d courage to say, "Better
from the belly than the pen;" and as he lay dying and a thunderstorm
broke above the house, he threatened it with his clenched fist.
Schubert learnt that he was to die, and turned his face to the wall
and did not speak again. It is hard to say whether his music was
sadder when he sang of death than when he sang of life. Even in his
rare moments of good spirits one catches stray echoes of his
prevailing note, and realises how completely his despair dominated
him. He could not sing of love or fighting or of the splendours of
nature without betraying his deep conviction of the futility of all
created things. It is characteristic that his major melodies should
often be as sad and wailing as his minor, and that his scherzos and
other movements, in which he has deliberately set out to be
light-hearted, should often be ponderous and without the nervous
energy he manifests when he gives his familiar feelings free play.

Despite its incessant plaintive accent, his music is saved by the
endless flow of melody, often lovely, generally characteristic, though
sometimes common, in which Schubert continually expressed anew his one
mood; and he was placed among the great ones by the miraculous
facility he possessed of extemporising frequent passages of
extraordinary power and bigness. At least half of his songs are
poor--for a composer capable of rising to such heights; but of the
remainder at least half are nearly equal to any songs in the world for
sweetness, strength, and accurate expressiveness, while a few approach
so close to Handel's and Mozart's that affection for the composer
presses one hard to put them on the same level. But, compared with
those high standards, Schubert, even at his best, is unmistakably felt
to be second-rate, while his average--always comparing it with the
highest--cannot truly be said to be more than fourth-rate. That he
stands far above Mendelssohn and Schumann, and perhaps a little above
Weber, almost goes without saying; for those composers have no more of
the great style, the style of Handel and Mozart, and Bach and
Beethoven at their finest, than Schubert, and they lack the lovely
irresistibly moving melody and the bigness. But it must be recognised
that Schubert never rose to a style of sustained grandeur and dignity;
he was always colloquial, paying in this the penalty for the extreme
facility with which he composed ("I compose every morning, and when I
have finished one