erest irony was wedded to
the deepest pathos, "the spoiled favorite of the Graces," "the knight
with the laughing tear in his scutcheon"--Heine, whose songs are
charged with the brightest light and deepest gloom of the human heart.

Schumann's songs never impress us as being deliberate attempts at
creative effort, consciously selected forms through which to express
thoughts struggling for speech. They are rather involuntary experiments
to relieve one's self of some wo-ful burden, medicine for the soul.
Schumann is never distinctively the lyric composer; his imagination had
too broad and majestic a wing. But in those moods, peculiar to genius,
where the soul is flung back on itself with a sense of impotence, our
composer instinctively burst into song. He did not in the least advance
or change its artistic form, as fixed by Schubert. This, indeed, would
have been irreconcilable with his use of the song as a simple medium of
personal feeling, an outlet and safeguard.

The peculiar place of Schumann as a songwriter is indicated by his being
called the musical exponent of Heine, who seems to be the other half of
his soul. The composer enters into each shade and detail of the poet's
meaning with an intensity and fidelity which one can never cease
admiring. It is this phase which gives the Schumann songs their great
artistic value. In their clean-cut, abrupt, epigrammatic force there is
something different from the work of any other musical lyrist. So much
has this impressed the students of the composer that more than one
able critic has ventured to prophesy that Schumann's greatest claim to
immortality would yet be found in such works as the settings of "Ich
grolle nicht" and the "Dichterliebe" series--a perverted estimate,
perhaps, but with a large substratum of truth. The duration of
Schumann's song-time was short, the greater part of his _Lieder_
having been written in 1840. After this he gave himself up to oratorio,
symphony, and chamber-music.

V.

Among the contemporary masters of the musical lyric, the most shining
name is that of Robert Franz, a marked individuality, and, though
indirectly moulded by the influence of Schubert and Schumann, a creative
mind of a striking type.

The art-impulse, strikingly characteristic of Franz as a song composer,
or, perhaps, to express it more accurately, the art-limitation, is that
the musical inspiration is directly dependent on the poetic strength of
the _Lied_. He would b