nything but its best it lacks
concentrated passion and dramatic intensity; more than any other
composer's it has one prevailing note, a note of deepest melancholy;
and therefore, when a few pieces are known, most of the rest seem
barren of what is wanted by those who seek chiefly in music the
expression of all the human passions.

Of his lengthiness, his discursiveness, Schubert might possibly have
been cured, but not of his melancholy: it is the very essence of his
music, as it was of his being. "The Wanderer" is his typical song: he
was himself the wanderer, straying disconsolately, helplessly,
hopelessly through a strange, chilly, unreal world, singing the
saddest and sometimes the sweetest songs that ever entered the ears of
men. That his home and his happiness lay close at hand counts for
nothing; for he did not and could not know that he was the voice of
the eighteenth century, worn out and keenly sensible of the futility
of the purely intellectual life. Even had he arrived at a
consciousness of the truth that the cure for his despair lay in
throwing over the antiquated forms, modes, and ideas of the eighteenth
century and living a nineteenth century life, free and conscienceless
in nature's way, he would have been little better off; for the
tendencies of many generations remained strong in him; and besides,
had he the physical energy for a free, buoyant, joyous existence, was
he not physiologically unfit for happiness? He lived with an
ever-present consciousness of his impotence to satisfy his deepest
needs. He was even destitute of that sense of the immeasurable good to
come which of old time found expression in the fiction of a personal
immortality, and in the nineteenth century in the complacent
acceptance of full and vigorous life, with death as a noble and
fitting close. Life and death alike were tragic, because hopeless, to
Schubert. His career, if career it can be called, is infinitely
touching. His helplessness moves one to pity, odd though it seems that
one in some ways so strong should also in so many ways be so weak; and
his death was as touching as his life. Of all the composers he met
death with least heroism. Mozart, it is true, shrieked hysterically;
but death to his diseased mind was merely an indescribable horror; and
the fact of his hysteria proves his revolt against fate. Beethoven,
during a surgical operation shortly before the end, saw the stream of
water and blood flowing from him, and foun