiration
for Verdi and Wagner is enough to show that the absence of any operatic
work from his list of compositions was simply due to the difficulty of
finding a libretto which appealed to him, not to any antagonism to the
lyric stage in its modern developments. How far he stood from the
prejudices of the typical pedant may be seen in the passionate love he
showed throughout his life for national music, especially that of
Hungary. Not only were his arrangements of Hungarian dances the first
work by which his name was known outside his native land, but his first
pianoforte quartet, op. 25 in G minor, incurred the wrath of the critics
of the time by its introduction of some characteristics of Hungarian
music into the finale. His arrangement of a number of children's
traditional songs was published without his name, and dedicated to the
children of Robert and Clara Schumann in the earliest years of his
creative life; and among the last of his publications was a collection
of forty-nine German Volkslieder, arranged with